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Comment by meekrohprocess | Hacker News Reader

That's always being worked on - modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous.

People are trying. We want to cure cancer, and find effective general-purpose antivirals, and help people maintain healthy bodies, and figure out how to repair hearts, and cure diabetes, and fix autoimmune disorders, and figure out general-purpose gene therapies, and work out what exactly is up with the gut microbiome, and make prosthetic ears/eyes/etc, and then there's the brain...

There's only so much that you can do with the technology we have right now. Advances in other fields will eventually help, but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.

Anyways, wouldn't significantly longer-lived people exacerbate climate change? You'd have many more people on the planet, and individuals would accumulate much more total wealth to spend on wasteful consumer goods thanks to the power of compound interest.

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I think what OP means is rather than trying to fix deceases one by one, why aren't we focusing more on the root cause (aging)? This seems like a much more efficient way of solving many of these things. There are a bunch of initiatives in this area already, but not nearly enough to be proportional to the potential.

> but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.

This I don't get though. Why not? We already do that. Making people healthier for longer is a massive win.

Because aging isn't "one thing" that breaks. There are a multitude of things that break down, and when you fix one, another one seems to pop up.

It's like growing a factory. expanding the bandwidth on one component, just pushes the bottleneck elsewhere.

You're right that it's being worked on - organizations like the SENS Research Foundation have been advocating it for years and pushing the field. From what I see though, far more resources are spent attempting to fix symptoms of aging (cancer, heart disease, frailty), than on preventing those conditions from occurring in the first place.

If we cure cancer, at best we're adding a few years to the average lifespan before something else kills you off. If we rejuvenate the immune system to that of a 20 year old, not only are those cancerous cells far more likely to be killed off at an earlier stage, but also prevent a ton of other age related diseases.

I don't think it's something that should just have a blank cheque written for it, but I think that governments should encourage young people to become researchers in the field and should spend far more resources on basic science. We can change the incentives for insurance companies to pay for preventing diabetes instead of treating it.

Climate change is solvable - it requires both research and effort to get us there. Many people are simply not willing to sacrifice to solve it since it won't affect them. We also have tons of older people who go from producers to consumers, and are not contributing to fixing climate change. A 75 year old can be building windmills instead of hanging out on a golf cart in florida. A research scientist can continue their work instead of experiencing cognitive decline. We'd probably experience a short term increase in carbon emissions but I think the long term trend would be much lower since we'll get past the technological hurtles quicker with more people working on the problem.

> ...help people maintain healthy bodies...

As a collective, we try. But are we really trying as hard as we should be? Companies have influenced the public and even health research to be in favor of sugar. I'm pretty sure the rate of diabetes is going up and that doesn't help. Companies contributing to global warming have influenced policies and discredited science they knew would harm their businesses.

There are plenty of smart people doing what they think is best for us, but then there is also greed that hinders us. Sure some of us are trying, but not even close to as much as we should be. The money just isn't there.

If anything the obesity epidemic shows that a huge percentage of people really arnt that concerned about living longer to begin with

Some of us are though. Maybe we shouldn't set our policy based upon what the bottom x% of the population consider important?

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