Living to 100 and Beyond | Hacker News Reader

Living to 100 and Beyond

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49 pointsgrellas10 comments

Peter Thiel says this in the foreword:

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"Unlike the other animals, we have knowledge of death. The origins of language, of culture, and of religion can perhaps all be traced to that point in the distant past when our ancestors first acquird this terrible knowlege and needed to tell themselves stories to make sense of life and death. Every myth on this planet is an untrue story that tells people that the purpose of life is death. Nationalistic myths tell us that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country, ideological myths tell us that progress requires violence and that one must break some eggs to make an omelet, and religious myths tell us to worship the old, the ancient, and the spirits of the dead. The crisis of the modern world is the crisis of mythology. We no longer believe in the old stories about life and death, but we also cannot go back to a time when we were not yet human and did not know about death. We cannot go back in time [to the innocent ignorance of youth] and we would prefer not to be turned [into animals]. As the same time we cannot simply deal with death as a 'fact of life.' What we desperately need is a new story - a true story - to help make sense of the world in which we find ourselves."

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The book should be read in the light of this thought: we build our myths, recapitulating them in technology just as soon as we are able. Though nowadays people are more likely to talk of "vision" and "cultural aspirations" than to tie present directions to the legacy of stories and desires that emerged from the deep past. Unlike Thiel, I don't think that all of the old tales are bad for being lies. In some tales, humanity lives in a world in which objects think and speak, aging can be banished, wounds healed with a touch, and spirits and gods watch over all - and with progress in artificial intelligence and biotechnology most of that will come to pass. There are good reasons why certain forms of story survive the millennia: they attract us and steer us just as much as we steer them. So long as there are at least a few people who prefer to build a tower rather than talk of building a tower, then we will build our mythology. Thiel is, however, right in the prevalence of tales that celebrate death and aging over life and longevity, and there is a scale crying out for a rebalancing.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/our-beauteous-but...

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"This is an age of progress and biotechnology. Yet we folk who might be the first ageless humans stand atop a bone mountain. Its slopes are the stories of the dead, created, told, and appreciated by people who knew their own mortality. It is an enormous, pervasive heritage, forged by an army of billions, and no part of our culture or our endeavors is left untouched by it. This is one part of the hurdle we must overcome as we strive to convince people that a near future of rejuvenation biotechnology is plausible, possible, and desirable."

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Burying the bone mountain is a big job, but that's why books like this have to be written. The better visions and better myths must win out if we are to see the broad support and desire needed to accomplish any great advance in technology, and then make it widespread.

Link to an academically hosted .PDF of the paper "The Value of Health and Longevity," mentioned in the submitted article.

http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/labor/lap05/topel-050325.p...

I'm going to have to check the methodology of this working paper, as I am dubious about its conclusion.

And here's a link to Amazon's description of the newly published book on which the submitted article is based:

http://www.amazon.com/100-Plus-Longevity-Everything-Relation...

I think that some points in this article are a bit misleading. Much of the focus is on an increase in the average life span of the population, of which a large portion can be attributed to a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in sanitation, or treatments of common disorders. However, for 100+ year lifespans and (optimistically) 1000 year life spans, we would need to drastically increase the maximum life span, which proves to be a much more difficult task in healthy individuals.

I was thinking the same thing. If we still had to feed ourselves by hunting mammoth with nothing but pointy sticks and sharp rocks we probably wouldn't live much longer than 18 even today.

To solve difficult problems like this, we really need to game problems to get more people involved. To get a man on the moon, for example, it took almost a decade, billions of dollars, and 300,000 Americans working on it. The problem he wants to solve is even more difficult.

Apollo was a difficult but reasonably straightforward engineering problem, which made it extremely susceptible to having money and manpower thrown at it. Life extension, and even most more modest medical problems, still lack large areas of basic understanding which makes them much less vulnerable to such mass attacks.

Very thought provoking. My first thought de Grey's claim that the first people to live a 1000 years have already been born is that will certainly require changes to social security. It seems likely even modest advances are enough to start getting societal conundrums. It looks like an interesting book.

That falls squarely under "problems we'd love to have".

There's a lot of big questions that come out of this. I'm thinking about how available such technological gains would be to the general public. As our current economic system stands now (U.S.) this would probably only apply to the wealthy. Think Dick Cheney, who seemingly will outlive all of us.

People would work longer than they do now because they would live healthier longer, possibly mitigating our current SS problems. It would also be in the best interest of the government to subsidize proven rejuvenation technologies because caring for the old is much more expensive than caring for the young.

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