Hacker News Reader

Comment by d_burfoot | Hacker News Reader

I love this. People are starting to realize how powerful the logic of life extension is. Think about this: if this startup succeeds only at extending human life expectancy by a single day, it's already worth it. A life is about 3e4 days, and there are 9e9 humans, so giving 1 extra day to every human is the equivalent of saving 3e5 lives.

View on HN

> startup succeeds only at extending human life expectancy by a single day

https://donate.worldvision.org/give/east-africa-hunger-crisi...

I can't help thinking that people dying of old age is our last defense against consolidation of power. No matter how much power someone accrues they're eventually going to die. That power always dissipates, dynasties never last forever.

This might be an extremely cynical take, but it feels like if we did discover a scientific fountain of youth we would end up with immortal billionaires rather than the likes of you and I becoming immortal. There's literally thousands of people dying prematurely in the US from lack of access to healthcare technology that we already have right now.

Power is already consolidated. It just passes generationally. Living longer won't change that, especially when we're talking optimistically about 10-20% longer lifetimes and, more likely, not much longer lifetimes but more healthy years with the same end date.

I have a really big problem with this mathematical reductionist view of the value of life and human time. A life is much more that the sum of its days, basically because for any individual the loss of a single day is basically indistinguishable from a loss of 0 days over a lifespan, but obviously the loss of ~300,000 people would be a catastrophe.

Indeed, days of lived experience are not fungible.

That's assuming the day doesn't cost $1,000,000 for each person treated.

Only if it's actually available to every living human on Earth, which unfortunately isn't the case for plenty of things we already have, like food, clean water, medical care and so on. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy[1] books explore what longevity treatments for some but not all could mean (along with terraforming Mars, and lots of other great stuff, that is).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

A single day would be insignificant and very hard to measure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com