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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Launching people into space should not be a priority at all. Most of the western world is dangerously aging, but there arent any (large scale) anti-aging projects.

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I completely disagree.

Western world is aging, bu we don't have a global issue of aging (e.g. population of Africa is growing) - as a species humans will survive this issue.

However - when (not if) an asteroid hits, we are all gone. We mostly can't anticipate a hit, and even if we could, we could just watch it destroy us.

We must become multiplanetary species to survive.

Africa is not funding research though. And the hypothetical asteroid is much less likely than a truly deadly pandemic or nuclear or biological war. Humans will never become multiplanetary. Another, engineered species will

Everyone who has ever been born is dangerously aging as far as I can make out. Doesn’t seem unique to one hemisphere.

The associated cost with aging is the real problem. Alzheimer’s, for example, is about $300 billion a year, on the way to $1 trillion.

https://www.ajmc.com/view/economic-burden-of-alzheimer-disea...

This is probably only because the US "health system" charges ridiculous amounts of money for Aspirin to arbitrarily inflate the prices

"Everyone who has ever been born is dangerously aging as far as I can make out." Except for those who have already dangerously aged a bit too far.

There are though. One such is Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Research_Foundation

>but there arent any anti-aging projects

Sure there are. The coming environmental collapse, the collapse of technological civilization soon to follow, increasingly virulent pandemics, violence, poverty, hunger, the rise of global fascism and war, self-driving cars plowing into pedestrians.

The future presents a bountiful cornucopia of options for never reaching adulthood.

Just like everything else in the globalised economy, young people are being manufactured at scale in places where the manufacturing costs are lower (for instance, Africa). So “aging western society” is mostly a question of logistics.

Young Africans aren’t a replacement for westerners. They are culturally too dissimilar.

https://www.startus-insights.com/innovators-guide/4-top-anti... lists 204 startups, more than the number of rocket startups. Calico alone has received $2.5B in funding, which is more than SpaceX has received in any one of its rounds.

Making it easier to have kids is the solution here, age related death is the natural equalizer

Getting off the planet is a priority, among many others.

with the genetic makeup developed entirely by and for planet earth? How is that a reasonable position

Evolution isn't paused

So evolution is just going to stop? Given enough time, humans will evolve to better survive their new homes.

evolution works over millions of years. The whole of human history is ~200 generations , during which nothing changed.

And no animal ever evolved to fly or live in outer space

That's a bit silly position to take. Different take would be if something happens to the planet, we all go. We need redundancy. Let alone all of the other possible benefits, starting with resources.

So we can have wars and destroy that one too?

Maybe first try to fix the problems here

We can do multiple things at once. Weird, right?

> there arent any anti-aging projects

Yeahhh, so this isn't true. Just because you don't know about them doesn't mean they don't exist.

Old age gets us all. Deal with it.

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