Hacker News Reader

Comment by doubleconfess | Hacker News Reader

I think mankind should treat aging as the biggest threat it faces, and pour our every last resource into delivering us from its tyranny. It's like we all have this really slow and really insidious fatal disease (aging) and no one wants to admit that it's beatable.

The downside to immortality is that the wealthy would just keep getting wealthier (since building wealth is at least partly a function of having wealth and having experience accumulating wealth) until eventually they are more important than governments. And the great War of 2188 will be of the nation of Zuckerberg vs the nation of the United States of Buffett, winner gets Earth, loser is expelled to roam space for all time.

Ok, I should drink less coffee. :)

View on HN

> I think mankind should treat aging as the biggest threat it faces

This is absolutely outrageous.

We are already immortal. My children and my children's children are my continuation. They are me. More than that, your infinite existence is harmful and is a threat to your children, who are essentially you. It's very important that you die. Otherwise, your children will have to compete for resources not only with everyone else, but you as well.

On top of all of that, we all go through phases as we age. Those phases are essential to our maturing and experiencing life. To stop aging is the equivalent of stopping the maturation process and stunting life itself.

Death is as natural as birth. We are born, we grow, we experience, we die. To break that cycle is a perversion in itself and would destroy any concept of humanity that currently exists.

We should fear untimely death, certainly. However, timely death should be embraced as much as birth. It is the completion of a cycle. There is absolutely no need to fear it.

Meh... you're entitled to your opinion. I wont lament the 'threat' to my unborn children's children. Of course if you're content to treat death as 'natural' then you're free to embrace it. I for one wish for eternal life... I can't imagine this ever getting boring.

Wow.

My children and my children's children are my continuation. They are me.

No, they aren't.

More than that, your infinite existence is harmful

Citation needed.

Otherwise, your children will have to compete for resources not only with everyone else, but you as well.

Yes, that's why we're so much worse off today than we were when the human population was 100 million.

Death is as natural as birth.

As is a 50% childhood mortality rate, people with bad eyesight being eaten by bears, cancer and Alzheimer's.

To break that cycle is a perversion in itself and would destroy any concept of humanity that currently exists.

Wow.

Aging is terrible. Not only does it cause immense suffering and reduced quality of life, it's the major cause of the impending Medicare fiscal train wreck. Although by your "logic" we could get rid of all of that humanity-destroying medicine and solve that problem...

This standpoint is a common example of an appeal to nature. In my opinion, it is specious reasoning; death may be natural, but that doesn't mean it's virtuous.

Your children are certainly the continuation of some of your genes, but the personality we commonly refer to as 'you' almost certainly does not persist after death.

As for resource competition, my preferred deal is simple - I would like to not be dealloced, and in return I will abstain from copying myself :)

If humans didn't age, weaken and die, would you vote to introduce it?

And if death were inevitable but we got to pick the average live expectancy, what would you vote for? 80 years? 100? Perhaps go for a more natural 60-but-with-high-infant-mortality thing? Or perhaps if we push it out to 200 years, that would be more fun. Or 2000 years.

When do you think the ideal death age is?

Ideally, when you want to. If we could actually live "age" 20 indefinitely, we wouldn't be decrepid and weak and tired all the time. We could work to pay our way. We could collectively solve big problems like food and space in innovative ways.

> If humans didn't age, weaken and die, would you vote to introduce it?

No. My advocacy of aging is based on the fact that it was a balance achieved by evolution. Every piece of evidence we have about aging points to it being a well-balanced and curated process of either evolution or design, whichever you prefer.

There are plants on this planet that live thousands of years. Animals that live hundreds. We are not among them. If you think that's a result of bad luck or some such thing, then I'm sorry, you need to go read a bit about evolutionary biology.

Longevity is a trait, crafted by an evolutionary path and the environment. Our life-spans are not an accident. They are not random. They are optimal.

They might change over time. Get shorter. Get longer. Whatever the optimal solution, I'm for it. However, I'm definitely against treating various parts of our nature as if it is some sort of a disease.

What if the human brain is nothing more than evolution's play for an immortal creature? Create an animal with the capacity to make itself immortal, churn through them until one of them does. Seed the universe with them. Win.

> What if the human brain is nothing more than evolution's play for an immortal creature?

This makes no sense. There is no intelligence behind evolution. It simply selects for the most optimal outcome. It can't plan for anything. To say that we were imbued with intelligence to achieve some future goal makes no sense. Intelligence was selected for immediately apparent benefits.

If you need to believe in some grand design and intelligence, G-d is your answer. Evolution is not.

As I already said, there are animals and plants that are for all intents and purposes without any upper limit on their lifespan. We are not them. There is a reason for that.

>It simply selects for the most optimal outcome

This is not a reasonable conclusion, and is anthropomorphism as well.

Evolution is the process of changing traits by the process of slightly or greatly more fit creatures for a certain environment happening to survive and breed while less fit creatures did not.

There is no reason behind the way anything is, other than it happened to survive better than the alternatives which tried in the circumstances they were tried in. Things are not optimal at all.

Right. So wisdom teeth, cancer and age-related poor vision are all AWESOME, let's leave those in too.

Evolution doesn't have a purpose. It's just stuff that happened to work out. The fact that really long lived humans don't exist now doesn't mean they shouldn't, it just means they didn't happen to exist in the past and show a particular advantage then that was bigger than the advantages other groups had. It doesn't mean they ever existed, so they may be far MORE optimal.

Evolution trends towards local fitness maximums for given solutions when there is competition for scarce resources. It doesn't find global solutions necessarily, nor does it even get to local maximumums even.

> Right. So wisdom teeth, cancer and age-related poor vision are all AWESOME, let's leave those in too.

There is a difference between a malfunction and a trait. A malfunction happens to some people, but always a minority. All of the things you mention are malfunctions.

Aging happens to all of us. It is a trait. At this point, I'm sounding like a broken record, but there is a mountain of evidence that suggests our lifespan is highly selected for by evolution. Please look up the Red Queen.

Cancer happens in 44% of men.

Wisdom teeth happen in over 90% of people

Age-related farsightedness occurs in EVERYONE (it's caused by continual growth of the lens).

If you even read the blurb of the red queen book, it's "contraversial" aka "usually strung together by a popsci writer"

> Cancer happens in 44% of men.

First, that's still a minority. Second, for the overwhelming majority of that 44%, you can easily categorize it as age related.

> Wisdom teeth happen in over 90% of people

The routine removal of wisdom teeth is unnecessary. It is only a necessity in a very small minority of people.

> Age-related farsightedness occurs in EVERYONE (it's caused by continual growth of the lens).

Uhmm, age related by definition. You do remember what we started to talk about originally, right?

> If you even read the blurb of the red queen book

No need to read a blurb when you read the book itself.

> it's "contraversial" aka "usually strung together by a popsci writer"

Do you frequently judge books without reading them? Oh well.

Yes, these are all age related. And they're all things we leave in. We also prevent tooth decay, which killed a large group of them. Etc.

I DO judge a book by the blurb the writer puts on the cover, yes. If they want to call out a controversial theory (by their own words), I'll wait until real scientists who are in that area look at the idea, not a pop-sci treatment of an idea that isn't actually being tested, especially a book advocating the death of billions.

The current accidental death and non-age based disease mortality still has us averaging a death at around 550-650. It's not forever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com