Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence.
If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.
Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?
Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.
While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
- Possible in our lifetime.
- Affordable to the faithful.
You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.
What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
> While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever.
Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.
It has also become popular with billionaires to invest huge sums of money into life extension, or at least cosmetic surgeries to appear younger (Hair transplants, etc).
I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
> Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.
Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?
For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.
I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future.
An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world.
I read an article somewhere around 1960 that predicted we'd achieve travel at the speed of light in 25 years (I forget the real number, but within the lifetime of many people living then), and exceed the speed of light shortly thereafter. He based his prediction on the increases in speed of travel over decreasing spans of time, starting with people running, then tens of millennia later horseback, then a couple millennia later steam ships and trains, then a century later airplanes, then sixty years later orbital space travel.
public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things.
> If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer?
Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before.
Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.
The problem is that mistrust is at its highest that it has been. Science and evidence have been used as political tools in the recent past... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Either that or to protect financial interests of some legacy chaebol... so people are losing faith.
In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go.
I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100.
When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.
Very few people have the genetics to support living past 100 regardless of lifestyle. In other words, lifestyle choices can help prevent premature death (and improve healthspan) but they can't extend maximum lifespan.
I was walking on the street the other day. It was fine summer, and I saw so many elderly walking outside. All of them were using one type of aid or another; some even had a social worker at their side. As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.
In the political sphere, some countries are tearing themselves apart on the question of immigration and identity. But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
> So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
> assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Unchecked immigration of people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values leads to a monoculture that is terrible for everyone. Multiculturalism doesn’t work when everyone’s culture is equal everywhere. And unless it wasn’t obvious, I firmly believe in multiculturalism, but I believe we (here in Europe in particular) have been misled about what it should look like. And no it’s not about ethnicity.
And that’s saying nothing about the impact on source countries as some other comments go into.
As another European I don't understand your argument because Europe has seen so much internal migration over the hundreds of years that it is weird to argue it is leading to monoculture.
Also unchecked migration to Europe is down to 200.000 people per year so less than 0.1% of population.
The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into.
Aesthetic Traditions ≠ Culture. Traditions are just one aspect, but as Nietzsche wrote about the death of God, traditions are not a substitute for values.
America for hundreds of years has offered a shared vision of the future and values to immigrants of every background, and within <1 generation most immigrants become fully integrated.
When European identities are all built around stories from the past, and the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes (climate apocalypse, population decline, social welfare breakdown, economic malaise, technophobia), it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture. I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
When your sales pitch is: "we don't like new things here so there's nothing to create, but life here is easy, you don't have to do much because the state will take care of you!" I don't think you're attracting the best citizens.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Not in a sustainable way.
Immigration is only viable as long as the countries of origin are so bad to live in so it's "better" to migrate. This is not really a world we want, is it?
Don't forget that the recipient countries of immigrants are brain-draining the countries they're leaving. Arguably those motivated individuals are precisely those that should stay in their country and make it less 'bad'.
> Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
Only if it can improve life quality rather than length alone.
Of course if we make it so you can live to 200 in the body of a 24-year-old and then suddenly drop dead, the good news is there will be no pensions to pay any more and the bad news is you will drop dead at your 180th year at work.
Which is not to say I would not take that deal. Aging is brutal and I've just about had enough already!
I would take that deal without even thinking about it. Heck, I would take it even if it was for only 100 years. Keeping the energy of a body in its twenties, not risking illnesses like Alzheimer's, dementia, a fragile body that can break at any time for the cost of working 8 hours a day (which we are already doing)? Tell me where to sign it.
Historically, increases in total lifespan have always corresponded to increases in the length of healthy lives. People don't only live longer, they also live without being sick a whole lot longer.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
You cannot discount the destabilising potential of immigration, and the lowering of societal trust it comes with. As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule. It will be especially harder to integrate people the way the demographic pyramid is looking right now in "developed" countries.
I would also question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged by the western, "developed" countries that will be hosting them.
I am an immigrant (expat?). I don't enjoy paying contributions for the welfare of the people who played in a huge role in the reasons I had to emigrate.
> As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule.
Is that true? Are you sure the edge cases where people didn't integrate aren't just bigger stories than the many many people who arrive and live normal boring lives?
> question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged
Maybe we could stop wronging and mistreating them? Or is that an important part of our European heritage?
I appreciate you being honest, but I also don't want people like you to immigrate to my country. How are you so sure of the role our old people played in your reasons for emigrating? Even if you're in the US and from a country the US has actively destabilized, how many of the people on welfare -- old and/or infirm -- were instrumental in the actions that led to the destabilization of your country? How many of these people had any active choice?
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Have you ever asked yourself what the purpose is of what you call "workforce"? Exactly what work are they doing that is more important than the survival of the native population? It's completely dehumanizing, and I can't find the logic behind it. If a geographical place needs constant influx of people from other places because the "system" there is slowly killing the population, then for what purpose should that continue?
> As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.
That “monetary cost” is not nothing. It represents a share of the finite resources your tribe has (individual/family/city/country) being spent on something with little return for future generations.
Developed countries are asking people who put in the effort to raise kids well to support those that don’t. That works when maybe 1 in 10 people don’t raise kids well, for whatever reason, but it doesn’t work so well when large portions of the population do not.
And there very well may be a justification to not raise kids well, but the math is going to be the math regardless of justifications.
Conceptually no, unless you specifically target end-of-life fatal ailments for some reason. Extending the healthy lifespan is a pretty reliable way to extend overall lifespan.
I think it's important to distinguish between "life expectancy gains have slowed substantially" vs "meaningful longevity increases are not reachable".
A huge fraction of deaths in the developed world are from "lifestyle diseases" from obesity, poor food choices, sedentary behaviors, alcohol, tobacco, etc, all of which we could improve. We eat too many highly processed foods, added sugars, etc. We have places without infrastructure for clean water. We have gun deaths and traffic deaths, and we have bad gun laws and car-centric communities. We have flooding/hurricane/heatwave deaths and we have a climate-denial public policy. There are _so many fixable things_ that shorten people's lives, and we'd all probably also live happier lives if we fixed them.
Is it just genetic? On my father’s side, people typically live to 100 at a minimum and are perfectly healthy mentally and physically right up till a week or so before they die. My grandmother is 103 and can still lives alone in her house and can walk unassisted, has a memory sharp as anything, and so on. Maybe look at long lived families and figure out what is different about them?
I think it's just plus or minus 10 years for whatever fate (genetics) had in store for you. That plus or minus being the little we can control (diet/activity).
So much of the modern US diet that’s being exported to the world negatively impacts life and health span. It’s very much controllable, just harder than the default.
My grandfather looked in his 50s and had more mobility than 50 year old men well into his 80s it’s only when cancer got to him that he started looking his age.
I've definitely experienced mental states that were worse than being dead. I don't regret remaining alive because of all the positive experiences I've had afterwards. But if we are talking about extending suffering that's only followed by death, I don't see the point.
I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt debilitating acute pain. I had nerve pain in the past to where my leg felt like it was on fire. It was then I understood how people get addicted to pain killers. I was able to address the problem and I’ve been fine for many years, but it hurt more than any pain I’ve ever had - and I have had many from sports.
You know this is how we will end eventually in the best case. We won’t master our biology, we will simply transcend it by pro-creating offspring that have something better. It’s also a much easier solution than untangling evolved biological systems that are not designed to last for what have been very beneficial reasons (e.g. scientific advances occur via death of the old guard).
Not even that. I guarantee you that once really good brain computer interfaces are a thing, investments into "brain in a vat" companies are going to start being a thing. Because keeping just the brain young and then alive is almost certainly very possible if that's the whole focus.
There are no new modes to switch to. We can’t fly supersonic passenger airlines anymore and haven’t been to the moon since 1972. The new Accela trains run slower than the old ones.
Half true. You can switch to the mode of not needing to go halfway around the world (or even just across the country) so often, because efficient information flows allow you to accomplish vastly more while mostly staying relatively local.
Sure, we all like to complain about burrito taxis, dating apps and endless Zoom calls, but in terms of quality-of-life per unit of energy, it's a step change.
Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be.
Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.
>Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
Doesn't scale. If you could put "sleeping well, eating well and exercising" into a $0.25 once a week pill and make that available to everyone, it would work. As is, it doesn't.
We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
> Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
Because although longevity is a nice recurrent idea for everyone in theory, when the rubber meets the road people routinely want to optimize time spent in living in pleasure.
The pleasurable stuff is almost all about "YOLO!" in every domain. A candle that shines twice as bright ends up consuming itself twice as fast and all that
Aging itself is not a disease, it's just stuff falling into disrepair over time.
Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.
Cancer is "stuff falling into disrepair over time" too. Get enough faulty cells with DNA damage and one of them is going to make itself a problem. The only way to avoid cancer is to have something else kill you before you get it.
That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results.
That’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.
Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer.
You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision.
Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.
If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime.
The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.
Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.
I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains.
Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.
The assumption that everything can be “fixed” is one I will never understand. It’s so obvious when studying organisms in all their shapes and forms how everything is a tradeoff, and nothing can be stable. The fundamental truth of the universe is change.
Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before then. You can’t patch it out completely without breaking something else.
This is a catch-all dismissal that you could make about any medical innovation throughout history. There are a lot of things we can fix, and we’ve had a lot of success so far in doing so.
It’s not. We never fix anything in medicine: We treat and prevent. Removing the appendix prevents or treats acute appendicitis, but it also has a tradeoff in terms of removing a gut biome reservoir.
This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in the past — and then some.
But you can’t fully fix aging. You can’t infinitely improve standard of living.
Their average life expectancy is around 70 years, and yes, cancer is rarer in elephants, potentially due to the species having extra copies of the TP53 gene.
Cancer is also a result of many other factors of which humans are more exposed to than elephants typically are, environmental and pollution being a major one, and food ingredients being another. A life expectancy of 70 years for a human isn't that great; in 2024 in Europe it was 79 years for males and 84 years for women, and that's with all the contributing cancer risk factors in society as mentioned earlier.
A more interesting species might be immortal jellyfish, but the simplicity of the organism might be a contributing factor in why it works the way it does.
The only reason aging can’t be reversed is because we don’t know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean that it is inherently impossible to achieve. The only things that are impossible to do are the ones that break the laws of physics.
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If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.
Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?
While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
- Possible in our lifetime.
- Affordable to the faithful.
You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.
I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever.
Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.
I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?
For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.
An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world.
In both cases, technological changes intervened.
So what? We can't see into the future. The future is never like the past, not least because a lot of present tends to intervene.
Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things.
https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293...
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Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer?
Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before.
Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.
Dead Comment
In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go.
I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100.
When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.
Yeah, they noticed when their lives kept getting longer and longer thanks to science and evidence-backed policy.
In the political sphere, some countries are tearing themselves apart on the question of immigration and identity. But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.
I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.
Unchecked immigration of people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values leads to a monoculture that is terrible for everyone. Multiculturalism doesn’t work when everyone’s culture is equal everywhere. And unless it wasn’t obvious, I firmly believe in multiculturalism, but I believe we (here in Europe in particular) have been misled about what it should look like. And no it’s not about ethnicity.
And that’s saying nothing about the impact on source countries as some other comments go into.
Also unchecked migration to Europe is down to 200.000 people per year so less than 0.1% of population.
However there is a lack of law enforcement and lack of integration programs for immigrants.
The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into.
Aesthetic Traditions ≠ Culture. Traditions are just one aspect, but as Nietzsche wrote about the death of God, traditions are not a substitute for values.
America for hundreds of years has offered a shared vision of the future and values to immigrants of every background, and within <1 generation most immigrants become fully integrated.
When European identities are all built around stories from the past, and the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes (climate apocalypse, population decline, social welfare breakdown, economic malaise, technophobia), it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture. I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
When your sales pitch is: "we don't like new things here so there's nothing to create, but life here is easy, you don't have to do much because the state will take care of you!" I don't think you're attracting the best citizens.
Not in a sustainable way.
Immigration is only viable as long as the countries of origin are so bad to live in so it's "better" to migrate. This is not really a world we want, is it?
Only if it can improve life quality rather than length alone.
Of course if we make it so you can live to 200 in the body of a 24-year-old and then suddenly drop dead, the good news is there will be no pensions to pay any more and the bad news is you will drop dead at your 180th year at work.
Which is not to say I would not take that deal. Aging is brutal and I've just about had enough already!
You cannot discount the destabilising potential of immigration, and the lowering of societal trust it comes with. As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule. It will be especially harder to integrate people the way the demographic pyramid is looking right now in "developed" countries.
I would also question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged by the western, "developed" countries that will be hosting them.
I am an immigrant (expat?). I don't enjoy paying contributions for the welfare of the people who played in a huge role in the reasons I had to emigrate.
Is that true? Are you sure the edge cases where people didn't integrate aren't just bigger stories than the many many people who arrive and live normal boring lives?
> question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged
Maybe we could stop wronging and mistreating them? Or is that an important part of our European heritage?
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This is why we need strong vetting of immigrants.
Have you ever asked yourself what the purpose is of what you call "workforce"? Exactly what work are they doing that is more important than the survival of the native population? It's completely dehumanizing, and I can't find the logic behind it. If a geographical place needs constant influx of people from other places because the "system" there is slowly killing the population, then for what purpose should that continue?
That “monetary cost” is not nothing. It represents a share of the finite resources your tribe has (individual/family/city/country) being spent on something with little return for future generations.
Developed countries are asking people who put in the effort to raise kids well to support those that don’t. That works when maybe 1 in 10 people don’t raise kids well, for whatever reason, but it doesn’t work so well when large portions of the population do not.
And there very well may be a justification to not raise kids well, but the math is going to be the math regardless of justifications.
Won't that just make the problem worse?
should be
"immigration or automation are the only things that can replenish their workforce."
Dead Comment
A huge fraction of deaths in the developed world are from "lifestyle diseases" from obesity, poor food choices, sedentary behaviors, alcohol, tobacco, etc, all of which we could improve. We eat too many highly processed foods, added sugars, etc. We have places without infrastructure for clean water. We have gun deaths and traffic deaths, and we have bad gun laws and car-centric communities. We have flooding/hurricane/heatwave deaths and we have a climate-denial public policy. There are _so many fixable things_ that shorten people's lives, and we'd all probably also live happier lives if we fixed them.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone
https://www.science.org/content/article/do-blue-zones-suppos...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/04/are-blu...
Dead Comment
But if you can get me 90 years where I feel like a spring chicken until 89, then that’s just fine.
I'd sign up for the same
I’d sign up for that.
Deleted Comment
At that age if you can avoid cancer the rest is stuff like “Strong enough so you don’t break a hip when tripping on the stairs”
88, feeling great!
89, feeling fine
90, less mighty*
91, not yet done!
92, don’t think I’ll hit 102!
He died a couple years later, just a few months after getting my grandmother into an assisted living facility.
*note, I struggle to recall the rhyme for 90, so this one might not be accurate!
Dead Comment
I've definitely experienced mental states that were worse than being dead. I don't regret remaining alive because of all the positive experiences I've had afterwards. But if we are talking about extending suffering that's only followed by death, I don't see the point.
Beginning at some acute level of pain you actually want to detach from the failing body.
Sure, we all like to complain about burrito taxis, dating apps and endless Zoom calls, but in terms of quality-of-life per unit of energy, it's a step change.
Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.
Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
It would not raise the life expectancy to 100 years but it would considerably reduce the health burden on the economy.
Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
Because although longevity is a nice recurrent idea for everyone in theory, when the rubber meets the road people routinely want to optimize time spent in living in pleasure.
The pleasurable stuff is almost all about "YOLO!" in every domain. A candle that shines twice as bright ends up consuming itself twice as fast and all that
Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.
That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results.
Aging should get the same treatment.
You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision.
Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.
If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.
Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.
Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.
Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before then. You can’t patch it out completely without breaking something else.
This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in the past — and then some.
But you can’t fully fix aging. You can’t infinitely improve standard of living.
The only real, fully enforced tradeoff is "energy is always required to keep the lights on". And it's not like humans are strapped for energy.
Cancer is also a result of many other factors of which humans are more exposed to than elephants typically are, environmental and pollution being a major one, and food ingredients being another. A life expectancy of 70 years for a human isn't that great; in 2024 in Europe it was 79 years for males and 84 years for women, and that's with all the contributing cancer risk factors in society as mentioned earlier.
A more interesting species might be immortal jellyfish, but the simplicity of the organism might be a contributing factor in why it works the way it does.