Don't you think that many of the world's problems: global warming, pollution, war, and so on, might be pursued a little more energetically if people knew they were going to be around for 500 years rather than 80?
I'm extremely interested in understanding your perspective. See, I not only publicly support this, but as an aging researcher, I spend my days, nights, and weekends (right now, in fact) working towards this goal.
I do so because I believe that, in a world full of Bad Things, death is pretty unambiguously the worst of them. Every time someone dies, a wealth of unique life experience and personality is lost, permanently. Forget Larry, I don't want to see my friends, family, and neighbors die. I don't know you at all, but I don't want you to die. And yes, I don't want to die myself either.
If you think that extending life is selfish and wrong, then to be logically consistent, wouldn't the Red Cross and hospitals and so on be evil organizations? What principle could we possibly use to establish when someone's life has been "too long"?
> Every time someone dies, a wealth of unique life experience and personality is lost, permanently.
- Every time a person dies, their life is passed on through those they have connected with and influenced. Their influence on the world does not end, only their opportunity to see its effect. And most importantly, gives room for someone to do even more with what they have accomplished.
> death is pretty unambiguously the worst of them.
- Death may be better described as one of the scariest of them. When you are dead you feel no pain. You don't even know you are dead. Certainly, we miss those in our life who have passed away, but they live on in our hearts and dreams for the remainder of our lives.
> I don't know you at all, but I don't want you to die. And yes, I don't want to die myself either.
- I'm sure most people don't want to die. That's part of what makes life so important. What makes us try to make every moment count. There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
> What principle could we possibly use to establish when someone's life has been "too long"?
- When you start to try and reverse or disable aging as opposed to attempting to cure disease.
I don't want to invalidate your work, but are you sure we really need this as a society? Or maybe we instead need to focus on making the time we have better for everyone?
I think this deals with your main premise of the nebulous 'room'.
From the paper Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging.
'Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time. Thus, even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to a success of biomedical war on aging, as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations.'
- I'm sure most people don't want to die. That's part of what makes life so important. What makes us try to make every moment count. There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -Bill Gates
Just like when people found better uses for space, people will find better uses for longer lifelines, given the opportunity. Considering how quickly we advance, how much more informed we are, how much more control we have over our lives, and how much increasingly more there is to do in the world for everyone, it makes sense now more than ever.
Other technologies can furthermore make this even more convenient, and possibly even eliminate the trade-off of having less children. The dynamics currently in place were intended for a different world, and the one of today is changing very rapidly.
>There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
And yet so very little life we actually do live in our limited time! Most of our time on this Earth is spent in drudgery just trying to stay alive.
>Or maybe we instead need to focus on making the time we have better for everyone?
We ought to be doing both. Anti-aging treatments ought to be available universally, for absolutely everyone, just like all other health-care that saves your life.
We also ought to be getting rid of things like poverty, that kill people a bit more slowly and make them live in misery in the meantime. And toil, too, while we're at it: it's simply got to go.
Unfortunately, our society seems to take no account whatsoever of ought, so anti-aging didn't happen until some billionaire decided he liked transhumanist scifi novels.
To be fair, people have been working on this problem for decades. It is only in the last 1-2 decades, though, that really large datasets (genetic and otherwise) have been available to turn understanding aging from a hard experimental problem into more of a data analysis problem (experiments will obviously still be needed). I think this new availability of biomedical "big data" is what is drawing in a lot of CS-type people recently.
Just like AI, people have been trying for a long time. It's just a damn hard problem.
There's a great diversity in lifespan among organisms, which is a good clue, but the number of organisms that actually show no senescence is quite small, and they are all very distant from humans evolutionarily.
Those few have been studied heavily in aging, but trying to extrapolate differences in these organisms to humans is very challenging because they have totally different anatomies, genomes, and sets of proteins. Plus, lifespan is very multifactorial; for example, you can "extend lifespan" in many species by inhibiting cancer, but that isn't really stopping aging per se.
It's hard for many reasons, but I think the most important one is that we have no good mathematical or experimental tools for understanding and predicting how a given perturbation (drug, diet, etc) will affect a hugely complex network of 25K+ transcripts. Or how those transcripts affect each other causally. In a variety of tissues. And genetic backgrounds. And in the context of longer-term changes like epigenetic changes and DNA mutation.
Another huge problem is that lifespan studies take, well, lifetimes. So we usually do them in organisms like worms and flies, which are very different from humans.
Almost everything related to getting "serious" mesospheric effects in biological systems is a hard problem. Animal bodies really are that complex.
On the other hand, it can still tick me off how aging and anti-aging are, in much of the world, simply not considered medical issues worthy of research at all.
It raises a lot of social and religious implications many would rather not think about.
But we have learned to deal with it. Instead of saying you're studying aging, you say you're studying "age-associated disease X" (which works for almost any X) and the effects of age on X. Or you say, "rising health care costs are a huge problem, and the bulk of costs are in the elderly. Therefore, we want to find ways to reduce age-associated morbidity and thereby lower costs."
>Or you say, "rising health care costs are a huge problem, and the bulk of costs are in the elderly. Therefore, we want to find ways to reduce age-associated morbidity and thereby lower costs."
I honestly hadn't thought that this isn't a genuine good argument in favor of anti-aging research.
>There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
Can't you just replace 65 with 55 and say the same thing? 55 with 45? 45 with 35?
Conversely, if I can live through so much life in 65 years, couldn't I live through more in 75? 85? 95? Given n years of healthy, productive life, at what point does the n+1th year of healthy productive life give you a negative marginal value?
First, there's no way you could offend me by anything you say. You've already done me a great service by explaining your views. I've met people with similar views before, but usually they're reluctant to describe them at length.
I agree that traces of people remain after their death -- genetically, in their children, and in the memories of those who knew them. But those traces fade quickly, and for all but the most famous, virtually disappear in a few centuries. And surely you agree that a memory is a poor substitute for a person -- I'd rather be able to talk to my dad or neighbor than have even the fondest memories of them.
We both seem to agree that improving the quality of people's lives, as well as the quantity, is extremely important. Aging is far from the only problem society faces. Tackling inequality/poverty, political dysfunction, war, ignorance, and other problems are also extremely important goals, and I greatly respect people who work on them. I also recognize that curing aging will introduce new societal problems even as it solves others (e.g., rising health care costs).
I think where we differ is that I think these other problems can be solved as well, and I believe that curing aging will, on balance help society more than it harms it. Consider how our scientific progress is retarded when our best scientists die or lose their mental acuity later in life. I've already alluded to the fact that people seem to ignore problems ranging from global warming to the national debt because "I'll be dead before it becomes a problem."
I have several responses to your concern that if people stop aging, we won't have room for future generations. First, it is well known that wealthier people and countries have a lower birth rate, so by solving poverty, the birth rate will decrease. Second, even if people don't age, they can still die from accidents or disease. Also, I think eventually humanity will expand to the stars, although we are far from it now.
Massive societal change is coming, from many sources, whether or not aging is solved (although I make no claims about when). Technology is going to put many people out of work. AI will eventually be created. Methods will be developed to improve human intelligence, enhancing technological development but increasing wealth inequality. Even if none of these developments occur, there is still an increasing centralization of wealth and power in developed countries.
It is hard to know how curing aging would interact with these trends, except to say that I think people would be more circumspect about societal decisions if they knew they would have to bear the long-term consequences. I think the demand for religion would decrease, which would have positive effects on geopolitical stability. Living longer would also give people more time to get educated, which would help with the electoral ignorance that is at the root of so many problems in the US.
Finally, your proposed principle for determining the "correct" lifespan is not a new one:
> When you start to try and reverse or disable aging as opposed to attempting to cure disease.
The NIH takes a similar view. The problem is that almost all major diseases (diabetes, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, to some extent cancer) are all diseases of aging. Young people don't (usually) get them. It may well be that to "cure" these diseases, we will have to solve the underlying problem -- that is, aging.
Also, consider that it is just genetic happenstance that our species max lifespan happens to be 120. Why should it not be 15 or 60 or 240? Letting evolution decide our lifespan is certainly the simplest method, but it seems fairly arbitrary.
Those are valid points. I'll only address one point below, because I see a lot of your reasoning as being that all technological advancement is a net good, which I feel is often the divide between those who are for and against anti-aging.
As for passing on to others. Its not memories or genetics. It's inertia. As we go through life we set other things in motion. Our interactions with each other and the world around us causes changes in direction and speed. Everything we do sets something else into motion, infinitely unique from what would have happened without us. No matter how small the action.
I watched that attitude over the years (people saying that death is "good"), and I think the reason is people believe death is inevitable. After all, this is how it has always been, and to them, dreaming about immortality is pointless and counterproductive. It's much easier just to find reasons why dying is "good for you".
Luckily, there are also people like you, who choose to do something about it. Personally, I work on AI, so that hopefully IBM Watson in 2050 will be able to help us cure aging.
There are many people who think that way too, but I think fred_durst seems to genuinely be more concerned about the effects on society.
When I was considering careers, I concluded that there are 3 world-changing scientific problems: aging, neuroscience (understanding the brain and cognitive enhancement), and AI. Interestingly, they're all intertwined.
Best of luck. Personally I think AI will come before a cure for aging. In some ways, I view my work as a fallback, in case AI doesn't come fast enough.
No. Not at all. In fact things like pollution and war will likely get a lot worse. I'm shocked people can even publicly admit they support this type of selfish behavior.
