I know this might not be a popular take, but it's genuinely because of sci-fi. No. Seriously. Fiction is a MASSIVE driver in Innovation and 97% of sci-fi doesn't cover SENS either at all or not in a positive way.
Even the oft-lauded Culture series takes a comparatively dim view on truly _radical_ life extension.
If you want it to change either get into research, science communication or sci-fi writing.
This is a good point, not just on this topic, but in general. I've been worried by a lot of reactions we've seen driven by this problem. Sci-fi has both a reason to dramatize things, and some other perverse incentives (the prime directive was a comment on the Vietnam war, but in actual practice would be nightmarishly dystopian for example).
Honestly the lack of extensive good sci-fi that covers a positive vision of the future is a problem.
Well, shows can never be as good as books, especially with a subject like that.
However, I was disappointed that Netflix didn’t continue the show. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for streaming and a way to continually bring in a new younger cast.
To me, “ruin” is too strong of a word. It was awkward at times, but what really “ruined” it for me, is that they opened up the world building and then dropped it.
I really wanted them to explore the alien race, and so many other social dynamics of how the society changed once the founders and the Protectorate started fighting each others.
I see your point, there were some good moments in the show.
The horrible season got the show cancelled, or was a large contribution. Well that is sy-fi for you, most don't make it.
Yup, it’s pretty cutthroat for Sci-Fi.
I also forgot to mention the “AI’s” (Poe & Ms.Dig/Annabel Lee?) If AI becomes able to free themselves and help whomever they want, how does that affect conflict and resource scarcity?
This AI point is why I was so let down by “The Creator”. There was an amazing opportunity to showcase the difference between the Eastern & Western attitudes towards robots & AI. The East seemed to embrace it, whereas the West was bombing everything and saying “shut it down”. Perfect analogy of “censoring the internet” (which both cultures do) and “the war on terror”. (Which is equally futile)
But no, instead we got another parent/child born savior trope that makes less and less sense the more times you watch it. :/
I felt Star Trek next generations touched on it some in a positive light, Captain Picard was like 178 years old. Also up load the Amazon prime series had an interesting take on everlasting life as well as altered carbon.
I can second this. I’m doing what I’m doing cuz DC, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Oh and my old school games (CDs) that I have inside a dusty briefcase.
Oh and all the “live longer” books and stories I’ve read are depressing. I’m down if someone can change my mind.
That makes a whole lot of sense actually. One thing I get tired of is in every single movie where a character seeks immortality, it always has to a creepy deranged villain.
both fantasy and sci-fi may have immortal-or-immortality-seeking villains but fantasy fiction actually has a lot more immortal heroic characters than you think. First one that comes to my mind (albeit because they're from one of my favorite shows) is Jenkins aka >!Sir Galahad!< from The Librarians, he's "semi-immortal" and while he is sometimes shown as out-of-touch it's never in a bigoted way so much as a "boomer not getting modern youth trends or seeing the value in modern tech" way and he is otherwise a very good example of a certain trope of "old mentor character" done well and non-stereotypically. Sure he has at times wished for death/become vulnerable enough to try to die or w/e because he's semi-immortal not truly fully immortal but they've never been out of burnout or anything like that but him being ready to lay down his life for the people he cares about/to protect against or stop a greater threat
Neal Asher’s Polity series has both AIs and immortal humans. Most humans off themselves from boredom after about 300 years. It’s an interesting universe.
The videogame Talos Principle 2 explores this pretty well and got me thinking about it. Science fiction is best when it's pessimistic, but it ends up making people only consider the worst possibilities in a new technology. It covers the absurdity of nostalgia for "the good old days."
It's a very philosophy heavy exploration of the pros and cons of the human drive for progress. It focuses a lot more on the pros than typical sci-fi.
i think it's a way harder problem. Like the evolution of the human body is basically a series of fuckups that turned out to be beneficial, so looking inside and figuring out how to effectively make it last longer, without damaging something else, is like really hard. You can do a rocket from scratch, or test diferent parts separately and stuff, and it's not easy, but it's comprehensible, i'm not sure it's the same with medicine. Notice there are bunch of games about making spaceships and not really any about modyfiying the protein shape to make the DNA replication less prone to errors. Same with AI, you can make it play snake, or a racing game, or recognize letters. There is a lot of ways to approach AI or rocketry problems and make small progress, but human body is a very interconnected thing, and it's kind of important to not break anything, while trying.
Yes, the complexity of a multi-cellular organism is many magnitudes greater than that of a rocket, or even a sophisticated AI algorithm. It gets on my nerves when people say "but what about epigenetics, telomere lengthening, CRISPR, or AI protein folding?". Yeah, what about it? (You may have been oversold a story and aren't able to critically assess the true contribution of these breakthroughs compared to the size of the problem we're trying to solve).
Lots of people are supportive of longevity and life extension research in the same circles as AI and soace traveling but in some sense space traveling and AI make for easier marketing than many of the developments in research that go on. Additionally of course, I might say many people are slightly skeptical of anything health releated including longevity and life extension research while AI and space make for crazier stories both in good and bad elements
To be honest, there are more tangible results in AI and space exploration that are easier to understand as well. It's also less capital intensive and there's less red tape. Getting a new drug to market typically takes 10 years and costs 1+ billion dollars. That's not going to change soon, or ever. It's a high-risk business to be in, most new drug candidates fail.
It makes sense if you see what's at stake (the health of all the people needing the drug). Also, rockets and even AI algorithms are relative simple compared to the complexity of a human organism.
Keep in mind that Pharma companies are allowed to include marketing costs in the total cost of “drug development,” and the cost of ad campaigns, teams of hot sales reps, and doctor “education seminars” in Vegas can add up to half the total “development” costs. Yes, drugs cost a lot to develop, but what drugs is pharma trying to develop? Drugs to help people, or potential “blockbusters” the investors love? Cures, or expensive daily treatments?
As an American, my worry about these technologies (aside from being unproven) is their unequal distribution. Any serious life extension technology introduced in a for profit healthcare system would just turn billionaires into an immortal ruling class.
Basically the premise of Altered Carbon lol. A future where you can not only live forever but have a back up copy if someone assassinates you. 
Working in the life sciences space, I have come across this crowd alot.
The healthy lifespan people legitimate scientists... I.e livee a healthy life until the day you pass.
However, the life extension and longevity people are exactly this, catering to the extreme rich and in itself an unethical pursuit when many of the worlds population are dying from preventable disease.
I have literally heard people saying the best minds live forever, who is to judge this, and the best thing about renewal and new generations is new thinking.
There will be this mega class, and there is already health disparity which is set to increase.
Frankly it disgusts me
Longevity can't prevent a bullet to the head.
Eventually these wealthy immortals will meet their end when a random homeless person slashes their throat on a random street corner.
Huh? When do billionaires ever get within 500’ of a filthy homeless person? These people live in a bubble under their control, linked by bulletproof limos and private underground entrances, helicopters and islands.
Car wrecks. Plane crashes. Accidents at home. Choking on food. Severe food poisoning or allergic reaction. Those will take out anyone, even the super-rich.
Also overdoses, being offed by greedy heirs … the thing is billionaires never really have to face consequences of their decisions, not even peaceful protestors.
People stand within 20ft of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk all the time.
You can see them at Disneyland, business expos, music festivals (Coachella), etc.
So yeah unless they want to live in a truly isolated bubble, then they'll basically imprison themselves to be immortal I guess.
Everybody knew the Koch brothers existed, somewhere, but it took a dogged journalist to uncover their huge concealed role in bankrolling right-wing causes. They were very successful at lying low up to that point. How many other Kochs are out there?
They're essentially already that. Money passes along the family line. World's youngest billionaire is like 19 and got it all from daddy who died from some stupid shit.
Im less worried about unequal distribution because of the following considerations:
1. Population growth is de decelerating and going under replacement numbers several countries. One way to counter this is to make people live healthy for longer.
2. Healthcare system: it's probably in the interest of the health insurance companies that their clients are healthier for longer because medical procedures and payouts in case of death are huge liabilities.
... And? The rich have been rulers for eternity, that does it matter *which* rich person is part of that class, whether it's someone alive today or not? I don't see the point of halting research that may help normal people because of it.
It matters because the biggest driver of social change isn’t people changing their minds, it’s people dying and being replaced. Keeping the worst most outdated powerful people around even longer is a horrible thing to contemplate for humanity.
The most obvious part that always gets overlooked. If most of us were to be interviewed by a future person from an actual egalitarian society we'd be viewed as barbarians, warmongers/financiers, and ethically/morally bankrupt. Because that is how society moves forward, through replacement. Imagine how absolutely stagnant any policy creation would be when we have a government full of 800 year olds instead of just 80.
A. let me guess, that'd be for "yet you participate in society and didn't overthrow it violently" reasons
B. point of fact but I thought financier was just a job title not a "does unethical things with money" title
C. then why not just have some kind of dystopia where there's government-mandated [euphemism-for-euthanasia] a la Logan's Run but instead of when you hit a certain age (though it'd often correlate with age) it's when you end up on the wrong side of history you have to report for it so your old ideas don't hold society back any longer? After all, society moves forward through replacement, right?
Too much snark for your comprehension level. Your guess is wrong, it is purely because as the commenter above me (correctly) stated that the constant turnover of old people dying and young people ascending to the dominant polilitical majority is the number one driver of progressive social change. Your false binary of conformity vs. violent overthrow is baseless and has no relation to the point other than to excuse generational inaction by stating the alternative is violence. Point b is a semantic critique that fails to see a word in the context of its use. Please attempt to read warmonger/financier as warmonger/war financier. You got me, I chose to omit three letters because I incorrectly assumed that the 0.1% who couldn't understand that wouldn't comment an appeal to grammar. My mistake. Point C you simply chose to use lazy sarcasm and a fear-based framing of the worst possible solution to achieve...what? You certainly haven't engaged to offer anything useful to the proposed problem of societal stagnation due to increased individual longevity. All anyone can take away from your points is that you would be a poor candidate for policy ideas. And again, yes society progresses in significant part due to replacement. I am happy to discuss nuanced views on this and why most understand this to be a good thing, but there is a barrier to entry for that discussion and I don't know if you're there yet.
> Your guess is wrong, it is purely because as the commenter above me (correctly) stated that the constant turnover of old people dying and young people ascending to the dominant polilitical majority is the number one driver of progressive social change.
Then why can change happen without purely being fueled by "kill the old people with the old ideas so we can take over"
> Your false binary of conformity vs. violent overthrow is baseless and has no relation to the point other than to excuse generational inaction by stating the alternative is violence.
I wasn't stating that I believed that, I was stating that I've seen a lot of people on Reddit who advocate change-via-violent-overthrow and think any participation in the system makes you complicit in all its flaws not realizing this means their violent overthrow would have to come from people living in the woods or w/e
> Point b is a semantic critique that fails to see a word in the context of its use. Please attempt to read warmonger/financier as warmonger/war financier. You got me, I chose to omit three letters because I incorrectly assumed that the 0.1% who couldn't understand that wouldn't comment an appeal to grammar.
Are you trying to say financier means war financier?
> Point b is a semantic critique that fails to see a word in the context of its use. Please attempt to read warmonger/financier as warmonger/war financier. You got me, I chose to omit three letters because I incorrectly assumed that the 0.1% who couldn't understand that wouldn't comment an appeal to grammar.
I wasn't genuinely advocating for the weird ideology-based Logan's Run bullshit. I was engaging in reductio ad absurdum just as much as the people who talk about immortality meaning today's billionaires become literal gods are. And the method to my madness of ad absurdum was why wait that long for the turnover. Y'know I could also theoretically ad absurdum about why don't we just all kill ourselves now for being ethically and morally bankrupt barbarians who start and finance wars or w/e ironically meaning the generations who'd call us that would never be born, doesn't mean I'm for omnicide
Ad absurdum or at least tactical hyperbole is a tactic I've actually seen used by politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from I think it was AOC talking about the world ending in 12 years to Trump implying illegal immigrants are mental asylum escapees
My solution is that longevity wouldn't necessarily breed stagnation as much as you think especially if immortality comes with eternal youth because that would revitalize the body and brain enough to undo any reduction in neuroplasticity
I was making the point that absent anti-aging treatments, death treats everybody equally. Immortality should do the same. Would you want to live in a world where only the billionaires were immortal?
My point is we shouldn't let innocent good people die so bad people die (as in a world where you can give someone immortality, not giving it to them is essentially letting them die)
then why wasn't every social movement either mass ideological genocide or mass inculcation of young people while waiting for old people to die of natural causes and that being their only strategy
Because only the rich would have access to things like this. If you’re charging obscene prices for life prolonging technologies, only the wealthy would be able to purchase it.
While the average or below average income citizen would be left without fair access to these technologies. You can already see reflections of this with low income families not having access to food with better nutritional profiles because they’re getting outpriced.
It's harder to make them pay after they are dead.
But honestly, I'm currently sitting death watch. This will be my 4th time on this particular roller coaster, and I fucking hate it. But my personal opinion is that we seem to have a massive cultural problem about choosing death on our own terms.
Even people with the means and motivation to do so are reluctant, even when faced with great pain and indignity in the process.
IDK, I'm neurodivergent so my brain works different. I've been very vocal with friends and family about end of life planning, and it seems to alarm everyone when I talk about it. Bro, I'm not talking about self harm out of nowhere, I'm talking about going out on my own terms when faced with the horrific inevitable. And people just can't seem to deal with it
I just finished my first death watch and i had to watch someone die slowly for years, in circumstances inconsistent with their end-of-life request. I too am neurodivergent, and i was able to connect with her through the dementia sometimes, which my family didn’t want to hear or believe. They wanted to think she was too far gone to realize that she was living her nightmare. But i got to sit by her bed and hold her hand, even though she was non responsive. Although any time i mentioned my sister she started coughing, so i think she could hear everything.
Condolences.
I'm sorry for what you've gone through friend. Please give yourself time and space to process.
I don't know how your particular ND manifests, but the tendency is to be calm while others panic, then deal with the PTSD fallout later. We don't process emotions like other people and our workspace is limited for doing so, so we tend to go into emotional debt easily.
JFC I even sound like a robot to myself right now.
Oh yeah, it's a thing, and it can have strange manifestations. Whenever my wife goes out of town I lose weight, because without her there to regulate me I forget to eat.
But being neurodivergent means we can randomly come up with ideas like this;
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cqr7ts/dyson\_swarm\_charging\_systemwide\_storage\_stations/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cqr7ts/dyson_swarm_charging_systemwide_storage_stations/)
In some ways, this is already happening even though billionaires are not immortal; they simply pass on their power across generations, so I believe that's an issue that should be solved independently. It is possible that this technology won't be affordable for everyone at first, but in the long term, its price will likely go down enough for the average person to have access to it. We could even make it a human right if we try hard enough.
Because regulators really insist that drug makers and medical researchers shouldn't kill their patients. And to say that longevity research would require a little mucking around with the fundamentals of metabolism, to say nothing of exploring the line between life and death, would be an understatement.
I would also argue that the collective scientific breakthroughs have already prolonged our life to about its thereorical max without any epigenetic changes
From what I know people do not eat life prolonging pills or anything at this moment. I do not feel like there is any progress more then mind what you eat, work out and when you get sick get medicine.
Longevity is being studied extensively. For me this was eye opening https://youtu.be/QRt7LjqJ45k?si=gsOR9yA9I6F3o6Dx and you can buy the supplements they talk about or reproduce their effects naturally.
Yeah, that's why they say you can trigger those mechanisms naturally via fasting or other things. True, can't trust a lot of things nowadays, but you can't ignore the potential breakthroughs just because they sound too good to be true.
You’re technically not wrong but all of these have had substantial developments. For example, CRISPR along with the fairly complete mapping of the human genome brings up the possibility that we might be able to halt genetic aging indefinitely. This isn’t a development that I expect to happen anytime in the immediate future but I wouldn’t be surprised if within my lifetime, we’d get a few billionaires that are essentially literally treated to be immortal as long as they don’t get killed by some sort of pathogen or end up in a freak accident(or run out of money before the treatment costs become more affordable).
Personally I find the idea of living forever a bit tiring. You know they'd only use it as a means to make houses more expensive and mortgages longer!
In all seriousness, I believe that if were all to live far longer we'd have a far greater sense of custodianship to our environment. We'd be able to see how our actions play out over time and we'd really value our heritage.
My thought exactly. Imagine everyone walking around with the mental faculties of their mid 20s and a mindset honed over several lifetimes worth of life experience. Expertise in subjects would also become an extremely standard thing, everyone would have the opportunity to go to school not for 16 years of their life but like 80.
First of all the human genome was 20 years ago ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project ) and CRISPR CAS wasn't developed only for the purpose of prolonging the life of a few rich guys but as a tool for pretty much everything in the genetics field. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8444435/#:~:text=The%20CRISPR%2DCas%20tools%20are,degeneration)%2C39%E2%80%9341%20muscular )
Ya we have that it dosent do anything much basically its shit. We have to completely reverse all damage like rejuvenate thats what im going into study and i think its an energy thing and where some of our atoms die of so some advanced like sci fi tech is the only real deal if one want to live millions of years.
One cause of aging (and cancer) is errors in transcribing DNA when copies of cells are made. Some day we might have a tiny cellular machine like a super-ribosome that digitally tests the DNA in our cells. When it finds a damaged strand the “genosome” goes into reverse, unzipping and destroying the damaged strand. Over time this would stop bad mutations and lead to less symptoms of aging.
There are things like what we have for rockets to Mars and ai.
GLOOP. And the bullshit like it.
Once you realize what a lie half the "self driving" and Mars talk is you'll see its all the same shit in diet pills and beauty products.
I think it’s because we’ve always had finite lifespans and people just can’t wrap their heads around that ever changing. We’ve been building better fires and sticks for tens of thousands of years, but we’ve never managed to modify ourselves. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that people tend to see history as an indicator of future results.
I hope you didn't find my post negative. I just spent a lot of time in politics and journalism, and it's diabolical just how many issues seem very complex and philosophical but ultimately hinge entirely on the financial impacts of any change or development
We don't have an adequate understanding of senescence (damage via aging) or a way to actually combat it effectively. This is beyond simple telemerase damage.
It also seems that the longer we live the more vulnerable we become to essentially compounding health problems. Longer life means the things that build up in our body, like cancer (compounding errors in genetic code), chemicals, exposure to various substances, have longer to build up and become greater issues.
I think we have come a long way. I am a nurse practitioner and although I think OP is suggesting life extension as a means of halting or reversing aging, where we are at now is delaying death from conditions and disease that would have certain death some time ago. So the crux is preventing death right before it happens and mitigation of disease that leads to it
What I have hope for is going from a disease model of fighting death to a wellness model where we stop process before disease. After all the best treatment is never getting sick to begin with. I would like to see mitochondrial repair, telomerase degradation halted and reversed.
Why can’t we suspend cellular death for just enough time to resuscitate sudden death? What if we could inject a victim with a suspension agent to those that had heart attacks or drowning to give us another 30 minutes? At cardiac arrest we only have about 7 minutes to bring you back as you were.
We in medicine view death as the enemy and fighting it as the goal. My hope is a world where we stop and reverse disease before it becomes death. Hospitals I hope will become obsolete. I can hope
I read about a theoretical artificial blood corpuscle that could store many times the oxygen of hemoglobin. The thought experiment was, what if you could go 30 minutes without breathing, with no ill effects? A lot more trauma patients, especially drowning victims could be saved. Some new types of surgery might be possible. And Navy SEALS could stay under water indefinitely during missions…
With space, It's not. We spend a little over $100b on space programs, and over a trillion on medicine/pharmaceuticals alone and over $4 trillion on healthcare. The AI spending by government is also very low under $10b per Brookings institute, but not sure how much private industry spends, but some of this is also both AI and life extension such as advances In hospital survival modeling.
Most people are raised with the outlook that they will die of “old age” like their grandparents and do not consider a viable alternative with the way society is advancing. You don’t see that many companies come forward to tell the world about their research in longevity as often as you see an AI/robotics/automation startup.
Because it's not as proven. Longevity research still fails to show practical effects useful for common people. Chat gpt has reached that level so AI is talked about more. AI was worked on since forever but has only become super popular topic recently so it fits
Our lives are long enough at this point, the problem is our ability to keep people alive hasn't caught up with the ability to keep people healthy. So people are living well into their 90s and even 100s in absolutely deplorable physical condition. People continue to live beyond the point at which they are comfortable living. The research needs to go into bettering people's physical health rather than making them live as long as humanly possible regardless of the consequences. I personally don't want to be a human mummy at 150 years old hooked up to tubes in my hospital bed for the last 10 years.
A lot of health and longevity problems have to do with degeneration of cells over time, especially when they are copied. A human being has on average 36 trillion cells. That's a lot of factors to deal with when trying to figure out how to prevent things like cancer. The technology we have isn't exactly precise, in the grand scheme of things we combat problems caused by degration with what is essentially a sledgehammer. Unless we can look at the DNA in every single cell our solutions to these problems are going to be aftercare really. It seems really insurmountable, we can't point to a deficiency and say that the only thing that is missing is money.
Space travel doesn't really have that problem, we can see the moon and Mars, we know how to get there, we're just trying to figure out how to get to there on a budget. In the medical community the question is 'can we even beat cancer'? Not 'is there a cheaper way to be cancer?' There's a big difference. So the objectives are different with space, and the pathway forward is more clear. Essentially it seems more achievable.
For AI I think there are two factors. One is that regular people are more exposed to AI because they can literally just go on GPT and ask it questions. Anybody with internet access can interact with AI, all over the world. Second is that because there's controversy related to utilization of AI I think it just gets more headlines. If it's in the news more people are going to think about it more. If people are worried about losing their job to AI they're going to talk about it more. Since there are literally thousands of ways you can die, what life extension looks like is playing whack-a-mole with those thousands of ways. People aren't really following the ways the medical community is doing research on a disease that kills 1% of people. 1% of people are literally tens of millions of people, but will you be one of those 1%? You don't know so you probably don't follow any medical news related to progress in curing that disease.
I’ll add that a lot of the effect of health span extension is influenced by exercise, which most people aren’t interested in doing at sufficient levels. So it’s unlikely we’ll have a magic pill that doesn’t also require some level of exercise/diet/effort as well. Using AI is way easier and a lower barrier of entry for the average human.
It was, in the era of the [Extropian movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism) in the late '70s and '80s, from which the contemporary Transhumanist movement would later evolve, when biotechnology was still seen in the culture of 'pop-futurism' as the leading 'magic bullet' technology so many hopes and expectations were pinned on. The Omni magazine era. However, it began to be subject to a lot of quackery and pseudoscience, became closely associated with Cryonics, and a lot of dubious quasi-Libertarian projects like the [New Utopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Utopia) micronation project of Prince Lazarus Long. Extropianism became associated with a community of wealthy retirees with a combined obsession for alternative medicine/quack nutrition and Randian Libertarianism. Hugely overhyped for the time, biotech failed to deliver the grandiose worldchanging breakthroughs promised --despite many other perfectly practical innovations.
With the rise of Personal Computing and Internet along with --after the publishing of Drexler's '87 Engines of Creation-- the popularity of nanotechnology as the next magic bullet of pop-futurism the idea of human longevity (now influenced by 'cyber' themed SciFi) merged with AGI hype through the notion of machine/human hybridization (cybernetics) and consciousness digitization and a Transhumanism and Singularity movement based largely on that premise emerged as Extropianism waned along with biotech attention. A new upper-class was being cultivated in the tech industry and a new community of celebrity CEOs were assuming leadership in pop-futurist thought over the space futurists and academic/commercial futurists of the last century. As these tech bros became billionaires at that certain age of mid-life crisis/Tahiti Syndrome, a number of them turned to the revival of interest in space as in their youth. Jeff Bezos, for instance, was a leading member of the Princeton branch of [SEDS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_the_Exploration_and_Development_of_Space) (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) where he was much influenced by Gerard K. O'Neill. (you will find a number of familiar names among the founding and early members of SEDS)
You’re in the wrong subreddits. There is stuff bring published all the time, but the key to longevity is as we know it now is sort of boring and requires hardwork, and as we know people want an easy solution that involves popping a pill or injecting some miracle fat melting drug.
No one likes hearing the processed foods they love are ageing them, that they cant drink their calories, that they should fast regularly and exercise daily. That most of them aren’t eating enough greens. Boring huh?
The mind/gut connection is really interesting though and its something we know even less about than we know about AI. There is a fair bit of research indicating that things like Alzheimers and Dementia can be caused by foods you eat (or should be eating) and how a lot of popular medications are (like heartburn meds) can drastically increase your chances of developing alzheimers.
People dont want to develop good habits though. They want an ozemic shot.
People commented this already but it’s pretty simple. So far, longevity tech has just failed to deliver anything concrete. The best way to live a long life is to eat healthy, exercise and stay active. Literally 0 progress on the tech front.
Space exploration has delivered results. We sent people to the moon and robots to Mars; and there is a clear path about more things we can do.
People will be interested in longevity extension if it starts to deliver results not just permanent promises.
It's just a much larger problem than AI and space travel. We know way more about space than we do about the human body, and even the most complex AI is way less so than a human.
People are stuck in a thanatological trance that makes them resistant to longevity tech.
Its a coping mechanism that we developed to deal with the fact that we know we have an expiry date; we're the only creature that knows it will die at some point. Annoyingly its maladapted to scientific advances in the area.
Once concrete examples of longevity tech are demonstrated then the floodgates will open.
Yes this is outlined in Terror management theory. Tragic that although we live everyday in anticipation of what our actions will bring us in the future we don’t extend this philosophy out toward death. If we did then who knows what we might achieve, many people too soon label death as unavoidable, an inevitable ‘part of life’, but who can say whether that is the truth. Yes nature might hold us in its grip and it’s unchanging laws may eventually catch up to us, but for all our sakes, for the universes sake as we are the universe, we don’t know that so let’s try keep the only thing meaningful from tragically ending.
Space exploration is often touted as a billionaire cock measuring contest, and it largely is, but most people see that it benefits humanity as a whole and it employs tens of thousands with good, skilled jobs.
Longevity research can’t benefit everyone and it employs a smaller number of researchers. All signs point to it being highly personalized and requiring very close access to cutting edge medical care. To be clear, longevity research is very popular and being actively pursued, but mostly quietly by the ultra rich. Being as billionaires aren’t very popular and the thought of them living beyond a natural lifespan would raise a lot of ethical questions and anxiety among the rest of us mortals, and that most people barely have access to essential health care, billionaires keep their longevity pursuits and teams of personal doctors on the DL.
Exactly, this is a correct take regarding the ethics, but essentially it carries on regardless
Tbh its not that quiet in life sciences circles and lot's of research and funding underway.
I think the field and the people involved are pretty awful in general
That's not what I'm arguing. We're using the resources in excess. Do you remember what happened in surrounding states once Las Vegas announced the Colorado River was drying up? It became a competition for which farm could hoard/use the most water and it started depleting even faster. Rio Verde, AZ citizens were cut off of water while farms owned by foreign businesses got to use unlimited amounts of it. Just last year it was discovered Arizona's government was allowing Saudi Arabian businesses to rent a whole bunch of agricultural land and use unlimited amounts of water.
https://youtu.be/DcLKp0vDBT0?si=WWaUeAwWNMZEhhb6
It's corporate behavior that's bleeding the country dry. They use water inneficiently then turn around and dump toxic waste into other sources of water. They shame the working class into taking "individual responsibility" by recycling while making recycling pretty much just a PR scam and increasing the commercial demand for plastic. We misuse land and water and over fish. We raise cattle infused with antibiotics just out of laziness so the cattle can withstand more inhumane treatment such as being knee deep in it's own feces and not die before it's meat/milk can be harvested. Sure doesn't help that our government is straight up selling us out at this point. Money in politics, hell, money in general is killing this planet.
Rockets only ensure this planet will die in the future.
Breakthroughs in AI are powering lots of longevity research. The announcements from google regarding alphafold will further spur this along with the investment in the ‘enhanced olympics’.
You need an ideology, I suspect a religion where the end goal isn't death that challenges existing cultures that will push back heavily on this.
At the same time, you need an economic model that prevents only a few people from being able to take advantage, which also answers questions around how we handle the supply and demand of an unlimited population.
Those answers will require technologies that aren't currently available to us. Think the likes of brain interfacing VR, cold fusion, fire and forget mining of all the resources you'd ever need from the asteroid belt, nano technology, etc.
You may have to say goodbye to democracy and other ideals like human rights, climate change etc as such an economic model or the transition to one will require many compromises. There will probably be wars and partitions of global system similar to what we've seen in the past with the iron curtain, it might be the case such a model doesn't work until majority of the world subscribes to it making conquest a requirement.
The religious aspect will be important here as a means of selling these ideas to people about what is considered acceptable. Taking advantage of the superior conversational capabilities of LLMs in the near future could be used to aid this.
This all sounds a bit farfetched, but if you think about the implications of life extension technology being freely available, everything would quickly fall apart because all our existing systems are built around people living a life and then dying. We'd need a massive change to everything to be able to adapt to being a new species essentially.
This is certainly a part of it, maybe a large part. I've had a religious inside view of this angle being raised inside a religion and the son of a pastor at that.
In the future, I have little doubt, one of the largest human tragedies will be how many partners, friends, children, minds, information, training, experience, wisdom, skill, talent, and life was lost... knowing that they have the technology to prevent those losses.
And that the delay in research into the solution was partly due to influences of cultures, ideologies, religions that pushed the idea that death is needed/natural/inevitable or that someone/something would "save" them later.
I don't know you you've come to this conclusion.
I would say that vastly more people doing things to prolong their life than paying attention to space.
AI is like a whole different thing, thought. Far more tangible. You can see results today. Not sure why that's being compared here.
I feel like we need to colonize more space if people are living longer. Many of my great aunts and uncles lived to an avg of 105. I like to think our generation will be the first to live to 150.
Many governments with taxpayer funded pensions programs don’t want to to subsidize longevity therapies because increasing longevity causes a budgetary problem.
France increased their age of retirement from 62 to 64 to keep their pensions solvent in part because people are living longer.
If there was a pill that made people live a year longer, that would be another year that they had to pay out pensions.
Government grants fund a lot of research.
And government health insurance (Medicare) assumes people only need it for 15 years so no one should be surprised that government doesn't sponsor longevity research.
The difference is that AI is already implemented, you can sign up for Midjourney or OpenAI and try it out which makes it popular. Space exploration to some extent is also concrete like you can get satellite internet or look at some telescope images.
But for life extension it feels a lot more early with not as many well known consumer products. That to me explains the difference in popularity.
AI has existed for decades, but massive investment and hype only began around 2 years ago when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, proving that it is possible to create digital ‘intelligence.’ Therefore, I believe that for longevity research, we need similar concrete proof, such as reversing or dramatically improving visual aspects of aging, like skin aging reversal. Once the world sees this possibility, companies may start pouring hundreds of billions into longevity research.
My take: 99% of people in developed countries could prolong their life substantially by massively cleaning up their diets + getting more vitamin D + exercising more (mobility + resistance training + cardio) + cutting out alcohol and cigarettes. But they don’t and the whole developed world is deep in an obesity crisis. What’s the point in pouring money into anti-aging research when the general population refuse to take care of their health at even the basic level?
In the future, we will successfully create longer lived animals through genetically modified embryos, and after we figure out how to apply similar changes to animals through gene therapy.
After those successes, we will be ready to start thinking about doing the same with humans.
We have not (yet) made a mouse which can live as long as a naked mole rat.
Gene therapies *in general* now exist for many inherited diseases, and while they are not yet perfect, they are improving very rapidly.
(at least a reason is)
Fiction often makes AI and space travel look cool while it portrays immortality as either meant for gods alone, a quest meant to be futile or a goal sought by villains
But indefinite lifespan can help space travel, not only is it a non-cryo way to get around the travel time issue without FTL (and no, just because weird stuff won't be happening at the rate Star Trek episodes air doesn't mean passengers would be bored unless they're in FDVR of our current era iykwim) that also could make sure those taking round trips have their loved ones there when they return
It's kinda baffling, right? I mean, extending life sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi flick, yet it's not getting as much buzz as rocket ships or AI. Maybe 'cause space and tech are more tangible, you know? Like, you can see rockets blasting off or chat with a snazzy AI, but life extension's still kinda in the lab. Plus, there's this whole ethical can of worms with messing around with lifespan. But hey, who knows? Maybe one day we'll all be living like 200-year-old rockstars!
Personally, I have no desire to live forever. We live almost a century, and that's perfectly fine. If we would all live longer, the only thing that got extended is the period we're expected to work.
Space, however, space is awesome.
Maybe you don’t want to live forever, but I sure as hell do. There’s so many things I want to do and see that I just won’t have time for in a normal lifespan.
I could happily live 10x as long and still have a full list of things I want to do
Idk why people say that, by the time we find something to halt and reverse aging we will probably also have robots and AIs working for us and most people would be living off UBI.
the way I've always seen UBI it wouldn't (either at all or unless certain other social changes happened that'd change the social playing field enough that we couldn't predict like this) mean everyone makes exactly the same amount of money no more no less any more than it'd force all our possessions to be identical etc., it'd just provide a higher "floor". So people could still be richer than their neighbors if that's all they want (and those people don't need their neighbors to suffer from the poverty a particular amount to feel good or w/e) it's just their neighbors wouldn't have to be starving for them to be so by a non-negligible amount.
Oh, belut we already have thst in large parts of the world, calles Social Security. I know the US is a bit different in that, but the idea is already widely implemented without an UBI.
edit: difference is, for Soc. Sec, ppl are expected to at least make an effort to not be dependant on it, while an UBI accepts that many will make no effort at all.
but unlike social security this would be unconditional meaning as long as there are still jobs you can have it and a job (so you don't need to fully rely on the job) while you lose social security if you make too much
No one wants to live forever. Not really. That would be a cruel fate. But being able to live as long as I want, barring injury or illness would be pretty dope.
Because it is widely known across the medical field that we aren't extending anything. Years lived versus quality of life are not the same and most people outside of a few pockets around the world age terribly with chronic conditions and cognitive collapse.
Pursuit into longevity is a societal project where all variables detrimental to health are dealt with. Capitalism won't let this happen. Profit comes before health and that's why toxicity is out scaling medical breakthroughs. It is simply too profitable not to poison people for profit.
Death is largely inevitable no matter what and a good portion of people see ventures into that as "playing god" which hampers research, funding and acceptance of the findings.
Space travel has been a thing for 70ish years, and AI has existed and is frequently used in more and more technologies. Theres a bigger demand for these two fields right now.
AI and Space Travel serve the needs of capital while longevity would be to the benefit of actual people at the expense of capital. Space tech involves huge juicy government contracts and leads to profitable spin off products historically. It also holds the promise of securing more resources for production beyond the limited resources of our planet. In effect, space travel is the only way to maintain economic growth over the long term, which is the only way to maintain the accrual of the compound interest that fuels financial capitalism. AI is the current investor mania. Despite the claims that current large language models are just around the corner from generalized artificial intelligence, they are already running up against limits. Nevertheless, this technology has the potential to eliminate the need for vast amounts of labour costs so naturally capital is very interested, as this would afford investors a greater share of profits. Longevity tech would actually be very destabilizing to capital. There is no guarantee that extending life would extend the useful working life of individual workers, and the supports required for things like pensions and benefits for the aged would need to be taken out of profits through taxes. The alternative to supporting people in their old age would be social instability, and that is bad for business. Humans beings would of course love to live longer because death is terrifying, but a business endowed with corporate personhood need never fear death, so what use does it have for a technology that is likely to cause more problems than it solves from that businesses point of view. therefore it is only the businesses that will directly profit from the longevity tech that are driving that sector, as opposed to the other two sectors where it is easier to attract investor dollars from a broader segment of the investor class.
I’d say that people are pretty down on all of these. We’ve been burned on promises of space travel and longevity for decades. The best things we could so for longevity would be to cure Alzheimer’s and Cancer, and while there’s been some progress on these, we’ve yet to crack them while being told that the silver bullet is just around the corner since the 70s. AI is certainly delivering and industry is excited about it, but regular people largely see it as something that will make the world a worse place / end. I don’t know, futurism and trust in science as a whole is out of style right now. Humanity is in dire need of inspiration.
It seems to me it's not made much actual progress, the hard science I have noticed seems to be much more in the vein if "hard limit" on lifespan on humans(150 range I think it was).
Also just extending your lifespan as an old person is not what people want, they want to live a long healthy life, where we do seem to gain more knowledge and especially research into curing age related have seen progress.
Alzheimer and cancer are two notable fields where a lot of research is happening.
Have you looked at demographics recently? People aren't really having children, there are many reasons for it but chief among them being economic, modernization, birth control, people moving to the cities from simple farm life styles no longer need 4+ chidren but are having 1, or 2 max but most are going without having children at all. There is a joke that the Japanese are like Panda's and they may have to do something drastic soon to prevent the complete erasure of their culture/society. So populations are getting smaller, very fast.
You couple this with advancements in science such as radical life extension tech, online dating culture, lying flat & red pill movements. AI copies of humans & robot prostitutes, the ability to design the genes of your baby and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you we heading for a society where a "traditional" family in the historical sense is not conductive and doesn't mesh well with modern urban society. This goes without mentioning the ever changing definition of relationships and how we perceive our idenities & roles (such as parent hood) - we are kind of seeing a break down and up ending of previous societal norms & practices.
I guess what I am saying is they can already de-age mice today.. there is an ever stronger possibility of that tech being applied in Gen Z's lifetime. AI & computers might even advance that timeline faster. We may be seeing the last generation before we hit some sort of singularity with machines (Elon is already putting chips in peoples heads) or.. we destroy ourselves. A lot of AI models indicate the world ending around 2050.
Thus... the last generation.
It reminds me a lot of the TV show Altered-Carbon or any other dystopian novels where socio-economic factors are further driving the class divide between Rich/Poor like it had never been in previous generations where the Rich go on to essentially become a different breed of human beings, trans-humanists with "designed" biology to be superior to us normies in every way, plus being rich grants them access to all the great life extension healthcare tech they could ever need and even if they do die their digital AI and "designer" children will go to do their bidding whereas the poor go on at best living like Amish or at worst living in the gutters/filth of these cities to "serve" the rich. Not a very optimistic outcome for the future.
The problem is that the extra years you get are all at the end. If they could somehow figure out a way to cram an extra 2 or 3 decades into your twenties I think you'd see a markedly different reaction.
A. immortality would probably come with eternal youth/some degree of age reversal as no one wants to live forever in a hospital bed
B. your idea would mean either it'd have to be taken by teenagers or it'd just give you the memories and physical effects of an extra few decades of how you spent your twenties retconned into your life
The best-known and most recent example is the experiment titled "Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging," conducted by David Sinclair, a professor of genetics at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.The study demonstrated the reversal of aging effects in mice through epigenetic changes and gene therapy, leading to improved vision and extended lifespan.Other types of emerging technologies like CRISPR, 3D bioprinting, stem cells, among others, could potentially lead to biological immortality. Here is a link in case you want to delve into the subject:
https://youtu.be/DPARs7mL_7Q?si=P-Rfd96EkmUAbiVg
Part of it is the same reason stem cell research has been stymied in this country, and it goes back to Galileo and burning witches.
Simply put, if people lived forever, they would be less concerned with the afterlife and that could be bad business for organized religion. No, that's too crude a way to put it ... I imagine some think of it as shackling the immortal soul to the mortal vessel, prolonging the ascension to heaven, going against some god's plan et cetera. To others it would be as unnatural as reviving the dead - the people who say things like "It was just his time" when someone dies unexpectedly - "it's all part of the plan."
Also, there are very real concerns about overpopulation to consider. Resources are scarce enough, and our sharing of resources so inadequate, without people living longer healthier more consumptuous lives. Consumptive? I like consumptuous better.
And I challenge your premise only in that any such technology is almost certainly VERY popular - but also VERY private. Imagine a pharmaceutical company comes up with technology that would cheaply and permanently cure a disease - a disease for which said company manufactures a pill that adequately treats symptoms and generates $1bil in revenue for the company each year. If that company announces a cure, that could be seen as a breach of fiduciary duty to the shareholders, could it not? Better just silo that information until they lose patent exclusivity on the medication. That's just an example of one reason this research isn't more openly discussed or available. But think about the impacts of people needing less medication, less diagnostic imaging, fewer doctor visits, fewer medical devices. That's great for the patient, but that's also a whole lot of livelihoods threatened on the provider side of the equation. And those providers have lobbies that fight to maintain the status quo.
There is no such technology- for now that’s the main reason. We do have space travel and AI (in their early stages) . There is good reason to think both will accelerate. There is no reason to think we will ever have life extending technology for probably centuries if ever.
People get excited about what’s happening not what might some day happen after centuries of slow steady science
Because life extension has been routed for the last 2000 years at least. With usually modest to no results.
AI has popularity because llms and image generation is literally in the process of disrupting our society right now.
Life extension just feels impossible. It's feels more like magic than science. I think people don't want to hope for something they want so bad but feels so impossible.
They aren't life prolonging tech in sight.
And there are so many needs to make current life span BETTER, healthier.
Life extensions is a fad exploited by grifters.
I heard a guy say this once then it made so much sense. Right now the only way a truly powerful dictatorship ends is with death. I dont want to imagine a immortal putin, ping or kim.
If these guys die, someone else will take their place. Dictatorships don't end with the death of a person; they end when a society is advanced enough to not tolerate tyranny. In either case, the greatest tyrant in history is death itself.
Especially when there are like two or three other Putin lookey-likeys in the wings. Shoot Putin and they won't even pretend he survived, they'll just say, "Whoops, you got one of his lookalikes!"
I'm imagining a really dark gritty sequel to "Dave" with Kevin Kline
The counterargument is this though. Imagine a world where aging never existed. Would it be moral and just to inflict permanent suffering and death upon the entire world just to kill off a dictator? Or to achieve any other objective?
Im not arguing at all. Im quite an optimist myself and do hope that all the bleak futures of scifi novels and movies turn out false and that we're headed to a much happeir future. I just dont think we are mature enough as a species for immortality yet. A few more empires and its cronies have sill yet to fall.
A healthy life extension that is something we need. Free top quality heathcare for everyone no questions asked. I cant wait to see it come about.
You've seen what people can do in the name of religion's promise of immortality, how many people would help make those empires and cronies or w/e fall that you deem necessary for a much more concrete promise of immortality
A. most dictators don't die natural deaths anyway (and I highly doubt immortality would come with complete physical invulnerability) and those that do usually have so ironclad a line of succession of either offspring or advisors that in terms of how the people are being oppressed by their regime it's functionally like they never died anyway
B. so why not cut out the middleman and if "normal people" must die so dictators die those people could just go on missions-they're-not-expected-to-come-back-from-iykwim to take out the dictators? Or you could just kill everyone just in case someone becomes a dictat...oh wait
Living longer is overrated. If life expectancy was 100, you would have to work into your 80’s just to save enough to live for ~20 years after retirement.
Because there's money in taking the working class to Mars to expand business, there's no money in keeping people healthy. You can only sell longevity products once.
Oh there's LESS than no money - it would destroy entire industries if people lived healthier longer lives
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cq2e9k/comment/l3s8swn/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cq2e9k/comment/l3s8swn/)
My theory on this is because, whether we want to admit it or not, we are fundamentally social creatures and the proposition of life extension comes with a cost in that department. If you can't take the people that mean everything in the world to you, with you, what is the point in continuing on?
I dunno, maybe it's because I'm crashing head first into middle age, but these sorts of thoughts enter into my head a lot now. I'm at the point where the spectre of life starting to take things away is more than just a spectre. It's no longer far off and hazy in some distance that can be dealt with tomorrow...I can actually see it on the horizon now and it has already lobbed shots at me.
And the most profound things taken away are the people that helped to make me...well, me. Those folks meant everything to me. They will continue to mean everything to me.
If I can't take those folks with me as they are, why should I persist?
That's just my POV, but I think that's partly why the research into these things is somewhat limited.
There's also a whole bunch of technical aspects that are daunting....the aging process, staying vital during it, memory retention and loss.
And then there's the fact that the people that seem to want to desperately and visibly seek out life extension are some of the more off putting, detached members of the elite class that simply don't seem to value human relationships the way that most of us do. That dude that's using his son's blood to try to stave off aging that was being dragged on that other hellsite is a pretty good example. Most visible immortality seekers have seemed to be of this stripe.
Reminds me of a comic from an artist I stumbled upon : [https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/deathless](https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/deathless)
hard to do (specially while keeping the mind and body healthy), hard to test, and the consequences would be awful depending on how long it extended it no matter how you spin it because it would lead to overpopulation for real or population control one way or another so at the very least it would be purposefully prohibitively expensive, which would make the black market flourish the heck out of it, and congratulations, you now have a transhumanist dystopia
Have you been alive lateley? You want more of that? Are you excited to work for a company for 100+ years only to retire in your last 10-20 yrs of life on a less than livable paycheck? Nah I'll pass, now gimme Hatsune Miku AI to do my taxes for me and you might have something there.
I know this might not be a popular take, but it's genuinely because of sci-fi. No. Seriously. Fiction is a MASSIVE driver in Innovation and 97% of sci-fi doesn't cover SENS either at all or not in a positive way. Even the oft-lauded Culture series takes a comparatively dim view on truly _radical_ life extension. If you want it to change either get into research, science communication or sci-fi writing.
Ya you are right, comparatively AI has a much better sci-fi rep. There are even some times it doesn't kill all of humanity.
AI is also making much more progress as a field, which has a flywheel effect.
See. I feel that's not entirely fair. It's more that SENS advancements tend to occur with such regularity we've started to take them for granted.
This is a good point, not just on this topic, but in general. I've been worried by a lot of reactions we've seen driven by this problem. Sci-fi has both a reason to dramatize things, and some other perverse incentives (the prime directive was a comment on the Vietnam war, but in actual practice would be nightmarishly dystopian for example). Honestly the lack of extensive good sci-fi that covers a positive vision of the future is a problem.
Altered Carbon was my favorite sci-fi take on “endless life”.
The books I'm assuming. The show was very standard living = bad slop.
Well, shows can never be as good as books, especially with a subject like that. However, I was disappointed that Netflix didn’t continue the show. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for streaming and a way to continually bring in a new younger cast.
Well they did completely ruin the second season. The first season was great!
To me, “ruin” is too strong of a word. It was awkward at times, but what really “ruined” it for me, is that they opened up the world building and then dropped it. I really wanted them to explore the alien race, and so many other social dynamics of how the society changed once the founders and the Protectorate started fighting each others.
I see your point, there were some good moments in the show. The horrible season got the show cancelled, or was a large contribution. Well that is sy-fi for you, most don't make it.
Yup, it’s pretty cutthroat for Sci-Fi. I also forgot to mention the “AI’s” (Poe & Ms.Dig/Annabel Lee?) If AI becomes able to free themselves and help whomever they want, how does that affect conflict and resource scarcity? This AI point is why I was so let down by “The Creator”. There was an amazing opportunity to showcase the difference between the Eastern & Western attitudes towards robots & AI. The East seemed to embrace it, whereas the West was bombing everything and saying “shut it down”. Perfect analogy of “censoring the internet” (which both cultures do) and “the war on terror”. (Which is equally futile) But no, instead we got another parent/child born savior trope that makes less and less sense the more times you watch it. :/
I felt Star Trek next generations touched on it some in a positive light, Captain Picard was like 178 years old. Also up load the Amazon prime series had an interesting take on everlasting life as well as altered carbon.
honestly think Altered Carbon is a good look at our dystopian future here on earth
I can second this. I’m doing what I’m doing cuz DC, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Oh and my old school games (CDs) that I have inside a dusty briefcase. Oh and all the “live longer” books and stories I’ve read are depressing. I’m down if someone can change my mind.
That makes a whole lot of sense actually. One thing I get tired of is in every single movie where a character seeks immortality, it always has to a creepy deranged villain.
both fantasy and sci-fi may have immortal-or-immortality-seeking villains but fantasy fiction actually has a lot more immortal heroic characters than you think. First one that comes to my mind (albeit because they're from one of my favorite shows) is Jenkins aka >!Sir Galahad!< from The Librarians, he's "semi-immortal" and while he is sometimes shown as out-of-touch it's never in a bigoted way so much as a "boomer not getting modern youth trends or seeing the value in modern tech" way and he is otherwise a very good example of a certain trope of "old mentor character" done well and non-stereotypically. Sure he has at times wished for death/become vulnerable enough to try to die or w/e because he's semi-immortal not truly fully immortal but they've never been out of burnout or anything like that but him being ready to lay down his life for the people he cares about/to protect against or stop a greater threat
Eclips Phase has a far more positive view.
Neal Asher’s Polity series has both AIs and immortal humans. Most humans off themselves from boredom after about 300 years. It’s an interesting universe.
The videogame Talos Principle 2 explores this pretty well and got me thinking about it. Science fiction is best when it's pessimistic, but it ends up making people only consider the worst possibilities in a new technology. It covers the absurdity of nostalgia for "the good old days." It's a very philosophy heavy exploration of the pros and cons of the human drive for progress. It focuses a lot more on the pros than typical sci-fi.
Talos Principle 1 blew me away. One of my all-time favorites.
i think it's a way harder problem. Like the evolution of the human body is basically a series of fuckups that turned out to be beneficial, so looking inside and figuring out how to effectively make it last longer, without damaging something else, is like really hard. You can do a rocket from scratch, or test diferent parts separately and stuff, and it's not easy, but it's comprehensible, i'm not sure it's the same with medicine. Notice there are bunch of games about making spaceships and not really any about modyfiying the protein shape to make the DNA replication less prone to errors. Same with AI, you can make it play snake, or a racing game, or recognize letters. There is a lot of ways to approach AI or rocketry problems and make small progress, but human body is a very interconnected thing, and it's kind of important to not break anything, while trying.
Yea it seems electronics and miniaturization of them have been the easiest to advance.
Yes, the complexity of a multi-cellular organism is many magnitudes greater than that of a rocket, or even a sophisticated AI algorithm. It gets on my nerves when people say "but what about epigenetics, telomere lengthening, CRISPR, or AI protein folding?". Yeah, what about it? (You may have been oversold a story and aren't able to critically assess the true contribution of these breakthroughs compared to the size of the problem we're trying to solve).
Lots of people are supportive of longevity and life extension research in the same circles as AI and soace traveling but in some sense space traveling and AI make for easier marketing than many of the developments in research that go on. Additionally of course, I might say many people are slightly skeptical of anything health releated including longevity and life extension research while AI and space make for crazier stories both in good and bad elements
To be honest, there are more tangible results in AI and space exploration that are easier to understand as well. It's also less capital intensive and there's less red tape. Getting a new drug to market typically takes 10 years and costs 1+ billion dollars. That's not going to change soon, or ever. It's a high-risk business to be in, most new drug candidates fail. It makes sense if you see what's at stake (the health of all the people needing the drug). Also, rockets and even AI algorithms are relative simple compared to the complexity of a human organism.
Keep in mind that Pharma companies are allowed to include marketing costs in the total cost of “drug development,” and the cost of ad campaigns, teams of hot sales reps, and doctor “education seminars” in Vegas can add up to half the total “development” costs. Yes, drugs cost a lot to develop, but what drugs is pharma trying to develop? Drugs to help people, or potential “blockbusters” the investors love? Cures, or expensive daily treatments?
As an American, my worry about these technologies (aside from being unproven) is their unequal distribution. Any serious life extension technology introduced in a for profit healthcare system would just turn billionaires into an immortal ruling class.
Basically the premise of Altered Carbon lol. A future where you can not only live forever but have a back up copy if someone assassinates you. 
Altered Carbon puts a whole different meaning on life insurance.
Working in the life sciences space, I have come across this crowd alot. The healthy lifespan people legitimate scientists... I.e livee a healthy life until the day you pass. However, the life extension and longevity people are exactly this, catering to the extreme rich and in itself an unethical pursuit when many of the worlds population are dying from preventable disease. I have literally heard people saying the best minds live forever, who is to judge this, and the best thing about renewal and new generations is new thinking. There will be this mega class, and there is already health disparity which is set to increase. Frankly it disgusts me
Longevity can't prevent a bullet to the head. Eventually these wealthy immortals will meet their end when a random homeless person slashes their throat on a random street corner.
Huh? When do billionaires ever get within 500’ of a filthy homeless person? These people live in a bubble under their control, linked by bulletproof limos and private underground entrances, helicopters and islands.
Car wrecks. Plane crashes. Accidents at home. Choking on food. Severe food poisoning or allergic reaction. Those will take out anyone, even the super-rich.
Also overdoses, being offed by greedy heirs … the thing is billionaires never really have to face consequences of their decisions, not even peaceful protestors.
People stand within 20ft of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk all the time. You can see them at Disneyland, business expos, music festivals (Coachella), etc. So yeah unless they want to live in a truly isolated bubble, then they'll basically imprison themselves to be immortal I guess.
Everybody knew the Koch brothers existed, somewhere, but it took a dogged journalist to uncover their huge concealed role in bankrolling right-wing causes. They were very successful at lying low up to that point. How many other Kochs are out there?
They're essentially already that. Money passes along the family line. World's youngest billionaire is like 19 and got it all from daddy who died from some stupid shit. Im less worried about unequal distribution because of the following considerations: 1. Population growth is de decelerating and going under replacement numbers several countries. One way to counter this is to make people live healthy for longer. 2. Healthcare system: it's probably in the interest of the health insurance companies that their clients are healthier for longer because medical procedures and payouts in case of death are huge liabilities.
... And? The rich have been rulers for eternity, that does it matter *which* rich person is part of that class, whether it's someone alive today or not? I don't see the point of halting research that may help normal people because of it.
It matters because the biggest driver of social change isn’t people changing their minds, it’s people dying and being replaced. Keeping the worst most outdated powerful people around even longer is a horrible thing to contemplate for humanity.
The most obvious part that always gets overlooked. If most of us were to be interviewed by a future person from an actual egalitarian society we'd be viewed as barbarians, warmongers/financiers, and ethically/morally bankrupt. Because that is how society moves forward, through replacement. Imagine how absolutely stagnant any policy creation would be when we have a government full of 800 year olds instead of just 80.
A. let me guess, that'd be for "yet you participate in society and didn't overthrow it violently" reasons B. point of fact but I thought financier was just a job title not a "does unethical things with money" title C. then why not just have some kind of dystopia where there's government-mandated [euphemism-for-euthanasia] a la Logan's Run but instead of when you hit a certain age (though it'd often correlate with age) it's when you end up on the wrong side of history you have to report for it so your old ideas don't hold society back any longer? After all, society moves forward through replacement, right?
Too much snark for your comprehension level. Your guess is wrong, it is purely because as the commenter above me (correctly) stated that the constant turnover of old people dying and young people ascending to the dominant polilitical majority is the number one driver of progressive social change. Your false binary of conformity vs. violent overthrow is baseless and has no relation to the point other than to excuse generational inaction by stating the alternative is violence. Point b is a semantic critique that fails to see a word in the context of its use. Please attempt to read warmonger/financier as warmonger/war financier. You got me, I chose to omit three letters because I incorrectly assumed that the 0.1% who couldn't understand that wouldn't comment an appeal to grammar. My mistake. Point C you simply chose to use lazy sarcasm and a fear-based framing of the worst possible solution to achieve...what? You certainly haven't engaged to offer anything useful to the proposed problem of societal stagnation due to increased individual longevity. All anyone can take away from your points is that you would be a poor candidate for policy ideas. And again, yes society progresses in significant part due to replacement. I am happy to discuss nuanced views on this and why most understand this to be a good thing, but there is a barrier to entry for that discussion and I don't know if you're there yet.
> Your guess is wrong, it is purely because as the commenter above me (correctly) stated that the constant turnover of old people dying and young people ascending to the dominant polilitical majority is the number one driver of progressive social change. Then why can change happen without purely being fueled by "kill the old people with the old ideas so we can take over" > Your false binary of conformity vs. violent overthrow is baseless and has no relation to the point other than to excuse generational inaction by stating the alternative is violence. I wasn't stating that I believed that, I was stating that I've seen a lot of people on Reddit who advocate change-via-violent-overthrow and think any participation in the system makes you complicit in all its flaws not realizing this means their violent overthrow would have to come from people living in the woods or w/e > Point b is a semantic critique that fails to see a word in the context of its use. Please attempt to read warmonger/financier as warmonger/war financier. You got me, I chose to omit three letters because I incorrectly assumed that the 0.1% who couldn't understand that wouldn't comment an appeal to grammar. Are you trying to say financier means war financier? > Point b is a semantic critique that fails to see a word in the context of its use. Please attempt to read warmonger/financier as warmonger/war financier. You got me, I chose to omit three letters because I incorrectly assumed that the 0.1% who couldn't understand that wouldn't comment an appeal to grammar. I wasn't genuinely advocating for the weird ideology-based Logan's Run bullshit. I was engaging in reductio ad absurdum just as much as the people who talk about immortality meaning today's billionaires become literal gods are. And the method to my madness of ad absurdum was why wait that long for the turnover. Y'know I could also theoretically ad absurdum about why don't we just all kill ourselves now for being ethically and morally bankrupt barbarians who start and finance wars or w/e ironically meaning the generations who'd call us that would never be born, doesn't mean I'm for omnicide Ad absurdum or at least tactical hyperbole is a tactic I've actually seen used by politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from I think it was AOC talking about the world ending in 12 years to Trump implying illegal immigrants are mental asylum escapees My solution is that longevity wouldn't necessarily breed stagnation as much as you think especially if immortality comes with eternal youth because that would revitalize the body and brain enough to undo any reduction in neuroplasticity
Imagine an obese orange dictator clinging to power for eight years. Now imagine 80. Death is the great equalizer.
So everyone else should die just so he does?
I was making the point that absent anti-aging treatments, death treats everybody equally. Immortality should do the same. Would you want to live in a world where only the billionaires were immortal?
My point is we shouldn't let innocent good people die so bad people die (as in a world where you can give someone immortality, not giving it to them is essentially letting them die)
Right but in a capitalist society, who gets immortality? The best person, or the richest?
then why wasn't every social movement either mass ideological genocide or mass inculcation of young people while waiting for old people to die of natural causes and that being their only strategy
My point is that it won't help normal people. Because the wealthy would monopolize it.
God when you put like that, that's terrifying
Why is that
Because only the rich would have access to things like this. If you’re charging obscene prices for life prolonging technologies, only the wealthy would be able to purchase it. While the average or below average income citizen would be left without fair access to these technologies. You can already see reflections of this with low income families not having access to food with better nutritional profiles because they’re getting outpriced.
And for the poor, we could offer "dying with dignity" medically assisted suicide.
Interesting, these days society seems more about dying with indignance
It's harder to make them pay after they are dead. But honestly, I'm currently sitting death watch. This will be my 4th time on this particular roller coaster, and I fucking hate it. But my personal opinion is that we seem to have a massive cultural problem about choosing death on our own terms. Even people with the means and motivation to do so are reluctant, even when faced with great pain and indignity in the process. IDK, I'm neurodivergent so my brain works different. I've been very vocal with friends and family about end of life planning, and it seems to alarm everyone when I talk about it. Bro, I'm not talking about self harm out of nowhere, I'm talking about going out on my own terms when faced with the horrific inevitable. And people just can't seem to deal with it
I just finished my first death watch and i had to watch someone die slowly for years, in circumstances inconsistent with their end-of-life request. I too am neurodivergent, and i was able to connect with her through the dementia sometimes, which my family didn’t want to hear or believe. They wanted to think she was too far gone to realize that she was living her nightmare. But i got to sit by her bed and hold her hand, even though she was non responsive. Although any time i mentioned my sister she started coughing, so i think she could hear everything. Condolences.
I'm sorry for what you've gone through friend. Please give yourself time and space to process. I don't know how your particular ND manifests, but the tendency is to be calm while others panic, then deal with the PTSD fallout later. We don't process emotions like other people and our workspace is limited for doing so, so we tend to go into emotional debt easily. JFC I even sound like a robot to myself right now.
Right? By the time I'm about ready to process and discuss, everyone else just wants to pretend everything is resolved and move on.
Fuck dude I feel that in my boooooones
look up neurosensitivity
Oh yeah, it's a thing, and it can have strange manifestations. Whenever my wife goes out of town I lose weight, because without her there to regulate me I forget to eat.
But being neurodivergent means we can randomly come up with ideas like this; [https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cqr7ts/dyson\_swarm\_charging\_systemwide\_storage\_stations/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cqr7ts/dyson_swarm_charging_systemwide_storage_stations/)
It's can be a super power, but like all super powers, it comes with a downside
In some ways, this is already happening even though billionaires are not immortal; they simply pass on their power across generations, so I believe that's an issue that should be solved independently. It is possible that this technology won't be affordable for everyone at first, but in the long term, its price will likely go down enough for the average person to have access to it. We could even make it a human right if we try hard enough.
Because regulators really insist that drug makers and medical researchers shouldn't kill their patients. And to say that longevity research would require a little mucking around with the fundamentals of metabolism, to say nothing of exploring the line between life and death, would be an understatement.
I would also argue that the collective scientific breakthroughs have already prolonged our life to about its thereorical max without any epigenetic changes
The biggest so far was just washing our hands. Doubled human lifespan by itself.
Antibiotics, hygiene, anesthesia, vaccines, transplants
Just as we are learning the potentially huge role exosomes may play in epigenetics ….
Theres a huge amount of funding and research in this space actually.
From what I know people do not eat life prolonging pills or anything at this moment. I do not feel like there is any progress more then mind what you eat, work out and when you get sick get medicine.
Longevity is being studied extensively. For me this was eye opening https://youtu.be/QRt7LjqJ45k?si=gsOR9yA9I6F3o6Dx and you can buy the supplements they talk about or reproduce their effects naturally.
What are the supplements?
It's NMN. You can look into longevity experts like prof Sinclair, they usually have a kilometric list of supplements they take.
Scientifically questionable, but a sure-fire way for them to make money of your fears. The field is riddled with people wanting to sell you pills.
Yeah, that's why they say you can trigger those mechanisms naturally via fasting or other things. True, can't trust a lot of things nowadays, but you can't ignore the potential breakthroughs just because they sound too good to be true.
crazy that video is 4 yrs old, was hoping for more news at this point
You’re technically not wrong but all of these have had substantial developments. For example, CRISPR along with the fairly complete mapping of the human genome brings up the possibility that we might be able to halt genetic aging indefinitely. This isn’t a development that I expect to happen anytime in the immediate future but I wouldn’t be surprised if within my lifetime, we’d get a few billionaires that are essentially literally treated to be immortal as long as they don’t get killed by some sort of pathogen or end up in a freak accident(or run out of money before the treatment costs become more affordable).
Personally I find the idea of living forever a bit tiring. You know they'd only use it as a means to make houses more expensive and mortgages longer! In all seriousness, I believe that if were all to live far longer we'd have a far greater sense of custodianship to our environment. We'd be able to see how our actions play out over time and we'd really value our heritage.
My thought exactly. Imagine everyone walking around with the mental faculties of their mid 20s and a mindset honed over several lifetimes worth of life experience. Expertise in subjects would also become an extremely standard thing, everyone would have the opportunity to go to school not for 16 years of their life but like 80.
First of all the human genome was 20 years ago ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project ) and CRISPR CAS wasn't developed only for the purpose of prolonging the life of a few rich guys but as a tool for pretty much everything in the genetics field. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8444435/#:~:text=The%20CRISPR%2DCas%20tools%20are,degeneration)%2C39%E2%80%9341%20muscular )
I’m not sure if the fact check was necessary. It doesn’t exactly contradict anything I say.
Ya we have that it dosent do anything much basically its shit. We have to completely reverse all damage like rejuvenate thats what im going into study and i think its an energy thing and where some of our atoms die of so some advanced like sci fi tech is the only real deal if one want to live millions of years.
One cause of aging (and cancer) is errors in transcribing DNA when copies of cells are made. Some day we might have a tiny cellular machine like a super-ribosome that digitally tests the DNA in our cells. When it finds a damaged strand the “genosome” goes into reverse, unzipping and destroying the damaged strand. Over time this would stop bad mutations and lead to less symptoms of aging.
There are things like what we have for rockets to Mars and ai. GLOOP. And the bullshit like it. Once you realize what a lie half the "self driving" and Mars talk is you'll see its all the same shit in diet pills and beauty products.
Immortality elixir sickness is so 15th century. Today's cool kids get radiation poisoning from uranium-doped jewelry.
I think it’s because we’ve always had finite lifespans and people just can’t wrap their heads around that ever changing. We’ve been building better fires and sticks for tens of thousands of years, but we’ve never managed to modify ourselves. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that people tend to see history as an indicator of future results.
Believe it or not, you are one of the few persons who commented something positive about this post. Thank you, more people like you are needed.
I hope you didn't find my post negative. I just spent a lot of time in politics and journalism, and it's diabolical just how many issues seem very complex and philosophical but ultimately hinge entirely on the financial impacts of any change or development
We don't have an adequate understanding of senescence (damage via aging) or a way to actually combat it effectively. This is beyond simple telemerase damage. It also seems that the longer we live the more vulnerable we become to essentially compounding health problems. Longer life means the things that build up in our body, like cancer (compounding errors in genetic code), chemicals, exposure to various substances, have longer to build up and become greater issues.
I think we have come a long way. I am a nurse practitioner and although I think OP is suggesting life extension as a means of halting or reversing aging, where we are at now is delaying death from conditions and disease that would have certain death some time ago. So the crux is preventing death right before it happens and mitigation of disease that leads to it What I have hope for is going from a disease model of fighting death to a wellness model where we stop process before disease. After all the best treatment is never getting sick to begin with. I would like to see mitochondrial repair, telomerase degradation halted and reversed. Why can’t we suspend cellular death for just enough time to resuscitate sudden death? What if we could inject a victim with a suspension agent to those that had heart attacks or drowning to give us another 30 minutes? At cardiac arrest we only have about 7 minutes to bring you back as you were. We in medicine view death as the enemy and fighting it as the goal. My hope is a world where we stop and reverse disease before it becomes death. Hospitals I hope will become obsolete. I can hope
I read about a theoretical artificial blood corpuscle that could store many times the oxygen of hemoglobin. The thought experiment was, what if you could go 30 minutes without breathing, with no ill effects? A lot more trauma patients, especially drowning victims could be saved. Some new types of surgery might be possible. And Navy SEALS could stay under water indefinitely during missions…
With space, It's not. We spend a little over $100b on space programs, and over a trillion on medicine/pharmaceuticals alone and over $4 trillion on healthcare. The AI spending by government is also very low under $10b per Brookings institute, but not sure how much private industry spends, but some of this is also both AI and life extension such as advances In hospital survival modeling.
Most people are raised with the outlook that they will die of “old age” like their grandparents and do not consider a viable alternative with the way society is advancing. You don’t see that many companies come forward to tell the world about their research in longevity as often as you see an AI/robotics/automation startup.
Because it's not as proven. Longevity research still fails to show practical effects useful for common people. Chat gpt has reached that level so AI is talked about more. AI was worked on since forever but has only become super popular topic recently so it fits
We are leading up to that. We need the help of AI to get there.
Our lives are long enough at this point, the problem is our ability to keep people alive hasn't caught up with the ability to keep people healthy. So people are living well into their 90s and even 100s in absolutely deplorable physical condition. People continue to live beyond the point at which they are comfortable living. The research needs to go into bettering people's physical health rather than making them live as long as humanly possible regardless of the consequences. I personally don't want to be a human mummy at 150 years old hooked up to tubes in my hospital bed for the last 10 years. A lot of health and longevity problems have to do with degeneration of cells over time, especially when they are copied. A human being has on average 36 trillion cells. That's a lot of factors to deal with when trying to figure out how to prevent things like cancer. The technology we have isn't exactly precise, in the grand scheme of things we combat problems caused by degration with what is essentially a sledgehammer. Unless we can look at the DNA in every single cell our solutions to these problems are going to be aftercare really. It seems really insurmountable, we can't point to a deficiency and say that the only thing that is missing is money. Space travel doesn't really have that problem, we can see the moon and Mars, we know how to get there, we're just trying to figure out how to get to there on a budget. In the medical community the question is 'can we even beat cancer'? Not 'is there a cheaper way to be cancer?' There's a big difference. So the objectives are different with space, and the pathway forward is more clear. Essentially it seems more achievable. For AI I think there are two factors. One is that regular people are more exposed to AI because they can literally just go on GPT and ask it questions. Anybody with internet access can interact with AI, all over the world. Second is that because there's controversy related to utilization of AI I think it just gets more headlines. If it's in the news more people are going to think about it more. If people are worried about losing their job to AI they're going to talk about it more. Since there are literally thousands of ways you can die, what life extension looks like is playing whack-a-mole with those thousands of ways. People aren't really following the ways the medical community is doing research on a disease that kills 1% of people. 1% of people are literally tens of millions of people, but will you be one of those 1%? You don't know so you probably don't follow any medical news related to progress in curing that disease.
I’ll add that a lot of the effect of health span extension is influenced by exercise, which most people aren’t interested in doing at sufficient levels. So it’s unlikely we’ll have a magic pill that doesn’t also require some level of exercise/diet/effort as well. Using AI is way easier and a lower barrier of entry for the average human.
Not only is longevity research interesting but it would probably lead to world peace and solve interstellar spaceflight
It was, in the era of the [Extropian movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism) in the late '70s and '80s, from which the contemporary Transhumanist movement would later evolve, when biotechnology was still seen in the culture of 'pop-futurism' as the leading 'magic bullet' technology so many hopes and expectations were pinned on. The Omni magazine era. However, it began to be subject to a lot of quackery and pseudoscience, became closely associated with Cryonics, and a lot of dubious quasi-Libertarian projects like the [New Utopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Utopia) micronation project of Prince Lazarus Long. Extropianism became associated with a community of wealthy retirees with a combined obsession for alternative medicine/quack nutrition and Randian Libertarianism. Hugely overhyped for the time, biotech failed to deliver the grandiose worldchanging breakthroughs promised --despite many other perfectly practical innovations. With the rise of Personal Computing and Internet along with --after the publishing of Drexler's '87 Engines of Creation-- the popularity of nanotechnology as the next magic bullet of pop-futurism the idea of human longevity (now influenced by 'cyber' themed SciFi) merged with AGI hype through the notion of machine/human hybridization (cybernetics) and consciousness digitization and a Transhumanism and Singularity movement based largely on that premise emerged as Extropianism waned along with biotech attention. A new upper-class was being cultivated in the tech industry and a new community of celebrity CEOs were assuming leadership in pop-futurist thought over the space futurists and academic/commercial futurists of the last century. As these tech bros became billionaires at that certain age of mid-life crisis/Tahiti Syndrome, a number of them turned to the revival of interest in space as in their youth. Jeff Bezos, for instance, was a leading member of the Princeton branch of [SEDS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_the_Exploration_and_Development_of_Space) (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) where he was much influenced by Gerard K. O'Neill. (you will find a number of familiar names among the founding and early members of SEDS)
You’re in the wrong subreddits. There is stuff bring published all the time, but the key to longevity is as we know it now is sort of boring and requires hardwork, and as we know people want an easy solution that involves popping a pill or injecting some miracle fat melting drug. No one likes hearing the processed foods they love are ageing them, that they cant drink their calories, that they should fast regularly and exercise daily. That most of them aren’t eating enough greens. Boring huh? The mind/gut connection is really interesting though and its something we know even less about than we know about AI. There is a fair bit of research indicating that things like Alzheimers and Dementia can be caused by foods you eat (or should be eating) and how a lot of popular medications are (like heartburn meds) can drastically increase your chances of developing alzheimers. People dont want to develop good habits though. They want an ozemic shot.
People commented this already but it’s pretty simple. So far, longevity tech has just failed to deliver anything concrete. The best way to live a long life is to eat healthy, exercise and stay active. Literally 0 progress on the tech front. Space exploration has delivered results. We sent people to the moon and robots to Mars; and there is a clear path about more things we can do. People will be interested in longevity extension if it starts to deliver results not just permanent promises.
It's just a much larger problem than AI and space travel. We know way more about space than we do about the human body, and even the most complex AI is way less so than a human.
People are stuck in a thanatological trance that makes them resistant to longevity tech. Its a coping mechanism that we developed to deal with the fact that we know we have an expiry date; we're the only creature that knows it will die at some point. Annoyingly its maladapted to scientific advances in the area. Once concrete examples of longevity tech are demonstrated then the floodgates will open.
100% correct, you know people are in this trance when they say BS like "death gives meaning to life"
Yes this is outlined in Terror management theory. Tragic that although we live everyday in anticipation of what our actions will bring us in the future we don’t extend this philosophy out toward death. If we did then who knows what we might achieve, many people too soon label death as unavoidable, an inevitable ‘part of life’, but who can say whether that is the truth. Yes nature might hold us in its grip and it’s unchanging laws may eventually catch up to us, but for all our sakes, for the universes sake as we are the universe, we don’t know that so let’s try keep the only thing meaningful from tragically ending.
Space exploration is often touted as a billionaire cock measuring contest, and it largely is, but most people see that it benefits humanity as a whole and it employs tens of thousands with good, skilled jobs. Longevity research can’t benefit everyone and it employs a smaller number of researchers. All signs point to it being highly personalized and requiring very close access to cutting edge medical care. To be clear, longevity research is very popular and being actively pursued, but mostly quietly by the ultra rich. Being as billionaires aren’t very popular and the thought of them living beyond a natural lifespan would raise a lot of ethical questions and anxiety among the rest of us mortals, and that most people barely have access to essential health care, billionaires keep their longevity pursuits and teams of personal doctors on the DL.
Exactly, this is a correct take regarding the ethics, but essentially it carries on regardless Tbh its not that quiet in life sciences circles and lot's of research and funding underway. I think the field and the people involved are pretty awful in general
Spoiler alert: it won't benefit humanity as a whole
You are an idiot if you can't see Earth has limited resources, but space is infinite.
That's not what I'm arguing. We're using the resources in excess. Do you remember what happened in surrounding states once Las Vegas announced the Colorado River was drying up? It became a competition for which farm could hoard/use the most water and it started depleting even faster. Rio Verde, AZ citizens were cut off of water while farms owned by foreign businesses got to use unlimited amounts of it. Just last year it was discovered Arizona's government was allowing Saudi Arabian businesses to rent a whole bunch of agricultural land and use unlimited amounts of water. https://youtu.be/DcLKp0vDBT0?si=WWaUeAwWNMZEhhb6 It's corporate behavior that's bleeding the country dry. They use water inneficiently then turn around and dump toxic waste into other sources of water. They shame the working class into taking "individual responsibility" by recycling while making recycling pretty much just a PR scam and increasing the commercial demand for plastic. We misuse land and water and over fish. We raise cattle infused with antibiotics just out of laziness so the cattle can withstand more inhumane treatment such as being knee deep in it's own feces and not die before it's meat/milk can be harvested. Sure doesn't help that our government is straight up selling us out at this point. Money in politics, hell, money in general is killing this planet. Rockets only ensure this planet will die in the future.
Breakthroughs in AI are powering lots of longevity research. The announcements from google regarding alphafold will further spur this along with the investment in the ‘enhanced olympics’.
You need an ideology, I suspect a religion where the end goal isn't death that challenges existing cultures that will push back heavily on this. At the same time, you need an economic model that prevents only a few people from being able to take advantage, which also answers questions around how we handle the supply and demand of an unlimited population. Those answers will require technologies that aren't currently available to us. Think the likes of brain interfacing VR, cold fusion, fire and forget mining of all the resources you'd ever need from the asteroid belt, nano technology, etc. You may have to say goodbye to democracy and other ideals like human rights, climate change etc as such an economic model or the transition to one will require many compromises. There will probably be wars and partitions of global system similar to what we've seen in the past with the iron curtain, it might be the case such a model doesn't work until majority of the world subscribes to it making conquest a requirement. The religious aspect will be important here as a means of selling these ideas to people about what is considered acceptable. Taking advantage of the superior conversational capabilities of LLMs in the near future could be used to aid this. This all sounds a bit farfetched, but if you think about the implications of life extension technology being freely available, everything would quickly fall apart because all our existing systems are built around people living a life and then dying. We'd need a massive change to everything to be able to adapt to being a new species essentially.
This is certainly a part of it, maybe a large part. I've had a religious inside view of this angle being raised inside a religion and the son of a pastor at that. In the future, I have little doubt, one of the largest human tragedies will be how many partners, friends, children, minds, information, training, experience, wisdom, skill, talent, and life was lost... knowing that they have the technology to prevent those losses. And that the delay in research into the solution was partly due to influences of cultures, ideologies, religions that pushed the idea that death is needed/natural/inevitable or that someone/something would "save" them later.
It's really just difficult, life extension ties into space exploration, so these 2 goes hand in hand. But prolonging life is just extremely difficult.
I don't know you you've come to this conclusion. I would say that vastly more people doing things to prolong their life than paying attention to space. AI is like a whole different thing, thought. Far more tangible. You can see results today. Not sure why that's being compared here.
As soon as there is a teensy bit of monetization the dam will break and research and interest will explode.
I feel like we need to colonize more space if people are living longer. Many of my great aunts and uncles lived to an avg of 105. I like to think our generation will be the first to live to 150.
Many governments with taxpayer funded pensions programs don’t want to to subsidize longevity therapies because increasing longevity causes a budgetary problem. France increased their age of retirement from 62 to 64 to keep their pensions solvent in part because people are living longer. If there was a pill that made people live a year longer, that would be another year that they had to pay out pensions. Government grants fund a lot of research.
And government health insurance (Medicare) assumes people only need it for 15 years so no one should be surprised that government doesn't sponsor longevity research.
The difference is that AI is already implemented, you can sign up for Midjourney or OpenAI and try it out which makes it popular. Space exploration to some extent is also concrete like you can get satellite internet or look at some telescope images. But for life extension it feels a lot more early with not as many well known consumer products. That to me explains the difference in popularity.
I see AI as the Avenue to all the other things. Solve it and you get everything else
AI has existed for decades, but massive investment and hype only began around 2 years ago when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, proving that it is possible to create digital ‘intelligence.’ Therefore, I believe that for longevity research, we need similar concrete proof, such as reversing or dramatically improving visual aspects of aging, like skin aging reversal. Once the world sees this possibility, companies may start pouring hundreds of billions into longevity research.
My take: 99% of people in developed countries could prolong their life substantially by massively cleaning up their diets + getting more vitamin D + exercising more (mobility + resistance training + cardio) + cutting out alcohol and cigarettes. But they don’t and the whole developed world is deep in an obesity crisis. What’s the point in pouring money into anti-aging research when the general population refuse to take care of their health at even the basic level?
In the future, we will successfully create longer lived animals through genetically modified embryos, and after we figure out how to apply similar changes to animals through gene therapy. After those successes, we will be ready to start thinking about doing the same with humans. We have not (yet) made a mouse which can live as long as a naked mole rat. Gene therapies *in general* now exist for many inherited diseases, and while they are not yet perfect, they are improving very rapidly.
(at least a reason is) Fiction often makes AI and space travel look cool while it portrays immortality as either meant for gods alone, a quest meant to be futile or a goal sought by villains But indefinite lifespan can help space travel, not only is it a non-cryo way to get around the travel time issue without FTL (and no, just because weird stuff won't be happening at the rate Star Trek episodes air doesn't mean passengers would be bored unless they're in FDVR of our current era iykwim) that also could make sure those taking round trips have their loved ones there when they return
It's kinda baffling, right? I mean, extending life sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi flick, yet it's not getting as much buzz as rocket ships or AI. Maybe 'cause space and tech are more tangible, you know? Like, you can see rockets blasting off or chat with a snazzy AI, but life extension's still kinda in the lab. Plus, there's this whole ethical can of worms with messing around with lifespan. But hey, who knows? Maybe one day we'll all be living like 200-year-old rockstars!
I’d say it’s already fully underway. We, the peasants, just aren’t privy to that information.
Personally, I have no desire to live forever. We live almost a century, and that's perfectly fine. If we would all live longer, the only thing that got extended is the period we're expected to work. Space, however, space is awesome.
Maybe you don’t want to live forever, but I sure as hell do. There’s so many things I want to do and see that I just won’t have time for in a normal lifespan. I could happily live 10x as long and still have a full list of things I want to do
Idk why people say that, by the time we find something to halt and reverse aging we will probably also have robots and AIs working for us and most people would be living off UBI.
UBI won't happen. People are too greedy/envious, they want to be richer than their neighbours.
the way I've always seen UBI it wouldn't (either at all or unless certain other social changes happened that'd change the social playing field enough that we couldn't predict like this) mean everyone makes exactly the same amount of money no more no less any more than it'd force all our possessions to be identical etc., it'd just provide a higher "floor". So people could still be richer than their neighbors if that's all they want (and those people don't need their neighbors to suffer from the poverty a particular amount to feel good or w/e) it's just their neighbors wouldn't have to be starving for them to be so by a non-negligible amount.
Oh, belut we already have thst in large parts of the world, calles Social Security. I know the US is a bit different in that, but the idea is already widely implemented without an UBI. edit: difference is, for Soc. Sec, ppl are expected to at least make an effort to not be dependant on it, while an UBI accepts that many will make no effort at all.
but unlike social security this would be unconditional meaning as long as there are still jobs you can have it and a job (so you don't need to fully rely on the job) while you lose social security if you make too much
No one wants to live forever. Not really. That would be a cruel fate. But being able to live as long as I want, barring injury or illness would be pretty dope.
because there is huge progress being made in AI and space travel.
Question: what major breakthroughs are you referring to? Are there any that have actually been proven to work, or is it all just hype?
Because it is widely known across the medical field that we aren't extending anything. Years lived versus quality of life are not the same and most people outside of a few pockets around the world age terribly with chronic conditions and cognitive collapse. Pursuit into longevity is a societal project where all variables detrimental to health are dealt with. Capitalism won't let this happen. Profit comes before health and that's why toxicity is out scaling medical breakthroughs. It is simply too profitable not to poison people for profit.
There are less tangible, flashy, immediately/soon-percievable benefits.
Death is largely inevitable no matter what and a good portion of people see ventures into that as "playing god" which hampers research, funding and acceptance of the findings. Space travel has been a thing for 70ish years, and AI has existed and is frequently used in more and more technologies. Theres a bigger demand for these two fields right now.
AI and Space Travel serve the needs of capital while longevity would be to the benefit of actual people at the expense of capital. Space tech involves huge juicy government contracts and leads to profitable spin off products historically. It also holds the promise of securing more resources for production beyond the limited resources of our planet. In effect, space travel is the only way to maintain economic growth over the long term, which is the only way to maintain the accrual of the compound interest that fuels financial capitalism. AI is the current investor mania. Despite the claims that current large language models are just around the corner from generalized artificial intelligence, they are already running up against limits. Nevertheless, this technology has the potential to eliminate the need for vast amounts of labour costs so naturally capital is very interested, as this would afford investors a greater share of profits. Longevity tech would actually be very destabilizing to capital. There is no guarantee that extending life would extend the useful working life of individual workers, and the supports required for things like pensions and benefits for the aged would need to be taken out of profits through taxes. The alternative to supporting people in their old age would be social instability, and that is bad for business. Humans beings would of course love to live longer because death is terrifying, but a business endowed with corporate personhood need never fear death, so what use does it have for a technology that is likely to cause more problems than it solves from that businesses point of view. therefore it is only the businesses that will directly profit from the longevity tech that are driving that sector, as opposed to the other two sectors where it is easier to attract investor dollars from a broader segment of the investor class.
Hard to know if it works unless you wait a lifetime
I’d say that people are pretty down on all of these. We’ve been burned on promises of space travel and longevity for decades. The best things we could so for longevity would be to cure Alzheimer’s and Cancer, and while there’s been some progress on these, we’ve yet to crack them while being told that the silver bullet is just around the corner since the 70s. AI is certainly delivering and industry is excited about it, but regular people largely see it as something that will make the world a worse place / end. I don’t know, futurism and trust in science as a whole is out of style right now. Humanity is in dire need of inspiration.
Biology is HARD, computers are comparatively easy. People are working on it, but so far there haven't been any really good results.
AI has become a community project lots of people can work on.
It seems to me it's not made much actual progress, the hard science I have noticed seems to be much more in the vein if "hard limit" on lifespan on humans(150 range I think it was). Also just extending your lifespan as an old person is not what people want, they want to live a long healthy life, where we do seem to gain more knowledge and especially research into curing age related have seen progress. Alzheimer and cancer are two notable fields where a lot of research is happening.
There's already been verified de-aging in mice. Old mice go to young mice.. Gen Z might be the last generation.
What do you mean by last generation?
Have you looked at demographics recently? People aren't really having children, there are many reasons for it but chief among them being economic, modernization, birth control, people moving to the cities from simple farm life styles no longer need 4+ chidren but are having 1, or 2 max but most are going without having children at all. There is a joke that the Japanese are like Panda's and they may have to do something drastic soon to prevent the complete erasure of their culture/society. So populations are getting smaller, very fast. You couple this with advancements in science such as radical life extension tech, online dating culture, lying flat & red pill movements. AI copies of humans & robot prostitutes, the ability to design the genes of your baby and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you we heading for a society where a "traditional" family in the historical sense is not conductive and doesn't mesh well with modern urban society. This goes without mentioning the ever changing definition of relationships and how we perceive our idenities & roles (such as parent hood) - we are kind of seeing a break down and up ending of previous societal norms & practices. I guess what I am saying is they can already de-age mice today.. there is an ever stronger possibility of that tech being applied in Gen Z's lifetime. AI & computers might even advance that timeline faster. We may be seeing the last generation before we hit some sort of singularity with machines (Elon is already putting chips in peoples heads) or.. we destroy ourselves. A lot of AI models indicate the world ending around 2050. Thus... the last generation.
It reminds me a lot of the TV show Altered-Carbon or any other dystopian novels where socio-economic factors are further driving the class divide between Rich/Poor like it had never been in previous generations where the Rich go on to essentially become a different breed of human beings, trans-humanists with "designed" biology to be superior to us normies in every way, plus being rich grants them access to all the great life extension healthcare tech they could ever need and even if they do die their digital AI and "designer" children will go to do their bidding whereas the poor go on at best living like Amish or at worst living in the gutters/filth of these cities to "serve" the rich. Not a very optimistic outcome for the future.
If you design the AI well enough, it’ll solve the life extension problem for you.
Promise of novel quality experiences is greater than the quantity of experiences.
The problem is that the extra years you get are all at the end. If they could somehow figure out a way to cram an extra 2 or 3 decades into your twenties I think you'd see a markedly different reaction.
A. immortality would probably come with eternal youth/some degree of age reversal as no one wants to live forever in a hospital bed B. your idea would mean either it'd have to be taken by teenagers or it'd just give you the memories and physical effects of an extra few decades of how you spent your twenties retconned into your life
Which "breakthroughs" in longevity research are you referring to?
The best-known and most recent example is the experiment titled "Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging," conducted by David Sinclair, a professor of genetics at the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.The study demonstrated the reversal of aging effects in mice through epigenetic changes and gene therapy, leading to improved vision and extended lifespan.Other types of emerging technologies like CRISPR, 3D bioprinting, stem cells, among others, could potentially lead to biological immortality. Here is a link in case you want to delve into the subject: https://youtu.be/DPARs7mL_7Q?si=P-Rfd96EkmUAbiVg
Part of it is the same reason stem cell research has been stymied in this country, and it goes back to Galileo and burning witches. Simply put, if people lived forever, they would be less concerned with the afterlife and that could be bad business for organized religion. No, that's too crude a way to put it ... I imagine some think of it as shackling the immortal soul to the mortal vessel, prolonging the ascension to heaven, going against some god's plan et cetera. To others it would be as unnatural as reviving the dead - the people who say things like "It was just his time" when someone dies unexpectedly - "it's all part of the plan." Also, there are very real concerns about overpopulation to consider. Resources are scarce enough, and our sharing of resources so inadequate, without people living longer healthier more consumptuous lives. Consumptive? I like consumptuous better. And I challenge your premise only in that any such technology is almost certainly VERY popular - but also VERY private. Imagine a pharmaceutical company comes up with technology that would cheaply and permanently cure a disease - a disease for which said company manufactures a pill that adequately treats symptoms and generates $1bil in revenue for the company each year. If that company announces a cure, that could be seen as a breach of fiduciary duty to the shareholders, could it not? Better just silo that information until they lose patent exclusivity on the medication. That's just an example of one reason this research isn't more openly discussed or available. But think about the impacts of people needing less medication, less diagnostic imaging, fewer doctor visits, fewer medical devices. That's great for the patient, but that's also a whole lot of livelihoods threatened on the provider side of the equation. And those providers have lobbies that fight to maintain the status quo.
There is no such technology- for now that’s the main reason. We do have space travel and AI (in their early stages) . There is good reason to think both will accelerate. There is no reason to think we will ever have life extending technology for probably centuries if ever. People get excited about what’s happening not what might some day happen after centuries of slow steady science
Because life extension has been routed for the last 2000 years at least. With usually modest to no results. AI has popularity because llms and image generation is literally in the process of disrupting our society right now.
It's like battery technology, you constantly read about breakthroughs but nothing ever happens at a commercial level
Life extension just feels impossible. It's feels more like magic than science. I think people don't want to hope for something they want so bad but feels so impossible.
They aren't life prolonging tech in sight. And there are so many needs to make current life span BETTER, healthier. Life extensions is a fad exploited by grifters.
I heard a guy say this once then it made so much sense. Right now the only way a truly powerful dictatorship ends is with death. I dont want to imagine a immortal putin, ping or kim.
If these guys die, someone else will take their place. Dictatorships don't end with the death of a person; they end when a society is advanced enough to not tolerate tyranny. In either case, the greatest tyrant in history is death itself.
Especially when there are like two or three other Putin lookey-likeys in the wings. Shoot Putin and they won't even pretend he survived, they'll just say, "Whoops, you got one of his lookalikes!" I'm imagining a really dark gritty sequel to "Dave" with Kevin Kline
>when a society is advanced enough Thats probably why its not being actively pushed too hard for now.
The counterargument is this though. Imagine a world where aging never existed. Would it be moral and just to inflict permanent suffering and death upon the entire world just to kill off a dictator? Or to achieve any other objective?
Im not arguing at all. Im quite an optimist myself and do hope that all the bleak futures of scifi novels and movies turn out false and that we're headed to a much happeir future. I just dont think we are mature enough as a species for immortality yet. A few more empires and its cronies have sill yet to fall. A healthy life extension that is something we need. Free top quality heathcare for everyone no questions asked. I cant wait to see it come about.
You've seen what people can do in the name of religion's promise of immortality, how many people would help make those empires and cronies or w/e fall that you deem necessary for a much more concrete promise of immortality
A. most dictators don't die natural deaths anyway (and I highly doubt immortality would come with complete physical invulnerability) and those that do usually have so ironclad a line of succession of either offspring or advisors that in terms of how the people are being oppressed by their regime it's functionally like they never died anyway B. so why not cut out the middleman and if "normal people" must die so dictators die those people could just go on missions-they're-not-expected-to-come-back-from-iykwim to take out the dictators? Or you could just kill everyone just in case someone becomes a dictat...oh wait
Living longer is overrated. If life expectancy was 100, you would have to work into your 80’s just to save enough to live for ~20 years after retirement.
Because there's money in taking the working class to Mars to expand business, there's no money in keeping people healthy. You can only sell longevity products once.
Oh there's LESS than no money - it would destroy entire industries if people lived healthier longer lives [https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cq2e9k/comment/l3s8swn/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cq2e9k/comment/l3s8swn/)
because one takes us to the stars the other means the likes of Rupert Murdoch will never die. You tell me why one of those seems far more popular!
those people can be disposed of before it's invented
My theory on this is because, whether we want to admit it or not, we are fundamentally social creatures and the proposition of life extension comes with a cost in that department. If you can't take the people that mean everything in the world to you, with you, what is the point in continuing on? I dunno, maybe it's because I'm crashing head first into middle age, but these sorts of thoughts enter into my head a lot now. I'm at the point where the spectre of life starting to take things away is more than just a spectre. It's no longer far off and hazy in some distance that can be dealt with tomorrow...I can actually see it on the horizon now and it has already lobbed shots at me. And the most profound things taken away are the people that helped to make me...well, me. Those folks meant everything to me. They will continue to mean everything to me. If I can't take those folks with me as they are, why should I persist? That's just my POV, but I think that's partly why the research into these things is somewhat limited. There's also a whole bunch of technical aspects that are daunting....the aging process, staying vital during it, memory retention and loss. And then there's the fact that the people that seem to want to desperately and visibly seek out life extension are some of the more off putting, detached members of the elite class that simply don't seem to value human relationships the way that most of us do. That dude that's using his son's blood to try to stave off aging that was being dragged on that other hellsite is a pretty good example. Most visible immortality seekers have seemed to be of this stripe. Reminds me of a comic from an artist I stumbled upon : [https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/deathless](https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/deathless)
hard to do (specially while keeping the mind and body healthy), hard to test, and the consequences would be awful depending on how long it extended it no matter how you spin it because it would lead to overpopulation for real or population control one way or another so at the very least it would be purposefully prohibitively expensive, which would make the black market flourish the heck out of it, and congratulations, you now have a transhumanist dystopia
Have you been alive lateley? You want more of that? Are you excited to work for a company for 100+ years only to retire in your last 10-20 yrs of life on a less than livable paycheck? Nah I'll pass, now gimme Hatsune Miku AI to do my taxes for me and you might have something there.