So many people think anti-aging science is just about living more years, but that's missing half the picture.
Anti-aging science is not just about living more years, it's about being able to live healthy and fulfilling lives both physically and mentally even as you age. Way too many people are broken by age before they die, to prevent that would be fantastic.
>So many people think anti-aging science is just about living more years, but that's missing half the picture. Anti-aging science is not just about living more years, it's about being able to live healthy and fulfilling lives both physically and mentally even as you age.
Thats's 2/3rds of the picture. The other 1/3rd of "anti-aging" is selling snake-oil fads to suckers and for people with anxieties to obsess over.
One man's lack of anxiety is another man's Stockholm syndrome. That in this day and age, anti-aging research is still considered fringe and frowned upon by the overarching culture, instead of being one of the top priorities of R&D worldwide, is pretty damn shameful.
>One man's lack of anxiety is another man's Stockholm syndrome.
Well, people have escaped kidnappers. None has escaped death, and until this happens (which very well could happen technically at some point) it's just anxiety over the inevitable.
In this thread I've seen the overpopulation argument framed as theft. Here are all the others I've found.
Summary of pro death arguments:
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
Bad for society
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.)
Old people suck. (death is an inferior cure to robustness.)
Bad for individual
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
People will force you to live forever (they aren't able to do this now, why would they begin to be?)
Do you think less people make progress faster? What's your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years?
More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.
Man up, save your family, save yourself.
P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.
Not to mention the other flaw of the "theft" framework or one or the other. Even if there was a fixed limit we would run against in spite of all innovations it is more efficient resource wise to build one person for 1000 years than 20 generations that live to 50. Growth and death itself has more expenses.
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. - Max Planck
Your entire argument seems to be more people = more progress. And longer lives of brilliant people = more progress. What about longer lives of those stuck in their ways or those who want to keep status quo?
You’re also making an abstract “progress” as the ultimate goal. But what type of progress? Creativity? Technology? What about happiness? Or sustainability?
This is operating on equal faith that immortality as a system wouldn't have ill effects that would cause society to collapse and progress regressed. (See: Behavioral Sinks [0]). Immortality would be a massive fundamental change in the system of human civilization and should be treated with caution equivalent to a complete refactoring of the legacy codebase that human life, culture, and every facet of existence is currently based upon.
I find this post to be in bad faith evaluation of those making those arguments ('asking people to die out of fear').
The most intriguing thing I found in the article, is that, If you design & sell items specifically to elderly, they wont buy it. Because they don't want the product to remind that they are old.
So the solution is to design a product which suits to the elderly but seems like its designed for young generation.
>The most intriguing thing I found in the article, is that, If you design & sell items specifically to elderly, they wont buy it. Because they don't want the product to remind that they are old
In the modern society, that is.
In previous eras/societies, it was a badge of honor to be among the elderly, and there were products/lifestyles associated to that that did fine.
I don't think that's necessarily true. It's just that items designed for the elderly are designed by young people who think this is what elderly people need. My mom uses quite a few items that are supposed to be designed for the elderly. Only a few really work whereas others simply don't work.
I don't think most elderly don't want to be reminded that they are old. They will happily use stuff that actually works for them.
I've seen this sort of argument many times before, most notably from Francis Fukuyama. The common thinking on the subject seems to be a deeply inaccurate decoupling of longevity and health.
Yes, we fear death, but we also fear the image of ourselves spending the final years of our lives bedridden and in pain. What we don't seem to understand is that patients in such poor health don't survive very long (despite the inevitable anecdotes about relatives who survived far too long in feeble condition, more a matter of perception than fact).
In other words, unhealthy people tend to have poor longevity.
Especially with dementia you can live a very long time. I have watched this with my dad now for more than 10 years and he may outlive my mom even though his mental capacity is not there anymore.
For cardio you can go to any park for running or biking. It’s way more fun. For strength training you can do bodyweight strength training at home with no equipment required (calisthenics).
Most people fall into the trap of paying for a gym membership, but then they never use it, because let’s face it, going to the gym wastes time and is uncomfortable.
If you train at home by using the weight of your own body for building muscle, all it takes is 10-20 minutes per day and there’s no cost and no excuse for not doing it.
Biking is fun, but running? It's the most boring activity I've ever tried.
A gym membership you don't use is useless of course, but having set appointments for sport, getting called on it when you don't show, and getting encouraged when you do, is far easier than trying to work up the self-discipline to do it at home. When you don't go to the gym on your own, what makes you think you'll do your exercises at home?
I started doing crossfit half a year ago, and now I usually go 3 times a week, far more than the maximum of once a week I did for previous sport/exercise attempts. And I manage to keep it up at least partially thanks to the positive and encouraging atmosphere, and the fact that I do it together. I'd never be able to get these results on my own at home.
Going to the gym makes me lose 30 minutes at least for the road.
You also end up exercising near other sweaty dudes, staying in line for the squat rack or whatever, then showering in conditions that are rarely ideal.
Whenever I go to the gym it takes at least an hour to go through my training, plus 30 minutes to get there and back. At home I can do my strength training in 15 minutes. I will then bike to and from work daily and thus get my cardio too.
A majority of people that pay for a gym membership don’t go to the gym and that’s a fact.
It depends on the individual I guess, but in my case not going to the gym and exercising at home is what made me a doer.
My gym is just around the corner; a minute by bike or maybe a few minutes walk. In crossfit, you do the workout together and give high-fives afterward, which helps a lot with motivation. About half the participants are women, so not just dudes. I shower at home, but that's easy for me because it's just around the corner.
I admit the distance to the gym and the fact that it's crossfit and not something solitary, makes a big difference. If I had to go to the other side of the city, I wouldn't go so much.
A couple of years ago, I did HEMA, which was either on the other side of the city, or in another town altogether. Very inconvenient, but it was fun to do. Once I got kids, the inconvenience eventually won, and now I really prefer my sport closer to home.
Be careful with crossfit training, though. If you favour crossfit style classes, just make sure you focus on your form.
The worst form I've ever seen has come out of crossfit classes. The way people learn to use ergometers in those classes makes me cringe—just asking for a ruined lower back. And lifting—it just looks painful.
They pay a lot of attention to posture when lifting. Not so much when rowing, and at first I sometimes felt it in my lower back. There's a lot of focus on strengthening core muscles though, and I now feel like my abs and back are a lot stronger already, and I haven't felt any back trouble in ages. (Well, weeks, I guess; I've been doing this for half a year now.)
I thought I'd hate going to the gym. In fact, I still often don't want to go. But I go anyway, because I remember that afterwards I'm always happy that I went, and I'm really starting to notice the results. Posture in particular; my core muscles are getting stronger leading to much better posture than anything else in my computer-bound existence has ever managed.
I don't really bike for exercise; I do it just to get around, and I hate going slow.
I never enjoyed running until I started focusing on my form. Now it's almost meditative. I always thought the only way I'd run is if I were being chased by a predator (or a fucking wasp), but now I run everyday and am totally addicted.
One problem is that when I run, I feel a stab in my guts due to all the bouncing up and down. I'm now trying to develop a running technique that keeps my torso on the same level, but it feels very unnatural.
The only way I can really run is when there's something with one of my kids who's a couple of hundred meters away.
I'd have to wear it on the inside. It's not that my gut is so large that it bounces, it's that I bounce while running. It seems to me everybody else does too, but it doesn't seem to be causing the same problems in other people.
Running is not boring if you are sprinting. But yes, the standard jog is the truly the most boring thing ever. I have fallen asleep and crashed while jogging. Sprinting is so much more fun - as long as you build up to it slowly to avoid sprains/pulls.
Don't post if you don't know what you are talking about. Bodyweight exercise is fine and great - yes, I have read Building the Gymnastics Body, Convict Conditioning, and did gymnastics and martial arts, so I have a vague notion of what it is. Except that it sucks for progressive overload. Progressive overload is VERY difficult with bodyweight training. If you aren't doing deadlifts, you are shortchanging yourself. Also, if you get stuck on pullups, guess what helps? Adding weight. Finally, it can be a time saving to not clean up everything and maintain your own workout space.
While there is some percentage of people who these compound movements would be bad for, the beauty of the progressive overload is that you can start incredibly light and strengthen your body overtime. When you compare older people who deadlift versus those who do not, you will often see a great difference in back pain and overall mobility. And for most people it is never too late to start.
And planks/step ups may be great, but they are no replacement for deadlifts and squats.
> Calisthenics develop muscle more harmoniously and yield stronger joints.
I did a quick google, and couldn't find any resources comparing bone density and joint strength for calisthenics practitioners vs strongmen or powerlifters. There's no way joint strength doesn't factor in when you're moving multiples of your own bodyweight. That's also a pretty hard limiting factor of calisthenics - once you're moving your own weight effectively, there's not a lot of places to go, unless you load up with more weight, and then, hey, you're weightlifting.
I'm also confused as to what you mean by "harmoniously" - the big compound movements in lifting that are in vogue right now use a ton of muscles to move stuff around, so a lot of muscles come into play. If you're talking about "muscle imbalances", well, if one was to do a ton of pull-ups and not a lot else, that's a calisthenics workout, and not balanced.
"For cardio you can go to any park for running or biking"
Running in a public park is a beautiful combination of boring, painful and embarrassing. Gym provides a structure. It is a place I go to exercise and everyone is there for the same reason. I hate it with a fiery passion, but so do many other people. It is just like going to physical therapy after a trauma, it hurts like hell, but if you don't do it you will be worse off in the long run.
Like the others have said, the bodyweightfitness subreddit is a great resource. I just want to stress if/when you get to using gymnastics rings, don't just jump right into them, be very careful with your form. Also be sure to that you have not progressed too quickly and are actually doing the exercises you should be doing for your strength level. I've injured myself on them multiple times (the first time I was just doing something dumb) and I'm currently on the tail end of the recovery of another injury. I would imagine this just has to do with the fact that each ring is independent of the other, with many free degrees of movement, which makes it easier to slip into form that is bad on your body.
That being said, I love body weight training and starting it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Aubrey De Grey isn't focused on giving esoteric anti-aging advice (unlike say Ray Kurzweil), he spends his time talking about the science and progress of anti-aging research.
Knowing that; living healthy is obviously important, but to suggest that you should also drop your intellectual curiosity for anti-aging science, like your comment essentially did, is just absurd. It's close to saying that people interested in physics should stop reading physics books and start playing ball sports instead.
That's my plan. I've got the gym membership and use it often.
I struggle mightily with eating less crap, though. (Especially chocolate.) Food is one of the great pleasures in life, and I haven't found really healthy food to be a good replacement for tasty junk.
Maybe advances in food production will bring hope?
This is just purely my observations. I'm of the firm belief that it doesn't really matter what you eat if you exercise enough. Military (actual combat, outside the wire) live off MREs yet are in phenomenal shape. I train strongman/powerlifting, it doesn't matter what I eat - double cheeseburger, fry, and chocolate shake, thats fine because my body needs the calories from the morning workout. It doesn't lead to six-pack abs, but I'll trade that for my level of strength.
Sure, but a nibble of dark chocolate is very satisfying and satiating. I can easily eat a bar or two of milk chocolate but naturally stop with a square or two of the good dark stuff.
100% Dark chocolate isn't 100% cocoa butter, it's the non-fat solids. If you eat some it's quite obviously not fatty, it's bitter and dry like a burnt coffee bean.
Edit: I'm mistaken here, dark chocolate is half fat, TIL.
100% chocolate is roughly half fat by weight, easily verified by looking at the nutrition information on the packaging. Not to be confused with cocoa powder, which is indeed just the non-fat solids.
As you add sugar to chocolate, the proportion of total weight that is fat goes down, and fat being more calorie dense than sugar, calories per unit weight go down.
I have found I actually really like fruit even more than sugared sweets.
The problem is that it's too bothersome to eat them.
It helps a lot to separate preparation from the moment I want to eat something, like cutting and packing an apple in the morning or washing a bunch of berries and carrying them in a jar.
He's far from a crackpot (negative connotations), eccentric would be a better term. Don't forget that De Grey has been one of the main popularizer of anti-aging science, and largely thanks to him there's now serious momentum behind it.
He seems to think that anti-aging science has speeded up drastically recently, both in terms of the science itself, the funding and the popularity. I really love what the SENS Foundation is doing in terms of spinning research avenues into startups, since most investors are far more likely to fund high-risk investments than non-profit ones.
He also mentions other positive developments in terms of legislation and advocacy.
His research agenda and goal is outrageously challenging and controversial and he might be a too overconfident. There is good reason to be skeptical, but he is not a crackpot. Attempting to do something that may turn out to be impossible or wrong approach is not crackpottery.
His work of identifying reasons of aging seems really reasonable. Trying to reverse every one of those is incredible challenge. It's the biggest moonshot ever attempted.
Well, we've had some wonderful crackpots through the ages. Tesla comes to mind.
Whatever you think about his idea of escape velocity you can't doubt the engineering approach he advocates makes sense. Solve these 7 problems [1] and there will be no reason the organism should die.
I can doubt of the engineering approach he advocates, because I am aware that people like me is completely an outsider in this branch of science and I cannot differentiate a charlatan from an actual scientist.
You could fool a person ignorant enough in a speciality with statements such as:
- To fly we just need a way to defeat gravity.
- To resurrect a body we just need to insufflate the soul back to the body.
- To make a head transplant we just need to reconnect the nerves and wait the meat to glue.
- An artificial intelligence will solve our company's problem.
This ver same person could be highly skilled or smart in other aspects. The more technical or scientific we sound the more a subject will give authority to the charlatan.
I ignore if these statements made by this person are overall valid, if the list is exhaust and if the things there are additional factors I ignore. Even in such case we also ignore the deepness of the problem and circumstances related.
Most of people, including myself, are no biologist or cryonogists and have not enough knowledge on that level, in addition it is in the human nature to have high hopes in self perpetuating ourselves. Thats the perfect ground for charlatans to grow.
I think funding doesn't qualify or disqualify him, if funding would give extra credibility points, tomorrow all charlatans of the world would fund something. He also raises big amounts of money and offers no results and that fact alone does imply nothing by itself.
P.D. many bluff companies have also lots of publications, papers etc... and that doesn't mean that they are innovative.
First of all, being specific doesn't mean irrefutable, correct or that it makes actual sense. My statements only seem unspecific because they are ridiculous for an educated person in our current century (although many educated people from our century felt for the last one.)
I don't want to turn that example in an exaggerated dichotomy, but my point is that for someone who lacks skill or knowledge on a deeply complex topic, most of the time by using the specific jargon the person will sounds specific, professional, serious,... they will automatically sound like an expert or authority in the subject.
In other words, I don't think most of people here in this forum, and for sure not myself, is qualified enough to say whether the first sentence is more specific or realizable than the second one:
- We need to find a way to fix mutations in mitochondria by looking at the telanoma and several teams of scientists are looking at that.
- To resurrect a body we just need to insufflate the soul back to the body and several teams of sorcerers are looking at that.
And even if my examples are not good enough, this whole thing could be the "detox" fashion that happened a years ago, just on a different level/topic for a different target audience who needs more complicated words in order to be tricked.
People were saying he was a crackpot just because he was saying that it was possible to defeat aging before it was cool to say that.
He is the leader who put himself out there and made it possible for all of these mainstream scientists to pursue anti-aging research seriously in the open.
By the way,his theory is still better than a what many of the mainstream scientists propose because he attributes aging to a more comprehensive (and therefore more realistic) set of problems.
Its actually similar to how people claimed Ben Goertzel was a crackpot, just because he was willing to promote AGI research when it wasn't cool. It always takes some 'crackpots' (i.e. leaders) to do something unfashionable before it can become fashionable and accepted.
Notice how this article doesn't mention de Grey. That is another unfortunate social aspect. The true leaders in science often go unacknowledged. Because society operates as a popularity contest, not a meritocracy.
One thing is for sure, the average Western diet has so many calories than most people could probably do with a little restriction. (Not even to do anything special, just to return to a healthy state.)
In the West? Men? I'd love to see statistics for that.
In general, being overweight is a far, far larger problem in the West, and being underweight is extremely rare outside of eating disorders like anorexia. There are people who are naturally skinny due to how their metabolism works, but they are rarely truly underweight.
Depends on the country, I suppose. I'm having a hard time finding stats for US that compare underweight and overweight % of population in one study.
Anecdotal evidence from Europe: in our industry, culturally associated with obesity, I meet roughly equal amount of obese and underweight people. And I seriously doubt those underweight people spend time in the gym.
There's a difference between weight gain strategies to build muscle and eating because you're "underweight." People not working out and eating normally will be less bulky than people who work out and eat comparatively more. But they won't be "underweight."
Sure it's a thing for a reason... the reason is guys who are into body lifting that was an easy source of calories and protein. It has nothing to do with your narrative.
Costco pizzas are $10 and over 4000 calories, eat one of those a day and if you don't get fat then you probably have a tapeworm in you or something. Or you're Michael Phelps during training season.
This has to do with mitochondrial metabolic processes being the most efficient to break down smaller quantities of sugar. There are mitochondrial mechanisms to break down a lot at once that are turned on in the presence of more sugar but they just aren’t as finely tuned and thus generate free radicals which can cause cellular problems. There really wasn’t a point throughout evolutionary history where there was a prolonged abundance of sugar available to the degree it is today. Because of that, the mechanisms to break down a lot of carbohydrates/sugars at the same time just did not evolve to be as operationally efficient. Free radicals can cause DNA/RNA disruptions and also damage other processes. Source: father is a dedicated microbiologist
Interesting to know about free radical creation when mitochondria are overwhelmed. I’m sure there’s a lot more factors involved in aging however, not the least of which would be senescent cells. Telomeres only allow cells to divide ~50 times before they’re unable to replicate further.
Before they start eating their own instructions. Every chromosome will become a Y chromosome some time in the future if we do not invent the necessary means.
Unfortunately free radical aging theories are not enough. It's a tiny piece of a picture, because effectively immortal organisms still use the same mechanisms.
And it's not for some magic scavenging either.
Even telomere bound is not enough.
It's likely a set of advanced repair and local homeostasis so that feels still execute the complex maturing program correctly.
Too many senescent or damaged cells might just break the conditions... And mitochondria and cells have excellent mechanisms of dealing with reactive species they make, but sometimes chemicals leak in.
I'd be more concerned with infections and resulting damage at this point, plus toxic damage.
Including endogenous like glycation.
Ask your father about drug induced mitochondrial dysfunction. I had ciprofloxacin 4 years ago and my exercise tolerance swiftly dropped in the months afterward. Research tells me this is due to mtdna depletion and dna damage and I just want to know how to get better. I now have stage 1 diastolic dysfunction and a plethora of seemingly unrelated problems, coming from none before.
It's probably not fixable if it's really that. Even if mtDNA is fine the mitochondria have their own mechanism for senescence based on other damage, just like cells.
It does not even have to be caused by radicals.
And would there be a way you think to test if that's really the case?
I have talked with some people who had like severe reactions to the drug who managed to get some kind of mitochondria testing and it would say stuff like "30% of the active sites are blocked on the mitochondria"
Agree with the sentiment. But in this instance the data, preliminary as it is, is pointing towards "no effect" in humans.
This is true of both animal studies, and preliminary statistical data on the few humans that have been trying CR for a few decades now. There is health improvement, but that's because CR is watching your diet, which is generally good for you. You correct for those factors and the effect basically disappears, at least into the high level of noise that comes with low sample sizes.
But if you still believe in CR, even easier is taking resveratrol. My understanding is that the caloric restriction basically causes the production of resveratrol which is the cause of the beneficial effects in mice. So take resveratrol and eat a normal amount of healthy food should have the same result.
I had never heard of that term but now that I know what it is, I think you’re right. There are so many very strong opinions about diet here and very little quality data to back it up (because for the most part it doesn’t exist).
What? I guess you haven't seen normal people then. Compared to HN, normies seem to have "orthorexia" up to ridiculous levels. Hardly a day goes by without hearing a genpop opinion on what I or someone else should eat, or why $whatever-I-just-looked-at will give me cancer - all of it being regurgitated garbage from the magazines and news sites they read, without them realizing that those sources are not science, but entertainment.
(My gripe is less with individuals, who are inconsiderate - it's primarily with aforementioned entertainment sources that purposefully twist and misrepresent actual research and play on people's fears.)
On a weekly basis someone tells me one of the following things: I'm not eating enough (I'm a healthy weight) , I'm eating too much junk food and not getting enough "nutrients" (they never seem to know which nutrients exactly, but they're sure I'm missing some), I spend too much time sitting down and that's why my back hurts, or I'm standing up too much and thats why my leg hurts. Of course they're well meaning, but I think it's funny to say that tech people are too health obsessed. Sleep obsessed, maybe.
>Calorie restriction is well known slowing biological aging process
Cut calories and you cut the amount of cardio and strength training you can do. This cuts muscles mass, bone density, and takes away the IQ-increasing brain simulation factors away. I am not sold at all.
Don't eat sugar.
Don't smoke.
Don't drink.
Eat fruits and vegetables.
Exercise regularly. Walking counts, but you probably want to throw some upper-body stuff in there as well. Working in the garden counts.
That's about 80-95% of "how to stay healthy using forces under your control" as far as I can tell.
+ have a lot of close friends. According to an 80 year Harvard study, the quality of close relationships was among the biggest factors in long term health.
“The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health,” said Robert Waldinger, director of the study, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”
Somewhat off-topic, but I always thought the most prominent real-life reenactment of The Fox and the Grapes was all of the media and thinkpieces that people have written about how living for an extended period of time would be just _awful_. You wouldn't find many people who think that 40 years would be an acceptable lifespan, and most people would probably like to live to 100 if they got there in good health, but as soon as the idea of living potential centuries is floated, it's all "it would drive you crazy with boredom!" It seems like a good-sized contingent of people believe that extending the human lifespan wouldn't be impossible or immoral so much as it would be _undesirable_. Boy, it sure is convenient that our "natural" longevity (whatever that means) is right at the limits of what humans can reasonably enjoy, huh?
I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors seems like a collective agreement among people to throw their hands up and go "well, fine! I don't even _want_ to live longer, who'd like that?"
All of this, of course, doesn't touch on the moral, economic, environmental, etc. problems that crop up with greatly extended longevity, for which there are a number of altogether more palatable arguments that would need to be engaged with more fully. Still, it's an odd piece of ideology that makes people feel like they don't need to deploy any of these in the conversation - why would they, when they _totally_ don't even want to live much longer than 100 anyways?
These are the same people who complain that they would be bored if out of work for too long. I personally have so many personal or passion projects that I would like to undertake, but don’t have the time for, that I’d happily fill a few lifetimes with interesting things to do.
Of course, there’s a difference between a few lifetimes and thousands of years or immortality.
I expect most people's experiences when they're unemployed are colored by being... unemployed. You're not retired or on vacation, you're jobless. You're not supposed to be having a good time following your passions, you're supposed to be looking for more work or skill-building so you can get work. And money is going to run out eventually and who is going to want to hire you when you haven't had a job in six months or a year?
A lot of cultural baggage and shame in it, most people just end up stressed out and depressed.
I’m not talking about the people who are unemployed against their will, but the people who are not unemployed and say “no, they couldn’t take a load of time of work[1] because they would be bored”. I took some time off a while back, to destress and work on my own ideas for a while and the amount of people who said they couldn’t do it, they’d be bored was mind blowing.
> who is going to want to hire you when you haven't had a job in six months or a year?
I’m lucky enough that in our industry, this hasn’t affected me. Tech companies seem pretty open to the idea that people take sabbaticals and such. Don’t get me wrong, I’m under no illusion that this isn’t a problem for other people and other industries, it absolutely is, unfortunately.
Yes, I think even when people choose to stop working, they often still fall into the trappings of joblessness and stress about the uncertainty of what they're going to do when it's time to go back to work. And so they don't enjoy it.
Seriously, I think this is actually a severe case of self-deception to cope with the realities of having to work in a modern environment. Or, for the other example, dying.
That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion. Cannot remember that last time being bored. You always have the option to spam your unqualified opinion on HN or something, there is so much potential stuff to do that a lifetime probably wouldn't be enough.
As someone who has been incredibly fortunate to be able to do pretty much whatever I want for the last 15 years I can tell you from personal experience: you can get sick and tired of pretty much anything and everything, and it happens a lot faster than you would expect (or at least a lot faster than I expected).
One of the really serious problems is that your brain generalizes, so once you get sick and tired of one thing, it's easier to get sick and tired of the next thing because your brain says, "Oh, this is kinda similar to this other thing that I already got sick and tired of."
Managing all this can be a real challenge. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, it's an incredibly nice problem to have, and I wouldn't trade it for the world (literally!) But even nice problems to have can still be real problems.
I guess I can’t relate, I’ve been lucky enough to have had a number of periods in my life where I’ve had time to do my own thing and... I never tire of having long periods of time to do with as I wish. I mean, sure, I have to actively seek the next fulfilling thing, I can’t just sit back and assume the projects in my mind will fulfilling longtime and I do agree that its easy to slip into boredom, but there are so many things I’d like to do or experience that there’s always something I can do that I find interesting or exciting enough to fill my time. I certainly wouldn’t be idle, which absolutely would bore me.
I suppose everybody is different though and what works for me, might not work for you.
I am the same way, have a bunch of things I would love to do, but don't have the time. Once thing I noticed is that at least in the past 2-3 decades there are more and more fields opening up to DIY projects that used to have a really high bar for entry in the past. DIY biology, robotics and other electronics and many others. So I think by the time we could fill one lifetime with projects, things would pile up enough to take another few lifetimes :)
Don't worry, it's quite likely you won't have thousands of years of immortality even if biological immortality is achieved. Eventually, something is going to kill you: a plane crash, a speeding bus, an earthquake, a murderer, etc. Just look at how many people are killed in cars every year in the US alone.
For some reason, any time we discuss extending human life, it quickly degenerates into an ethical question.
First, I wouldn’t worry about it because we spend more effort discussing ethics than actually trying to solve the problem. Basically, because the problem is so hard we bikeshed on ethics.
Second, it’s a very hard problem. It’s unlikely with the actual amount of effort, that we’ll be able to do much to extend life in the foreseeable future. We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.
Most of these are mostly age-related. Reducing your body's age may reduce these problems a lot. So a completely different issue than you are addressing.
>We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.
No, we really don't. Heart disease is mostly caused by lifestyle. And cancer and the aging process are two sides of the same coin: solve aging and you'll figure out cancer too. Alzheimer's is now appearing to be caused by a virus, so we'll probably have a vaccine for that before long.
I feel like we might be habituated to justifying our own failures in terms of the restrictions life makes for us. I'm not a billionaire because I couldn't be. I'm not a world-class piano player because I couldn't be. And I can't be because life is too short for all that.
So when you tell somebody that life isn't short, suddenly they are confronted with the fact that maybe they could be those things, and now they have to justify why they haven't been working at it all along. "Well, I wouldn't want it anyway."
I think the rapid mental and physical decline in your twilight years dissuades most people from wanting to live much longer than that, not some inane moral compulsion to live within our "rightful" lifespan.
Everyone advocating and working towards increasing lifespan wants to eliminate that mental and physical decline. The goal is to give you more years feeling 30-40, not just more years feeling 90-110.
That decline is what kills you. If you live longer, it is necessary that this decline be inhibited. Saying you don't want to live longer is basically the same as saying you want to be less healthy.
That's too simple. Slowing the decline for people who are in at least moderately good health who can enjoy life is of course a good thing. But in poor health, with no prospects of improvement... well, when's the last time you've visited a nursing home?
The experience of helping taking care someone in hospice care makes it very clear that at some point they can't do much of anything, or enjoy much of anything, and prolonging the suffering is not on the agenda of anyone with a heart.
Ok then. Let's just take this broad conversation about "most people" and distort it with wildly pessimistic and self-contradictory assumptions.
I can only repeat myself here. If you want to live longer, you want better health. If you don't want better health because "there's no prospect for improvement", then I don't know what to tell you. That's a contradiction.
In any case, slowing the decline due to aging doesn't mean you spend more time in a nursing home. I means you delay entering a nursing home in the first place.
I agree that it's very useful to prolong the amount of time spent in earlier, healthier stages of life. The treatments described in the New Yorker article sound quite promising.
However, you aren't taking the elderly seriously. It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. This is something that happens to everyone who doesn't die first. It's a normal part of life.
Look, you're the one saying that elderly people are so miserable that we should not prolong their lives.
>It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point.
Your thoughts are pessimistic, not the fact that you are thinking. The main purpose of a nursing home is to extend the length of people's lives. If you think this is inhumane, then perhaps you would prefer a crematorium to a nursing home?
There is nothing about extending the life of people who are in a place specifically to have their lives extended that is 'not taking the elderly seriously.'
You're engaging in one-bit thinking, where things are either one extreme or the other. I didn't say that everyone in a nursing home wants to die! That's something you made up. However, you can find people with very poor health there. Let me quote from the article I linked to:
"In medical jargon, healthy people are “alert and oriented x 3”, which means oriented to person (you know your name), oriented to time (you know what day/month/year it is), and oriented to place (you know you’re in a hospital). My patients who have the sorts of issues I mentioned in the last paragraph are generally alert and oriented x0. They don’t remember their own names, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing there, and they think it’s the 1930s or the 1950s or don’t even have a concept of years at all. When you’re alert and oriented x0, the world becomes this terrifying place where you are stuck in some kind of bed and can’t move and people are sticking you with very large needles and forcing tubes down your throat and you have no idea why or what’s going on."
It doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen enough that people who work in health care, or have had to help elderly relatives, or anyone closer to the end of their life needs to think about what to do about it, and set up things like advance directives and medical power of attorney.
There is also the POLST, which is a pink sheet with doctor's orders that terminally ill people put on their refrigerator that tell paramedics not to do CPR (for example). https://polst.org/polst-and-advance-directives/
Although the health care system is usually about extending people's lives, this is not always appropriate. Acknowledging that is just being real about what goes on as people get close to death.
>Slowing the decline for people who are in at least moderately good health who can enjoy life is of course a good thing. But in poor health, with no prospects of improvement
This is a really silly and non-sensical line of reasoning. We're talking here about achieving biological immortality: stopping the aging process. This would necessarily require understanding human biology and cellular processes at an extremely detailed level, in order to modify them artificially to stop aging altogether. (Most likely, this will require periodic treatments, much like we currently go to the dentist every 6 months for a cleaning.) If we have the technology to do this, people aren't going to be in poor health with "no prospects for improvement": the anti-aging technology or treatments are going to change that.
You're engaging in one-bit reasoning where longevity treatments are either a magic fountain of youth, stopping aging and disease completely, or they don't work at all. But how can we know how well they will work?
I think it's more likely that the first ones could add years or decades of life without being nearly that good, and perhaps still having significant side effects or just not affecting some aspects of aging. If so, difficult decisions about what to do when closer to death won't go away.
Those difficult decisions are there right now; life extensions just push them further away. I don't see the problem here. And yes, longevity treatments will necessarily involve reducing disease and aging, or else they won't increase your lifespan. Aging is simply a disease, where much like AIDS causes your immune system to fail which causes other diseases to kill you, with aging some other aging-related disease finally kills you, such as Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, etc. Longevity treatments will necessarily result in less disease, even if they can't figure out how to stop all diseases right away. I don't see how they'll result in hordes of centenarians on life support.
I'm not saying there is any new problem, just that the problems of aging may still be rather similar to today, just happening later.
If life doesn't really go on forever and people still eventually die of some disease or other, that's a lot of old people who are on life support at some point in their lives, right? Just like today.
As AstralStorm said, you just made the argument for why it should be pursued. If you look at humans as economic units, we as a society invest an incredible amount of time and resources into every person to make them a productive adult: it takes a bare minimum of 18 years, and generally more like 22-26, with a lot of education and other resources. Then if they're too feeble to be productive by the time they're 70, that's only 40-something years. If you extend the lifespan just so they can be productive until 110, you've now doubled your return on that investment!
On top of that, now with people delaying parenthood so much, or not even having kids, we're facing demographic problems (too many old people being supported by too few young workers). If people have significantly longer adult lives, this could very well make it more feasible and desirable to have kids at older ages, which could stabilize the population problem. (People could have two kids at 40, and two more at 60, and two more at 80, for instance.)
I'm not sure I buy your arguments, though. For people who earn enough to retire and live off investments, this could mean more time in retirement, rather than more time working. (Still good, but not a productivity boost.)
Also, I don't see a reason to assume that an anti-aging treatment would delay the end of fertility in women past 35 or so, or make egg freezing work for longer. Those would be separate medical advances.
>For people who earn enough to retire and live off investments, this could mean more time in retirement, rather than more time working. (Still good, but not a productivity boost.)
Who cares? As long as they're not a drain on the system (compared to today), what's the problem? That sounds like a big plus actually: people getting to enjoy more time in their lives. Why would anyone not want that, unless they're some kind of religious nut who thinks this isn't "god's will" or something?
>Also, I don't see a reason to assume that an anti-aging treatment would delay the end of fertility in women past 35 or so, or make egg freezing work for longer. Those would be separate medical advances.
I don't think they'd be entirely separate. We can already freeze eggs, and women are able to carry children at older ages (sometimes not even their own children) thanks to IVF now. Anti-aging treatments should make this even better; women may routinely get their eggs frozen at 25, and then use them to make children at 75.
Boy, it sure is convenient that our "natural" longevity (whatever that means) is right at the limits of what humans can reasonably enjoy, huh?
I suspect you have not spent much time around eg people with dementia, who are well within their “natural longevity” but for some have not “reasonably enjoyed” anything in many years, sometimes decades.
Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already.
For many entering old age, the concern is not about how many years they have left, but if they’ll be able to take care of their basic needs during them.
>Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already.
Instead of that, try visiting some universities where there's still some elderly people working as academics. Or try going to a classic rock concert where guys in their 70s are still playing on stage, sounding just about as good as they did decades before. Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older, and keep doing the things they enjoy.
> Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older
... you understand that declining mental health is not the result of "giving up", right? And that the celebrity academics/rockstars still active at 85 often are 1) reasonably wealthy and 2) lucky.
I've TA'd for 70+ years old professors with declining health who were still teaching because they didn't have a choice and had bills to pay, and it was just sad. Complete waste of time for the students (and tragic for the professors to find themselves in that situation).
Your messages give the sense that you have a very naive/idealistic view of aging.
"I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors ..."
I've spent some time thinking about this. Bear with me ...
First, let me agree with you that I am flabbergasted by the notion that one would have nothing but ill-use for another 40 or 80 or 200 years of life - I would certainly find good and productive use for it, provided I was in good physical and mental health.
However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century. Pick any that you like (hint: they're all men). Now bring them forward to the present and they are impossibly reactionary and conservative. Their wives didn't wear pants, they would refuse to speak to a divorced woman in public (if such a woman was even present) and they probably believed that homosexuals had no place in society.
That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now.
To put it succinctly: progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.
So now consider if all of those "woke" 18th century (white males) were walking around with us today. How does that affect politics and civilization ? We don't need to do a thought experiment - it's right here in front of us: the "villians" in the housing/NIMBY/prop13 debate are basically anyone over the age of 50 who owns property. Those people aren't even a full generation away from us and we're trying to decide whether they're just sort-of evil or all-the-way evil.
So yes, there is a cultural resistance to people living (a lot) longer and if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years I think you can see how quickly that would get murderous - and I do mean that.
...
Looking deeper, I think the prohibition is more than a political one, as I've described above, but one of individual vs. group optimization. You are thinking of your personal self as the organism - and that makes sense because we aren't bees or ants. However, there are other units that can be thought of as an organism and there is, by definition, a conflict between optimizing for the individual vs. optimizing for the tribe/race/species.
Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.
People can change world-views multiple times in their lifetime, maybe this plasticity is just another thing we'll need to preserve as part of improvements designed for staying younger longer.
Arguably, for example in science, advancing it "one funeral at a time" is too slow even at current life expectancy. So one way of speeding it up is killing any prominent scientists over 30. Lots of benefits, right? We would have moon bases in early hundreds BC if humanity adopted that approach!
Advancing societal progress one generation worth of funerals at a time doesn't sound like a good strategy either. I propose reeducations camps instead. Similarly to how slavery during the time of its invention was a great humanitarian advance (alternative was literally death), imperative to keep up with times would be a good alternative to death as well.
Seriously though, changing society to value rationality, (in lesswrong kind of sense, with obligatory Crisis Of Faith exercises, etc) might be not much harder than extending life expectancy to 1k years.
Re: cancer -- society is not an organism, there is no inherent worth of society separate from what benefits it conveys to individual members. In other words, maybe that's my individual organismic bias showing, but individual cells live for the benefit of the host organism, while society exists for the benefit of individual members. Cancer cells are freedom loving cells!
That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now.
I knew a young woman in college who was extremely homophobic. I witnessed her bonding with a gay activist over soap operas and changing her mind. People change and adapt. Also, if you look back at history, you'll find people more "woke" than you.
if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years
Human history doesn't really work like that. We may be going beyond human history with AI, and it would work quite like that either.
Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.
A single alien AI that controls the resources of an entire solar system would likely see our civilization in these terms.
This is an interesting aspect. But our inability to or having a hard time of changing our fundamental believes seems like a bug to me. I'd hope its one of those health issues we'll learn to mitigate. Btw, do you guys also despise the concept of a global learning rate in AI/ML? There has to be a better way than just assuming "the current state is good enough, now lets only fix details". Humans certainly don't work that way.
But back to topic... even without, I have a hard time accepting that you can simply extrapolate the current "old people behavior" happening for a few hundred years longer. A lot of issues would suddenly affect them. They'd have already lived though multiple revolutions (e.g. new tech, maybe like not paying with hard cash anymore) and internalize this as a part of life. Actually, we're close to having to learn this right now, with how fast progress has accelerated.
But yeah, making it work with stuff like actively seeking peers across a diverse spectrum would probably require drastic effort with a significant burden placed on the individual.
But only some of the ideology from then is reactionary and conservative by today's standards.
Why the assumption that Past = Right/Conservative and Future = Left/Progressive? I grew up with about this view of politics, but I don't think it's accurate. It seems like a nice simplification, but it's a gross oversimplification that paints anything right of center as being obviously backwards.
"Why the assumption that Past = Right/Conservative and Future = Left/Progressive?"
No, that's not really what I am saying ... and you are correct, that would be a very blunt oversimplification (or just plain wrong).
What I am saying is that in an unbroken thread of society (that is, absent disaster or revolution or other "resets") views and mores become viewed as more and more conservative by each successive generation that succeeds them.
As I wrote, "progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time." I don't mean that those people become conservatives, I mean that successive generations view them as more and more conservative.
I don't think that implies that conservative views are backwards - unless you start with an assumption that "new is always better". I don't assume that.
I understood your original point. Implicitly, you are assuming that people develop their values and beliefs and lose plasticity over time, so they will not adapt to the societal changes happening around them.
I think the underlying thought experiment "would I want to be immortal" is plagued by these and other unspoken assumptions. We simply don't know what it would mean to have a lifespan decoupled from our evolutionary experience. Clearly, we have psychological and emotional development coupled to our physical development and our functional roles within human society.
What does it mean to freeze our physical health at our "prime" of 20s-30s? Would it also freeze our cognition and emotion? Or would an accumulation of experience still shift our minds into very different modes incongruent with what we assume of young adults? Think of idioms like "young at heart", "wise for her age", or "has an old soul". Will people freeze with one personality, or all trend towards some world-weary and sage disposition as they witness more and more of life and loss?
And what of pathologies and maladaption? When would people reproduce, if they are immortal? Where does evolutionary pressure provide feedback, if traits can erupt with arbitrarily inter-generational delay?
Can an economic and social system develop to handle immortal participants? The worst aspects of primacy could emerge, if actual individuals can take the place of dynasties and corporations as permanent centers of wealth and power. Conversely, would any potentially immortal individual want to take on great personal risk for the betterment of a larger group? How does this change with time? Would centuries of experience lead one to sacrifice for the young, or would the absence of decrepitude encourage selfish delusions of grandeur, thinking that an accumulation of vast experience should be preserved by spilling blood of relatively empty youth...?
"I understood your original point. Implicitly, you are assuming that people develop their values and beliefs and lose plasticity over time, so they will not adapt to the societal changes happening around them."
With respect, we're talking past one another.
I am not talking about the persons whose lives are extended.
I am talking about their new contemporaries - their "younger peers" who, in the past, would have never found themselves cohabitating with people who had lived 1xx or 2xx years ago.
It is those future young people who I think will have a very hard time accepting any views of any kind coming from any "great old ones" - no matter how plastic or malleable or open-minded those old people might be.
Their sin is simply being old and youth defines itself by breaking with the old. Right now there's a throttle on that struggle because people die. Without that throttle, the young will, I fear, kill the "vampires".
To me, you still seem to be implicitly assuming that the old person would be reflecting "old" perspectives. I don't necessarily disagree with this assumption, but I think you may be overlooking how much your argument depends on this. And, I am not sure that the dreamers of life extension share this assumption.
Playing devil's advocate: If one had the permanent physical and cognitive characteristics of someone in their 20s-30s, might they not continue to pass as a young person? Unless you look up their identity in some registry, you wouldn't necessarily be able to identify a cohort. Here is urban Southern California, I see plenty of "old" people in their 50s-60s who are trying to pass as young people all the time. What if they don't have to mask fading hair and eyes, sagging or blotchy skin, aching joints, gravely voices, or personality changes?
You describe a person from 200 years ago existing today, as if they step out of a time machine. But, if they have had 200 years to absorb pop culture, mannerisms, dialect, etc. then how would you know? They won't be repelled by garlic nor invisible in mirrors. They won't even be afraid of sunlight (no skin aging!) and their blood-sucking may not be distinguishable from any young go-getter's.
>However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century
People change over time. My mother is over 80 now, and happily buys all kinds of stuff on Amazon with her laptop or smartphone, even though she said decades ago she didn't see the need for a computer. Her politics are also quite liberal, a lot more so than a lot of 20-somethings I talk to these days who seem to be a bunch of MAGA fans.
Also, how do you know that progressive people from the 18th century would have a problem talking to a divorced woman or women wearing pants? Just because that was the standard of the day doesn't mean that everyone from those times agreed with that.
>progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.
This simply isn't true at all. Many of today's conservatives are quite young, and lots of liberals are quite old. One of the most liberal SCOTUS justices is on her deathbed now, while the youngest one is a Trump appointee.
"progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time."
I'm sorry - that line makes it sound like I am saying those people who were progressive become, themselves, reactionary conservatives.
What I am trying to say is that viewed by successive, future generations those people become reactionary conservatives. That is, simply the passage of time changes the view, from outside, of those people.
"Many of today's conservatives are quite young, and lots of liberals are quite old."
Agreed. What I am saying is that, absent a revolution or other reset of our current society, both of those groups will be considered, 200 years from now, quite conservative.
An example looking backward:
Find me the most liberal and the most conservative participants at the signing of the US Declaration of Independence - now let's sign them up to speak at Berkeley tomorrow and see how that goes. See what I'm saying ?
You're falling victim to the classic fallacy that societies get more liberal with time. That simply isn't true at all, and you can see it many times in history. Here's a couple of examples:
1) Roman society vs. Medieval feudal society vs western society in the 15-1800s. The Romans had slaves, but the slaves could own money, buy their own freedom, etc., so they were really more like "indentured servants", so this already makes them more liberal and respecting of human rights than America in the early 1800s. Romans had freedom of religion: no one was burned at the stake for believing the wrong kind of religion there. You can't say the same for Medieval times.
2) Ancient Greece vs. everything until about 40 years ago: in ancient Greece and nearby areas, homosexuality was not only tolerated, but encouraged among military members to improve unit cohesion. We're only now tolerating homosexuality again, and even then, not that well.
3) America in the 1920s vs. America in the 1940s-60s. Remember "flappers", speakeasies, etc.? Society was more liberal in the 20s than later.
I can easily find examples of people in my own social circles (mainly through family contacts) where there's young people who are die-hard conservatives, MAGA fans, Christian zealots, etc., and older and elderly people who are staunch defenders of Roe v. Wade.
The things you identify as "liberal" vs. "conservative" simply do not correlate very well with age or generation at all.
isn't this happening already? From totally unscientific perspective, if you look at pictures of people from olden days (say high school seniors from 1970s/1980s vs from 21st century) as well pictures of 60+ people from 1940s/1950s,
you will notice people now look a lot younger. It isn't only the sense of grooming/clothing but also physical attributes which have changed
What I'd like to more accurately identify is the point at which we get diminishing returns to health from strenuous exercise, in measurable form. Exercise of course provides enormous health benefits, but progressive overload for instance demands ever increasing caloric intake which runs counter to health recommendations. This is probably easier to track than high intensity cardio except in terms of pure caloric need. I deadlift twice my bodyweight at up to 5 reps and consume somewhere in the range of 2000-2500 calories a day. But is reaching the 1000 pound club worth it from a health standpoint? I doubt it, but the evidence surrounding this is sorely lacking.
It would vary depending on type of exercise. Giving my opinions based on being very interested in the subject for years, without bothering with citations.
For muscle-mass, the health benefits come from having higher glycogen storage (helping to prevent diabetes), as well as maintaining function late into life. The latter is subject to diminishing returns, and maintenance is more important than the amount when you peaked. Also, having too much muscle mass would put a strain on the heart.
Daily light movement is important for circulation. 10-12k steps seems to about ideal.
15-20 minutes of moderate-intensity (120-140 bpm) or 4 total minutes of high-intensity (> 160 bpm) cardio improves heart function, blood-flow, and mitochondrial density. Any more seems to be subject to diminishing returns.
Stretching around 10 minutes per day may help prevent cancer and preserve function.
This leads me to the following recommendations:
1-3 weekly strength training sessions of around 45 minutes
This closely approximates what I've gunned for. I'm not aiming to be a maximalist, but want my investments to be worthwhile. My intuition has suggested to me that with cardio (moderate/intense), a little goes a long way and long sessions can eventually yield injury. You mentioned not bothering with citations but if you recall any sources I'd check those out.
You didn't mention it, but the other benefit of strength training is higher testosterone levels.
I don't see discussion about the natural emotional maturation process. Even with a much better body, I don't feel about life and things the same way. We might as well take care about not misaligning somatic health with mental health too much. It would be fruitless.
That doesn't make sense on several levels including mathematically. Two sterile immortals would use less resources than a stable progression of two child average couples in a generation. There would exist therefore a middling equivalent or lesser resource using immortal reproduction k per t or n additional projection than say N per generation mortals.
Not to mention the theft framework is nonsensical - while it is a good thing to have sustainable systems and resources how can one steal from that which does not exist and may not ever even?
Under that framework I could accuse anyone of wrongfully occupying the space of an entity which may only exist at the end of time after all intelligent life is dead - which is more absurd than the invisible pink unicorn arguements.
I would never classify being alive as “stealing resources” but regardless, you’re assuming that people don’t make meaningful contributions to society while alive. What if while you were living longer you cured cancer?
Under your philosophy wouldn’t reproducing steal even more resources? If you have three children then you’re stealing them 3X faster.
You're following the narative trope of one person being immortal and watching as everything around them dies. If everyone is immortal it would be much more mundane than you'd expect, think more to the tune of "happy 679th mom" or "man remember that song from 179 years ago?"
> You're following the narative trope of one person being immortal and watching as everything around them dies.
No, that is not the reason for my comment.
It seems clear to me, both by life experience and reading related research that humans require meaning to have lives worth living. This might be a hard pill to swallow, but I suspect that it is ultimately our mortality that gives our lives meaning. If there is nothing to strive for, then there is only pleasure seeking. Your life becomes an infinitely long hedonistic binge. Human beings were not designed to withstand hedonistic binges for too long without dark consequences (as in, dissolution of meaning, extreme depression, etc).
I guess you could argue that with infinite time, you could figure out how to redesign yourself until you are comfortable with immortality. But are you still yourself by then? Or is this problem also already solved by... just dying?
Sure, why not? Then I could study all of mathematics, physics, computer science, or whatnot at my leisure! Right now, I can only experience the smallest of glimpses into incredibly interesting fields.
Ok, so you are assuming that you would be immortal and free to pursue intellectual endeavors forever. This implies that all of your problems would be solved.
You would be forever chasing the dopamine hit of understanding more of the fields that interest you. Or you could just shoot heroin. Without mortality or problems to confront, all meaning would be lost. Math, heroin, sex, all the same. Consider the dissolution of meaning, and the fact that infinity is a very very long time.
It's weird how people like you somehow think that immortal people would somehow be immune to gunshots or speeding buses. In reality, you'd have at most 1000 years before you were the victim of some tragic accident or murder.
Is there a need for so many new people? I don't see why the current pool of conscious agents can not live longer and reduce the frequency of ultimate personal tragedy.
Few people are trying to make the case for shortening life in the interest of having more children, so is there anything special about the current balance to suggest we should not continue to push it further away from this?
If ageing becomes something we can turn off, and we become biologically immortal, then I think the main unfortunate consequence is that the remaining causes of death become more dominant and are unnatural and unpredictable: accident; poverty; war; disease.
More people, as long as we avoid massive overpopulation and resource depletion, should result in more technology. More technology means better resource usage, which enables more people to exist.
There's plenty of room on the planet for more people, but not if everyone wants to live like a suburban American with 2 big SUVs and a McMansion with a huge lawn. If everyone lived like in Tokyo, we wouldn't be so worried about overpopulation. Better technology will also help us create more food without having to take up more land for it. Finally, technology will allow us to push into space and use that for both resource extraction, manufacturing, farming, and living, giving us space only limited by the amount of building material we can gather there.
I don't think many commenters got what I was trying to say. I'll have another go. Assuming you haven't done all the things you want to do in (say) 70 years, why would you say you need or deserve more time?
I wish we lived little less, resulting in, less knowledge transfer, less technology, less of the destruction caused by humans on nature.
We live longer than most of the creatures of our size, and we have larger brain. That's the reason of the damage we create to the earth like swarms of locusts do to the green grass fields [1].
And still we wish more life! Sad!
On a serious note, the most intriguing thing I found in the article, is that, If you design & sell items specifically to elderly, they wont buy it. Because they don't want the product to remind that they are old.
So the solution is to design a product which suits to the elderly but seems like its designed for young generation.
> So the solution is to design a product which suits to the elderly but seems like its designed for young generation.
Aren't a lot of products you see on infomercials exactly that?
I've seen people argue that it's a market failure or an inefficiency of capitalism that people are trying to market products for elderly and disabled people to younger people and families. From this it seems more likely the opposite. They are designed for the elderly or disabled but are falsely marketed to everyone in order to get their real target audience to buy it.
Anti-aging science is not just about living more years, it's about being able to live healthy and fulfilling lives both physically and mentally even as you age. Way too many people are broken by age before they die, to prevent that would be fantastic.