This makes perfect sense to me. If I were a billionaire, I'd very quickly drop down to millionaire because I'd be putting 99% of my funds into solving the "our bodies and brains are ridiculously failure-prone" problem. And I'd be begging every other billionaire to do the same.
Most billionaires I know would rather leave behind a legacy in the form of charitable foundations, their work, and their families. Squandering their fortune in a vain attempt to extend their own lives is not a widely accepted choice.
Most rich folks would rather preserve their fortune for their offspring or try to make the world a better place. Eventually many people, rich or not, notice that the younger generations are better equipped to run the world.
Not to mention we'd be better off extending human life by preventing and curing diseases and ailments like cancer and heart disease.
I raised $27M for longevity research (SENS.org). 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.
I find the way you summarized the discussion unhelpful, because your goal is to present very reasonable critiques to living forever in the most absurd way, and insult those who have those opinions "Man up, save your family, save yourself"? Was it really necessary to insult, among many, the curage of people who may have no fear of dying? I do not even where one would start to debate this.
> More people make more progress faster.
Really? Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area?
> Stop having kids
Even if this were a viable solution (history teaches us it is not) dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives?
> If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.
What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse? What about those who will suffer the many disadvantages?
> Old people suck.
No, they don't. Whoever makes this argument does not deserver a response. What is true however is that most old people seem to have less flexibility to adapting to change, and with accelerating progress the chasm between the generation widens. The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision.
> Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Thank you for this snarky remark.
Every time I hear people arguing against having kids for reasons (overpopulation, bad for environment, pessimism about the future), I cannot help but think: "why doesn't that argument extend to the present generation - i.e. suicide?"
So far, the best answer I've gotten is equivalent to "suicide is bad" (a.k.a. "I have no good rational arguments but it makes me feel bad")
To me, longevity is just a bridge to get us to live long enough to transfer our consciousness to small robots. I'd rather live 1000 years as an solar-powered ion rocket roaming around the nearby stars than as a fragile protein meatpack
richard, do you think a DAO would be better for this than traditional non-for profit organisation? notably newlimit is a for-profit. given the aubrey de grey was ousted from sens in suspicious way after the capital injection, its time to rethink traditional legal entities for this kind of work?
If I look around me - and I'm more at the bottom, at grassheight relative to billionaires and UHNWI in general on skyscrapers - I see a host of other immediate "longevity issues".
For one there is a substantial amount of people just trying get by and being like 50/50 on the choice of rather being dead already or trying to get through somehow 'till the next day, ad infinitum: from depressives who are stuck in a loop of ever growing void of meaningless in "wealthy" countries to factory workers serving as means to an end kept away from "jumping to termination" by saftey nets.
And of course those infamous 10% in absolute poverty which nowadays is more like a definition game by statisticians sponsored by the World Bank showing steady progress since the 1800s.
From a psychological point of view it becomes exponentially difficult to not have an inflated ego with more and more wealth. If I would win the lottery today my ordinary psyche would not be able to process it adequately, I would inevitably grossly overestimate my contribution to it, we are simply not finetuned to handle gigantic orders of probabilites.
So it comes off as a childish thing for most of us mere mortals trying to overcome your "lifetime" limitations without taking into account your environment the "soil of decaying and growing matter" in a biosphere going around an unimaginable ball of pure "fuel" in its dimension and age seperated by a vastness of nothingness in between.
At some point in the "success-intoxicated" linear chase of an ever increasing personal "lifetime" I would speculate that one would reach a critical point, a no point of return in which the sense of the self would ultimatley shatter, your (biographical) memories become obliterated beyond "recognition", so just another death-life cycle we are seeing and studying already in all life around us.
So, I would appreciate the more sober tone of just improving life in general like addressing immediate, mundane and unspectcular things like e.g. the wealth gap instead of playing on the reptilians chords of our brains by searching the "cure of aging" which kind of gives off a vibe of an coke head.
Addressing the "wealth gap" sounds good but is ultimately misguided.
If you look 100 years back, Rockefeller was the richest man in history (and might still be...), yet 1 of his 5 children died in infancy of a bacterial disease. These days, such diseases are extremely rare for about 1bn people in the western world, all of whom are effectively wealthier than Rockefeller was.
Yes, you can "save" people from poverty by giving them money, but ultimately you're just condemning their children to the same fate (after your money runs out). The only real progress is technology. And billionaires spending on anti-aging is exactly the kind of technology that will immensely benefit billions of people in the future.
While people working on longevity might sound like "coke heads" to you, generations from now your descendants will scarcely be able to imagine a world where death was not a willful choice, and they will look back on today as "that horrific time when people just dropped dead."
They will find it barbaric and terrifying that people could not live life out to contentment, but rather, were forced to die, and people merely accepted it rather than doing anything to fight it.
Finally, addressing the wealth gap is not mutually exclusive from solving much more important problems like death.
> What differentiates SpaceX from NASA, or SpaceX from Blue Origin, is people and culture. We are not trying to build an institute or academic minded organization where papers are more important than products. Our goal is to build an ambitious, well run, for-profit company that will deliver revenue generating products on the way toward accomplishing its much bigger objective.
It is debatable whether they truely understand the financials of biotech. The grind of basic research will never go away. Many successful biotech company essentially acquihire researchers and work that is already 80% complete, the role of the company is to bring it to production. That itself will make up the bulk of the company's workload. Similarly, SpaceX had the benefit of leveraging an existing pool of talent and resources; you cannot build a heavy launch company in Zimbabwe. If they want to do both active basic research and at the same time trial therapies, then they would need an enormous amount of funding (on the software unicorn level). You will need scale on the same magnitude as Pharma giants like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson and Johnson to be able to acquire companies, run trials, and discard ideas that do not work. In the current bull market, this is the perfect company to build with Coinbase's founder as the chief fundraiser.
I'm not criticizing the effort nor being sarcastic: was there any measurable progress by any of the companies working on increasing longevity? I'm talking about actual increase of lifespan, not promising ideas.
Imagine you are "filthy rich", what would be your main worry? Having money without having time is meaningless. Consider also that "crypto millionaires" are often sophisticated "lottery winners", they didn't get their money like Bezos or Musk.
The bright side is that society as a whole will profit from this also.
Frankly, this is what America has always been about - A combination of science, technology and capitalism. We need a lot more of these moonshots attempted at a massive scale. So what if it may not work out? People can not stop for the fear of failure. If founders have money and resources, by all mean I for one welcome these with open arms.
Yeah I wouldn't even mind if somebody spent billions on finding an 'Upload' like solution where you can just put your consciousness in a computer and live forever like that instead.
People generally have a knee jerk hate for such things but I welcome that with open arms too.
I don't fear it. I simply don't want to unwillingly die. Life is incredible, and I'd like to continue enjoying it on my schedule.
"Conscious entity doesn't want to die" should be justification enough for not wanting to die. However, it seems that just because we've lived with a naturally imposed expiry date for so long, we are expected to accept death after an arbitrarily imposed time limit.
I live in an artificial structure because I do not accept the natural outdoor conditions that my ancestors lived in.
I communicate with people around the world, using horrendously artificial means, because I refuse to accept the silly natural limitations of local auditory communication.
I choose to accept antibiotics for infections that would otherwise naturally kill or maim me.
And if I can, I will choose to opt-out of death, the greatest disease that afflicts all of us.
As an aside, I do fear the tragedy of the aging process, for both myself and other people, but although that's presently a tightly-coupled problem, I'm assuming we're strictly discussing death and not aging.
I fear not being there to provide for my kids and seeing them grow up. The opportunity to help them grow into better people than myself and watch what they do with their lives.
I think that’s a legitimate fear, and nothing to do with what happens next to me.
You're confusing (deliberately?) a few different things.
(1) better healthcare, reducing poverty etc. lift the floor of longevity but not the ceiling
(2) "cost of old age" is exactly what longevity research attempts to reduce - noone is interested in living longer as a vegetable; instead, the goal is to increase healthspan - living healthier for longer
That's the logic of mass homicide. How many children would you kill now, today, to spare the generation after the burden of taking care of them? Why haven't you killed yourself to spare (y)our children the pollution your existance causes?
Humans are a burden to humans, but we're also humans' best shot at prosperity. Let's not be so quick to deny the upside of living longer, healthier.
(That said I agree with you that up to age 80 or so the recipe for general healthspan is very simple and up to personal responsibility)
There is something dystopian, childish, naive, desperate, arrogant, sad and tragic about billionaires founding and funding longevity companies and projects. They think that they've got it all, but deep down there's still this gaping hole of meaninglessness. They can control evertything. Everything but death. If only they can find a way to live longer, maybe even a way to never die of natural causes, everything will be better.
I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging such as dementia and various cancers. But when I read this announcement I feel an air of arrogance that fucking annoys me.
There's very little funding of longevity research apparently. Probably because of people sharing your opinion that stopping aging is selfish/immoral. But this is not right, we've severely underestimated the biological dangers of our overpopulated-overconnected world. We find ourselves needing to fight a pandemic with similar methods as in 1917, because we ve not prepared for that. Biotech should be an imperative for humanity if we want to live in an open connected world or if we want to go to space.
> I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging
That's like researching the symptoms instead of the cause, it's the wrong way to do medicine
I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging such as dementia and various cancers. But when I read this announcement I feel an air of arrogance that fucking annoys me.
Your feeling of arrogance seems to be a product of a cultural programmed reaction. There's no shortage of movies, cultural works, and tv shows that tell us that immortality is unwanted, unattainable, selfish, or somehow otherwise bad, starting with our oldest myths and stories, Epic of Gilgamesh.
If the goal of medicine is to cure or prevent every diseases and dysfunction in the human body, then we must conclude that as an unavoidable side effect that being healthier will extend long life.
If we care about our fellow human beings, especially the elderly, then we do not want them to live in pain, to be in dementia, or otherwise have a poor quality of life. We must also recognize that many of them may not want to die.
I applaud the pursuit of longevity and health so long it is paired with the egalitarian outcome in that everybody will be entitled and receive it, regardless of who they are and what they did.
This is just deathist brainrot. If we lived for 10k years "naturally", would you support killing people off after 70-80 years? Of course living longer would make things better.
Increase in human lifespan (and longevity of "youth") is the most obvious sign of the success of modern civilization. We have doubled the average life expectancy in just about a century, so by your reasoning, past humans would likely call us "arrogant" when on average we live better, more fuller lives than they ever did.
There will be unintended consequences of humans living longer, of course but those are problems which will be solved by smart people of the future (and present).
On the other hand, I think that aging is an extremely destructive process to the individual (while possibly still a net good for the species) and billionaires who spend their money on longevity research are doing a good thing, regardless of their motivation.
It is not just death, it is the long period of chronic illness that currently tends to precede it. Understanding aging will let us combat a thousand diseases at once.
I thin the reason why this wasn't attempted before wasn't humility. Rather, people (including many people today) did not think of aging as something modifiable. Aging has been until today understood as an unstoppable force beyond human possibilities, something like gravity or a hurricane.
Now that the viewpoints are slowly changing, we may be up to picking some low hanging fruit, and if a billionaire or ten decides to fund the necessary research, I won't be complaining. Unless they somehow manage to hoard the necessary knowledge only to themselves, which is rather unlikely in the modern world, where technological and scientific capabilities are spread more than ever before.
To be a little less than polite: fuck cancer, fuck cardiovascular disease, fuck Alzheimers, fuck severe covid etc. And whoever contributes to this great fucking of age-related disease is a friend of the whole humanity.
I don't see it as arrogance at all, I see it as being uniquely fortunate to be in a position where one can attempt to address a fundamental problem that affects most people.
I'm not a billionaire and have zero prospects of ever becoming one. Maybe this would also be considered arrogance, but I don't want to grow old and die. Neither do any of my friends or family. None of them are billionaires either.
Life is absolutely incredible. Humanity is on the brink of technological progress the likes of which we've never seen before, and I'd love to (selfishly) stick around to experience it. I also don't see anything noble or enjoyable in watching friends, family and other people slowly break down and eventually die. I'd hazard a guess that a lot of people share this opinion.
I sadly don't have the resources to direct activity against the scourge of aging and death, and can only hope that fortunately-resourced individuals decide to do so.
The extradordinary negativity of this comment actually got to me, I wish I hadn't read that; it's really just a string of adjectives and name-calling that finished with "fucking annoys me".
Please reconsider sharing this type of thinking, it's too arrogant for anyone.
On the one hand, it is another step towards more inequality, a society of Eloi and Morlocks, since these treatments will only be available to the very rich who develop them. They claim in the announcement that the costs will (eventually) come down so ordinary people can afford this, but that's not the way all tech goes. As shown by the rising difference in health-span between the wealthy and working poor, medical advances do not always trickle down.
On the other hand, it could actually provide tangible benefits to some human beings. Saying "I was the first to land a human on Mars" has no such advantage.
Longevity is a worthwhile goal for striving for. It is horrific that beings with hopes, dreams, and loves are forced to die and lose everything they have ever had, doomed to an eternity of the black void of nonexistence. That should be a choice.
I for one am thrilled that society is starting to view death as something we might be able to one day defeat, rather than the resigned acceptance that has reigned throughout the history of our species.
That just seems really presumptuous to me: I don't see anything in the article to support that outlook -- it even contradicts your position by emphasizing healthspan over lifespan.
Rather than your judgemental take-- Why not adopt the simpler theory that these are simply parties that can afford fund very expensive efforts which are extremely likely to fail?
The number one factor driving cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and a myriad of other types of human suffering by an order of magnitude is biological age.
But how is it different from a company spending money to find cure for cancer which also ultimately extends the lives of the people? Am I missing something?
Those “management failures” seem to be working pretty well then, as the US gov and private industry don’t seem to see the fuss. Where’s your competition?
That said, it is definitely foolish the comparison here.
Mixed feelings. On one hand I can imagine situations where longetivity and its development might really be useful, for example when (if ever) we enter the human space travel era, where the human lifespan will eventually start to factor in. On the other, its hard to not consider the deeper meaning of such pursuits. After all, death is what gives life meaning and pushing it further raises lots of possible negatives e.g. 1) less sense of urgency 2) traumatic death will be even more traumautic, especially in the early years of life… I do wish I can live healthily to the end of my days, but its really a sort of miracle in todays world if the reaper doesn’t collect you before aging runs it course.
The real problem is that it will even further empower the gerontocracy. Imagine older people accumulating more and more wealth and being an ever larger voting bloc. Now you could imagine a world in which lifespan is extended and these issues are also resolved and we don't get stasis where nothing can be built and huge inequality, but it's unlikely to happen in a democracy.
newsbinator|4 years ago
xyzzy_plugh|4 years ago
Most rich folks would rather preserve their fortune for their offspring or try to make the world a better place. Eventually many people, rich or not, notice that the younger generations are better equipped to run the world.
Not to mention we'd be better off extending human life by preventing and curing diseases and ailments like cancer and heart disease.
RichardHeart|4 years ago
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.
i000|4 years ago
> More people make more progress faster.
Really? Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area?
> Stop having kids
Even if this were a viable solution (history teaches us it is not) dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives?
> If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.
What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse? What about those who will suffer the many disadvantages?
> Old people suck.
No, they don't. Whoever makes this argument does not deserver a response. What is true however is that most old people seem to have less flexibility to adapting to change, and with accelerating progress the chasm between the generation widens. The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision.
tomp|4 years ago
Thank you for this snarky remark.
Every time I hear people arguing against having kids for reasons (overpopulation, bad for environment, pessimism about the future), I cannot help but think: "why doesn't that argument extend to the present generation - i.e. suicide?"
So far, the best answer I've gotten is equivalent to "suicide is bad" (a.k.a. "I have no good rational arguments but it makes me feel bad")
cblconfederate|4 years ago
bachback|4 years ago
xvector|4 years ago
dav_Oz|4 years ago
For one there is a substantial amount of people just trying get by and being like 50/50 on the choice of rather being dead already or trying to get through somehow 'till the next day, ad infinitum: from depressives who are stuck in a loop of ever growing void of meaningless in "wealthy" countries to factory workers serving as means to an end kept away from "jumping to termination" by saftey nets. And of course those infamous 10% in absolute poverty which nowadays is more like a definition game by statisticians sponsored by the World Bank showing steady progress since the 1800s.
From a psychological point of view it becomes exponentially difficult to not have an inflated ego with more and more wealth. If I would win the lottery today my ordinary psyche would not be able to process it adequately, I would inevitably grossly overestimate my contribution to it, we are simply not finetuned to handle gigantic orders of probabilites. So it comes off as a childish thing for most of us mere mortals trying to overcome your "lifetime" limitations without taking into account your environment the "soil of decaying and growing matter" in a biosphere going around an unimaginable ball of pure "fuel" in its dimension and age seperated by a vastness of nothingness in between.
At some point in the "success-intoxicated" linear chase of an ever increasing personal "lifetime" I would speculate that one would reach a critical point, a no point of return in which the sense of the self would ultimatley shatter, your (biographical) memories become obliterated beyond "recognition", so just another death-life cycle we are seeing and studying already in all life around us.
So, I would appreciate the more sober tone of just improving life in general like addressing immediate, mundane and unspectcular things like e.g. the wealth gap instead of playing on the reptilians chords of our brains by searching the "cure of aging" which kind of gives off a vibe of an coke head.
tomp|4 years ago
If you look 100 years back, Rockefeller was the richest man in history (and might still be...), yet 1 of his 5 children died in infancy of a bacterial disease. These days, such diseases are extremely rare for about 1bn people in the western world, all of whom are effectively wealthier than Rockefeller was.
Yes, you can "save" people from poverty by giving them money, but ultimately you're just condemning their children to the same fate (after your money runs out). The only real progress is technology. And billionaires spending on anti-aging is exactly the kind of technology that will immensely benefit billions of people in the future.
xvector|4 years ago
They will find it barbaric and terrifying that people could not live life out to contentment, but rather, were forced to die, and people merely accepted it rather than doing anything to fight it.
Finally, addressing the wealth gap is not mutually exclusive from solving much more important problems like death.
ampdepolymerase|4 years ago
It is debatable whether they truely understand the financials of biotech. The grind of basic research will never go away. Many successful biotech company essentially acquihire researchers and work that is already 80% complete, the role of the company is to bring it to production. That itself will make up the bulk of the company's workload. Similarly, SpaceX had the benefit of leveraging an existing pool of talent and resources; you cannot build a heavy launch company in Zimbabwe. If they want to do both active basic research and at the same time trial therapies, then they would need an enormous amount of funding (on the software unicorn level). You will need scale on the same magnitude as Pharma giants like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson and Johnson to be able to acquire companies, run trials, and discard ideas that do not work. In the current bull market, this is the perfect company to build with Coinbase's founder as the chief fundraiser.
LNSY|4 years ago
Only Burroughs could truly capture the ghastly consequences.
danielrpa|4 years ago
galfarragem|4 years ago
vgchh|4 years ago
ghoomketu|4 years ago
People generally have a knee jerk hate for such things but I welcome that with open arms too.
morpheos137|4 years ago
mrshadowgoose|4 years ago
"Conscious entity doesn't want to die" should be justification enough for not wanting to die. However, it seems that just because we've lived with a naturally imposed expiry date for so long, we are expected to accept death after an arbitrarily imposed time limit.
I live in an artificial structure because I do not accept the natural outdoor conditions that my ancestors lived in.
I communicate with people around the world, using horrendously artificial means, because I refuse to accept the silly natural limitations of local auditory communication.
I choose to accept antibiotics for infections that would otherwise naturally kill or maim me.
And if I can, I will choose to opt-out of death, the greatest disease that afflicts all of us.
As an aside, I do fear the tragedy of the aging process, for both myself and other people, but although that's presently a tightly-coupled problem, I'm assuming we're strictly discussing death and not aging.
samwillis|4 years ago
I think that’s a legitimate fear, and nothing to do with what happens next to me.
cblconfederate|4 years ago
bellyfullofbac|4 years ago
On the other hand, accelerate the burning of the planet by giving more people access to an energy-wasting ponzi scheme.
Your 2 goals are incompatible with each other, Brian and Blake.
inkblotuniverse|4 years ago
youngtaff|4 years ago
Biggest problem with people living longer is the costs of supporting them increase dramatically, and who's going to pay these costs?
Increasing longevity places a burden on our children, and their children
tomp|4 years ago
(1) better healthcare, reducing poverty etc. lift the floor of longevity but not the ceiling
(2) "cost of old age" is exactly what longevity research attempts to reduce - noone is interested in living longer as a vegetable; instead, the goal is to increase healthspan - living healthier for longer
zemvpferreira|4 years ago
Humans are a burden to humans, but we're also humans' best shot at prosperity. Let's not be so quick to deny the upside of living longer, healthier.
(That said I agree with you that up to age 80 or so the recipe for general healthspan is very simple and up to personal responsibility)
shafyy|4 years ago
I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging such as dementia and various cancers. But when I read this announcement I feel an air of arrogance that fucking annoys me.
cblconfederate|4 years ago
> I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging
That's like researching the symptoms instead of the cause, it's the wrong way to do medicine
FinanceAnon|4 years ago
hungryforcodes|4 years ago
kiba|4 years ago
Your feeling of arrogance seems to be a product of a cultural programmed reaction. There's no shortage of movies, cultural works, and tv shows that tell us that immortality is unwanted, unattainable, selfish, or somehow otherwise bad, starting with our oldest myths and stories, Epic of Gilgamesh.
If the goal of medicine is to cure or prevent every diseases and dysfunction in the human body, then we must conclude that as an unavoidable side effect that being healthier will extend long life.
If we care about our fellow human beings, especially the elderly, then we do not want them to live in pain, to be in dementia, or otherwise have a poor quality of life. We must also recognize that many of them may not want to die.
I applaud the pursuit of longevity and health so long it is paired with the egalitarian outcome in that everybody will be entitled and receive it, regardless of who they are and what they did.
bobcostas55|4 years ago
blueblisters|4 years ago
There will be unintended consequences of humans living longer, of course but those are problems which will be solved by smart people of the future (and present).
inglor_cz|4 years ago
It is not just death, it is the long period of chronic illness that currently tends to precede it. Understanding aging will let us combat a thousand diseases at once.
I thin the reason why this wasn't attempted before wasn't humility. Rather, people (including many people today) did not think of aging as something modifiable. Aging has been until today understood as an unstoppable force beyond human possibilities, something like gravity or a hurricane.
Now that the viewpoints are slowly changing, we may be up to picking some low hanging fruit, and if a billionaire or ten decides to fund the necessary research, I won't be complaining. Unless they somehow manage to hoard the necessary knowledge only to themselves, which is rather unlikely in the modern world, where technological and scientific capabilities are spread more than ever before.
To be a little less than polite: fuck cancer, fuck cardiovascular disease, fuck Alzheimers, fuck severe covid etc. And whoever contributes to this great fucking of age-related disease is a friend of the whole humanity.
mrshadowgoose|4 years ago
I'm not a billionaire and have zero prospects of ever becoming one. Maybe this would also be considered arrogance, but I don't want to grow old and die. Neither do any of my friends or family. None of them are billionaires either.
Life is absolutely incredible. Humanity is on the brink of technological progress the likes of which we've never seen before, and I'd love to (selfishly) stick around to experience it. I also don't see anything noble or enjoyable in watching friends, family and other people slowly break down and eventually die. I'd hazard a guess that a lot of people share this opinion.
I sadly don't have the resources to direct activity against the scourge of aging and death, and can only hope that fortunately-resourced individuals decide to do so.
sabellito|4 years ago
Please reconsider sharing this type of thinking, it's too arrogant for anyone.
username223|4 years ago
On the other hand, it could actually provide tangible benefits to some human beings. Saying "I was the first to land a human on Mars" has no such advantage.
xvector|4 years ago
I for one am thrilled that society is starting to view death as something we might be able to one day defeat, rather than the resigned acceptance that has reigned throughout the history of our species.
nullc|4 years ago
Rather than your judgemental take-- Why not adopt the simpler theory that these are simply parties that can afford fund very expensive efforts which are extremely likely to fail?
agumonkey|4 years ago
[0] unless their ventures are really immature glorifying ways to spend money and produce nothing
kgin|4 years ago
Crazyontap|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
justsomeuser|4 years ago
Unless they explicitly communicate this, you are just guessing.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
axiosgunnar|4 years ago
According to this, all of medicine is pointless.
Would you not want grandma's back to hurt a little less?
pixelgeek|4 years ago
sschueller|4 years ago
Also asking your employees to work over the holidays (SpaceX Company email) because of your management failures is not a good company culture.
extheat|4 years ago
That said, it is definitely foolish the comparison here.
varjag|4 years ago
supercon|4 years ago
rwmj|4 years ago
newsbinator|4 years ago
citation needed
xvector|4 years ago
We define the meaning of life, not death. I would find my life perfectly meaningful without death.