Science progresses because it makes a disciplined study of the world with numerical predictions that are checked for accuracy.
Politics is treated by most people as essentially a religion. And religion does not progress with death. It just cycles through periods of greater fundamentalism and less fundamentalism.
There aren't enough people studying political science and studying it rigorously enough for the Planck observation to apply.
That is a really naive epistemology. Science as an objective methodology that churns out truth doesn't exist. Its a human endeavor full of interests.
Religion is also a human endeavor full of interests, and can also ascertain certain truths. Often people who subscribe to scientism gloat that even in the farthest reaches of space, other aliens will arrive at the same equations. Similarly, I think at the farthest reaches of space aliens will have to reckon with wickedness, duty, hospitality, forgiveness, etc. It can even make numerical predictions like "there will always be the poor". So far so true.
This is just a bunch of cold-war style anti-science critique stuff. It's frankly not worth responding to.
There are reasonable things to say about science, but the anti-objectivity bit was an attempt to undermine science and reduce opposition to political rule by fiat. The rise in authoritarian rhetoric and beliefs is why we're seeing the anti-science and anti-expert ideas become fashionable again.
Notice that the anti-expert/anti-intellectual/anti-science people always have something else they're selling you that conflicts with the experts/intellectuals/science.
This isn't an anti-science critique. It's a philosophical argument about how science actually operates. I'm not coming at this from a populist authoritarian angle! (Literally my views were influenced by Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)
The tobacco-funded studies that failed to prove cigarettes harmful? Those were scientists doing "objective methodology." Pharmaceutical companies suppressing unfavorable trials? Scientists. The replication crisis? Scientists following the same process.
These aren't exceptions. They show that science is a human practice embedded in institutional and economic contexts.
Acknowledging that science involves human interests doesn't undermine it. It's how you maintain critical perspective when bad actors claim scientific authority. Or should I trust the current experts that Tylenol causes Autism?
I agree. People stop changing their mind at some point. Social progress is only possible when old generations die. To think scientists are some sort of truth seeking machines, unbiased, isolated from society, is naive.
Also I really dislike the categorisation into scientists and non-scientists, this really makes science sound like a dogma. I prefer inventors, pioneers, or simply curious people.
Possible, but many concepts and principles are frozen by the age of 30 already.
I have never seen someone which is left on the political spectrum at 30 become a Keynesian by 50.
I know such people exist, but they are the exception.
Personality psychology shows personality does not change much after 30.
And there is even some theories such as the “impressionable years” (15-25) which are even more extreme in that respect, stating that basically very little changes after 25.
Overall this makes me doubt stem cells can change any of this.
But I am myself way past my impressionable years, my mental flexibility is lessened, I may be wrong and not open to new ideas.
It would feel sad though, having civilisation lead by the same people over hundreds of years if not more, somewhat stratified, predictable, dull.
> (Literally my views were influenced by Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)
Sigh this is the most annoying thing on the internet. It's like every online debate a leftist post-structuralist has to say "nuh uh actually everything is relative because it's all about structure and there's no objective truth man." It's a lazy critique. You can aim post-structuralist critique at literally anything. You're right, science is an artifact of the society it's in, and actually society is based on the Wim Hof breathing technique so really science is in service of Wim Hof Breathing. You can't argue with me because everything is relative and based on structures and Wim Hof breathing is the root of all social structure.
If you're going to trot out a post-structuralist critique, build an alternate theory, don't just pick an argument apart. I'm hardly the first person to note this continental Leftist weakness. Zizek has written about this extensively. I don't need to believe in Soviet conspiracy theories to think your argument is weak.
Feyerabend was writing during the cold war and was influenced by Marx (an authoritarian) and Marxist critiques of science promoted by the Soviets at the time. You get the same threads running through people like Kuhn and Popper.
The backdrop of these ideas is that the authoritarian Soviet state wanted to undermine faith in science within the US for the same reason it wanted to undermine democracy. They also wanted to promote the idea of alternative views of science at home because Soviet science was constrained by needing to be consistent with Marx. These ideas percolated for a few decades as propaganda before people like Feyerabend gussied them up and tried to publish them as academic works.
First, state communists kill anarchists. That's history.
Second, the Soviets were incredibly dogmatic about science because they used it to justify their materialist ideology. They promoted Lysenkoism (fake genetics) to conform to Marxist doctrine. That's literally the opposite of epistemological questioning.
Third, claiming Kuhn and Popper were Soviet mouthpieces is unhinged. Popper wrote "The Open Society and Its Enemies" as an anti-communist text. Kuhn taught at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. They were Western academics, not agents.
You've gone from defending naive scientism to claiming anyone who critiques it is a communist propagandist. That's McCarthyism, not an argument.
No, it's not. Like I said this isn't worth responding to, but people who actually look into the history will understand what I'm saying.
The problem you're facing is you don't believe in any sort of objective reality so you're acting as if ideas are about which team you're on instead of how they relate to the truth.
The difference between you and me is I've focused on what you've written and you've called me every name in the book despite not knowing what you're talking about.
We see your other posts where you're asking why murdering your enemies isn't okay and promoting conspiracy theories. I don't have to imagine who you are, you've told us.
"This is just a bunch of cold-war style anti-science critique stuff. It's frankly not worth responding to."
This is, ironically, an absurd echo of every autocrat's self-defense. "It is just the commies/right-wingers who hate our Dear Leader and want to undermine his benevolent authority for their own nefarious purposes."
Scientists are humans, prone to every vice that plagues humanity: jealousy, lust for power, greed, willingness to bend data to make their theory work, plagiarism, and, lately, blatant misuse of AI without even acknowledging it aloud.
The scientific community absolutely needs both internal self-policing, external policing, and mechanisms that limit abuse of power by the elders against their subordinates, or it will lose the necessary integrity and thus also any trust of the outsiders.
If you deny this, you basically deny humanity of everyone involved. And I say this as a former young scientist with a PhD from algebra. I have seen enough, with my own eyes.
Science needs exactly as much policing as every other human activity: airlines, accounting, agriculture etc.
I have no problem with you "drawing everyone's attention" to the fact that I think so. Indeed I consider the above to be self-evident, because humans aren't angels.
Maybe you confuse policing with censorship or political pressure? That is not the same thing.
"The rest is just rhetoric."
Nope, you just prefer to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room whose name is "replication crisis". Partly caused by outright fraud.
This just sounds like rationalization to me, just-so stories we tell ourselves to feel better about something we can't change anyway, so isn't it lucky that everything is perfect just the way it is!
I think it's nonsense. Society is the way it is because of the prevailing conditions. We haven't really had to deal with getting rid of dead wood in science because death always did that anyway, if death goes away then we'll just adapt. That witticism from Planck is just an observation of the times, not some universal, uh, constant.
> There is plenty of reason to welcome death
Maybe we should welcome it even faster then! If death speeds up science so much, then maybe society shouldn't provide health care to scientists at all. In fact maybe we should euthanize all scientists at age 50 - or earlier. Right?
Ask yourself if most older people reliably update their beliefs as the world changes.
If the answer is "No, they don't," then it follows that part of progress is newer generations moving into positions of authority and bringing their new ideas with them.
Yes. Older people are much more flexible as they have had to adopt new thinking, been exposed to much more new ideas, realized the mistakes dogmatic young them did. Young people seem much more rigid and dogmatic to their much shorter held and therefore often much lesser informed positions.
Part of curing aging would be restoring youthful brain characteristics such as openness to change. Which honestly seems like a small and easy task when compared to the whole endeavor of curing aging.
It's not that old people are not open to change, they just very reasonably disregard all the bullshit that contradicts their experience. To achieve plasticity of beliefs people will have to forget stuff.
Which closes the circle, nature already invented all that: your kids are a version of you that's free from both the baggage of harmful mutations and the baggage of harmful presuppositions.
Not at all clear to me why we want to reinvent an inferior version of this process, it works remarkably well.
That's an inversion of Pascal's wager. Pascal says if I'm right about this my death will reward me, therefore I believe, and you've come up with if I'm wrong about this my death will criticise me, therefore I believe.
Do you agree with the Pascal's wager then? I don't and if mine is an inversion, I don't see a problem with it.
It's not scary to make a mistake if any decision you make is temporary anyhow. Knowing that I die no matter what I do with my life gives me so much more freedom in how I can live it.
I think it's the same kind of idea, because it shuts down any duty to worry about whether you are right. You get to be a dogmatist, since dogmatists die eventually.
The second sentence deserves some response, but I don't know what to make of it. Mistakes are good, surely? More mistakes faster. Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.
I don't really see an issue with it either, though it depends on what exactly you mean by a dogmatist.
Literally everyone operates within some framework of unprovable dogmas to be able to tell good from evil and to decide how to act. Accepting that fact is a IMO a better path than striving for some sort of non-existent objective skepticism (but that's only better within my framework of what better is, of course).
And surely I worry whether I'm right, and all the time. It's just that when I worry and estimate the expected value of my decisions, I don't get NaNs and INFs. My life is not infinitely valuable to me, engaging in activities that involve possible loss of my life is often a good decision because the upside is good. That's largely true because I die anyway, I'm not sure the same calculations would hold if I were immortal.
UPD to respond to the second part that was added later
> Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.
It's remarkably easy to ruin your life by dying or getting a permanent disability. Would you climb a mountain with a risk of avalanches and rockfalls if you were otherwise immortal? Even commuting to work by bicycle becomes questionable, chances of getting hit by a car on a crossing are pretty high compared to taking the metro.
I almost completely disagree with "everyone operates within some framework of unprovable [moral] dogmas", but I don't completely disagree. I think the potential for mind-changing debate about moral matters - some of it inexplicit, but still rational - is enormous: and that the dogmatic cores of almost everyone's moral worldviews are, in modern times, practically identical, or close enough to be compatible.
More to the point, you can refrain from being unnecessarily dogmatic. As I'm sure you do really. But that means anticipation of death, to wipe out your ideas, shouldn't diminish your will to filter them through argument or thought. It just acts as a safety mechanism against your possibly losing your grip on rationality and becoming an intransigent old nuisance, I suppose.
So the second point is that self-sacrifice is less expensive for the mortal. I guess that could be seen as a rather cold fact that a mortal person is less valuable. But immortal people could be hindered by being all neurotic about risks to their lives, if that even is how we make decisions about self-sacrifice and mortal danger (however mild - germs?) ... but I suspect that isn't a calculation we'd do, even if immortal. I suspect the basis for these decisions is something different. This makes me scratch my head, I may come back to it.
...OK, ready. This is really about a certain puzzle to which immortality is irrelevant, which is: how can we take risks at all? If you cross the street you might lose your life, and since that's everything you've got, the cost is infinitely large, so you can never cross the street.
There are numerous tangents to go on from there. If you're being objective, your value is your ideas, your relationships, and your potential to have future ideas. With the last in mind, maybe immortality does change the calculation? Maybe risk-taking for mortal people should increase with age. Well, we do tend to self-sacrifice in a crisis, and to save children preferentially (though I'm not sure why future potential should trump existing ideas in a person). And there's this "I've lived a full life, I'll be the one" trope, which really means "I'm nearly dead already, so I'm expendable." And sure, immortal people can't say that. But that doesn't have bearing on how young people can complete routine life goals such as crossing the street.
You could also claim that a decision like deciding to stay in bed is risky in itself, and that we take risky actions in order to minimize risk. But I don't think that's truly the normal way to operate.
The main thing is, we do decide to take risks somehow. We know that decision paralysis is bad: we're morally opposed to it. And this would remain true even if we were immortal and were risking the loss of much longer lives. Mortal or not, we risk all we've got, all the time, by living lives. The difference is only in an extreme self-sacrifice situation, where relative to one other younger person an immortal person would feel less disposable than an old mortal might.
> In fact maybe we should euthanize all scientists at age 50 - or earlier. Right?
I understand you're trying to perform reductio ad absurdum but I would like to point out that the proposition is less absurd than you make out.
E.g. if Ancel Keys died at 50 then health risks of sugar consumption would have been accepted by the scientific community decades earlier saving tens of millions of lives. I certainly don't suggest to euthanize anyone however I'm glad he died eventually. In fact I'm glad everyone dies eventually me included.
So you advocate a traditional, orderly, socially acceptable form of killing everybody, by maintaining traditional death against possible ways to overcome it.
It's a bit far, but I think countries and societies will be split around this question if or when such a technology comes. You'll definitely find a place to opt out, I would stick/move to a country where immortality is illegal.
Now if my world model is correct, the immortal societies will see a decline akin to the Byzantine empire (which never actually declined, just progressed slower than it's neighbors). As the result they will either succumb and integrate into their mortal counterparts or perhaps continue existing like some sort of native tribal reservations. If I'm wrong, the inverse will happen.
In the end the more effective and stable socioeconomic model wins because it's the only thing that matters in the long run. It may take a while to reach the equilibrium though.
I don’t know where I saw that number, but supposedly the mean age of an immortal human will be 500 years due to accidents. True immortality is not a thing.
Maybe 500 years by today's behavioral standards. I assume that if people were told you could live ~forever barring an accident leading to your death, many people in society would behave VERY differently. The risk profile of you or me getting in a car to drive to the store is VERY different than someone with age-and-sickness-proof-but-accident-vulnerable immortality.
Incidentally this is one reason why people in the past seemed braver than now and did crazier things. When your life expectancy is 25, you take a lot more risks.
You don't understand the aphorism if you think that death in itself causes scientific progress.
It means something else. When old, entrenched scientists die, they lose their ability to prevent younger scientists from studying topics they personally don't like. Dead people cannot deny the living use of labs, grants etc.
Plenty of otherwise impeccable great minds died "stuck" on bad ideas. For example, the great German pathologist Rudolf Virchow utterly rejected the idea of archaic humans existing, and did his best to slow down the research on the Neanderthals etc.
Einstein himself rejected the quantum theory, though, to his credit, he didn't prevent others from studying it.
Ancel Keys, who lived to be almost 100, tried to destroy career of every nutritional scientist who toyed with the idea that saturated fats may not be the killers he pronounced them to be, and defended sugar from more scrutiny.
I distrust aphorisms, not without having read the literature on the evidence or lack thereof behind the aphorism.
For example: History is written by the winner.
Certainly not true on its face. The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. It certainly wasn't. They managed to reshape popular narrative.
History is written by the winner. does not mean that everybody trusts what is written by the winner. It has also become somewhat weaker in the era of digital communication, when censorship of sources becomes harder.
"The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. "
A certain percentage of people will believe in anything. Putin is a virtuous peacemaker, Nazis didn't murder people in industrial ovens, Stalin was a good person, the American Civil War wasn't about slavery, you name it.
That still does not negate the overall observation expressed in the aphorism: winners have a lot more clout when determining how the war will be seen by future generations. The percentage of Confederacy supporters in the Western civilization is fairly small. They may be visible, but the vast majority of the Western population, to the extent that they think of ACW at all, don't support the cause of continuing enslavement of blacks.
Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful".
Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful".
I am not treating them as mathematical statement, I just don't take it for granted that these "aphorism" are in fact historical truth.
Cursory search of "winners write history" already reveal to me a far more complex and nuanced reality. Indeed, such a statement is considered harmful.
there's no need to understand it, as being healthy well after being alive for hundreds of years would incentivize a lot of people to do more with their life than clutching their academic pearls.
even if not, the aphorism is not a necessity. scientific progress is a very soft thing anyway in most fields (medicine for example), and just because nowadays when the old guard dies off a new paradigm takes over doesn't necessarily mean that were the old guard alive there wouldn't be paradigm shifts!
simply accumulating the necessary data to convincingly be able to claim that the new model is better takes decades ... which conveniently coincidences with some old dog dying.
sure, likely if the old guard would be alive for a few more decades maybe they would insist on even more convincing data.
but that would at least help us to have better science!
and no one is prohibited from exploring applications of the new models before they became de facto dogma!
... and so on.
most of the time progress is limited by methods (data collection, precision - repeatability, and of course replicability), but those are usually limited by engineering, culture, funding, etc.
see the whole story with Alzheimer's and the first mouse model problem, and the failed clinical trials of various treatments, and ... despite all this how still we have no better idea, despite decades of effort!
This is literally amazing research, just because we are getting closer to rejuvenating tissue does not imply that suddenly we will stop dying - it just means vastly increased health span which means less health care cost and more joy in life! Congratulations to the authors of this paper!
Im not sure this will reduce healthcare costs very much since age related care is already the largest bulk of healthcare costs and living longer at an advanced age, even if relatively healthy, gives more time to accrue costs and age related problems.
I expect if people use healthcare 2x less, then the insurance companies and other companies that make their money from the sick will simply charge 4x more when you need healthcare.
I've been reading HN for a number of years, I think I only discovered it around 2018. I didn't register at first. It felt better then, but that could be my wrong memory.
I really agree with you. I wish I could find somewhere with as many interesting people to discuss technology and/or science without so much pavlovian cynicism.
I think the last several months have been very un-optimistic for quite a lot of us. Especially when it comes what's being done by aged people that have also accumulated power.
I don't particularly like death, but the potential societal stasis caused by longer lives is a problem as well.
Already when living to our 80s and 90s, we can see the top strata of the society (CEO level, Parliaments) overflowing with very old people who don't want to relax their grip on power. The current US Senate is older than the Brezhnev politburo, widely considered a gerontocracy, once was. It is the same elsewhere. Few powerful people are as self-aware as Benedict XIV. was, or their lust for power is simply too big.
In autocracies, people like Putin, Erdogan, Khamenei and Xi built very resilient systems that could support them for decades, if not centuries, and death is the only way that can reliably get them out of the way.
I suppose that not even the Americans would like to see various replays of Biden vs. Trump for several election cycles, and the Supreme Court is a veritable gerontocracy as well. If longevity research succeeds, the younger justices like Gorsuch and Barrett may well stay on the bench until 2070 or even longer, shaping rules for a world they will no longer understand.
If we ever are to achieve very long lives, we need to expand into the universe as well, so that the younger generations can build their own domains somewhere else, unburdened by the dictates of the old.
Yeah I’m imagining people living 2x as longer in the great health.
I don’t see any problems. If you want to kill someone, go ahead, that’s between you and them and your reasons for thinking they should die at a certain age. But I have no qualms about anyone living longer, healthier lives. This includes you.
Equating realism to pessimism is intellectually dishonest.
I'm at an age where many of my friends have died and many more soon will. Even in the most optimistic scenario this technology will not become normalized in my lifetime--and if it does become normalized there will be many undesirable consequences. In any case, global warming will destroy human civilization and this technology will die with it.
Tolkien didn't call death “The gift of Ilúvatar” for nothing.
In fact, even in our world, age-related death is an evolved trait, this isn't something obvious but that's something that arised through the natural selection because it improves fitness.
Death holds profound significance, it acts as a mental reset
Accumulating traumas across an eternity would harm society
And I think it's unfair to reserve that for the wealthy, if anything, eugenics should determine who gains access, only the most genetically advantaged should be allowed, in an effort to protect and strengthen humankind
But I don't think our society is ready to have this discussion, hence why, aging and death should not be frowned upon
I do wonder how the psychology of humanity will change once you can't wait for someone to die, and conversely, you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you.
Without going in to spoilers, the recent season of the Revolutions podcast about a future fictional revolution on Mars touches on this a fair bit. Someone about to die seizes power for himself, but no one cares much because he was already in charge and extending his reign a few more years till he dies was no big deal, until he extends his life and lives another 75 years.
"Putin Eternal", or something like that. Ironically, the technology will probably lead to faster, worse fates for many like that than might have been the case if they'd just left it alone.
The risk of death per year increasing with number of years lived is aging.
Without that people have lived longer are more likely to have lower risks of death per year. And thus older people in such a society would on average live longer.
Unless it also cures cancer a more likely outcome is that people who get the treatment will just stay young until they get cancer and die. Also, as I understand it cancer also slows down in old age, so staying younger could mean faster cancers possibly negating some of the gains from the decreased aging.
Cancer is primarily caused by aging, so in this world there likely wouldn’t be much cancer outside of the deliberate cancers caused by things like smoking
This is grossly wrong. "anti-aging" treatments won't reduce people's ages and won't undo epigenetic damage. And while age is the single strongest risk factor for cancer, it isn't the "primary cause", and there are numerous non-age-related causes of cancer.
Bad “anti-aging” treatments definitely won’t do it, but they also won’t provide indefinite lifespans.
> it isn't the "primary cause
Only if you’re using an inaccurate definition of aging. If everyone over 20 should have the same risk of cancer as 20 years olds the total number of cancers would drop by more than half.
If someone has an increased risk of death per year from cancer or whatever because something is failing over time they are still aging.
If the rate per year stays the same IE being 20 or 20,000 has no impact on your risks of cancer each year then someone that’s 20,000 likely takes very few other risks and is more likely to live another 20,000 years than the random 20 year old.
Altered Carbon used alien magic, the way this works in the real world will be far worse: Brain transplants. First, many poor people will need to be used as guinea pigs (a la the Sun King's anal fistula). Then once it works.. well some strapping young man (or woman!) will have to "volunteer" their body to host Elon's brain.
They don't need a volunteer. They can clone themselves when they are, say, 30 year old and they will have a 100% compatible, 20 year old donor who has spent their life in suspended animation when the original is 50.
The practice of illegal clone brain transplants figures in some of the Vorkosigan series books: The clone-children of various customers are raised in cohorts, and taught little while enduring years of strictly controlled diets, cosmetic surgeries, and exercise regimes.
Then, one day, the are told their important and distant "parents" are finally arriving to bring them away to their new life...
Anyway, the point is that any aging wealthy pedicidal murderers are also gonna insist the body is perfect before they move in. The easiest way to do that without conjuring more new technology is the force the future-victim to do it.
Thanks for bringing that up, it's probably time got for me to reread the Vorkosigan Saga.
And you also reminded me of the flawed but moving film "Never Let Me Go" from 2010 about a more present version of this. Oh, and there's also Michael Bay's "The Island".
No that won't do. You need someone else to prepare the body: you know... rigorous workouts for strength and physique. Ideally the person is an excellent cage fighter and has the reflexes of a top-tier video gamer.
All options are too far away to predict which will come first, or with what side effects.
(In practice, almost everything over 5 years away, even when already in early human trials, has this property; the only reason the Covid vaccines happened faster is that everyone was willing to throw unlimited resources at the problem and do simultaneous tests on all candidates, and in a pipeline, rather than cost-efficiently and slowly like everything else has been).
IIRC, there's no current way to scan even a single living synapse/synaptic cleft/dendrite combination to read out the corresponding connection strengths, let alone for the whole brain, so we can't yet scan a brain — but if we could do that, writing it back to a fresh blank one currently seems(!) like the easy part, as neurons change shape and grow in response to electrical gradients.
One non-measuring idea is to gradually replace portions of the brain with artificial blanks, relying on some sort of holistic (or holographic) redundancy where the "damage" is repaired by neighbors.
This, er, Brain of Theseus would retain operational patterns even if the individual cells have been replaced.
A variation on that would be too do it stochastically, constantly substituting a miniscule percentage of cells evenly across the entire brain.
I'm not an expert in psychology, but within a fixed population window, the murder rate will only go up unless there is a limited supply of those who murderers want to murder or unless murderers tend to prefer murdering other murderers, perhaps due to the change in game theory creating a new incentive. As humans would begin to live ever increasingly far away, we may approach a "murder death" condition where no new murders are possible. I will leave alone those who played Among Us until their numbers diminish and there is a better chance of reaching an early asymptote.
> you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you.
Many of the worst people in humanity, seem(ed) to act like they thought they were immortal.
Even being grazed by a bullet didn't stop Trump praising the second amendment.
(Though I say that as a non-American, and someone for whom the 2nd was part of why I never even considered attempting to migrate to the US; I do recognise the language used to support it as a quasi-religious badge of identity, i.e. hard to shake).
> Even being grazed by a bullet didn't stop Trump praising the second amendment.
This at least gives the semblance of Trump having and sticking to a set of principles (though I suspect it's more to do with what his supporters would accept)
If you’re curious about fiction which thinks about this there’s Altered Carbon which is “what if the rich assholes can live forever” and there’s The Postmortal where all assholes get to live forever.
“To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
I don't think that the assertions are nonsense, but I don't understand how this works.
I have heard variants on this assertion:
"Two of the most prominent purported underlying causes of aging are chronic inflammation and senescent cells."
One thing that surprises me is that telomeres aren't mentioned.
I also don't understand how this is happening (is apoptosis somehow triggered?):
"Now, the Academy researchers demonstrate that SRCs reduce senescent cells, measured using a blue dye called SA-β-Gal, in multiple organs, including the brain, heart, and lungs."
The main mechanism of action appears to be:
"The therapeutic efficacy of MPCs is largely attributed to their paracrine actions, with exosomes playing a pivotal role in mediating these effects."
The researchers do not appear to fully understand how this is happening:
"Among the diverse geroprotective functions of SRCs in the brain and ovary, the restorative effect of SRC-derived exosomes on aged cells and their surroundings emerges as a key mechanism. Rejuvenation of aged cells by exosomes likely involves multiple pathways and targets."
it kinda looks like you've assumed my "ideology", or even a country. Also, to die of natural causes, you know, for some people in some positions is actually a good wish. And we all will be there, I just really hope to outlive particular people.
we may alternatively end up with even older elders because of general lifespan increases, it just so happens people with more experience are older, if you think older people being in charge is bad just wait until you see how the younger ones do
What will that achieve? Next generation with no doubt will have their own POSs, their offspring think pretty much like them already, there is no way out of this vicious cycle.
I don't really blame humans in particular, a bear can eat it's prey alive and feel nothing at all about it, and many other similar examples of cruelty exist in nature, many even eat their own species in special circumstances, despite that I don't consider any of them evil.
Nothing short of a highly contagious virus that affects the brain and makes us more emphatic (with no other side effect) would break the cycle, but that's just sci-fi talk.
No idea who that is, but it's not particularly challenging to realize evolution doesn't overall favor empathy -even if it played some role-, sometimes it's the full opposite, sometimes is punished ("no good deed goes unpunished"), firemen are the most prone to burns, the equivalent it's true for many other altruistic endeavors, including rare occasional ones unlike firemen.
It's also not particularly challenging to see society lacks any intrinsic defence from the most ruthless and greedy from advancing in any given power structure inside of it, it's a long term damage so it's abstracted away while more immediate issues take presedence, it's in our DNA to give too priority to immediate threats, while long term problems such as this don't make the top 10 (another example being climate change, etc)
Stalin died literally in his bed, secure and surrounded by dozens of protecting bodyguards who ironically were so afraid to bother him that his stroke wen't unattended for hours after he'd had it. And in dying at 74, he enjoyed what despite the hard toll of heavy smoking, drinking, eating richly, and deprivation in his youth, was a pretty decent lifespan by the standards of his time.
Hitler ultimately died from the sheer gambler's recklessness of reaching for far too much that belonged to too many other powers, and being burned by all the consequences. Had he not started a multi-front world war against almost every single one of the world's other major nations, he could have stayed safely in power as Germany's beloved dictator right up until any old age he managed to reach (as Franco pulled off by much more wisely focusing on consolidating domestic power and avoiding wars)
Societies do have ways of dealing with tyrants, yes, and mostly it's just by rewarding them with more. The bad parts mostly happen to utterly foolish tyrants who make tremendous missteps.
Outstanding visualization work in this paper. I didn't go through them all individually because I'm not competent enough in biology to evaluate the claims, but this is one of the most data-rich papers I've seen in a while. If the results hold and the process is as straightforward as it sounds, this could be a big step forward.
Maybe someone with more of a bio background can comment on the actual paper. When I look through the figures, I don't see a strong an evidence as they are claiming in the text.
E.g. figure 1G... naive image analysis (to me) does not match the claimed statistics. And the statistics are all on n<10, which also adds a lot of uncertainty.
China isn't as interested in immortality as they are in their aging workforce being fully productive right up until they die. So even if that is by turning into a giant ball of cancer, it still does what they need. What most all of the world needs actually.
Examine your assumptions. There is no inherent reason that there has to be a catch. We are all from a long line of cellular reproduction that has lasted billions of years. There is no inherent reasons why cellular mechanisms can't keep maintaining/replacing a collection of those cell lineages...our relatively short lifespans are probably the products of evolutionary fitness functions acting on more fruitful strategies for reproductive success than staying off aging.
When the upside is extraordinary, it’s very reasonable to expect some downside, just based on experience of, like, everything ever.
As well as the undeniable benefit to individuals, a cure for aging would unleash a whole new bunch of problems that have been kept in check through the mechanism of people dying off regularly. A society of immortals could be quite alien to us.
Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes. Human bodies are adapted to environments with harsh constraints about injuries, pathogens, temperature, energy usage, etc. The only catch to counteracting those adaptations is that it makes you worse at being a hunter-gatherer.
> Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes
Good example is vitamin supplementation. There isn't a downside. It's just a fuck-up we can't synthesise vitamin C. (There may be path-dependent benefits, e.g. our jaw muscles getting smaller thereby permitting a larger brain. But we don't need to be vitamin C restricted anymore.)
Catch is perhaps a strong word. Trade-off would be more accurate.
Every action in the known universe (and surely in some unknown ones too) results in a trade-off. This is maybe the only precept on software architecture that doesn't "depends" on anything and is closer to natural law.
Sure, but there's usually plenty of other tradeoffs in any system of notable complexity. This is certainly a system of notable complexity. We may find that there is mental degradation that's not covered by this. We may discover that cancer is practically unavoidable if you live long enough, and the problem compounds even further with age than we can anticipate now. There's never just one lever being pulled in isolation.
I mean, if you gain +20 years of longevity to most of the body, but not to mind? That's still 20 extra years of lifespan if you're lucky. And if you aren't, it's still better health in general, until your mind goes.
There are old people who remain lucid and active well into their nineties, not getting dementia or cancer - through some combination of good luck, good genes and good lifestyle choices. They live a good life - until a stroke cripples them, or the heart fails them, or a very mundane illness like flu puts them in bed and they never quite recover from it. If that couldn't happen to them, how many more good years would that buy them?
Any treatment that addresses the aging-associated systematic decline in bodily functions should be extremely desirable. Even if it wouldn't help everyone live longer, it would help a lot of people live better lives nonetheless.
My personal thought on the "catch" (of "curing death") is that we seriously don't understand how removing or slowing evolution in the equation at the population level plays out over time. Evolution seems to be a fairly robust and complex subsystem of reality.
My assumption is, there are lots of rich people who want to live forever and lots of people who want their wealth and breakthroughs with anti ageing were quite rare or rather non existent as far as I know.
My assumption is that I'd feel more certain if this science had been conducted in the U.S. or Europe, but your assumptions is a little too conspiratorial for me.
The title is overblown. This just improves certain biomarkers that are associated with aging. This might improve healthspan but there is no indication that these monkeys will live any longer than the natural range.
"The super stem cells prevent age-related bone loss while rejuvenating over 50% of the 61 tissues analyzed." (including the brain).
What do people die of when they die of 'old age'? There's the 3 pillars: cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative. These are often (but not always) metabolic diseases; i.e. cardiovascular death often arises from kidney insufficiency. If you can regenerate the liver, kidney, etc. indefinitely, a large vector of metabolic disease is probably diminished or disappears.
In the paper, monkeys restored brain volume. They reduced the levels of senescent cells to youthful levels. They increased bone mass. This reduces or eliminates many of the threats that inflict casualties among the centenarian population.
Sure, something else could come up that the monkeys start dying from instead. But, given the way humans and monkeys die of old age—by reducing or eliminating all known threats—it's hard to see how this wouldn't extend lifespan.
This paper doesn't prove that it extends lifespan. So to speculate on that extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence to back it up is useless. It would be far easier to prove this out on a species with a much smaller lifespan like mice, not to mention cheaper, but so far we're unable to make a mouse live longer than 5 years.
Yes, I'm certainly speculating. It certainly seems that this could be a path to extending lifespan. I think the claim is less than "extraordinary" though. Many teams are working to figure out how to extend lifespan in many species—it seems likely that there will be meaningful progress in the coming years or decades.
Monkeys are not humans, anti-aging is imprecise and does not necessarily translate into longer life expectancies for people, and promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too.
The implanted stem cells, however, were human. (The fact that that the treatments did not cause "fever or substantial changes in immune cell levels (lymphocytes, neutrophils, and monocytes), which are commonly monitored for xenograft-related immune responses," is itself surprising.)
> promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too
Correct, though I'd say because this is early-stage medical research. Not because it's targeting longevity. I'd be similarly sceptical of an N = 16 early-stage drug trial for the flu.
16 primates is not small when it comes to primate studies. In any case, knowing how expensive and rare primate research is to conduct, I doubt this is the first animal model used on this approach.
In terms of replicatability, it is also not always the sample size, it is the effect size. Small samples do affect ability to generalize, but the point is that sample size isn't everything.
Oh, absolutely correct. Small study doesn't mean shit science. It just means there is plenty of room for randomness and hidden variables to create havoc on the way to a treatment.
I skimmed the article looking for a lifespan plot. Didn't see one. Instead it is replaced by a "proprietary multidimensional primate aging clock measurement". Take it as you will...
Or maybe not. Some species are very resistant to cancer. For example, bats basically never get it, even though they live up to 40 years.
Would they get cancer if they lived for 400 years? Maybe not either. Their immune systems are very good, better than ours.
(We humans don't really want to acknowledge that some other animals may have better immune systems, or any other systems, at their disposal.)
On the other end of the scale, mice die of cancer while not even three years old, because their immune systems are really bad at fighting cancer cells.
Cancer in mammals seems to be a function of failing immune systems rather than raw age in numbers. In some species, including us humans, weakening of the immune system goes hand in hand with aging. But in others it does not.
Peto's paradox - and the existence of whales in particular.
If cancer really is an inevitability, then whales, who have both livespan limits longer than that of humans, and enormous bodies with a staggering amount of living cells, would be full of cancer. They aren't.
Clearly, humans must have better innate cancer suppression than mice, and whales must have better innate cancer suppression than humans.
There are some hints that this may come down to programmed cell death and DNA repair mechanisms (i.e. the p53 pathway) more than the immune system tweaks - with immune response being the "last resort" of cancer suppression. But we also don't know enough about the immune system to be able to examine it the same detail we can examine the DNA repair pathways.
The correct way to phrase this is that humans have a level of cancer that does not greatly impede the fitness of the species in having offspring. We didn't hill climb into other evolutionary protective mechanisms because they either were not discovered or did not convey appropriate fitness benefits.
Our evolutionary biology doesn't "care" if we get cancer. Just that we have healthy children and can rear them for one or two generations. That was a (locally) optimal algorithm.
We have plenty of in-built checks and protections in our molecular biology, and they are sufficient to expand the species.
So the best way to get induced pluripotent stem cells is through the Yamanaka factors, which are proteins coded for by genes which are not expressed in mature cells. Using all four Yamanaka factors is a one-way ticket to tumor town. But, as it turns out, using three of the four still gets you IPSCs without the elevated cancer risk.
If you had asked me how I reckoned they reversed aging in Monkeys, I honestly would have said "stem cells". But then again, my answer to a lot of questions these days is "stem cells".
Consider looking at social media less and reading more history. The idea that people are recently celebrating cruelty, but did not earlier, is charmingly nostalgic but not exactly historical.
My clearest memory of that period was Al Qaeda flying planes into the twin towers in 2001 followed by the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. I'm not sure it was a unique time of brotherly love?
It North America, it was better overall; we didn't immediately assume the other person was inhuman because they voted for the other guy. In the US, we are just so fucked.
The rest of the world, at that time? Probably not so great.
What about people celebrating burning women alive back In medieval times?
That's what people doing all the time not just now. Only that the whole world can see a few insane people doing.
No more new generations, no more change. Just immensely powerful old people who look young grabbing ever more tightly onto power.
Right now generational wealth fizzles out due to idiot heirs eventually appearing. Imagine if someone could ride a thousand years of exponential gains.
I hope you're ready to worship or be of direct service to the capricious god-emporor of Mars, in exchange for your daily 500l oxygen supply, and 2000 calories.
A lot of things in science/technology have been invented essentially by accident though, with little to no understanding of why it worked. Who’s to say aging can’t be similar.
The site that is linked here is a site dedicated to the sale of the drug NAD so it is not objective on the topic of aging. Not trying to debunk anything but let's put on our skeptic hats here and be extra vigilant, given the source.
Regarding NAD, not the article but it pertains to the subject, I actually think it has promise and as an older person take NMN to very (like... WOW, very) positive result (an NAD precursor that is arguably better as it is used by the body to create NAD whereas the consumption of NAD itself via the digestive system is in need of study as the suspicion is that it doesn't make the journey very successfully).
I want back the decades of stem cell research opportunities wasted by hand-wringing conservatives who placed the potential for life above the actuality of life.
I wonder how humanity will react when the richest can live much longer than everyone else. Knowing that the current group of billionaires might still be alive hundreds of years from now is very depressing.
>Imagine all the elderly autocrats got to rule forever
since the end of monarchies autocracy has been impersonal and institutionalized. You can think of the Pope or Dalai Lama as software, the latter literally being rebooted when the last one kicks the bucket, the substrate doesn't matter much.
In the words of Jung: people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Big Brother is a program, not a person and so physical death doesn't help you much in that regard.
It's quite the opposite. Since the end of monarchies we actually don't observe stable autocracies anymore. They used to last for millennia, now they don't even get to a century.
An autocracy is an idea but an autocrat is a human who cares about himself. Anyone capable of carrying the torch is seen as threat and gets exiled, imprisoned or killed. In the end it's scorched earth within the current elites so instead of succession you get revolution with say 40-50% chance. You may get the succession to work once, maybe two-three times if you're lucky, but that's it.
Now contrast it with a world where an autocrat doesn't actually need a successor and can run the country indefinitely.
Monarchies are autocratic, but I don't think it's fair to throw them in the same bucket as modern autocracies. They came in many flavours and shapes. Often they had some checks and balances and due to the ruler not fearing for loss of power, they often had the intention to actually invest in their country and make their peoples live better.
A modern autocracy has the incentive to keep the population dumb to stay existing. Old monarchies have the incentive to make their population more intelligent, so it has more power than the neighbor.
Wake me when you have J. Fred Muggs[11] riding a horse on TV and asking his doctor if stem cell injections are right for him. Until then, I'll remain skeptical, thanks.
This is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it.
It would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology. Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
If that doesn't cool your jets, let's say the treatment is so cheap it can be widely available to everyone. Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries. It's madness. I don't think we've evolved enough, ethically speaking, as a species to wrestle with such long lifespans.
>Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
What makes the current lifespan any more correct than 2x or 3x, or 0.5x of a century or two ago? Given that life expectancy was much shorter a century ago, should we start randomly executing people to keep "the uber-wealthy and powerful" from living too long? That would probably have kept "the current American president" from being in power.
Iiuc it wasn’t a comment about what the perfect lifespan is. It’s expressing a concern about how people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power.
Or put differently: it’s a request, given limited resources let’s expend effort on a fairer society, not one with longer lived people.
> people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power
Sure. One of which would be broadly granting access to it.
Like, if a country tried to restrict such technology to its leaders, you could probably trigger regime change by simply promising to share the technology in the event of deposement. Every party member who barely missed the cut would become your revolutionary.
That’s possible, I suppose. I think @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that. For example: labor camps.
> @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that
Nihilistic Luddism. It works against any argument for making the world a better place.
> For example: labor camps
...what's the connection between longevity and labor camps? Empirically, as life expectancies (at birth and in adulthood) have risen, the prevalence of labor camps has gone down. We can see this both longitudinally and between countries.
Uber rich have means of extending their power to the next generation anyway. Look at North Korea. It's stagnant and hardly changed despite changing hand 3 times.
Whereas if you live a super long life, you can't afford to be risk averse and hope for a dictator to die of old age and hope that will somehow magically change thing.
Life expectancy was shorter a century ago because infant mortality, disease and injury pull the average down. We've done an amazing job of a society pulling up that lower end, but lifespan associated with normal aging is actually fairly stable. For example, Plato lived to be roughly 80 years old.
Anti aging is not just about living long. Having a good quality of life as long as you live is essential. The world population is ageing and costs of caring for them will be huge cost for humanity.
I want this longevity to be real. I have to stick around long enough to see if people respond differently to me when they are older.
'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain' Nobody seems to agree on who actually said that.
Your comment appears to be based in fear, without presenting any reasonable argument against extended lifespans. The idea that a naughty president, or a prisoner, would live hundreds of years is not a longevity problem, its a politics problem.
I feel like the point mostly comes down to “our current society sucks so we shouldn’t want to live longer in it,” but that could be improved and you can always just, ya know, dip out.
This study appears to have used "human embryonic stem cells (hESCs)" [1]. We haven't tested this with iPSCs [2].
Even if it only works with hESCs, if the part of the population that thinks blastocysts are people wants to live a third or a quarter as long as the part that doesn't, I don't see a problem with that. We're basically going in that direction with vaccination anyway.
Thank you for the details about this article but that's not quite what I meant.
I meant where do you get enough stem cells to make the procedure widely available to the developed world? Stem cells are kinda scarce, as far as I know, so it may gate such a thing.
Embryonic stem cells are rare in America because of religious types. They're not particularly difficult to manufacture or extract--the limit is really human eggs, and we can make those in the lab [1]. (Human sperm are not, for many reasons, difficult to secure.)
I'd actually guess hESCs would be the cheapest route. If we insist on iPSCs, then this turns into a personalised medicine treatment. But in that, it's no different from e.g. oncology.
I would expect it to shift power dynamics quite dramatically, and probably in ways that can't be accurately predicted. What happens when raising a family no longer occupies the bulk of adults' healthy lives and lived experience and wisdom is no longer dragged down by the gradual descent into senility? What if age didn't inversely correlate to neuroplasticity? What if as a young person, your runway to get where you want to go is 80+ years after graduating high school instead of 30-40? All sorts of assumptions and social structures would be upended.
This is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it.
The odds of this actually happening are about about zero anyway, so this is not something to be concerned about. I am more optimistic, if it were to happen ,in unlocking economic potential. Why would we not want some of society's most productive people to live longer. Think of all the careers derailed by illness, lives separated by death.
In today's regulatory environment, I don't even think the CEO of the immortality service provider would know if their service were safe. But you can guarantee it will have personalized pricing calculated right at the edge of the immense wealth required to have that service. And it's a high priced subscription too, you betcha.
The next problem would be overpopulation - OTOH, if people could live naturally for 1000 years or so, manned space travel to habitable planets would be a lot more feasible.
I'll just grant you that most societies are wholly unequipped to deal with long lifespans, and there will be tons of murder, exploitation, and suffering if we fixed our biology. First, how is that any different than the current situation? Second, do you expect societies to quickly evolve to fix all of these problems (or at least tame them), much like societies had to do after the invention of fire, agriculture, steel, gunpowder, or steam?
You're welcome to die if you'd like, but I'll take my chances on living longer with any unknown repercussions.
The technology would have to be accessible to everyone, otherwise "the wealthy" would be murdered. And no, some futuristic sci-fi bullshit isn't going to save them.
> Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries.
I don't really understand this line of reasoning at all. Slaves exist, and slavery is miserable, therefore nobody on the planet should live beyond current human lifetimes? If a slave or exploited person is going to get healthcare for something that might otherwise cause them to die, are you arguing healthcare should be withheld?
> Picture a world where a slew of today's despots get to live for two, or three human lifespans
Uprisings or outright assassinations would become much more common.
Seriously. Every senior government official or sniper in Russia who isn't happy with Putin is placated by telling themselves "everybody dies sooner or later". Take that away and you'll force people to do something instead of just waiting out the clock.
Never thought I'd see so many people rooting for death here on HN. What a dour, pessimistic place this has become.
There is plenty of reason to welcome death. And be optimistic about its presence.
As Max Planck observed: "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
And really, the same can be said for political beliefs.
Humans are stubborn creatures that stratify power. Death has always been the great equalizer. But perhaps soon, no longer.
Science progresses because it makes a disciplined study of the world with numerical predictions that are checked for accuracy.
Politics is treated by most people as essentially a religion. And religion does not progress with death. It just cycles through periods of greater fundamentalism and less fundamentalism.
There aren't enough people studying political science and studying it rigorously enough for the Planck observation to apply.
That is a really naive epistemology. Science as an objective methodology that churns out truth doesn't exist. Its a human endeavor full of interests.
Religion is also a human endeavor full of interests, and can also ascertain certain truths. Often people who subscribe to scientism gloat that even in the farthest reaches of space, other aliens will arrive at the same equations. Similarly, I think at the farthest reaches of space aliens will have to reckon with wickedness, duty, hospitality, forgiveness, etc. It can even make numerical predictions like "there will always be the poor". So far so true.
This is just a bunch of cold-war style anti-science critique stuff. It's frankly not worth responding to.
There are reasonable things to say about science, but the anti-objectivity bit was an attempt to undermine science and reduce opposition to political rule by fiat. The rise in authoritarian rhetoric and beliefs is why we're seeing the anti-science and anti-expert ideas become fashionable again.
Notice that the anti-expert/anti-intellectual/anti-science people always have something else they're selling you that conflicts with the experts/intellectuals/science.
Anyway, good luck.
This isn't an anti-science critique. It's a philosophical argument about how science actually operates. I'm not coming at this from a populist authoritarian angle! (Literally my views were influenced by Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)
The tobacco-funded studies that failed to prove cigarettes harmful? Those were scientists doing "objective methodology." Pharmaceutical companies suppressing unfavorable trials? Scientists. The replication crisis? Scientists following the same process.
These aren't exceptions. They show that science is a human practice embedded in institutional and economic contexts.
Acknowledging that science involves human interests doesn't undermine it. It's how you maintain critical perspective when bad actors claim scientific authority. Or should I trust the current experts that Tylenol causes Autism?
I agree. People stop changing their mind at some point. Social progress is only possible when old generations die. To think scientists are some sort of truth seeking machines, unbiased, isolated from society, is naive.
Also I really dislike the categorisation into scientists and non-scientists, this really makes science sound like a dogma. I prefer inventors, pioneers, or simply curious people.
Or do people stop changing their minds because they're worn down, their brains no longer as capable of making space and joy for new ideas?
Which these stem cells, if they pan out, very specifically fix
Possible, but many concepts and principles are frozen by the age of 30 already.
I have never seen someone which is left on the political spectrum at 30 become a Keynesian by 50.
I know such people exist, but they are the exception.
Personality psychology shows personality does not change much after 30.
And there is even some theories such as the “impressionable years” (15-25) which are even more extreme in that respect, stating that basically very little changes after 25.
Overall this makes me doubt stem cells can change any of this.
But I am myself way past my impressionable years, my mental flexibility is lessened, I may be wrong and not open to new ideas.
It would feel sad though, having civilisation lead by the same people over hundreds of years if not more, somewhat stratified, predictable, dull.
> (Literally my views were influenced by Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)
Sigh this is the most annoying thing on the internet. It's like every online debate a leftist post-structuralist has to say "nuh uh actually everything is relative because it's all about structure and there's no objective truth man." It's a lazy critique. You can aim post-structuralist critique at literally anything. You're right, science is an artifact of the society it's in, and actually society is based on the Wim Hof breathing technique so really science is in service of Wim Hof Breathing. You can't argue with me because everything is relative and based on structures and Wim Hof breathing is the root of all social structure.
If you're going to trot out a post-structuralist critique, build an alternate theory, don't just pick an argument apart. I'm hardly the first person to note this continental Leftist weakness. Zizek has written about this extensively. I don't need to believe in Soviet conspiracy theories to think your argument is weak.
Zero disagreement. I will only add that I am patiently waiting for transmetropolitcan prediction of postneoredereconstructionism to become true.
> These aren't exceptions.
It's furious cherry picking. The scientific consensus is that cigarettes are harmful, the globe is warming, Tylenol DOES NOT cause autism, etc.
> Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)
Yes that was obvious in your first post.
Feyerabend was writing during the cold war and was influenced by Marx (an authoritarian) and Marxist critiques of science promoted by the Soviets at the time. You get the same threads running through people like Kuhn and Popper.
The backdrop of these ideas is that the authoritarian Soviet state wanted to undermine faith in science within the US for the same reason it wanted to undermine democracy. They also wanted to promote the idea of alternative views of science at home because Soviet science was constrained by needing to be consistent with Marx. These ideas percolated for a few decades as propaganda before people like Feyerabend gussied them up and tried to publish them as academic works.
This is ahistorical conspiracy theory.
First, state communists kill anarchists. That's history.
Second, the Soviets were incredibly dogmatic about science because they used it to justify their materialist ideology. They promoted Lysenkoism (fake genetics) to conform to Marxist doctrine. That's literally the opposite of epistemological questioning.
Third, claiming Kuhn and Popper were Soviet mouthpieces is unhinged. Popper wrote "The Open Society and Its Enemies" as an anti-communist text. Kuhn taught at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. They were Western academics, not agents.
You've gone from defending naive scientism to claiming anyone who critiques it is a communist propagandist. That's McCarthyism, not an argument.
No, it's not. Like I said this isn't worth responding to, but people who actually look into the history will understand what I'm saying.
The problem you're facing is you don't believe in any sort of objective reality so you're acting as if ideas are about which team you're on instead of how they relate to the truth.
Whoever you are imagining has nothing to do with me. Enjoy debating your spooky stalinist strawmen.
The difference between you and me is I've focused on what you've written and you've called me every name in the book despite not knowing what you're talking about.
We see your other posts where you're asking why murdering your enemies isn't okay and promoting conspiracy theories. I don't have to imagine who you are, you've told us.
"This is just a bunch of cold-war style anti-science critique stuff. It's frankly not worth responding to."
This is, ironically, an absurd echo of every autocrat's self-defense. "It is just the commies/right-wingers who hate our Dear Leader and want to undermine his benevolent authority for their own nefarious purposes."
Scientists are humans, prone to every vice that plagues humanity: jealousy, lust for power, greed, willingness to bend data to make their theory work, plagiarism, and, lately, blatant misuse of AI without even acknowledging it aloud.
The scientific community absolutely needs both internal self-policing, external policing, and mechanisms that limit abuse of power by the elders against their subordinates, or it will lose the necessary integrity and thus also any trust of the outsiders.
If you deny this, you basically deny humanity of everyone involved. And I say this as a former young scientist with a PhD from algebra. I have seen enough, with my own eyes.
I just want to draw everyone's attention to the fact that you're saying science needs a lot of policing to keep it in line. The rest is just rhetoric.
Science needs exactly as much policing as every other human activity: airlines, accounting, agriculture etc.
I have no problem with you "drawing everyone's attention" to the fact that I think so. Indeed I consider the above to be self-evident, because humans aren't angels.
Maybe you confuse policing with censorship or political pressure? That is not the same thing.
"The rest is just rhetoric."
Nope, you just prefer to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room whose name is "replication crisis". Partly caused by outright fraud.
By definition things that are true are science and things that have no evidence are religion.
That understanding of what science is, in its de facto form of practice to date, is remarkably ungrounded from the history of science.
Nope it's remarkably consistent with the history of science, which I've studied pretty extensively.
do you have any result of this study, like an essay or a video? Would be curious to read too
It's even worse than that. When people who have experience die, new people arise to repeat their mistakes. Witness the NYC mayoral race.
When I think of repeated mistakes, I think of populists embracing fascism.
There's no shortage of mistakes to support the counterargument to the proposition that the death of experience is the best path to a better world.
This just sounds like rationalization to me, just-so stories we tell ourselves to feel better about something we can't change anyway, so isn't it lucky that everything is perfect just the way it is!
I think it's nonsense. Society is the way it is because of the prevailing conditions. We haven't really had to deal with getting rid of dead wood in science because death always did that anyway, if death goes away then we'll just adapt. That witticism from Planck is just an observation of the times, not some universal, uh, constant.
> There is plenty of reason to welcome death
Maybe we should welcome it even faster then! If death speeds up science so much, then maybe society shouldn't provide health care to scientists at all. In fact maybe we should euthanize all scientists at age 50 - or earlier. Right?
Ask yourself if most older people reliably update their beliefs as the world changes.
If the answer is "No, they don't," then it follows that part of progress is newer generations moving into positions of authority and bringing their new ideas with them.
Yes. Older people are much more flexible as they have had to adopt new thinking, been exposed to much more new ideas, realized the mistakes dogmatic young them did. Young people seem much more rigid and dogmatic to their much shorter held and therefore often much lesser informed positions.
Part of curing aging would be restoring youthful brain characteristics such as openness to change. Which honestly seems like a small and easy task when compared to the whole endeavor of curing aging.
It's not that old people are not open to change, they just very reasonably disregard all the bullshit that contradicts their experience. To achieve plasticity of beliefs people will have to forget stuff.
Which closes the circle, nature already invented all that: your kids are a version of you that's free from both the baggage of harmful mutations and the baggage of harmful presuppositions.
Not at all clear to me why we want to reinvent an inferior version of this process, it works remarkably well.
> Not at all clear to me why we want to reinvent an inferior version of this process, it works remarkably well.
That sounds like something that someone who is not open to change would say.
Absolutely. Progress is a delicate balance of accepting change and being conservative.
Not all change is worth accepting, but if I'm wrong about this one my death will eventually put an end to me being wrong.
That's an inversion of Pascal's wager. Pascal says if I'm right about this my death will reward me, therefore I believe, and you've come up with if I'm wrong about this my death will criticise me, therefore I believe.
Do you agree with the Pascal's wager then? I don't and if mine is an inversion, I don't see a problem with it.
It's not scary to make a mistake if any decision you make is temporary anyhow. Knowing that I die no matter what I do with my life gives me so much more freedom in how I can live it.
I think it's the same kind of idea, because it shuts down any duty to worry about whether you are right. You get to be a dogmatist, since dogmatists die eventually.
The second sentence deserves some response, but I don't know what to make of it. Mistakes are good, surely? More mistakes faster. Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.
I don't really see an issue with it either, though it depends on what exactly you mean by a dogmatist.
Literally everyone operates within some framework of unprovable dogmas to be able to tell good from evil and to decide how to act. Accepting that fact is a IMO a better path than striving for some sort of non-existent objective skepticism (but that's only better within my framework of what better is, of course).
And surely I worry whether I'm right, and all the time. It's just that when I worry and estimate the expected value of my decisions, I don't get NaNs and INFs. My life is not infinitely valuable to me, engaging in activities that involve possible loss of my life is often a good decision because the upside is good. That's largely true because I die anyway, I'm not sure the same calculations would hold if I were immortal.
UPD to respond to the second part that was added later
> Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.
It's remarkably easy to ruin your life by dying or getting a permanent disability. Would you climb a mountain with a risk of avalanches and rockfalls if you were otherwise immortal? Even commuting to work by bicycle becomes questionable, chances of getting hit by a car on a crossing are pretty high compared to taking the metro.
I almost completely disagree with "everyone operates within some framework of unprovable [moral] dogmas", but I don't completely disagree. I think the potential for mind-changing debate about moral matters - some of it inexplicit, but still rational - is enormous: and that the dogmatic cores of almost everyone's moral worldviews are, in modern times, practically identical, or close enough to be compatible.
More to the point, you can refrain from being unnecessarily dogmatic. As I'm sure you do really. But that means anticipation of death, to wipe out your ideas, shouldn't diminish your will to filter them through argument or thought. It just acts as a safety mechanism against your possibly losing your grip on rationality and becoming an intransigent old nuisance, I suppose.
So the second point is that self-sacrifice is less expensive for the mortal. I guess that could be seen as a rather cold fact that a mortal person is less valuable. But immortal people could be hindered by being all neurotic about risks to their lives, if that even is how we make decisions about self-sacrifice and mortal danger (however mild - germs?) ... but I suspect that isn't a calculation we'd do, even if immortal. I suspect the basis for these decisions is something different. This makes me scratch my head, I may come back to it.
...OK, ready. This is really about a certain puzzle to which immortality is irrelevant, which is: how can we take risks at all? If you cross the street you might lose your life, and since that's everything you've got, the cost is infinitely large, so you can never cross the street.
There are numerous tangents to go on from there. If you're being objective, your value is your ideas, your relationships, and your potential to have future ideas. With the last in mind, maybe immortality does change the calculation? Maybe risk-taking for mortal people should increase with age. Well, we do tend to self-sacrifice in a crisis, and to save children preferentially (though I'm not sure why future potential should trump existing ideas in a person). And there's this "I've lived a full life, I'll be the one" trope, which really means "I'm nearly dead already, so I'm expendable." And sure, immortal people can't say that. But that doesn't have bearing on how young people can complete routine life goals such as crossing the street.
You could also claim that a decision like deciding to stay in bed is risky in itself, and that we take risky actions in order to minimize risk. But I don't think that's truly the normal way to operate.
The main thing is, we do decide to take risks somehow. We know that decision paralysis is bad: we're morally opposed to it. And this would remain true even if we were immortal and were risking the loss of much longer lives. Mortal or not, we risk all we've got, all the time, by living lives. The difference is only in an extreme self-sacrifice situation, where relative to one other younger person an immortal person would feel less disposable than an old mortal might.
> In fact maybe we should euthanize all scientists at age 50 - or earlier. Right?
I understand you're trying to perform reductio ad absurdum but I would like to point out that the proposition is less absurd than you make out.
E.g. if Ancel Keys died at 50 then health risks of sugar consumption would have been accepted by the scientific community decades earlier saving tens of millions of lives. I certainly don't suggest to euthanize anyone however I'm glad he died eventually. In fact I'm glad everyone dies eventually me included.
So you advocate a traditional, orderly, socially acceptable form of killing everybody, by maintaining traditional death against possible ways to overcome it.
Correct
It's got a certain appeal, but I'm undecided. Will I be allowed to opt out?
It's a bit far, but I think countries and societies will be split around this question if or when such a technology comes. You'll definitely find a place to opt out, I would stick/move to a country where immortality is illegal.
Now if my world model is correct, the immortal societies will see a decline akin to the Byzantine empire (which never actually declined, just progressed slower than it's neighbors). As the result they will either succumb and integrate into their mortal counterparts or perhaps continue existing like some sort of native tribal reservations. If I'm wrong, the inverse will happen.
In the end the more effective and stable socioeconomic model wins because it's the only thing that matters in the long run. It may take a while to reach the equilibrium though.
Very good! This sounds groovy, let the competition pan out how it will.
I don’t know where I saw that number, but supposedly the mean age of an immortal human will be 500 years due to accidents. True immortality is not a thing.
Maybe 500 years by today's behavioral standards. I assume that if people were told you could live ~forever barring an accident leading to your death, many people in society would behave VERY differently. The risk profile of you or me getting in a car to drive to the store is VERY different than someone with age-and-sickness-proof-but-accident-vulnerable immortality.
Incidentally this is one reason why people in the past seemed braver than now and did crazier things. When your life expectancy is 25, you take a lot more risks.
It also increases the cost of martyrdom.
mind uploading and backups
Science might progress faster if people can spend hundreds of years becoming experts in multiple fields.
> There is plenty of reason to welcome death.
Only when painfully ill, this reverses old age symptoms correlated with some of those painful conditions.
> As Max Planck observed: "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
If the aphorism was causally true, Spanish Flu, the Nazi's death camps, and Pol Pot's Cambodia would've created a lot more science than they did.
Even for politics: the Holodomor didn't end Stalin; the deaths in WW1 didn't change the world order enough to prevent WW2.
You don't understand the aphorism if you think that death in itself causes scientific progress.
It means something else. When old, entrenched scientists die, they lose their ability to prevent younger scientists from studying topics they personally don't like. Dead people cannot deny the living use of labs, grants etc.
Plenty of otherwise impeccable great minds died "stuck" on bad ideas. For example, the great German pathologist Rudolf Virchow utterly rejected the idea of archaic humans existing, and did his best to slow down the research on the Neanderthals etc.
Einstein himself rejected the quantum theory, though, to his credit, he didn't prevent others from studying it.
Ancel Keys, who lived to be almost 100, tried to destroy career of every nutritional scientist who toyed with the idea that saturated fats may not be the killers he pronounced them to be, and defended sugar from more scrutiny.
I distrust aphorisms, not without having read the literature on the evidence or lack thereof behind the aphorism.
For example: History is written by the winner.
Certainly not true on its face. The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. It certainly wasn't. They managed to reshape popular narrative.
History is written by the winner. does not mean that everybody trusts what is written by the winner. It has also become somewhat weaker in the era of digital communication, when censorship of sources becomes harder.
"The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. "
A certain percentage of people will believe in anything. Putin is a virtuous peacemaker, Nazis didn't murder people in industrial ovens, Stalin was a good person, the American Civil War wasn't about slavery, you name it.
That still does not negate the overall observation expressed in the aphorism: winners have a lot more clout when determining how the war will be seen by future generations. The percentage of Confederacy supporters in the Western civilization is fairly small. They may be visible, but the vast majority of the Western population, to the extent that they think of ACW at all, don't support the cause of continuing enslavement of blacks.
Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful".
Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful".
I am not treating them as mathematical statement, I just don't take it for granted that these "aphorism" are in fact historical truth.
Cursory search of "winners write history" already reveal to me a far more complex and nuanced reality. Indeed, such a statement is considered harmful.
If (and to the extent that) the aphorism isn't causal, then it is irrelevant to a hypothetical where we solve death.
You still don't understand what is being said, and what precisely is the line of causality there.
Maybe someone else can explain it better than I can.
there's no need to understand it, as being healthy well after being alive for hundreds of years would incentivize a lot of people to do more with their life than clutching their academic pearls.
even if not, the aphorism is not a necessity. scientific progress is a very soft thing anyway in most fields (medicine for example), and just because nowadays when the old guard dies off a new paradigm takes over doesn't necessarily mean that were the old guard alive there wouldn't be paradigm shifts!
simply accumulating the necessary data to convincingly be able to claim that the new model is better takes decades ... which conveniently coincidences with some old dog dying.
sure, likely if the old guard would be alive for a few more decades maybe they would insist on even more convincing data.
but that would at least help us to have better science!
and no one is prohibited from exploring applications of the new models before they became de facto dogma!
... and so on.
most of the time progress is limited by methods (data collection, precision - repeatability, and of course replicability), but those are usually limited by engineering, culture, funding, etc.
see the whole story with Alzheimer's and the first mouse model problem, and the failed clinical trials of various treatments, and ... despite all this how still we have no better idea, despite decades of effort!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechani...
code reviews could go much quicker...
This is literally amazing research, just because we are getting closer to rejuvenating tissue does not imply that suddenly we will stop dying - it just means vastly increased health span which means less health care cost and more joy in life! Congratulations to the authors of this paper!
Im not sure this will reduce healthcare costs very much since age related care is already the largest bulk of healthcare costs and living longer at an advanced age, even if relatively healthy, gives more time to accrue costs and age related problems.
I expect if people use healthcare 2x less, then the insurance companies and other companies that make their money from the sick will simply charge 4x more when you need healthcare.
seriously, HN has gone mad recently. The amount of doom in commentators is just off the chart.
I always loved going into HN comments, because the insights you could read here were very often of better quality than linked sources.
Now it's mostly doom and despair
I've been reading HN for a number of years, I think I only discovered it around 2018. I didn't register at first. It felt better then, but that could be my wrong memory.
I really agree with you. I wish I could find somewhere with as many interesting people to discuss technology and/or science without so much pavlovian cynicism.
It’s kind of new anti human belief system that a lot of people Here have.
I think the last several months have been very un-optimistic for quite a lot of us. Especially when it comes what's being done by aged people that have also accumulated power.
I don't particularly like death, but the potential societal stasis caused by longer lives is a problem as well.
Already when living to our 80s and 90s, we can see the top strata of the society (CEO level, Parliaments) overflowing with very old people who don't want to relax their grip on power. The current US Senate is older than the Brezhnev politburo, widely considered a gerontocracy, once was. It is the same elsewhere. Few powerful people are as self-aware as Benedict XIV. was, or their lust for power is simply too big.
In autocracies, people like Putin, Erdogan, Khamenei and Xi built very resilient systems that could support them for decades, if not centuries, and death is the only way that can reliably get them out of the way.
I suppose that not even the Americans would like to see various replays of Biden vs. Trump for several election cycles, and the Supreme Court is a veritable gerontocracy as well. If longevity research succeeds, the younger justices like Gorsuch and Barrett may well stay on the bench until 2070 or even longer, shaping rules for a world they will no longer understand.
If we ever are to achieve very long lives, we need to expand into the universe as well, so that the younger generations can build their own domains somewhere else, unburdened by the dictates of the old.
I like it here but this place has always been dour and pessimistic.
Many people here have kids, it changes the way you see life and death quite a bit.
I have kids. I want to live much longer.
I have kids. The current crop of the politicians in the most important/impactful countries is frankly terrifying.
Yes, it's made me determined to live as long as possible, so that I can see more of my kids' lives.
Just imagine Putin, Netanyahu, Musk, Thiel and Trump living 2x longer in the great health.
Because this technology won't be available to these raising the humanity, but to those ruthless.
Yeah I’m imagining people living 2x as longer in the great health.
I don’t see any problems. If you want to kill someone, go ahead, that’s between you and them and your reasons for thinking they should die at a certain age. But I have no qualms about anyone living longer, healthier lives. This includes you.
Equating realism to pessimism is intellectually dishonest.
I'm at an age where many of my friends have died and many more soon will. Even in the most optimistic scenario this technology will not become normalized in my lifetime--and if it does become normalized there will be many undesirable consequences. In any case, global warming will destroy human civilization and this technology will die with it.
Really? I am surprised it is this low.
Tolkien didn't call death “The gift of Ilúvatar” for nothing.
In fact, even in our world, age-related death is an evolved trait, this isn't something obvious but that's something that arised through the natural selection because it improves fitness.
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Death holds profound significance, it acts as a mental reset
Accumulating traumas across an eternity would harm society
And I think it's unfair to reserve that for the wealthy, if anything, eugenics should determine who gains access, only the most genetically advantaged should be allowed, in an effort to protect and strengthen humankind
But I don't think our society is ready to have this discussion, hence why, aging and death should not be frowned upon
I'd love the current generation of POSs in power to die off naturally before those advancements will be applied, thank you.
I do wonder how the psychology of humanity will change once you can't wait for someone to die, and conversely, you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you.
Without going in to spoilers, the recent season of the Revolutions podcast about a future fictional revolution on Mars touches on this a fair bit. Someone about to die seizes power for himself, but no one cares much because he was already in charge and extending his reign a few more years till he dies was no big deal, until he extends his life and lives another 75 years.
"Putin Eternal", or something like that. Ironically, the technology will probably lead to faster, worse fates for many like that than might have been the case if they'd just left it alone.
> once you can't wait for someone to die, and consequently, you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you
People will still die, even in a world without ageing, which this treatment doesn't promise.
The risk of death per year increasing with number of years lived is aging.
Without that people have lived longer are more likely to have lower risks of death per year. And thus older people in such a society would on average live longer.
Unless it also cures cancer a more likely outcome is that people who get the treatment will just stay young until they get cancer and die. Also, as I understand it cancer also slows down in old age, so staying younger could mean faster cancers possibly negating some of the gains from the decreased aging.
Cancer is primarily caused by aging, so in this world there likely wouldn’t be much cancer outside of the deliberate cancers caused by things like smoking
This is grossly wrong. "anti-aging" treatments won't reduce people's ages and won't undo epigenetic damage. And while age is the single strongest risk factor for cancer, it isn't the "primary cause", and there are numerous non-age-related causes of cancer.
Bad “anti-aging” treatments definitely won’t do it, but they also won’t provide indefinite lifespans.
> it isn't the "primary cause
Only if you’re using an inaccurate definition of aging. If everyone over 20 should have the same risk of cancer as 20 years olds the total number of cancers would drop by more than half.
P.S. The response is incoherent. Talk about "inaccurate definition" ... someone has an inaccurate definition of "cause".
Aging is more than just looking old.
If someone has an increased risk of death per year from cancer or whatever because something is failing over time they are still aging.
If the rate per year stays the same IE being 20 or 20,000 has no impact on your risks of cancer each year then someone that’s 20,000 likely takes very few other risks and is more likely to live another 20,000 years than the random 20 year old.
The Altered Carbon universe is a manifestation of this.
I'm certain, at some point in the not so distant future, Neuralink will create an arm of the company to build "sleeves".
Altered Carbon used alien magic, the way this works in the real world will be far worse: Brain transplants. First, many poor people will need to be used as guinea pigs (a la the Sun King's anal fistula). Then once it works.. well some strapping young man (or woman!) will have to "volunteer" their body to host Elon's brain.
They don't need a volunteer. They can clone themselves when they are, say, 30 year old and they will have a 100% compatible, 20 year old donor who has spent their life in suspended animation when the original is 50.
The practice of illegal clone brain transplants figures in some of the Vorkosigan series books: The clone-children of various customers are raised in cohorts, and taught little while enduring years of strictly controlled diets, cosmetic surgeries, and exercise regimes.
Then, one day, the are told their important and distant "parents" are finally arriving to bring them away to their new life...
Anyway, the point is that any aging wealthy pedicidal murderers are also gonna insist the body is perfect before they move in. The easiest way to do that without conjuring more new technology is the force the future-victim to do it.
Thanks for bringing that up, it's probably time got for me to reread the Vorkosigan Saga.
And you also reminded me of the flawed but moving film "Never Let Me Go" from 2010 about a more present version of this. Oh, and there's also Michael Bay's "The Island".
No that won't do. You need someone else to prepare the body: you know... rigorous workouts for strength and physique. Ideally the person is an excellent cage fighter and has the reflexes of a top-tier video gamer.
Get Out.
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All options are too far away to predict which will come first, or with what side effects.
(In practice, almost everything over 5 years away, even when already in early human trials, has this property; the only reason the Covid vaccines happened faster is that everyone was willing to throw unlimited resources at the problem and do simultaneous tests on all candidates, and in a pipeline, rather than cost-efficiently and slowly like everything else has been).
In-vitro tissue culture is already a thing (including brain organoids, if you want a brain to control a robot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_organoid), as is 3D bio-printing.
IIRC, there's no current way to scan even a single living synapse/synaptic cleft/dendrite combination to read out the corresponding connection strengths, let alone for the whole brain, so we can't yet scan a brain — but if we could do that, writing it back to a fresh blank one currently seems(!) like the easy part, as neurons change shape and grow in response to electrical gradients.
One non-measuring idea is to gradually replace portions of the brain with artificial blanks, relying on some sort of holistic (or holographic) redundancy where the "damage" is repaired by neighbors.
This, er, Brain of Theseus would retain operational patterns even if the individual cells have been replaced.
A variation on that would be too do it stochastically, constantly substituting a miniscule percentage of cells evenly across the entire brain.
the Sun King's anal fistula
This thread is about stem cells in monkeys.
Anyone have an ETA on Curious Yellow?
https://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)
h/t HN user cstross
As I have gotten older I've slowly realized that waiting for people to die takes a long, long time, and no longer regard it as a good strategy.
Unfortunately seems to only be the case in aggregate
Consequences seem to not matter so we’ll just get a bunch of meths like from altered carbon.
I'm not an expert in psychology, but within a fixed population window, the murder rate will only go up unless there is a limited supply of those who murderers want to murder or unless murderers tend to prefer murdering other murderers, perhaps due to the change in game theory creating a new incentive. As humans would begin to live ever increasingly far away, we may approach a "murder death" condition where no new murders are possible. I will leave alone those who played Among Us until their numbers diminish and there is a better chance of reaching an early asymptote.
> you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you.
Many of the worst people in humanity, seem(ed) to act like they thought they were immortal.
Even being grazed by a bullet didn't stop Trump praising the second amendment.
(Though I say that as a non-American, and someone for whom the 2nd was part of why I never even considered attempting to migrate to the US; I do recognise the language used to support it as a quasi-religious badge of identity, i.e. hard to shake).
> Even being grazed by a bullet didn't stop Trump praising the second amendment.
This at least gives the semblance of Trump having and sticking to a set of principles (though I suspect it's more to do with what his supporters would accept)
If you’re curious about fiction which thinks about this there’s Altered Carbon which is “what if the rich assholes can live forever” and there’s The Postmortal where all assholes get to live forever.
cf. Palpatine
“To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
This article, like most about medical breakthroughs, is probably nonsense.
And that's good because, for my part, I plan to shuffle off this mortal coil in time not to see America elect Nick Fuentes as President.
I don't think that the assertions are nonsense, but I don't understand how this works.
I have heard variants on this assertion:
"Two of the most prominent purported underlying causes of aging are chronic inflammation and senescent cells."
One thing that surprises me is that telomeres aren't mentioned.
I also don't understand how this is happening (is apoptosis somehow triggered?):
"Now, the Academy researchers demonstrate that SRCs reduce senescent cells, measured using a blue dye called SA-β-Gal, in multiple organs, including the brain, heart, and lungs."
The main mechanism of action appears to be:
"The therapeutic efficacy of MPCs is largely attributed to their paracrine actions, with exosomes playing a pivotal role in mediating these effects."
The researchers do not appear to fully understand how this is happening:
"Among the diverse geroprotective functions of SRCs in the brain and ovary, the restorative effect of SRC-derived exosomes on aged cells and their surroundings emerges as a key mechanism. Rejuvenation of aged cells by exosomes likely involves multiple pathways and targets."
It really seems like things are heading in that direction :/
Wishing harm on someone is not acceptable behavior on HN. Ideological warfare is not acceptable behavior on HN. Please do not do this here.
it kinda looks like you've assumed my "ideology", or even a country. Also, to die of natural causes, you know, for some people in some positions is actually a good wish. And we all will be there, I just really hope to outlive particular people.
The comment you responded to is one of many grossly intellectually dishonest ones in this discussion.
If you think the next generation will be any better, I have bad news for you...
In 200 years, we're going to look at our lack of checks and balances against gerontocracy as naive as trusting monarchy in the middle ages.
we may alternatively end up with even older elders because of general lifespan increases, it just so happens people with more experience are older, if you think older people being in charge is bad just wait until you see how the younger ones do
> love the current generation of POSs in power to die off naturally before those advancements will be applied
These treatments aren't panaceas. The benefit would almost certainly accrue inversely with age.
Sadly, we will never run out of evil people regardless.
For every evil old person today, there's a handful of evil younger people behind them, just because of demographics.
What will that achieve? Next generation with no doubt will have their own POSs, their offspring think pretty much like them already, there is no way out of this vicious cycle.
I don't really blame humans in particular, a bear can eat it's prey alive and feel nothing at all about it, and many other similar examples of cruelty exist in nature, many even eat their own species in special circumstances, despite that I don't consider any of them evil.
Nothing short of a highly contagious virus that affects the brain and makes us more emphatic (with no other side effect) would break the cycle, but that's just sci-fi talk.
I wonder if somebody already experiments on altering toxoplasmosis
What, did you read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time recently?
No idea who that is, but it's not particularly challenging to realize evolution doesn't overall favor empathy -even if it played some role-, sometimes it's the full opposite, sometimes is punished ("no good deed goes unpunished"), firemen are the most prone to burns, the equivalent it's true for many other altruistic endeavors, including rare occasional ones unlike firemen.
It's also not particularly challenging to see society lacks any intrinsic defence from the most ruthless and greedy from advancing in any given power structure inside of it, it's a long term damage so it's abstracted away while more immediate issues take presedence, it's in our DNA to give too priority to immediate threats, while long term problems such as this don't make the top 10 (another example being climate change, etc)
Contrariwise, neither Hitler nor Stalin died of old age. Societies have ways of dealing with tyrants.
Trite, and wrong. Stalin died of a stroke at 74. To take just two more examples, Mao and Franco both died at 82, also of natural causes.
Stalin died literally in his bed, secure and surrounded by dozens of protecting bodyguards who ironically were so afraid to bother him that his stroke wen't unattended for hours after he'd had it. And in dying at 74, he enjoyed what despite the hard toll of heavy smoking, drinking, eating richly, and deprivation in his youth, was a pretty decent lifespan by the standards of his time.
Hitler ultimately died from the sheer gambler's recklessness of reaching for far too much that belonged to too many other powers, and being burned by all the consequences. Had he not started a multi-front world war against almost every single one of the world's other major nations, he could have stayed safely in power as Germany's beloved dictator right up until any old age he managed to reach (as Franco pulled off by much more wisely focusing on consolidating domestic power and avoiding wars)
Societies do have ways of dealing with tyrants, yes, and mostly it's just by rewarding them with more. The bad parts mostly happen to utterly foolish tyrants who make tremendous missteps.
To make room for a new generation of POSs?
Too late... Putin is already all over this. No need for organ transplants :)
150 is the new 70
This is in reference to recent events: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/05/healthy-living...
xi jinping and puting already said
Tell them it's an anti-aging vaccine.
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Enter a generation of spoiled nepo babies with AI Terminators to put them in power and medical immortality to keep them in power.
Fundamental attribution error. It's the system which requires people be POSes to maintain their position.
There are a million problems that will arise if people won't be able to die and that's just another one of them.
Did nobody notice that this is a spam blog designed to sell NAD+ supplements?
I noticed the domain and assumed it was another of Dr David Sinclair's scams
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/resveratrol-resear...
The referenced journal article is published in Cell: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
I don't thing they did a bad job in scicomm even though it's a commercial blog
maybe but the article is on cell?
Outstanding visualization work in this paper. I didn't go through them all individually because I'm not competent enough in biology to evaluate the claims, but this is one of the most data-rich papers I've seen in a while. If the results hold and the process is as straightforward as it sounds, this could be a big step forward.
If Larry Ellison outlives me so help me god
It's a real research paper, but a bit of a hokey one.
The spam blog is just promoting it. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40516525/
I'm not clear why they didn't continue the treatment to see if it prevented the monkeys from dying at all?
Maybe they did but when they realized it was working decided not to publish /joking
Maybe someone with more of a bio background can comment on the actual paper. When I look through the figures, I don't see a strong an evidence as they are claiming in the text.
E.g. figure 1G... naive image analysis (to me) does not match the claimed statistics. And the statistics are all on n<10, which also adds a lot of uncertainty.
China isn't as interested in immortality as they are in their aging workforce being fully productive right up until they die. So even if that is by turning into a giant ball of cancer, it still does what they need. What most all of the world needs actually.
> aging workforce being fully productive right up until they die
China has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world for men[0] and they have the lowest retirement age in the world for women[1]
The archive link isn't loading and I'm not educated enough to understand the paper.
Can you someone provide a summary of this breakthrough?
So a question to the experts here: What's the catch?
Examine your assumptions. There is no inherent reason that there has to be a catch. We are all from a long line of cellular reproduction that has lasted billions of years. There is no inherent reasons why cellular mechanisms can't keep maintaining/replacing a collection of those cell lineages...our relatively short lifespans are probably the products of evolutionary fitness functions acting on more fruitful strategies for reproductive success than staying off aging.
When the upside is extraordinary, it’s very reasonable to expect some downside, just based on experience of, like, everything ever.
As well as the undeniable benefit to individuals, a cure for aging would unleash a whole new bunch of problems that have been kept in check through the mechanism of people dying off regularly. A society of immortals could be quite alien to us.
Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes. Human bodies are adapted to environments with harsh constraints about injuries, pathogens, temperature, energy usage, etc. The only catch to counteracting those adaptations is that it makes you worse at being a hunter-gatherer.
> Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes
Good example is vitamin supplementation. There isn't a downside. It's just a fuck-up we can't synthesise vitamin C. (There may be path-dependent benefits, e.g. our jaw muscles getting smaller thereby permitting a larger brain. But we don't need to be vitamin C restricted anymore.)
Same to be said about the solution for hunger, pain, sadness, madness. I guess we better stay where are just in case.
Catch is perhaps a strong word. Trade-off would be more accurate.
Every action in the known universe (and surely in some unknown ones too) results in a trade-off. This is maybe the only precept on software architecture that doesn't "depends" on anything and is closer to natural law.
The only tradeoff that's truly enforced is "you need to spend energy to get anything done".
Human body isn't exactly bottlenecked by energy availability. Calories are getting cheaper and cheaper, with obesity rates as a testament to that.
Sure, but there's usually plenty of other tradeoffs in any system of notable complexity. This is certainly a system of notable complexity. We may find that there is mental degradation that's not covered by this. We may discover that cancer is practically unavoidable if you live long enough, and the problem compounds even further with age than we can anticipate now. There's never just one lever being pulled in isolation.
I mean, if you gain +20 years of longevity to most of the body, but not to mind? That's still 20 extra years of lifespan if you're lucky. And if you aren't, it's still better health in general, until your mind goes.
There are old people who remain lucid and active well into their nineties, not getting dementia or cancer - through some combination of good luck, good genes and good lifestyle choices. They live a good life - until a stroke cripples them, or the heart fails them, or a very mundane illness like flu puts them in bed and they never quite recover from it. If that couldn't happen to them, how many more good years would that buy them?
Any treatment that addresses the aging-associated systematic decline in bodily functions should be extremely desirable. Even if it wouldn't help everyone live longer, it would help a lot of people live better lives nonetheless.
My personal thought on the "catch" (of "curing death") is that we seriously don't understand how removing or slowing evolution in the equation at the population level plays out over time. Evolution seems to be a fairly robust and complex subsystem of reality.
> There is no inherent reason that there has to be a catch
We are consistently sold ideas that do not meet expectation, the catch is expected.
"Hey everyone we discovered X breakthrough!" It only has Y constrains or consequences which make it not so useful, or at worst, harmful later.
My assumption is, there are lots of rich people who want to live forever and lots of people who want their wealth and breakthroughs with anti ageing were quite rare or rather non existent as far as I know.
My assumption is that I'd feel more certain if this science had been conducted in the U.S. or Europe, but your assumptions is a little too conspiratorial for me.
How many breakthroughs have there been so far in anti-aging research that turned out to be real?
The title is overblown. This just improves certain biomarkers that are associated with aging. This might improve healthspan but there is no indication that these monkeys will live any longer than the natural range.
That might not be true, if you look at the paper:
"The super stem cells prevent age-related bone loss while rejuvenating over 50% of the 61 tissues analyzed." (including the brain).
What do people die of when they die of 'old age'? There's the 3 pillars: cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative. These are often (but not always) metabolic diseases; i.e. cardiovascular death often arises from kidney insufficiency. If you can regenerate the liver, kidney, etc. indefinitely, a large vector of metabolic disease is probably diminished or disappears.
In the paper, monkeys restored brain volume. They reduced the levels of senescent cells to youthful levels. They increased bone mass. This reduces or eliminates many of the threats that inflict casualties among the centenarian population.
Sure, something else could come up that the monkeys start dying from instead. But, given the way humans and monkeys die of old age—by reducing or eliminating all known threats—it's hard to see how this wouldn't extend lifespan.
This paper doesn't prove that it extends lifespan. So to speculate on that extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence to back it up is useless. It would be far easier to prove this out on a species with a much smaller lifespan like mice, not to mention cheaper, but so far we're unable to make a mouse live longer than 5 years.
Yes, I'm certainly speculating. It certainly seems that this could be a path to extending lifespan. I think the claim is less than "extraordinary" though. Many teams are working to figure out how to extend lifespan in many species—it seems likely that there will be meaningful progress in the coming years or decades.
Monkeys are not humans, anti-aging is imprecise and does not necessarily translate into longer life expectancies for people, and promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too.
> Monkeys are not humans
The implanted stem cells, however, were human. (The fact that that the treatments did not cause "fever or substantial changes in immune cell levels (lymphocytes, neutrophils, and monocytes), which are commonly monitored for xenograft-related immune responses," is itself surprising.)
> promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too
Correct, though I'd say because this is early-stage medical research. Not because it's targeting longevity. I'd be similarly sceptical of an N = 16 early-stage drug trial for the flu.
16 primates is not small when it comes to primate studies. In any case, knowing how expensive and rare primate research is to conduct, I doubt this is the first animal model used on this approach.
In terms of replicatability, it is also not always the sample size, it is the effect size. Small samples do affect ability to generalize, but the point is that sample size isn't everything.
> its the effect size
Which effect size do you find lacking?
I was responding to the idea that listing a small sample size automatically means its shit science.
Oh, absolutely correct. Small study doesn't mean shit science. It just means there is plenty of room for randomness and hidden variables to create havoc on the way to a treatment.
But they sure ain't mice, either. This is a LOT closer than results in mice.
Is there another, better animal that is used in late stage testing for other drugs you are aware of?
I skimmed the article looking for a lifespan plot. Didn't see one. Instead it is replaced by a "proprietary multidimensional primate aging clock measurement". Take it as you will...
It delays that sweet eternal rest
gotta be cancer
> gotta be cancer
"Notably, none of the cell transplant recipients developed tumors (n = 16)."
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
If a subset of the population stops dying, and that group grows, you've just invented cancer again on a different scale.
Okay Agent Smith.
When you extend human lifespan long enough, cancer becomes close to inevitable anyway.
Or maybe not. Some species are very resistant to cancer. For example, bats basically never get it, even though they live up to 40 years.
Would they get cancer if they lived for 400 years? Maybe not either. Their immune systems are very good, better than ours.
(We humans don't really want to acknowledge that some other animals may have better immune systems, or any other systems, at their disposal.)
On the other end of the scale, mice die of cancer while not even three years old, because their immune systems are really bad at fighting cancer cells.
Cancer in mammals seems to be a function of failing immune systems rather than raw age in numbers. In some species, including us humans, weakening of the immune system goes hand in hand with aging. But in others it does not.
Peto's paradox - and the existence of whales in particular.
If cancer really is an inevitability, then whales, who have both livespan limits longer than that of humans, and enormous bodies with a staggering amount of living cells, would be full of cancer. They aren't.
Clearly, humans must have better innate cancer suppression than mice, and whales must have better innate cancer suppression than humans.
There are some hints that this may come down to programmed cell death and DNA repair mechanisms (i.e. the p53 pathway) more than the immune system tweaks - with immune response being the "last resort" of cancer suppression. But we also don't know enough about the immune system to be able to examine it the same detail we can examine the DNA repair pathways.
See Peto's Paradox for discussion of different cancer rates among species:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox
The correct way to phrase this is that humans have a level of cancer that does not greatly impede the fitness of the species in having offspring. We didn't hill climb into other evolutionary protective mechanisms because they either were not discovered or did not convey appropriate fitness benefits.
Our evolutionary biology doesn't "care" if we get cancer. Just that we have healthy children and can rear them for one or two generations. That was a (locally) optimal algorithm.
We have plenty of in-built checks and protections in our molecular biology, and they are sufficient to expand the species.
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thanks for the a.i. slop?
So the best way to get induced pluripotent stem cells is through the Yamanaka factors, which are proteins coded for by genes which are not expressed in mature cells. Using all four Yamanaka factors is a one-way ticket to tumor town. But, as it turns out, using three of the four still gets you IPSCs without the elevated cancer risk.
Personally I’m holding out for something a bit more interesting like some even more macabre Picture of Dorian Gray type thing.
It's really adrenochrome.
Aging is related to shortening of telomeres - the speculated evolutionary advantage is that it's a mechanism to protect against cancer.
Unclear from the study what the stem cells are doing to address either problem.
that's one small part of aging
If you had asked me how I reckoned they reversed aging in Monkeys, I honestly would have said "stem cells". But then again, my answer to a lot of questions these days is "stem cells".
It the same with CRISPR. If you see a headline about "curing" this or that, good chance you'll see the word CRISPR in the article.
No thanks, I've seen enough already. I'm ready to go.
I read this and feel very sad, though I understand the sentiment.
The world I knew in the 90's and 2000's is long gone and people are celebrating cruelty now. I want out.
Consider looking at social media less and reading more history. The idea that people are recently celebrating cruelty, but did not earlier, is charmingly nostalgic but not exactly historical.
The scale of it, in the US, is new. Social media has enabled this scale.
Before that, we had... mailing lists? Web forums?
Before that? BBSs and in-person meetings.
Cheap and easy world-scale communication has fucked us at the same time it has helped us.
I'm talking about in my lifetime. Your nihilism may comfort you but it doesn't comfort me.
My clearest memory of that period was Al Qaeda flying planes into the twin towers in 2001 followed by the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. I'm not sure it was a unique time of brotherly love?
It North America, it was better overall; we didn't immediately assume the other person was inhuman because they voted for the other guy. In the US, we are just so fucked.
The rest of the world, at that time? Probably not so great.
What about people celebrating burning women alive back In medieval times? That's what people doing all the time not just now. Only that the whole world can see a few insane people doing.
In my lifetime competence has taken a back seat to hatred and cruelty. Save your whataboutism for Reddit.
What about people celebrating burning women alive back In medieval times?
What about what about what about. Should we be saying it used to happen so its fine now?
I'm annoyed to have been born early enough for biological life extension to not be available, but late enough to actually consider it a possibility.
Darn why couldn't I be a monkey?
At the time of this writing, the link does not work.
504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
Wait, aren't stem cells supposed to reverse aging since at least the 2000s? (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09603)
So the only way to get rid of humans will be to kill them?
No more new generations, no more change. Just immensely powerful old people who look young grabbing ever more tightly onto power.
Right now generational wealth fizzles out due to idiot heirs eventually appearing. Imagine if someone could ride a thousand years of exponential gains.
Silver lining? The thousand year olds may actually care a bit about climate change.
Yeah, in a place where they live. Whatever it happens to be (and doesn't have to stay the same).
The 200 year old elves in LOTR also were wise enough not to go to war..
The 200 year old elves in LOTR weren't real.
In reality all we have are humans, and humans are bastards.
As a card-carrying bastard myself, I can assure you that not all humans are bastards. Some humans are lovely to be around.
Until the AIs otherthrow them.
Watch Babylon 5. Vorlons.
Or Lord of the Rings and Elves.
Immortality likely breeds ossification. Stasis.
Open exploration of space and let the cubic volume of effectively infinite space absorb them.
You'll slip in the shower sooner or later.
Anti-aging breakthrough: Shower mats increase life expectancy in monkeys
_
If we cure aging, life expectancy is 9000 years at current accident rates
Oh there’s a movie about that, I think they grow a beard and you need to cut their heads
Interesting. Appears that we'll sooner solve ageing than ageing of societies.
If this ever goes mainstream, I'll head off to live on Mars - provided that is solved beforehand.
I hope you're ready to worship or be of direct service to the capricious god-emporor of Mars, in exchange for your daily 500l oxygen supply, and 2000 calories.
We're nowhere close to solving aging. We don't even understand aging and understanding the problem should be much easier than solving it.
A lot of things in science/technology have been invented essentially by accident though, with little to no understanding of why it worked. Who’s to say aging can’t be similar.
Link doesn’t work?
The site that is linked here is a site dedicated to the sale of the drug NAD so it is not objective on the topic of aging. Not trying to debunk anything but let's put on our skeptic hats here and be extra vigilant, given the source.
Regarding NAD, not the article but it pertains to the subject, I actually think it has promise and as an older person take NMN to very (like... WOW, very) positive result (an NAD precursor that is arguably better as it is used by the body to create NAD whereas the consumption of NAD itself via the digestive system is in need of study as the suspicion is that it doesn't make the journey very successfully).
They should call it anti aging finding
Maybe after this we can figure out how to reverse entropy.
Edit: The Last Question reference seems to have not hit. My bad.
We already figured that out a while ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entr...
Not every problem must be solved. Death is essential.
Imagine a future world where the richest people never die and rule over the poor mortals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
there's also that love death robots episode about not allowing people to have kids
I want back the decades of stem cell research opportunities wasted by hand-wringing conservatives who placed the potential for life above the actuality of life.
https://healthland.time.com/2012/08/21/legitimate-rape-todd-...
I wonder how humanity will react when the richest can live much longer than everyone else. Knowing that the current group of billionaires might still be alive hundreds of years from now is very depressing.
Great now I can’t retire early.
we're never going to get rid of the boomers are we?
Hugged to death. But I think it refers to this study: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
and a write-up: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1088662
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Who needs permafrost, when you can have perma-musk?
Why not experimental drugs for lunatics sounds exactly right for the timeline.
Eternal life would be disastrous for humanity. Imagine all the elderly autocrats got to rule forever, utterly bored, with no hope in sight.
>Imagine all the elderly autocrats got to rule forever
since the end of monarchies autocracy has been impersonal and institutionalized. You can think of the Pope or Dalai Lama as software, the latter literally being rebooted when the last one kicks the bucket, the substrate doesn't matter much.
In the words of Jung: people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Big Brother is a program, not a person and so physical death doesn't help you much in that regard.
It's quite the opposite. Since the end of monarchies we actually don't observe stable autocracies anymore. They used to last for millennia, now they don't even get to a century.
An autocracy is an idea but an autocrat is a human who cares about himself. Anyone capable of carrying the torch is seen as threat and gets exiled, imprisoned or killed. In the end it's scorched earth within the current elites so instead of succession you get revolution with say 40-50% chance. You may get the succession to work once, maybe two-three times if you're lucky, but that's it.
Now contrast it with a world where an autocrat doesn't actually need a successor and can run the country indefinitely.
Monarchies are autocratic, but I don't think it's fair to throw them in the same bucket as modern autocracies. They came in many flavours and shapes. Often they had some checks and balances and due to the ruler not fearing for loss of power, they often had the intention to actually invest in their country and make their peoples live better.
A modern autocracy has the incentive to keep the population dumb to stay existing. Old monarchies have the incentive to make their population more intelligent, so it has more power than the neighbor.
Wake me when you have J. Fred Muggs[11] riding a horse on TV and asking his doctor if stem cell injections are right for him. Until then, I'll remain skeptical, thanks.
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Fred_Muggs
This is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it.
It would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology. Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
If that doesn't cool your jets, let's say the treatment is so cheap it can be widely available to everyone. Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries. It's madness. I don't think we've evolved enough, ethically speaking, as a species to wrestle with such long lifespans.
>Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
What makes the current lifespan any more correct than 2x or 3x, or 0.5x of a century or two ago? Given that life expectancy was much shorter a century ago, should we start randomly executing people to keep "the uber-wealthy and powerful" from living too long? That would probably have kept "the current American president" from being in power.
Iiuc it wasn’t a comment about what the perfect lifespan is. It’s expressing a concern about how people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power.
Or put differently: it’s a request, given limited resources let’s expend effort on a fairer society, not one with longer lived people.
> people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power
Sure. One of which would be broadly granting access to it.
Like, if a country tried to restrict such technology to its leaders, you could probably trigger regime change by simply promising to share the technology in the event of deposement. Every party member who barely missed the cut would become your revolutionary.
That’s possible, I suppose. I think @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that. For example: labor camps.
> @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that
Nihilistic Luddism. It works against any argument for making the world a better place.
> For example: labor camps
...what's the connection between longevity and labor camps? Empirically, as life expectancies (at birth and in adulthood) have risen, the prevalence of labor camps has gone down. We can see this both longitudinally and between countries.
Uber rich have means of extending their power to the next generation anyway. Look at North Korea. It's stagnant and hardly changed despite changing hand 3 times.
Whereas if you live a super long life, you can't afford to be risk averse and hope for a dictator to die of old age and hope that will somehow magically change thing.
Life expectancy was shorter a century ago because infant mortality, disease and injury pull the average down. We've done an amazing job of a society pulling up that lower end, but lifespan associated with normal aging is actually fairly stable. For example, Plato lived to be roughly 80 years old.
Anti aging is not just about living long. Having a good quality of life as long as you live is essential. The world population is ageing and costs of caring for them will be huge cost for humanity.
That's why they analyze factors such as memory improvements and bone density.
Do you still want this longevity to be real?
I want this longevity to be real. I have to stick around long enough to see if people respond differently to me when they are older.
'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain' Nobody seems to agree on who actually said that.
The author of that quote only proved that those two qualities aren’t mutually exclusive.
Picture the inverse of what you are saying.
“Everyone can live 500 years but I think we should set up a program to randomly murder them at around 60-90 years old.”
Your comment appears to be based in fear, without presenting any reasonable argument against extended lifespans. The idea that a naughty president, or a prisoner, would live hundreds of years is not a longevity problem, its a politics problem.
I feel like the point mostly comes down to “our current society sucks so we shouldn’t want to live longer in it,” but that could be improved and you can always just, ya know, dip out.
> would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology
If by uber-wealthy you mean most people in rich countries, sure. Otherwise, I don't see why this would progress in a way all other medicine has not.
Where are the stem cells coming from?
> Where are the stem cells coming from?
This study appears to have used "human embryonic stem cells (hESCs)" [1]. We haven't tested this with iPSCs [2].
Even if it only works with hESCs, if the part of the population that thinks blastocysts are people wants to live a third or a quarter as long as the part that doesn't, I don't see a problem with that. We're basically going in that direction with vaccination anyway.
[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell
Thank you for the details about this article but that's not quite what I meant.
I meant where do you get enough stem cells to make the procedure widely available to the developed world? Stem cells are kinda scarce, as far as I know, so it may gate such a thing.
> Stem cells are kinda scarce, as far as I know
Embryonic stem cells are rare in America because of religious types. They're not particularly difficult to manufacture or extract--the limit is really human eggs, and we can make those in the lab [1]. (Human sperm are not, for many reasons, difficult to secure.)
I'd actually guess hESCs would be the cheapest route. If we insist on iPSCs, then this turns into a personalised medicine treatment. But in that, it's no different from e.g. oncology.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/30/nx-s1-5553322/ivg-human-eggs-...
I would expect it to shift power dynamics quite dramatically, and probably in ways that can't be accurately predicted. What happens when raising a family no longer occupies the bulk of adults' healthy lives and lived experience and wisdom is no longer dragged down by the gradual descent into senility? What if age didn't inversely correlate to neuroplasticity? What if as a young person, your runway to get where you want to go is 80+ years after graduating high school instead of 30-40? All sorts of assumptions and social structures would be upended.
This is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it.
The odds of this actually happening are about about zero anyway, so this is not something to be concerned about. I am more optimistic, if it were to happen ,in unlocking economic potential. Why would we not want some of society's most productive people to live longer. Think of all the careers derailed by illness, lives separated by death.
In today's regulatory environment, I don't even think the CEO of the immortality service provider would know if their service were safe. But you can guarantee it will have personalized pricing calculated right at the edge of the immense wealth required to have that service. And it's a high priced subscription too, you betcha.
The next problem would be overpopulation - OTOH, if people could live naturally for 1000 years or so, manned space travel to habitable planets would be a lot more feasible.
I'll just grant you that most societies are wholly unequipped to deal with long lifespans, and there will be tons of murder, exploitation, and suffering if we fixed our biology. First, how is that any different than the current situation? Second, do you expect societies to quickly evolve to fix all of these problems (or at least tame them), much like societies had to do after the invention of fire, agriculture, steel, gunpowder, or steam?
You're welcome to die if you'd like, but I'll take my chances on living longer with any unknown repercussions.
The technology would have to be accessible to everyone, otherwise "the wealthy" would be murdered. And no, some futuristic sci-fi bullshit isn't going to save them.
> Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries.
I don't really understand this line of reasoning at all. Slaves exist, and slavery is miserable, therefore nobody on the planet should live beyond current human lifetimes? If a slave or exploited person is going to get healthcare for something that might otherwise cause them to die, are you arguing healthcare should be withheld?
So the argument is essentially "8 billion people dying is a problem, that is worse than whatever the result of longevity is". I'm not sure that it is.
You just need a Prime Radiant
> Picture a world where a slew of today's despots get to live for two, or three human lifespans
Uprisings or outright assassinations would become much more common.
Seriously. Every senior government official or sniper in Russia who isn't happy with Putin is placated by telling themselves "everybody dies sooner or later". Take that away and you'll force people to do something instead of just waiting out the clock.
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The break even point on this is when it costs less than just replacing one of the infinite monkeys working on the Shakespeare project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem