Life extension video and my thoughts

[Winston Blake]

Here's a video of various PhD's proposing Life Extension with lots of 'I'm a radical!' gusto. The hippie guy has a PhD in biology. I took a look at that Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant and it reads like shitty fanfiction. Here's my idea:

The Fable of the Conveyor Belt Robot

Once upon a time, there was a robot working in a toy factory. The factory's name was "Crude Longwinded Unnecessary Metaphor on Post-modern Existentialism and Youth". The robot’s name was Bob.

Bob the Robot worked on a short conveyor belt. Once every second, Bob would pick up a new toy with his robotic arm and put it on the start of the conveyor belt. Bob would then watch the toys move down the conveyor belt, until just one minute after he placed them, they fell off the end. Bob felt sad for the toys. But he kept working, putting a toy onto the conveyor belt once every second, while knowing that they were falling off the other end, once every second.

One day, Bob the Sad Robot had an idea. If he could make it longer, he could keep the toys on the conveyor belt. So that is what he did. He made the conveyor belt twice as long as it had been before, while still putting a toy on once every second.

"How wonderful!" Bob the Happy Robot thought. "Now there are no toys falling off the conveyor belt."

But Bob's happiness did not last long. One minute after he had extended the conveyor belt, the toys started falling off again. He watched them. Now when he put a toy on once every second, they would travel down the conveyor belt for two minutes. But they still fell off the end, once every second.

"I must save them again!" Bob the Anxious Robot thought.

So he made the conveyor belt three times as long as it had been before. Soon, the toys were falling off again, once every second. Bob the Inexplicably Emotional Robot became worried again, and extended the conveyor belt to four times as long. After extending the conveyor belt one hundred times, Bob the Robot gave up and slit his own hydraulic lines.

______________________________________________________________

You see, the conveyor belt is life and the toys are people. When a toy is put on, a person is born and when a toy falls off, a person dies. The length of the conveyor belt is the human lifespan. Bob is a talking robot with a robotic arm.

100 000 people die of aging every day. How can we save them! By stopping aging, obviously. What does that mean? We extend the human lifespan. Great! The world is saved! Now people won't die from aging. Oh, wait, we'd have to make people infinitely immortal. However, we won't have to worry about overpopulation, we'll just make the birth rate match the death rate. The death rate which is now zero.

OK, so let's forget immortality and just give everyone a long lifespan. It's a good thing that there aren't so many old people now, isn't it? Except that there is now just as many old people as there was before, and their old age lasts longer, requiring younger people to live longer to support them.

Getting rid of old-age frailty and disability has nothing to do with life extension. You could achieve it even if the human lifespan was shorter.

Life extension does not save lives. Please, think of the robots.

[Nate_A]

I don't get it. An average lifespan of 160 would be good for the same reason that an average lifespan of 40 would be bad. What else needs to be said?

( And I thought the trailer was great. )

[Magus]

I don't get it. An average lifespan of 160 would be good for the same reason that an average lifespan of 40 would be bad. What else needs to be said?

I believe the point Winston's trying to make is that, while we have succeeded in increasing the average lifespan, we haven't necessarily improved quality of life for much of that lifespan. Back when lifespans were 40-ish, you lived a (relatively) healthy life until you died. Now, old people linger for 30+ years. Perhaps it would be better to work on slowing aging, rather than preventing death.

[Winston Blake]

I don't get it. An average lifespan of 160 would be good for the same reason that an average lifespan of 40 would be bad. What else needs to be said?

( And I thought the trailer was great. )

They argue that if only we had life extension, it would be saving 35 million people a year and would eliminate healthcare costs. This doesn't fly. Increased healthspan would be good, potentially beyond 120 years, requiring lifespan extension. Decreased healthspan would be bad e.g. lifespan of 40. But these particular arguments for lifespan extension don't work, particularly that they cherry-pick the effects of increased lifespan and infinite lifespan.

When you say you don't get it, is my conveyor belt model difficult to understand?

[Ariphaos]

I believe the point Winston's trying to make is that, while we have succeeded in increasing the average lifespan, we haven't necessarily improved quality of life for much of that lifespan. Back when lifespans were 40-ish, you lived a (relatively) healthy life until you died. Now, old people linger for 30+ years. Perhaps it would be better to work on slowing aging, rather than preventing death.

In order to get past 130 years or so, that's pretty much what you have to do - reduce or reverse the seven root causes of decay in human tissues. The basic idea of how it can be done is fairly well established. Only a few partial solutions to specific problems are currently available, however.

[Sikon]

Once upon a time, there was a robot working in a toy factory. The factory's name was "Crude Longwinded Unnecessary Metaphor on Post-modern Existentialism and Youth". The robot’s name was Bob.

Bob the Robot worked on a short conveyor belt. Once every second, Bob would pick up a new toy with his robotic arm and put it on the start of the conveyor belt. Bob would then watch the toys move down the conveyor belt, until just one minute after he placed them, they fell off the end. Bob felt sad for the toys. But he kept working, putting a toy onto the conveyor belt once every second, while knowing that they were falling off the other end, once every second.

One day, Bob the Sad Robot had an idea. If he could make it longer, he could keep the toys on the conveyor belt. So that is what he did. He made the conveyor belt twice as long as it had been before, while still putting a toy on once every second.

"How wonderful!" Bob the Happy Robot thought. "Now there are no toys falling off the conveyor belt."

But Bob's happiness did not last long. One minute after he had extended the conveyor belt, the toys started falling off again. He watched them. Now when he put a toy on once every second, they would travel down the conveyor belt for two minutes. But they still fell off the end, once every second.

"I must save them again!" Bob the Anxious Robot thought.

So he made the conveyor belt three times as long as it had been before. Soon, the toys were falling off again, once every second. Bob the Inexplicably Emotional Robot became worried again, and extended the conveyor belt to four times as long. After extending the conveyor belt one hundred times, Bob the Robot gave up and slit his own hydraulic lines.

You see, the conveyor belt is life and the toys are people. When a toy is put on, a person is born and when a toy falls off, a person dies. The length of the conveyor belt is the human lifespan. Bob is a talking robot with a robotic arm.

The above is a verbose way of saying that people die eventually whether everybody dies by age 20, age 200, or any other finite age.

Everybody reading this is alive today because they have taken the effort to stay alive, because it does matter to them whether they die tomorrow or die decades from now. Some may later prefer death to life but only some.

After extending the conveyor belt one hundred times, Bob the Robot gave up and slit his own hydraulic lines.

Throughout history, every doctor, every philanthropist, every scientist struggling to save lives would have also committed suicide if they followed the same "logic" and believed nothing mattered because people die someday.

Even today, doctors work to extend lifespan, to save lives.

Some hypothetical methods would be more effective at doing so than today's methods.

------------

The expectation is not that nobody dies ever. However much senescence (aging) is reduced, separate causes of death from unrelated illnesses, accidents, and other causes limit life expectancy to a finite span. For example, the rates of such in developed countries of today correspond to a life expectancy of several hundred years if not for senescence.

However, such would be better than a life expectancy of 80 years, just like that is better than a life expectancy of 30 years.

100 000 people die of aging every day. How can we save them! By stopping aging, obviously. What does that mean? We extend the human lifespan. Great! The world is saved! Now people won't die from aging. Oh, wait, we'd have to make people infinitely immortal. However, we won't have to worry about overpopulation, we'll just make the birth rate match the death rate. The death rate which is now zero.

For a random illustration, consider a lifespan of 300 years.

What birth rate should be used in this illustration?

When people become prosperous, birth rates naturally drop. For example, that is a factor in why Somalia has on average 6.76 children born per woman, while Singapore has 1.06 (CIA). The figures are dropping in developed nations. Instead of nearly all of the population having many children, there is a natural trend for only some to choose to do so. Suppose 1 child per woman on average.

How much overpopulation results?

Well, if there are X people initially with an even mixture of men/women, the number of children born is 1/2 of X, so each generation is half as many as the last generation, not overpopulating but actually underpopulating in this scenario.

As can be seen, the figure that really determines long-term population is whether the number of children born per woman is above or below the replacement rate of approximately 2.

If the children born per woman was Somalia's figure, then the population would nominally head towards infinity whether the life expectancy is several decades or several centuries. If it is like Singapore's rate, the population nominally heads towards eventual decrease all of the way down to approach extinction for any finite life expectancy, unless the rate increases someday.

Somewhere between the two extremes can work fine, avoiding either a population decrease or a growth rate more extreme than practical.

Thus, practically any increased life expectancy still allows any couples desiring children to have them, at least provided they don't on average have too many each.

---------------

While the above illustrates that future population could easily be limited or even undesirably decreasing anyway, what would constitute "overpopulation" in the distant future?

A civilization with very effective life extension technology and many individuals centuries old would probably be an advanced future civilization. It would be unlikely to still be planet-bound by then.

To utilize 2E24 kg of material would be just a portion of the suitable total material in the solar system. Even supposing up to on the order of a million metric tons per person, that would be enough for quadrillions of people, with acres of effective land area per person.

To put that in perspective, even for a death rate arbitrarily close to zero, a billion children could be born every decade without reaching that number before tens of million years from now. This is not to imply that such an unchanging situation for millions of years is likely. Rather, the future is utterly unknown beyond a century or two. One can observe that such distant times are no more a present-day concern than the possible death of the universe in many billions of years.

The above is merely an illustration of how such constant population growth even with "infinite lifespan" could take long to be troublesome. Of course, interstellar travel beyond the solar system is possible long before millions of years from now, but the preceding illustration is good enough.

The example above is just to illustrate a constant growth scenario, not to imply that would actually occur.

Indeed, as previously mentioned, if the number of children born per woman is instead not more than the minimum replacement rate of 2 (with even gender distribution), there is no long-term continuous population growth at all for any finite life expectancy. For example, with a constant rate of about 2 children per woman, the population would initially increase right after treating senescence, with the demographic change and initial reduction in deaths, but then it would reach an equilibrium in the long-term.

If the world becomes prosperous with the typical drop in child-bearing, population decrease in the distant future is more likely to be a worry than worrying about too much population growth. Most of the world's most prosperous countries of today are already at less than replacement rate. It is the developing world, the poor countries, which presently have far more than 2 children born per woman, a figure likely to drop in time...

OK, so let's forget immortality and just give everyone a long lifespan. It's a good thing that there aren't so many old people now, isn't it? Except that there is now just as many old people as there was before, and their old age lasts longer, requiring younger people to live longer to support them.

The current situation is that senescence permanently takes people out of the workforce while making health-care costs be extreme.

There are many young people who are like me, typically consuming only hundreds of dollars or less of health care annually. Yet health-care spending in the U.S. is on the order of $7000 per capita and fast increasing. How is the average so high? It is because there are many people who use tens of thousands of dollars of health care a year, or more. The bulk of those expensive patients are people greatly afflicted with senescence. They are the elderly ending up spending much of their time in nursing homes, hospitals, and ICUs (intensive care units).

In contrast, in a hypothetical world with advances leading to little senescence, a person could instead be 100 years old and still consuming under $1000 a year of health care.

As one illustration of the current situation, cancer is among the diseases that primarily indirectly results from senescence, with on the order of 99% of cancer deaths occurring to people over 50. At great expense, sometimes the life of a 90-year old with cancer is successfully saved today; unfortunately, while that is a good thing, the rate of senescence-related diseases is so great by then that the person will probably die within 10 years, after more hospital stays.

In a hypothetical world with reduced senescence, where a relatively old person would be as healthy, fit, and active as a young person of today, much more of the total population can be capable of working. That is better than the current situation where the healthy workforce must support a large number of senescence-afflicted people. Possibly the retirement age could be raised. Alternatively, retirement could be temporary.

Consider the following two potential options:

1) Retire at age 65 afflicted with senescence like today, live typically for 10 to 15 more years, and die.

2) Get life extension treatment, retire at age 65, stay on retirement for 15 years, go back to work at 80 with the equivalent of a young or middle-aged body, work for a while, and then retire again.

The latter would be preferred by many people, and it could give a ratio of workers to non-workers much higher than the present day.

Getting rid of old-age frailty and disability has nothing to do with life extension. You could achieve it even if the human lifespan was shorter.

Old-age frailty and disability is the result of senescence. Cure senescence, and people would no longer end up in nursing homes, instead being more healthy and living much longer.

It would not even be possible to extend lifespan by many decades without giving relative youth, as reducing "frailty" would be needed to do so. Recall my example of the 90 year-old cured from cancer today. Without effective youth, without reducing senescence, that person is probably going to die within 10 years. The "frailty" of senescence causes such a rate of diseases that the person has no chance of living to 200 years or longer unless that is changed.

A good analogy to the effect of senescence is a rusting steel structure which eventually gets blown over by a gust of wind. At great expense, one might slightly increase the survival time of the steel structure by building a wind shield around it, to prevent periodic gusts of wind from pushing on it. Yet the structure is still rusting, still weakening, still deteriorating more and more with age. The only way to really make it last much longer is to stop the rusting. With the rusting representing aging deterioration (senescence) and the gust of wind representing diseases like cancer, that is the situation with human lifespan.

Life extension does not save lives. Please, think of the robots.

If a doctor saves someone from a gunshot wound, who will then die 50 years later, a life is saved.

If a doctor cures someone of cancer, who will then die 10 years later, a life is saved.

If a doctor cures someone of senescence, who will then die 200 years later, a life is saved.

All medical treatment of naturally fatal diseases is a form of life extension. Indeed, combined with sanitation, such has helped increase life expectancies much beyond the 20 to 40 years typical before the modern era. The hypothetical concept commonly referred to as life extension is about making that much more effective, by managing to treat the indirect root cause of most present-day deaths: deterioration from aging.

Reducing senescence would save lives just as much as treating cancer, actually more so.

[Sikon]

I believe the point Winston's trying to make is that, while we have succeeded in increasing the average lifespan, we haven't necessarily improved quality of life for much of that lifespan.

That is one of the main reasons to research how to reduce senescence, instead of primarily only focusing on individual diseases like cancer that are often more like side-effects of the main problem.

Back when lifespans were 40-ish, you lived a (relatively) healthy life until you died. Now, old people linger for 30+ years. Perhaps it would be better to work on slowing aging, rather than preventing death.

Slowing (or eliminating) aging is exactly the goal of those advocating life extension. Slow aging, and one prevents deaths just as much as curing cancer.

Today, as good as it is when the life of an 90-year old of cancer is saved, the person's primary problem of senescence remains uncured, making them often go back to a nursing home, dying from another senescence-related disease probably within ten years. The ability to treat senescence so the afflicted elderly could instead move out of the nursing homes and live for far longer would be better.

As illustrated in the discussion in my previous post, one would not and could not extend life by many decades without extending effective youth.

It is not those advocating life extension who are failing to recognize the importance and value of reducing aging. Rather, it is everyone opposing life extension research.

Unfortunately, there is not even a single billion-dollar project today aimed directly at finding a method to drastically reduce senescence. Decade after decade, trillions of dollars are spent treating diseases like cancer that primarily indirectly result from senescence. While that attempt is a good thing, there should be more focus on the root problem as well. Alas, no nation has "curing senescence" as a research goal like "curing cancer."

Reducing aging is the best hope to prevent lingering deaths, and that is life extension.

A quote from the author of the dragon story derided in the opening post is relevant here:

Stories about aging have traditionally focused on the need for graceful accommodation. The recommended solution to diminishing vigor and impending death was resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and personal relationships. Given that nothing could be done to prevent or retard aging, this focus made sense. Rather than fretting about the inevitable, one could aim for peace of mind.

Today we face a different situation. While we still lack effective and acceptable means for slowing the aging process[1], we can identify research directions that might lead to the development of such means in the foreseeable future. “Deathist” stories and ideologies, which counsel passive acceptance, are no longer harmless sources of consolation. They are fatal barriers to urgently needed action.

[Nate_A]

Thank you, Sikon. I think you covered just about everything. But, let me add, regarding overpopulation, who cares? No sane person would suggest that we stop working on a cure for AIDS because Africa is overpopulated. First we must deal with the immediate problem, then, we can worry about any minor problems which may result.

I don't get it. An average lifespan of 160 would be good for the same reason that an average lifespan of 40 would be bad. What else needs to be said?

( And I thought the trailer was great. )

They argue that if only we had life extension, it would be saving 35 million people a year and would eliminate healthcare costs. This doesn't fly. Increased healthspan would be good, potentially beyond 120 years, requiring lifespan extension. Decreased healthspan would be bad e.g. lifespan of 40. But these particular arguments for lifespan extension don't work, particularly that they cherry-pick the effects of increased lifespan and infinite lifespan.

Eliminating, or slowing, aging would save people in the same sense that elimating, or slowing, cancer saves people; and elimating aging ( the root cause of most health problems ) would definately reduce healthcare costs. So these particular arguments do work.

Still, I'm glad to hear that you are only arguing against the particular arguments employed for life extention, and not the goal of life extention itself. ( It was hard to tell. )

When you say you don't get it, is my conveyor belt model difficult to understand?

No, your analogy was patronizingly simple, I just don't understand how it helps your argument. For example: I would much rather be a toy on the long conveyor belt than on the short; and, from the perspective of the toys that were near the end of the conveyor belt when it was extended, it must have seemed like they had been saved.

[Junghalli]

Well I don't know about you but I sure as hell would want my life extended by a factor of three! Sure it sucks that I'll still eventually die at 240, but that's not the point. IMO this is probably the only sentient existence you'll get, and that makes living time an incomparably precious gift. Just because I don't get to live forever doesn't mean being around for an extra 160 years isn't worthwhile. I think most people on the planet would agree with me.

[Magus]

Well I don't know about you but I sure as hell would want my life extended by a factor of three! Sure it sucks that I'll still eventually die at 240, but that's not the point. IMO this is probably the only sentient existence you'll get, and that makes living time an incomparably precious gift. Just because I don't get to live forever doesn't mean being around for an extra 160 years isn't worthwhile. I think most people on the planet would agree with me.

Perhaps this is simply naivety on my part, but I'd think longer lifespans would also help us become more patient, more logical, and more at peace with ourselves, since we won't have the constant threat of death lurking over our shoulder, scaring us to "achieve, achieve, achieve!"

[Junghalli]

Perhaps this is simply naivety on my part, but I'd think longer lifespans would also help us become more patient, more logical, and more at peace with ourselves, since we won't have the constant threat of death lurking over our shoulder, scaring us to "achieve, achieve, achieve!"

Quite possible. I know I'd be a more relaxed person if I had more than 200 years ahead of me instead of 60.

On the other hand it might also make us more conservative, as older generations hang around much longer.

[Magus]

On the other hand it might also make us more conservative, as older generations hang around much longer.

You say that like it's a bad thing

[Winston Blake]

The above is a verbose way of saying that people die eventually whether everybody dies by age 20, age 200, or any other finite age.

Everybody reading this is alive today because they have taken the effort to stay alive, because it does matter to them whether they die tomorrow or die decades from now. Some may later prefer death to life but only some.

What does that have to do with the arguments in the video?

Verbose? How far did you get into The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant? It's gigantic for something typed one-handed.

Throughout history, every doctor, every philanthropist, every scientist struggling to save lives would have also committed suicide if they followed the same "logic" and believed nothing mattered because people die someday.

Even today, doctors work to extend lifespan, to save lives.

Some hypothetical methods would be more effective at doing so than today's methods.

Um, the part about the robot killing itself out of frustration was a joke, not an argument.

The expectation is not that nobody dies ever. However much senescence (aging) is reduced, separate causes of death from unrelated illnesses, accidents, and other causes limit life expectancy to a finite span. For example, the rates of such in developed countries of today correspond to a life expectancy of several hundred years if not for senescence.

However, such would be better than a life expectancy of 80 years, just like that is better than a life expectancy of 30 years.

Maybe I should have said "The death rate due to reaching the lifetime limit, which is now zero" rather than "The death rate which is now zero". See below.

100 000 people die of aging every day. How can we save them! By stopping aging, obviously. What does that mean? We extend the human lifespan. Great! The world is saved! Now people won't die from aging. Oh, wait, we'd have to make people infinitely immortal. However, we won't have to worry about overpopulation, we'll just make the birth rate match the death rate. The death rate which is now zero.

For a random illustration, consider a lifespan of 300 years. [snip]

Learn to read. I already acknowledged that there is no need for overpopulation if the birth rate balances the death rate. My argument is that increasing the lifespan doesn't decrease the rate of deaths due to reaching the lifetime-limit (RLL for convenience, vs inspecific 'aging'). The only way this could be done is if people could be stopped from dying completely (assuming constant population etc).

While the above illustrates that future population could easily be limited or even undesirably decreasing anyway, what would constitute "overpopulation" in the distant future?

A civilization with very effective life extension technology and many individuals centuries old would probably be an advanced future civilization. It would be unlikely to still be planet-bound by then.

[snip]

The example above is just to illustrate a constant growth scenario, not to imply that would actually occur.

Hey! I'm a big fan of space colonisation. My arguments are along the lines of 'all other things being equal', i.e. no big changes to the game.

Indeed, as previously mentioned, if the number of children born per woman is instead not more than the minimum replacement rate of 2 (with even gender distribution), there is no long-term continuous population growth at all for any finite life expectancy. For example, with a constant rate of about 2 children per woman, the population would initially increase right after treating senescence, with the demographic change and initial reduction in deaths, but then it would reach an equilibrium in the long-term.

Did you not read the part about the robot having to wait one minute before equilibrium returned? Although interestingly, since I was illustrating that increasing the lifespan alone doesn't affect death rate due to RLL, I admit that I didn't consider the robot wanting to maintain the original number of toys on the conveyor belt. This is important, and I'll come back to it.

OK, so let's forget immortality and just give everyone a long lifespan. It's a good thing that there aren't so many old people now, isn't it? Except that there is now just as many old people as there was before, and their old age lasts longer, requiring younger people to live longer to support them.

The current situation is that senescence permanently takes people out of the workforce while making health-care costs be extreme.

There are many young people who are like me, typically consuming only hundreds of dollars or less of health care annually. Yet health-care spending in the U.S. is on the order of $7000 per capita and fast increasing. How is the average so high? It is because there are many people who use tens of thousands of dollars of health care a year, or more. The bulk of those expensive patients are people greatly afflicted with senescence. They are the elderly ending up spending much of their time in nursing homes, hospitals, and ICUs (intensive care units).

In contrast, in a hypothetical world with advances leading to little senescence, a person could instead be 100 years old and still consuming under $1000 a year of health care.

When you say 'little senscence' are you talking about increasing healthspan or lifespan? If the former, we agree. If not, I'd say that the 270+ year olds are still draining healthcare.

As one illustration of the current situation, cancer is among the diseases that primarily indirectly results from senescence, with on the order of 99% of cancer deaths occurring to people over 50. At great expense, sometimes the life of a 90-year old with cancer is successfully saved today; unfortunately, while that is a good thing, the rate of senescence-related diseases is so great by then that the person will probably die within 10 years, after more hospital stays.

In a hypothetical world with reduced senescence, where a relatively old person would be as healthy, fit, and active as a young person of today, much more of the total population can be capable of working. That is better than the current situation where the healthy workforce must support a large number of senescence-afflicted people. Possibly the retirement age could be raised. Alternatively, retirement could be temporary.

Consider the following two potential options:

1) Retire at age 65 afflicted with senescence like today, live typically for 10 to 15 more years, and die.

2) Get life extension treatment, retire at age 65, stay on retirement for 15 years, go back to work at 80 with the equivalent of a young or middle-aged body, work for a while, and then retire again.

The latter would be preferred by many people, and it could give a ratio of workers to non-workers much higher than the present day.

Those effects are for a hypothetical world with increased healthspan, not necessarily increased lifespan. For example, they would still apply if everyone was sent to Carousel at age 40.

Getting rid of old-age frailty and disability has nothing to do with life extension. You could achieve it even if the human lifespan was shorter.

Old-age frailty and disability is the result of senescence. Cure senescence, and people would no longer end up in nursing homes, instead being more healthy and living much longer.

It would not even be possible to extend lifespan by many decades without giving relative youth, as reducing "frailty" would be needed to do so. Recall my example of the 90 year-old cured from cancer today. Without effective youth, without reducing senescence, that person is probably going to die within 10 years. The "frailty" of senescence causes such a rate of diseases that the person has no chance of living to 200 years or longer unless that is changed.

I was under the impression that a person will still die of old age (RLL) even with no diseases or disorders, including those more likely to affect old people. This is where my distinction between altering healthspan and altering lifespan comes from, and my argument that lifespan extension does not necessarily have the benefits that healthspan extension does, e.g. increasing lifespan has no effect on healthcare costs.

A good analogy to the effect of senescence is a rusting steel structure which eventually gets blown over by a gust of wind. At great expense, one might slightly increase the survival time of the steel structure by building a wind shield around it, to prevent periodic gusts of wind from pushing on it. Yet the structure is still rusting, still weakening, still deteriorating more and more with age. The only way to really make it last much longer is to stop the rusting. With the rusting representing aging deterioration (senescence) and the gust of wind representing diseases like cancer, that is the situation with human lifespan.

It's a good analogy, but the bolded part already includes the assumption that making it last longer is the goal, rather than designing it so that only in its final year does it lose serviceability and rust and collapse under its own weight. Increasing serviceability should be the goal. Further, if the structure is explicitly stated to be an idealised bridge, then the traffic across it could be analogous to workload, i.e. rusty bridges can't carry as much traffic, just like age-deteriorated people can't do as much work.

All medical treatment of naturally fatal diseases is a form of life extension. Indeed, combined with sanitation, such has helped increase life expectancies much beyond the 20 to 40 years typical before the modern era. The hypothetical concept commonly referred to as life extension is about making that much more effective, by managing to treat the indirect root cause of most present-day deaths: deterioration from aging.

Healthspan vs Lifespan.

------------------

Now, above I mentioned the number of toys on the belt remaining constant. This means that as the conveyor belt length is increased, AND the toy population must remain constant, then yes, the toy placement rate must be decreased and because of that, the rate at which toys fall off will decrease. So increasing lifespan alone really does decrease RLL death rate, since we want the population to remain constant. However, unless this lifespan increase is based on healthspan increase, it'll just result in a greater fraction of old age.

I still think arguments like healthcare costs don't support simply increasing lifespan, but rather working on healthspan. Now, I concede that when healthspan increase results in lifespan increase, the RLL death rate is reduced. So with a little alteration about the number of toys on the conveyor belt remaining constant, The Fable of the Conveyor Belt Robot is instead an argument for life extension.

As an aside, that video was my introduction to life extension. Except I've seen Vanilla Sky.

[Winston Blake]

Thank you, Sikon. I think you covered just about everything. But, let me add, regarding overpopulation, who cares? No sane person would suggest that we stop working on a cure for AIDS because Africa is overpopulated. First we must deal with the immediate problem, then, we can worry about any minor problems which may result.

I fucked it where I said 'The death rate which is now zero'. It wouldn't be funny any more, but I should have said 'The death rate due to reaching the lifetime limit which is now zero, making the total death rate very small requiring stopping all the world's unprotected sex'. Also, in the 70's, people faced with the prospect of overpopulation didn't think it was a 'minor problem'. Overpopulation could lead to universally shit quality of life, which is why O'Neill's space colonisation ideas are so awesome.

I don't get it. An average lifespan of 160 would be good for the same reason that an average lifespan of 40 would be bad. What else needs to be said?
( And I thought the trailer was great. )

They argue that if only we had life extension, it would be saving 35 million people a year and would eliminate healthcare costs. This doesn't fly. Increased healthspan would be good, potentially beyond 120 years, requiring lifespan extension. Decreased healthspan would be bad e.g. lifespan of 40. But these particular arguments for lifespan extension don't work, particularly that they cherry-pick the effects of increased lifespan and infinite lifespan.

Eliminating, or slowing, aging would save people in the same sense that elimating, or slowing, cancer saves people; and elimating aging ( the root cause of most health problems ) would definately reduce healthcare costs. So these particular arguments do work.

No, they don't, because if everybody was perfectly healthy until they suddenly died at 80, the healthcare costs would still be saved. It's the difference between combating 'aging' as age-resultant deterioration vs 'aging' as reaching your lifetime-limit.

Still, I'm glad to hear that you are only arguing against the particular arguments employed for life extention, and not the goal of life extention itself. ( It was hard to tell. )

Right. Healthspan vs lifespan. See the last paragraph of my last post where I concede my 'Fable'.

When you say you don't get it, is my conveyor belt model difficult to understand?

No, your analogy was patronizingly simple,

Good, that's what I was aiming for.

I just don't understand how it helps your argument. For example: I would much rather be a toy on the long conveyor belt than on the short; and, from the perspective of the toys that were near the end of the conveyor belt when it was extended, it must have seemed like they had been saved.

It was about using the current death rate as an argument for increasing lifespan. Both the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant and the video wank over the death rate and portray immortality and extended lifespan as the same thing.

[Winston Blake]

Well I don't know about you but I sure as hell would want my life extended by a factor of three! Sure it sucks that I'll still eventually die at 240, but that's not the point. IMO this is probably the only sentient existence you'll get, and that makes living time an incomparably precious gift. Just because I don't get to live forever doesn't mean being around for an extra 160 years isn't worthwhile. I think most people on the planet would agree with me.

Perhaps this is simply naivety on my part, but I'd think longer lifespans would also help us become more patient, more logical, and more at peace with ourselves, since we won't have the constant threat of death lurking over our shoulder, scaring us to "achieve, achieve, achieve!"

Bullshit. Real life isn't Star Trek. You'll just be expected to do more. Everyone will still be competing with everyone else, if you don't work as hard as the next guy, you won't get the job.

Also, yeah, it'd be awesome to be healthy until 300. One point I'm particularly attracted to is that if exceptional scientists and engineers could continue their work, humanity would advance more quickly.

[Nate_A]

Thank you, Sikon. I think you covered just about everything. But, let me add, regarding overpopulation, who cares? No sane person would suggest that we stop working on a cure for AIDS because Africa is overpopulated. First we must deal with the immediate problem, then, we can worry about any minor problems which may result.

I fucked it where I said 'The death rate which is now zero'. It wouldn't be funny any more, but I should have said 'The death rate due to reaching the lifetime limit which is now zero, making the total death rate very small requiring stopping all the world's unprotected sex'. Also, in the 70's, people faced with the prospect of overpopulation didn't think it was a 'minor problem'. Overpopulation could lead to universally shit quality of life, which is why O'Neill's space colonisation ideas are so awesome.

Overpopulation is a very small problem compared to aging (which makes nearly everybody miserable for years and then kills them.). And, if the population expands too fast for advancing technology to support it, castration is a much better option than slowly rotting.

Eliminating, or slowing, aging would save people in the same sense that elimating, or slowing, cancer saves people; and elimating aging ( the root cause of most health problems ) would definately reduce healthcare costs. So these particular arguments do work.

No, they don't, because if everybody was perfectly healthy until they suddenly died at 80, the healthcare costs would still be saved. It's the difference between combating 'aging' as age-resultant deterioration vs 'aging' as reaching your lifetime-limit.

Slowing aging would allow people to live longer, which is good. Eliminating aging altogether would allow people to live much longer and save money on healthcare (a relatively minor consideration). If we eliminated aging, but everyone suddenly died at eighty for some reason, that would be bad. Are we agreed so far? OK, now, what's your point?

Still, I'm glad to hear that you are only arguing against the particular arguments employed for life extention, and not the goal of life extention itself. ( It was hard to tell. )

Right. Healthspan vs lifespan. See the last paragraph of my last post where I concede my 'Fable'.

What's the difference? You don't think that the purpose of life extention is to hook up withered old husks of human beings to life support machines, do you?

I just don't understand how it helps your argument. For example: I would much rather be a toy on the long conveyor belt than on the short; and, from the perspective of the toys that were near the end of the conveyor belt when it was extended, it must have seemed like they had been saved.

It was about using the current death rate as an argument for increasing lifespan. Both the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant and the video wank over the death rate and portray immortality and extended lifespan as the same thing.

But saving people from being consumed by a dragon doesn't give them immortality either - it just extends their lives. So the analogy is perfectly valid. (unless I missed the part of the fable where all of the people in the kindom are said to be naturally immortal. ( I was just skimming. )) When did the video or the fable suggest that long life is the same as immortality?

I agree that the fable is rather long and not very well-written; but it raises consciousness to the fact that thousands of people are dying every day, and illustrates how stupid it is to just accept it when there's just a chance that we can put a stop to it.

Maybe it's just the time of night, but I'm having a genuinely hard time understanding what you're trying to say.

[Winston Blake]

Overpopulation is a very small problem compared to aging (which makes nearly everybody miserable for years and then kills them.). And, if the population expands too fast for advancing technology to support it, castration is a much better option than slowly rotting.

I think it'd be better if everyone was happy and had to age, than was miserable due to insufficient resources. BTW, how would you decide who gets sterilised and who doesn't?

Slowing aging would allow people to live longer, which is good. Eliminating aging altogether would allow people to live much longer and save money on healthcare (a relatively minor consideration). If we eliminated aging, but everyone suddenly died at eighty for some reason, that would be bad. Are we agreed so far? OK, now, what's your point?

My point is that healthcare costs don't justify trying to increase maximum lifespan, rather than increasing healthspan with increased average lifespan as a side-effect. What I'm arguing against is 'We need to extend lifespan beyond 120 years! Why? For example, there's healthcare costs...'.

Right. Healthspan vs lifespan. See the last paragraph of my last post where I concede my 'Fable'.

What's the difference? You don't think that the purpose of life extention is to hook up withered old husks of human beings to life support machines, do you?

See above.

But saving people from being consumed by a dragon doesn't give them immortality either - it just extends their lives. So the analogy is perfectly valid. (unless I missed the part of the fable where all of the people in the kindom are said to be naturally immortal. ( I was just skimming. )) When did the video or the fable suggest that long life is the same as immortality?

The start of the video says it's from the Immortality Institute, and suggests 'defeating' aging. It explicitly states the goal as "attempts to extend human life beyond the current maximum lifespan", rather than age-related deterioration.

To be honest I stopped really reading the dragon fable when he started talking about a composite as being an excellent penetrator. Composites just don't make good kinetic energy penetrators. The way he described the dragon as one single monolithic threat to be defeated in one fell swoop implied to me that the dragon symbolised death due to old age. That instead of gradually increasing lifespan through continuous work, it was about sensationalistically defeating death once and for all, i.e. immortality.

I agree that the fable is rather long and not very well-written; but it raises consciousness to the fact that thousands of people are dying every day, and illustrates how stupid it is to just accept it when there's just a chance that we can put a stop to it.

Maybe it's just the time of night, but I'm having a genuinely hard time understanding what you're trying to say.

Put a stop to what? To thousands of people dying every day? Just saying to people 'think of how many people die per day!' is misleading. With every other field of medicine, achieving a cure would lower the death rate. Smugly stating that aging is just the same is like saying that life itself is a terminally incurable sexually transmitted disease.

I'm for life extension as far as it can increase healthspan, but I'm against waving super-lifespan and immortality about in order to get people on-side. It's just sensationalist marketing, and it's going to put people on their guard and make the whole effort harder.

[Nate_A]

Overpopulation is a very small problem compared to aging (which makes nearly everybody miserable for years and then kills them.). And, if the population expands too fast for advancing technology to support it, castration is a much better option than slowly rotting.

I think it'd be better if everyone was happy and had to age, than was miserable due to insufficient resources.

How can people be happy and have to age? Unless you're literally starving to death, lack of resources is not going to make you more miserable than slow deterioration and imminent death. (In which case, they would be about the same.)

BTW, how would you decide who gets sterilised and who doesn't?

That was an extreme example I used to illustrate just how bad things would have to get before letting people rot becomes a good idea. ( Even euthanasia at a fixed age would be better. ) But I highly doubt that it will get that bad. Population growth is already leveling off, and it's not like we're going to achieve immortality tomorrow anyway.

Slowing aging would allow people to live longer, which is good. Eliminating aging altogether would allow people to live much longer and save money on healthcare (a relatively minor consideration). If we eliminated aging, but everyone suddenly died at eighty for some reason, that would be bad. Are we agreed so far? OK, now, what's your point?

My point is that healthcare costs don't justify trying to increase maximum lifespan, rather than increasing healthspan with increased average lifespan as a side-effect. What I'm arguing against is 'We need to extend lifespan beyond 120 years! Why? For example, there's healthcare costs...'.

Fair enough, but where did you get that from? I've only ever said that eliminating aging altogether would lower healthcare costs.

Right. Healthspan vs lifespan. See the last paragraph of my last post where I concede my 'Fable'.

What's the difference? You don't think that the purpose of life extention is to hook up withered old husks of human beings to life support machines, do you?

See above.

I think we're all for increasing healthspan. Most of that video was about preventing or delaying the effects of aging ( i.e. increasing healthspan ).

But saving people from being consumed by a dragon doesn't give them immortality either - it just extends their lives. So the analogy is perfectly valid. (unless I missed the part of the fable where all of the people in the kindom are said to be naturally immortal. ( I was just skimming. )) When did the video or the fable suggest that long life is the same as immortality?

The start of the video says it's from the Immortality Institute, and suggests 'defeating' aging. It explicitly states the goal as "attempts to extend human life beyond the current maximum lifespan", rather than age-related deterioration.

Um, I watched the video again (twice), and I don't know what you're talking about. At the beginning, they say that the sooner we achive "negligible senescence" the more people will be "saved". Later, they say that making small progress on anti-aging would raise consciousness and allow them to pursue greater goals. And they said life extention was increasing human life beyond the current maximum lifespan. They didn't say that was their only goal.

To be honest I stopped really reading the dragon fable when he started talking about a composite as being an excellent penetrator. Composites just don't make good kinetic energy penetrators. The way he described the dragon as one single monolithic threat to be defeated in one fell swoop implied to me that the dragon symbolised death due to old age. That instead of gradually increasing lifespan through continuous work, it was about sensationalistically defeating death once and for all, i.e. immortality.

Agreed, the story wasn't that great. But, again, I think it is important to raise consciousness.

I agree that the fable is rather long and not very well-written; but it raises consciousness to the fact that thousands of people are dying every day, and illustrates how stupid it is to just accept it when there's just a chance that we can put a stop to it.

Maybe it's just the time of night, but I'm having a genuinely hard time understanding what you're trying to say.

Put a stop to what? To thousands of people dying every day? Just saying to people 'think of how many people die per day!' is misleading. With every other field of medicine, achieving a cure would lower the death rate. Smugly stating that aging is just the same is like saying that life itself is a terminally incurable sexually transmitted disease.

In the sense that the genes your parents pass on to you will eventually kill you as well as give you life, that is accrurate. Aging is a disease. It kills thousands every day. for the first time in human history, it is possible to develope a cure. This is not sensationalism, it is just the truth, plain and simple.

[Sikon]

Here I have rearranged quotes out of the original order. They are now sorted by topic rather than chronologically. That is since Winston Blake's position is more clear if one combines his replies to me with some of his to Nate_A.

I will reply to multiple quotes at once.

--------------------

Winston Blake on overpopulation (excluding quotes moved to misc.)

While the above illustrates that future population could easily be limited or even undesirably decreasing anyway, what would constitute "overpopulation" in the distant future? [...]

Hey! I'm a big fan of space colonisation. My arguments are along the lines of 'all other things being equal', i.e. no big changes to the game.
[...]

[...] For example, with a constant rate of about 2 children per woman, the population would initially increase right after treating senescence, with the demographic change and initial reduction in deaths, but then it would reach an equilibrium in the long-term.

Did you not read the part about the robot having to wait one minute before equilibrium returned? Although interestingly, since I was illustrating that increasing the lifespan alone doesn't affect death rate due to RLL, I admit that I didn't consider the robot wanting to maintain the original number of toys on the conveyor belt. This is important, and I'll come back to it.

I fucked it where I said 'The death rate which is now zero'. It wouldn't be funny any more, but I should have said 'The death rate due to reaching the lifetime limit which is now zero, making the total death rate very small requiring stopping all the world's unprotected sex'. Also, in the 70's, people faced with the prospect of overpopulation didn't think it was a 'minor problem'. Overpopulation could lead to universally shit quality of life, which is why O'Neill's space colonisation ideas are so awesome.
[...]
I think it'd be better if everyone was happy and had to age, than was miserable due to insufficient resources. BTW, how would you decide who gets sterilised and who doesn't?

My reply on overpopulation

As I keep pointing out, most people in prosperous countries naturally tend to not have many children, and population does not increase in the long-term for any finite life expectancy with births below the replacement rate of 2 per woman. For example, if life extension was developed tomorrow, Singapore would still need to increase their birth rate (or immigration) to avoid heading towards eventual extinction.

Still, if one is exceptionally concerned, have the free, default life extension procedure not extend the fertile period of one's life. Avoiding such is easy as it takes effort to do that. Then, only the small minority of the population greatly desiring to have children repeatedly over many decades would go to the trouble involved in getting an extra procedure for unnaturally long fertility.

I would actually rather see population increase, expansion into space, and a gigantic future civilization beyond earth in the same way that earth's technology, cultural richness, etc. are superior to that of a single city of 100,000. A civilization of eventually trillions utilizing the potential of space could be awesome. Imagine the equivalent of a million billion-dollar movies produced per year, or the levels of research possible.

However, if one instead wants no long-term population growth, all one needs is to ensure that the number of children per couple is no more than about the replacement rate of 2. Ensuring such when the natural trend over time is lesser birth rates isn't that difficult.

Certainly "overpopulation" concerns are no excuse not to develop life extension. Better to live than die.

--------------------

By the way, while mostly a separate issue as previously implied, "overpopulation" is much overrated on earth today. What I pointed out in the earlier "a cleansing" thread applies here:

"Overpopulated" Africa has at least two or so orders of magnitude less population density than Japan. Poverty and violence are the actual problems. All countries with starvation today would have none if they were less impoverished and stabilized by better governments. People aren't suffering because there is X number in so-and-so land area. They suffer because the local government consists of militias hacking them to death, because they don't have nuclear reactors making fertilizer, or for other reasons related to violence and poverty.

If someone thinks their city is overpopulated, it is because people have chosen to concentrate rather than spreading out more evenly over large and areas. As someone in Australia, you must notice the vast expanses of land which are almost uninhabited compared to cities. Here is a world population density map, illustrating what I say about Africa's problems being violence and poverty rather than "overpopulation":



The bigger, high resolution version is here.

Just so nobody is confused, no, I am not suggesting there are absolutely no limits to desirable population on earth. Talking about a population of trillions being great is rather in reference to space settlement. However, if there was a brief jump in population after life extension before population stabilized or before space colonization, such would not be much of a problem. Any country managing to widely provide advanced medical care like life extension would also manage to produce enough food, have enough social order, and be sufficiently prosperous to solve the problems widely blamed on "overpopulation" today. Even environmental issues are due to the technology applied. For example, nuclear power is good for the environment, but currently most electrical production runs on coal.

--------------------

Winston Blake talking about healthspan, lifespan, and a lifetime-limit

Maybe I should have said "The death rate due to reaching the lifetime limit, which is now zero" rather than "The death rate which is now zero". See below.
[...]
My argument is that increasing the lifespan doesn't decrease the rate of deaths due to reaching the lifetime-limit (RLL for convenience, vs inspecific 'aging'). The only way this could be done is if people could be stopped from dying completely (assuming constant population etc).
[...]
When you say 'little senscence' are you talking about increasing healthspan or lifespan? If the former, we agree. If not, I'd say that the 270+ year olds are still draining healthcare.
[...]
Those effects are for a hypothetical world with increased healthspan, not necessarily increased lifespan. For example, they would still apply if everyone was sent to Carousel at age 40.
[...]
I was under the impression that a person will still die of old age (RLL) even with no diseases or disorders, including those more likely to affect old people. This is where my distinction between altering healthspan and altering lifespan comes from, and my argument that lifespan extension does not necessarily have the benefits that healthspan extension does, e.g. increasing lifespan has no effect on healthcare costs.
[...]

A good analogy to the effect of senescence is a rusting steel structure which eventually gets blown over by a gust of wind. [...] The only way to really make it last much longer is to stop the rusting. [...]

It's a good analogy, but the bolded part already includes the assumption that making it last longer is the goal, rather than designing it so that only in its final year does it lose serviceability and rust and collapse under its own weight. Increasing serviceability should be the goal. Further, if the structure is explicitly stated to be an idealised bridge, then the traffic across it could be analogous to workload, i.e. rusty bridges can't carry as much traffic, just like age-deteriorated people can't do as much work.
[...]

[...]The hypothetical concept commonly referred to as life extension is about making that much more effective, by managing to treat the indirect root cause of most present-day deaths: deterioration from aging.

Healthspan vs Lifespan.

------------------

Now, above I mentioned the number of toys on the belt remaining constant. This means that as the conveyor belt length is increased, AND the toy population must remain constant, then yes, the toy placement rate must be decreased and because of that, the rate at which toys fall off will decrease. So increasing lifespan alone really does decrease RLL death rate, since we want the population to remain constant. However, unless this lifespan increase is based on healthspan increase, it'll just result in a greater fraction of old age.

I still think arguments like healthcare costs don't support simply increasing lifespan, but rather working on healthspan.

Eliminating, or slowing, aging would save people in the same sense that elimating, or slowing, cancer saves people; and elimating aging ( the root cause of most health problems ) would definately reduce healthcare costs. So these particular arguments do work.

No, they don't, because if everybody was perfectly healthy until they suddenly died at 80, the healthcare costs would still be saved. It's the difference between combating 'aging' as age-resultant deterioration vs 'aging' as reaching your lifetime-limit.

My reply about senescence, health, and average life expectancy

I don't think you are seeing exactly how senescence and mortality work, particularly not with your repeated use of "lifetime-limit" as if it is a superior term.

Later, you implied your main introduction to life extension was the video, and I see it at one point says "life extension consists of attempts to extend human life beyond the current maximum lifespan."

Really, "maximum lifespan" is just a term biologists sometimes use for convenience. For example, one may say maximum lifespan is quite short for dogs, around 120 years for a human, and around two centuries for some types of turtles, urchins, whales, and rockfish. (Most of the latter four groups of animals have shorter lives, but some particular species of them have an exceptionally slow rate of aging, making them helpful to study as a guide to genetic engineering, gene therapy, or cell replacement). Indeed, one might say the current maximum lifespan of humans today is 120 years. That is approximately the present-day world record, despite average life expectancy being no more than 70 to 80 years even in developed countries.

However, the marginal chance of a person surviving another year without dying from cancer or another senescence-related disease drastically drops beyond 50 to 70 years age. Mortality from senescence is an exponential process, a matter of risks that statistically much increase with aging. Think of it as a matter of probabilities, as a continuous mathematical function, not as a function with a discontinuity or discrete jump. Out of the population, most survive to age 70, on the order of 1 in 1000 survives to around age 100, and only a tiny number of people out of billions survive beyond age 110.

Indeed, if the population was many times greater, all else being equal, someone probably would have made it to 125 years or longer instead of the documented world record of 122 years. However, note that the very few people currently living beyond 100 are afflicted with senescence decade after decade. They are mainly just lucky that they haven't died from a senescence-related disease yet, though of course luck is an oversimplification with all of the factors involved.

As I keep implying, you can't distinguish between increasing "healthspan" and increasing lifespan so much because the one way to get the majority of the population living to 200+ would be to either eliminate or at least vastly reduce senescence. The chance of a person living for many decades while much afflicted with senescence would be essentially zero. Not 1% of people last more than 2 or 3 decades beyond age 65, and most don't live more than 1 or 2 decades after the time major senescence begins.

I noticed from one quote above that you have been thinking people can "die of old age (RLL) even with no diseases or disorders." To say people died from "old age" was common in 19th-century novels. One sometimes even hears the phrase today. However, it is not precisely correct. Nobody dies solely from old age in itself. Rather, the rate of senescence-related diseases goes up as I have discussed. For example, on the order of 99% of cancer deaths occur to people over 50. An illustration is the CDC report on 2003 U.S. mortality in the large PDF file here. It lists causes like malignant neoplasms (cancer), Alzheimer's disease, etc. but not just "old age." Old age is not the direct cause of death, though aging is the indirect root cause of most deaths, as discussed earlier.

Anyway, what one wants to do is drastically reduce senescence, which would vastly extend average life expectancy.

As an illustration, imagine the ideal extreme of no senescence at all. In that case, there would be not be senescence-afflicted people in nursing homes, and there would definitely not be a particular "lifetime-limit." Health care costs could be quite low in that scenario. There would seldom be lingering deaths. However, there would still be other potential causes of deaths, such as accidents, wars, and illnesses not related to senescence. As observed in my first post, average life expectancy would still be finite, possibly several hundred years, some dying sooner, some later. Think of LOTR elves, dying from some causes but not aging.

Okay, but what if one merely managed to reduce the rate of senescence? For example, if average life expectancy is 300, would the fraction of time spent in poor health tend to be as great as it is today?

No. In countries with a life expectancy almost 80, around 20% of the total population may be as senescence-afflicted as happens from being 65 years old or older today. Proportionally, that would be like having people equally afflicted with senescence from an age of 240 to an age of 300, but such is unlikely. Recall my earlier observation of what senescence does to the rate of diseases. For the average 240-year-old to survive long enough to have a life expectancy of 300, they would need to be less senescence-afflicted than a 65-year-old of today. A scenario in which people were fairly senescence-afflicted from 285 to 300 years of age could theoretically be possible, but that would be only 5% of the population instead of 20%. Besides, if you can keep senescence so low up to age 285, you might be able to almost always keep people out of nursing homes their whole lives, obtaining negligible senescence...

Thus, people can't live long while greatly afflicted with senescence. One can not practically increase lifespan by many decades without decreasing senescence, so people are not going to live centuries with poor health. They could only live centuries with decent health.

Note the preceding figures are averages, so a life expectancy of 300 would just refer to the average, not any particular "lifetime-limit."

As much as I have discussed reduced health care costs as one eventual potential benefit, that is not the real motivation. If you want yourself, your family members, or future generations to have a chance at longer lives, you have little to lose by supporting life extension. Initial experiments might be expensive relative to the first few treated, but, once the public sees many other people living longer, they would force governments to offer life extension to all citizens, with substantial economy of scale.

It is as if you are imagining a split in worldview between advocates of life extension versus advocates of health. There is no such distinction. The real split in worldview is between life extension advocates and the bulk of the public who have never even considered funding major projects aimed at reducing senescence. Too few people have heard that reducing senescence is very plausible future possibility for modern science. Many gain their perceptions of the future primarily from mainstream science fiction like major movies, so presumably more of the public imagines a future with FTL travel than with life extension!

Summary: Life extension ~= reduced aging ~= more health

--------------------

Misc. quotes, with replies

100 000 people die of aging every day. How can we save them! By stopping aging, obviously. What does that mean? We extend the human lifespan. Great! The world is saved! Now people won't die from aging. Oh, wait, we'd have to make people infinitely immortal. However, we won't have to worry about overpopulation, we'll just make the birth rate match the death rate. The death rate which is now zero.

For a random illustration, consider a lifespan of 300 years.
[...]
Thus, practically any increased life expectancy still allows any couples desiring children to have them, at least provided they don't on average have too many each.
[...]

Learn to read. I already acknowledged that there is no need for overpopulation if the birth rate balances the death rate.

As shown in the nestled quotes above, you did not suggest that there could still be a substantial birth rate, so I illustrated how people could still have children at least up to 2 per couple. See the overpopulation discussion earlier in this post.

The above is a verbose way of saying that people die eventually whether everybody dies by age 20, age 200, or any other finite age. [...]

What does that have to do with the arguments in the video?

My reply was to your conveyor-belt story. Almost any reader would conclude its "moral" is suggesting that the length of "the belt" doesn't matter, that how long people live doesn't even matter.

Actually, I should revise that. Its apparent "moral" was worse than suggesting increasing human lifespan would have no benefit. Rather, it also focused on supposing negative effects like either "overpopulation," people no longer being able to have children, or monetary expenses. Its apparent "moral" was actually implying that life extension research is a net negative.

From your posts after the opening post, I see you may not actually be opposed to life extension research in the manner that story would suggest. However, focus only on hypothetical negatives did not demonstrate that to the hundreds of readers. There is no great worldwide problem with excessive optimism about life extension. The problem is so little public support for it that not even 0.01% of world GDP is directly focused on reducing senescence as the goal. Researching methods will be difficult and time-consuming, so the best hope of it succeeding within any of our lifetimes is if more major efforts get started soon.

Verbose? How far did you get into The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant? It's gigantic for something typed one-handed.

Yes, the Dragon-Tyrant story is verbose. The author is not someone skilled at writing entertaining novels. However, at least it has a good intended message, supporting research against senescence.

By means of analogy, it tries to break through the mental block of much of the public against even considering trying to retard aging. That is in contrast to the overall trend in literature, which is to treat reducing aging more like a forbidden fruit, a tower of Babel. Though they are not explicitly arguing against life extension, look at some examples from the most popular science fiction and fantasy series:

In Star Wars, the most noticeable character seeking extended lifespan is the evil Emperor, as shown in the EU. Certainly his particular Dark Side technique is immoral if he destroys a sapient human being in the process of taking over a body, but notice the trend of having the bad guys be those seeking immortality.

In Star Trek, there are multiple examples, but one that comes to mind is the Insurrection movie. The "bad guys" are those who seek to harvest the particles retarding aging.

In Harry Potter, the characters on the light side show lack of interest in living longer, while Lord Voldemort seeks immortality. When the Philosopher's Stone is destroyed, that is certainly not treated as a tragedy.

There are no doubt many more examples of the overall cultural and literary trend. Indeed, if a major movie protrayed the good guys as harmlessly seeking "immortality" with the bad guys desiring all to have "natural lifespans" and interfering, that would be such a reversal of the cliché as to shock viewers.

There are some cases in which "good guys" have long lifespans naturally, such as the natives on the planet in ST:TNG Insurrection or Tolkien elves in LOTR. However, if anybody is actively seeking "immortality" with their own efforts, one can be almost sure the cliché of them being the bad guys will not be broken.

Um, the part about the robot killing itself out of frustration was a joke, not an argument.

Most readers would not conclude it was merely a joke in the context of a story with the second sentence to the end saying "life extension does not save lives." Rather, it seemed to be supporting a "moral" saying that life extension is pointless, that someone trying would become depressed at "failure."

Now, I concede that when healthspan increase results in lifespan increase, the RLL death rate is reduced. So with a little alteration about the number of toys on the conveyor belt remaining constant, The Fable of the Conveyor Belt Robot is instead an argument for life extension.

I would disagree about the number of alterations needed for that story to be supporting life extension. However, if you support life extension research, we are in agreement about the most important aspect of the discussion.

As an aside, that video was my introduction to life extension. Except I've seen Vanilla Sky.

Ok. Since this thread appeared concurrently to my discussion of life extension in the biotech thread in Pure Star Wars, I guessed it was probably indirectly related. That may have just been coincidence.

I didn't download and watch the video on my slow dial-up connection before this post, just replying to your story earlier. I see the video sometimes uses different terminology and sometimes focuses on different arguments. However, overall the video is quite good, giving the right message of supporting life extension research.

[Winston Blake]

I think it'd be better if everyone was happy and had to age, than was miserable due to insufficient resources.

How can people be happy and have to age? Unless you're literally starving to death, lack of resources is not going to make you more miserable than slow deterioration and imminent death. (In which case, they would be about the same.)

What about all the people throughout history who have been happy before they got old and died? I'm probably going to die at less than 100, but I'd rather that than go below the poverty line for 300 years.

BTW, how would you decide who gets sterilised and who doesn't?

That was an extreme example I used to illustrate just how bad things would have to get before letting people rot becomes a good idea. ( Even euthanasia at a fixed age would be better. ) But I highly doubt that it will get that bad. Population growth is already leveling off, and it's not like we're going to achieve immortality tomorrow anyway.

Ok, sure. Although I'll note that in the video, the guy says it would be better to 'ask' people to limit the number of children they have rather than for them to die.

Fair enough, but where did you get that from? I've only ever said that eliminating aging altogether would lower healthcare costs.

It wasn't in response to you, sorry if I gave you that impression, it was part of the general arguments before starting this discussion.

Um, I watched the video again (twice), and I don't know what you're talking about. At the beginning, they say that the sooner we achive "negligible senescence" the more people will be "saved". Later, they say that making small progress on anti-aging would raise consciousness and allow them to pursue greater goals. And they said life extention was increasing human life beyond the current maximum lifespan. They didn't say that was their only goal.

My point is that it shouldn't be a goal at all. These are early days and that shouldn't be waved about just to get people on board. It's counterproductive marketing.

Agreed, the story wasn't that great. But, again, I think it is important to raise consciousness.

So do I, but the way they're doing it is pretty annoying. Come on, "Aging is a barbaric phenomenon that shouldn't be tolerated in polite society". The 'holier-than-thou' attitude is dripping off the video.

In the sense that the genes your parents pass on to you will eventually kill you as well as give you life, that is accrurate. Aging is a disease. It kills thousands every day. for the first time in human history, it is possible to develope a cure. This is not sensationalism, it is just the truth, plain and simple.

Diseases are abnormal, but eventual death obviously isn't. The focus should be on gradually working through age-resultant deterioration, not thrusting a flaming sword through Death's skull and raising a 'Huzzah!'.

[Winston Blake]

My reply on overpopulation
[snip]

However, if one instead wants no long-term population growth, all one needs is to ensure that the number of children per couple is no more than about the replacement rate of 2. Ensuring such when the natural trend over time is lesser birth rates isn't that difficult.

Certainly "overpopulation" concerns are no excuse not to develop life extension. Better to live than die.

As I said earlier. the overpopulation thing was in response to defeating death entirely, completely delayed aging, negligible senescence, immortality.

Any country managing to widely provide advanced medical care like life extension would also manage to produce enough food, have enough social order, and be sufficiently prosperous to solve the problems widely blamed on "overpopulation" today.

That's on a pretty small scale, it's not as if nations don't rise and fall in prosperity over 300 years, and there are plenty of poor people living in first world nations today.

Nobody dies solely from old age in itself. Rather, the rate of senescence-related diseases goes up as I have discussed.

OK, so where I said:

I was under the impression that a person will still die of old age (RLL) even with no diseases or disorders, including those more likely to affect old people.

I concede that is, in fact, incorrect.

As shown in the nestled quotes above, you did not suggest that there could still be a substantial birth rate, so I illustrated how people could still have children at least up to 2 per couple. See the overpopulation discussion earlier in this post.

As I've said previously, that was about immortality. If everyone was immortal, there couldn't be a substantial birth rate (all other things equal).

What does that have to do with the arguments in the video?

My reply was to your conveyor-belt story. Almost any reader would conclude its "moral" is suggesting that the length of "the belt" doesn't matter, that how long people live doesn't even matter.

My response wasn't supposed to be read alone. It was a response, just like the title of the thread suggests.

Yes, the Dragon-Tyrant story is verbose. The author is not someone skilled at writing entertaining novels. However, at least it has a good intended message, supporting research against senescence.

By means of analogy, it tries to break through the mental block of much of the public against even considering trying to retard aging. That is in contrast to the overall trend in literature, which is to treat reducing aging more like a forbidden fruit, a tower of Babel.

You see, I don't think the fable does a good job at all. I think it only attracts people who are already for life extension. It's inherently patronising and filled with holier-than-thou attitude. I really think a far better alternative is to focus on age-resultant deterioration, not tell people 'You fools! Can't you see if you just give us your money, we'll make you live forever!'

Um, the part about the robot killing itself out of frustration was a joke, not an argument.

Most readers would not conclude it was merely a joke in the context of a story with the second sentence to the end saying "life extension does not save lives." Rather, it seemed to be supporting a "moral" saying that life extension is pointless, that someone trying would become depressed at "failure."

The robot doesn't represent someone trying for life extension, unless gerontologists are in the business of creating human life worldwide (toy-placement).

Ok. Since this thread appeared concurrently to my discussion of life extension in the biotech thread in Pure Star Wars, I guessed it was probably indirectly related. That may have just been coincidence.

Yep, it is.

I didn't download and watch the video on my slow dial-up connection before this post, just replying to your story earlier. I see the video sometimes uses different terminology and sometimes focuses on different arguments.

Ah, ok.

However, overall the video is quite good, giving the right message of supporting life extension research.

I really think it doesn't do a good job.

[Sikon]

As I said earlier. the overpopulation thing was in response to defeating death entirely, completely delayed aging, negligible senescence, immortality.

Okay. But do note that even stopping aging entirely would not be defeating death utterly, though I know some other life extension advocates are careless about the term. People can still die from causes like those that kill young people today.

It looks like you recognize the potential of space. That means even the possibility of eventually almost zero death wouldn't have to be very troublesome before thousands or millions of years, maybe not even then, as the distant future is utterly unknown. Start researching senescence reduction now, then if lesser troubles appear someday, deal with them then.

Any country managing to widely provide advanced medical care like life extension would also manage to produce enough food, have enough social order, and be sufficiently prosperous to solve the problems widely blamed on "overpopulation" today.

That's on a pretty small scale, it's not as if nations don't rise and fall in prosperity over 300 years, and there are plenty of poor people living in first world nations today.

Any poverty is undesirable, but there is astronomical difference between developed countries and places like some of Africa where some people actually starve to death. I am technically under the official U.S. poverty line of about $10000/year at the moment, but appropriate choices for decent food are only $2 a day (about half ramen noodles), rent $400 a month, and all other critical expenses combined a lot less than rent. While life extension should be not too expensive and eventually less than the $7000 per capita spent on average in the U.S. on health care annually, there is no way a country would really manage to provide life extension to its general populace without also having a decent quality of life otherwise.

Nations rise and fall, but usually the variance is more in their relative standing than absolute terms. There never was a nation that had economic output per capita literally drop by a factor of a hundred.

Besides, note the big picture. Without reducing senescence, the probability of everyone suffering somewhat and then dying within not many decades is 100%. If life extension research succeeds, chances are better overall.

Nobody dies solely from old age in itself. Rather, the rate of senescence-related diseases goes up as I have discussed.

OK, so where I said:

I was under the impression that a person will still die of old age (RLL) even with no diseases or disorders, including those more likely to affect old people.

I concede that is, in fact, incorrect.

Okay, it sounds like we are approaching an agreement.

As shown in the nestled quotes above, you did not suggest that there could still be a substantial birth rate, so I illustrated how people could still have children at least up to 2 per couple. See the overpopulation discussion earlier in this post.

As I've said previously, that was about immortality. If everyone was immortal, there couldn't be a substantial birth rate (all other things equal).

As suggested above, absolute immortality would not occur, at least not within the foreseeable future, and it could take practically eons to really overwhelm this star system alone even if it did happen, even with a fair number of new children per decade.

My reply was to your conveyor-belt story. Almost any reader would conclude its "moral" is suggesting that the length of "the belt" doesn't matter, that how long people live doesn't even matter.

My response wasn't supposed to be read alone. It was a response, just like the title of the thread suggests.

Ok.

I will skip over some of the rest of your replies, since some don't really need another reply.

You see, I don't think the fable does a good job at all. I think it only attracts people who are already for life extension. It's inherently patronising and filled with holier-than-thou attitude. I really think a far better alternative is to focus on age-resultant deterioration, not tell people 'You fools! Can't you see if you just give us your money, we'll make you live forever!'

How it could be improved is an interesting thought. To focus on decreasing age-resultant deterioration as the goal stated to the public might be most effective.

Among the SDN board population, nobody here has suggested life extension is wrong because it would be unnatural or "playing God." Yet a huge fraction of the public would aim to prevent work on it due to such beliefs, with an emotional reaction. Those are the people who could not be convinced by rational argument, only by making life extension so popular that their own self-interest eventually overrides their original ideological beliefs.

Right now, life extension research is too limited and unknown to attract either much support or much opposition. Eventually, once people saw their neighbors no longer aging much, there would be widespread demand for universal life extension available to any citizen. However, between those two periods, there are major political risks. There is much potential for an unholy alliance against life extension with many religious fundamentalists, many concerned about overpopulation or inequality, and plenty of politicians worrying about what it would do to the status quo like social security. Politicians tend to be more subtle than an outright ban, but regulating various methods like gene therapy ("human genetic modification") out of existence is very possible.

Fortunately, the U.N. is not a world government, so hopefully one or more advanced nations would break the trend if that happened.

The best way to maximize public support while minimizing risks might not be to talk about obtaining "immortality." Rather, describe the goal as reducing the negative effects of aging, as treating senescence. Seeking immortality is a concept associated with Lord Voldemort, Emperor Palpatine, etc. Some research techniques could potentially involve politically controversial methods like stem cells, genetic engineering of human cells, etc. Yet almost nobody would be directly opposed to their grandparents being more healthy. A project reducing the negative effects of aging could be supported by the average person learning their news in 30-second soundbites.

The key would be to still differentiate it, to make people understand that current medical research is not already focused on the goal, not to any substantial degree yet. Unfortunately, popular suggestion of methods to retard aging is too much the domain of quacks today, like ones selling "anti-aging" pills. People would need to understand that senescence itself needs to be focused on just like cancer or AIDs, with large research & development projects.

However, overall the video is quite good, giving the right message of supporting life extension research.

I really think it doesn't do a good job.

I like its message, but it could be improved. For example, I think this thread has illustrated some good points to cover, although my writing is too verbose and technical to be comparable. Anything expected to be read or watched by the general public would need to be very concise and simple, understandable and convincing even to those with a short attention span and little scientific understanding.

[Winston Blake]

As I said earlier. the overpopulation thing was in response to defeating death entirely, completely delayed aging, negligible senescence, immortality.

Okay. But do note that even stopping aging entirely would not be defeating death utterly, though I know some other life extension advocates are careless about the term. People can still die from causes like those that kill young people today.

Yeah, that's implied.

Nations rise and fall, but usually the variance is more in their relative standing than absolute terms. There never was a nation that had economic output per capita literally drop by a factor of a hundred.

What about the nations that don't exist any more? What about wars? About immortality, all I'm saying is that for it to become the norm, it'd opens up a whole can of worms like requiring worldwide control of sex. Otherwise a lot of people are going to be born only to die in resource conflicts (all other things equal).

As suggested above, absolute immortality would not occur, at least not within the foreseeable future, and it could take practically eons to really overwhelm this star system alone even if it did happen, even with a fair number of new children per decade.

The Immortality Institute seems to think it is in the foreseeable future.

The best way to maximize public support while minimizing risks might not be to talk about obtaining "immortality." Rather, describe the goal as reducing the negative effects of aging, as treating senescence. Seeking immortality is a concept associated with Lord Voldemort, Emperor Palpatine, etc. Some research techniques could potentially involve politically controversial methods like stem cells, genetic engineering of human cells, etc. Yet almost nobody would be directly opposed to their grandparents being more healthy. A project reducing the negative effects of aging could be supported by the average person learning their news in 30-second soundbites.

Yes, I completely agree.

[Junghalli]

Bullshit. Real life isn't Star Trek. You'll just be expected to do more. Everyone will still be competing with everyone else, if you don't work as hard as the next guy, you won't get the job.

But we might at least be a little more relaxed and hence happier if we didn't have the yawning maw of death so opressively close. I know I would be. We start to see our bodies deteriorate a mere 10-15 years after we've just finished catching up to what everybody else has learned. Think about that.

[Winston Blake]

But we might at least be a little more relaxed and hence happier if we didn't have the yawning maw of death so opressively close. I know I would be. We start to see our bodies deteriorate a mere 10-15 years after we've just finished catching up to what everybody else has learned. Think about that.

Yeah but ideas like 'close' and 'far' are all relative. Somebody who will live to 300 will just be saying 'Man I wish I could live until 900' with just as much stress.