Life extension video and my thoughts

[Sikon]

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.

Ok.

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).

Genocide wouldn't be classified as economic output per capita dropping by a factor of a hundred, as that would mean no "per capita" left.

Extended lifespan might drop the rate of wars. Besides, nations prosperous by modern standards like modern democracies don't go to war with each other often. Nobody really expects Britain is going to fight France again in the 21st century. Those are the kind of nations which would manage to provide life extension. Of course, the goal is for all nations to provide life extension, but that can only happen by them first becoming more like the first-world nations, which tend to be relatively peaceful. Besides, wars usually kill only a small percentage of the population in relative terms, not like senescence that indirectly kills 100% not killed earlier.

We are talking about the future by the time of life extension, not precisely today's world. Even optimistically, life extension research is going to take time to succeed, then longer for its effects on population to much appear, so they would probably happen after the immediate near-term, after peak oil, after the Middle East conflicts I suspect you are imagining.

After life extension, there would not be particular need for worldwide control of sex if governments acted appropriately. Taking measures to limit population growth is one option, but accepting some population increase is also a legitimate option. If I recall correctly, the Limits to Growth book that was the archetype for modern overpopulation concerns categorized four factors involved in hypothetical "limits to growth": energy, food, resources, and pollution. Even for a future world initially planet-bound with an increasing population, those would not have to be excessive problems, giving time to go beyond earth.

Energy can be solved by nuclear power. Seaweed allows extraction of trace uranium from seawater, where there is a practically unlimited amount, billions of tons. It isn't as cheap as current uranium mines, but that doesn't matter because nuke fuel is still a minor expense.

As for food, if there ever was an actual overall shortage of cropland available, a NASA space station study here estimated that the right techniques can make only 49 square meters of food production area needed per person. Aside from the 24-hour sunlight, all factors involved in that production density could readily be reproduced in greenhouses on earth if the moderate extra expense was really worthwhile. To put that in perspective, even at a quarter of that production density, only four thousandths of earth's 5.1E14 square meter surface area would be enough to produce food for 10 billion people.

Resources? Well, oil is going to decline with or without population growth anyway. Synthetic plastics and hydrocarbon fuels could be produced with the help of nuclear power. One basically just needs a carbon source (coal, CO2, kerogen, etc.), a hydrogen source (water), an energy source (nuclear), a little more, and some chemical engineering. With that, plastics can be produced anywhere from Earth to the asteroid belt. The portion of GDP spent today on the raw material cost of plastics is trivial, so a moderate increase in cost compared to production from oil could be affordable enough. Metals aren't a big deal as the most important ones like iron and aluminum are common in earth's crust, impossible to really run out.

Pollution? That depends much less on population in itself than on how technology is utilized.

Although I would not agree with absolutely everything he says, the Sustainability of Human Progress website here makes many good points about topics ranging from energy to water supply. As implied by me before, the problems blamed on "overpopulation" today are due to violence, poverty, and improper technological usage.

As a reminder, there could be much economic disruption after peak oil, as the world is not properly prepared, but the situation of the more distant future is what is relevant to considering the effects of eventually managing to reduce senescence, as population would take decades to much increase even after success.

Admittedly, governments might not act appropriately and rather act unintelligently, given past behavior. In that case, one hopes the free market still develops the solutions needed, as it has managed so far. However, even if one did suppose poor decisions led to "worldwide control of sex" ending up being used, it could be subtle, as suggested earlier. Nothing as draconian as China's one child policy would be needed, particularly not when two children per couple is the replacement rate, and a large fraction of the population in prosperous countries doesn't even want children.

In summary: So what? Potential costs are barely worth mentioning compared to the benefits.

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.

Well, almost absolute immortality eventually is a possibility, but it wouldn't really be within the foreseeable future. The kind of extreme technology and social changes involved would make prediction of such a distant future too uncertain.

Here is an illustration of the difficulty:

Consider a person living in a world where the average life expectancy is 300 years. Normally he has no chance of being close to immortal. Accidents, homicide, and other causes of death make his chance of living more than a few centuries limited. Perhaps rates of such are reduced worldwide with the extra motivation after people live longer, but that still only goes so far with a fragile human body. If he wants to be really close to immortal, his best hope is that technology advances to reach an extreme level before the end of his three-century median life expectancy.

In that case, perhaps he could have his brain's neurons gradually supplemented and replaced over years by nanorobots. With the hypothetical uber-tech, make avatars which are just like his original human body on the outside, including all nerves for senses but have a radio transmitter instead of a brain (or the uber-tech equivalent to radio control). With perfect telepresence, a perfect neural interface, possessing an avatar is utterly indistinguishable to him from having his original human body, from eyesight to touch. Then, he could have no risk of dying in ordinary accidents, as one of his telepresence avatar bodies being destroyed would be harmless.

Still, even then, his chance of surviving for millions of years is reduced by having a single point of failure: his upgraded brain module. To further approach immortality, he might maximize redundancy. An individual insect dies easily and fast, but the class Insecta as a whole lasts for millions of years. Likewise, have his nanotech neuron-clusters gradually move apart and have backups added, connected by electronic communication. His brain could become a swarm of many redundant elements, up to many kilometers wide, protected by shielding, backups, etc. In that case, he might actually approach immortality, lasting for millions or even billions of years. Still, it is not known if any solution to the possible eventual "death" of the universe could be found even in that much time. If he ever died, he would not be absolutely immortal.

The above is just an illustration, but observe how a scenario in which people became very close to truely immortal would be too alien to the present-day world to be really understood, predicted, or foreseen now. Making the rate of deaths from all causes from accidents to violence be essentially zero would not be a simple task, not one likely to be accomplished by anything short of people much different from baseline biological homo sapiens.

Anyway, even considering such as an eventual possibility is beyond the comfort level of most people, who can see more the possibility of becoming like LOTR elves than becoming AI "gods." Maybe the future might be strange in thousands or millions of years, but, for now, the logical focus is on reducing senescence, just increasing life expectancy to up to several centuries. So, it is best not to say absolute immortality is the research goal.

EDIT:
On second thought, the term "immortal" is commonly used to refer to fictional creatures that aren't absolutely immortal, like vampires and even the elves (dying in violence periodically), so the Immortality Institute might mean to use it under a less strict definition than absolutely zero chance of death. Still, the best terminology for public relations would merely talk about reducing the negative effects of aging as the goal.

By the way, if life extension research started making progress within the lifetime of the current generation but didn't seem to succeed in time, it might still not be too late. If a suspended animation technique like this was discovered to work on humans for long enough periods, the elderly near death might have the option of going into hibernation to survive until the research against senescence succeeded. Sure, it is only a possibility, no guarantee, but the key observation is future technology might give some chance.

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.

I'm not surprised, as it was an expansion of your original thought.

[Nate_A]

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?

They're... not happy anymore; and they'll never be happy again.

I'm probably going to die at less than 100, but I'd rather that than go below the poverty line for 300 years.

What if you could live 300 years in poverty, then live like a king for 10,000 more?

Imagine the exponential growth of machines that can make copies of themselves in space - a population of robots doubling every year - then, in great numbers, setting to work exploiting the vast riches of the solar system. Imagine enormous factories producing everything we need, everything we want, without human supervision; and tiny machines repairing the human body at the molecular level.

That's what's great about life. It means hope. Seeing how much progress has been made in the last few centuries, I have a great deal of hope for the future. But there is no hope after death.

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.

Well, naturally that would be a better idea.

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.

But what was it in response to? I still don't know where you got it from.

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.

I assume you mean that it shouldn't be advertised as a goal. Are you saying that deceptive advertising sould be used?

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.

OK, I now have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. He was just pointing out the elephant in the room!

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.

Who cares whether it's normal? It's bad!

The focus should be on gradually working through age-resultant deterioration, not thrusting a flaming sword through Death's skull and raising a 'Huzzah!'.

Look, if you want to talk about the best way to present this whole thing to the public, then that is interresting in its own right and should be discussed; but there is no question as to what the eventual goal should be. It's to plunge a flaming sword through deaths metaphorical head.

[Wyrm]

What about all the people throughout history who have been happy before they got old and died?

They're... not happy anymore; and they'll never be happy again.

But they got their happy. While they were on the earth, for the most part life was worth living, and some of them died satisfied with the life they led.

I'm probably going to die at less than 100, but I'd rather that than go below the poverty line for 300 years.

What if you could live 300 years in poverty, then live like a king for 10,000 more?

Imagine the exponential growth of machines that can make copies of themselves in space - a population of robots doubling every year - then, in great numbers, setting to work exploiting the vast riches of the solar system. Imagine enormous factories producing everything we need, everything we want, without human supervision; and tiny machines repairing the human body at the molecular level.

That's what's great about life. It means hope. Seeing how much progress has been made in the last few centuries, I have a great deal of hope for the future. But there is no hope after death.

You do realize that just getting into space requires an enormous amount of energy, do you not? The vast riches of the solar system will remain unaccessible while we're stuck at the bottom of this damnible potential energy well. Meanwhile, the resources of Earth itself are FINITE; there's only so much to go around, and if you squander your resources, you won't be living to 10,000 y in any condition.

First things first, Nate. Before potentially ballooning the population of humanity threefold, which means on average, everyone sees a 2/3 drop in the availible resources, let's make sure we can access the riches of space properly.

Life extension only works to make people happier overall if we also properly exploit space (because only then can we bring the kingly life to all without making hash of our Earth). However, proper exploitation of space does not seem to require life extension to make people happier overall. I know which of these my money is on.

I've only ever said that eliminating aging altogether would lower healthcare costs.

Not necessarily. 90% of a person's health care expenses comes at the last six months of life. (We found this out, to our dismay, when my grandmother was on her way out.) Only when the end of life is relatively swift, where little can actually be done to delay the inevidable (or when this choice is made volutarily) is the cost cheap. But end of life comes to everyone, even if the whole of your life is long.

As for aging, you're pretending that we actually can eliminate it altogether. Human beings (and indeed, animals in general) are victims of planned obsolescence; humans only regularly started living past 40-50 y within the last two centuries. As a result, we evolved such that our systems put a lot of load on us during our early years, because we could only expect to live to 10 y anyway (more often than not, something else would come along and kill us). Now that we've eliminated most of those things that claim us early, the design compromises that have evolved into us show up as aging.

It's not that death is one entity that sweeps down and harvests us. We're simply not built to last forever.

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.

I assume you mean that it shouldn't be advertised as a goal. Are you saying that deceptive advertising sould be used?

How is it deceptive advertising to say that the battle against aging will be a long, dragged out affair with absolutely no guarantee that we will ever conquer death, and quite likely will turn out that we definitely, provably, cannot conquer death, period? That's the unvarnished truth, dearheart.

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.

OK, I now have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. He was just pointing out the elephant in the room!

An elephant everyone is already perfectly aware is there, but no one can do anything about until we manage to build an elephant gun, which (for the sake of the analogy) is something that we cannot be sure even exists. Until we understand why we age, how we age, and how to slow down and eventually stop aging, aging is something you're just going to have to deal with. Meanwhile, we have all of these more pressing issues that almost certainly need more immediate and urgent attention, such as global warming. Global warming is something that has the potential of crippling and even destroying human civilization... and good luck reaching 30 under such conditions.

Diseases are abnormal, but eventual death obviously isn't.

Who cares whether it's normal? It's bad!

Deal with it. More pressing problems need our attention than your ability to play with your prick an extra 200 years.

Look, if you want to talk about the best way to present this whole thing to the public, then that is interresting in its own right and should be discussed; but there is no question as to what the eventual goal should be. It's to plunge a flaming sword through deaths metaphorical head.

The most correct way of presenting this to the public is, as always, with the unvarnished truth. Liken the human body to a car tha is only designed to last so long before things start breaking down, one after another. Anyone who's owned a car for long will know exactly what you're talking about. Keeping such a car going "forever" is going to be damned hard.

[Sikon]

But they got their happy. While they were on the earth, for the most part life was worth living, and some of them died satisfied with the life they led.

That does nothing to change the fact that a life with reduced senescence lasting longer would be superior. If you prefer a life expectancy of 80 years to one of 20, then you should see how a life expectancy of 200+ could likewise be superior to one of 80 years.

You do realize that just getting into space requires an enormous amount of energy, do you not? The vast riches of the solar system will remain unaccessible while we're stuck at the bottom of this damnible potential energy well.

As I pointed out in this thread:

Energy/fuel costs are not the problem, not 1% of launch costs. Propellant is mostly liquid oxygen costing cents per pound. The electrical energy equivalent at $0.05/kw-hr of sending an object to orbit is $0.20 per pound before inefficiencies. Space Shuttle launch costs are a hundred thousand times greater: $26000+ per pound of payload.

The energy required to reach LEO (low earth orbit) is not very huge compared to that used in a long airline flight, though rockets burn their propellant fast. For example, a 747 can use up to around 500 liters of fuel per passenger, on the order of 17 GJ energy, approximating as 0.8 kg/liter and 43 MJ/kg of fuel. To put that in perspective, the energy required to reach LEO is about 0.03 GJ per kilogram before inefficiencies, mostly from the 7800 m/s orbital velocity with KE = 0.5 MV^2.

A very small fraction of world power production powering mass drivers could put a lot of equipment into orbit. The reason space is expensive today is not due to fuel/energy costs but due to launch vehicles having economic performance around the equivalent of throwing away a 747 after one flight.

Meanwhile, the resources of Earth itself are FINITE; there's only so much to go around

If you are talking about oil, peak oil is probably going to happen long before life extension much increases population, as I implied above, so oil is going to be depleted anyway. As for other resources, there are billions of tons of uranium extractable from seawater for energy (nuclear), trillions of tons of iron and other key metals in the earth's crust, etc. As I pointed out before, people suffer today not from "overpopulation" but rather from violence, poverty, and improper technology usage. That is what matters; people were not richer when the world's population was a tenth of what it is today, rather far worse off. A nation would have to be relatively stable and prosperous to provide life extension to its citizens anyway.

Now, there are still some limits on desirable population on earth, and expansion into space is certainly worthwhile, being worthwhile in any case. However, see my prior discussion in earlier posts in this thread.

and if you squander your resources, you won't be living to 10,000 y in any condition.

Compared to the trillions of dollars presently wasted every decade, putting some money into research on reducing senescence wouldn't be squandering resources.

Before potentially ballooning the population of humanity threefold, which means on average, everyone sees a 2/3 drop in the availible resources, let's make sure we can access the riches of space properly.

Life extension only works to make people happier overall if we also properly exploit space (because only then can we bring the kingly life to all without making hash of our Earth). However, proper exploitation of space does not seem to require life extension to make people happier overall. I know which of these my money is on.

See the above and my earlier discussion of "overpopulation" in this thread.

Space settlement is extremely desirable, but this is not an either/or situation. Working on both space and life extension is best.

90% of a person's health care expenses comes at the last six months of life. (We found this out, to our dismay, when my grandmother was on her way out.) Only when the end of life is relatively swift, where little can actually be done to delay the inevidable (or when this choice is made volutarily) is the cost cheap.

Most health care costs are from those afflicted with senescence. You do not seem to have read this thread fully. In earlier posts, I showed how major life extension would reduce the senescence-afflicted fraction of a person's total lifespan.

But end of life comes to everyone, even if the whole of your life is long.

As for aging, you're pretending that we actually can eliminate it altogether.

Obtaining negligible senescence is uncertain, but any substantial reduction in senescence would be of great benefit regardless.

Human beings (and indeed, animals in general) are victims of planned obsolescence; humans only regularly started living past 40-50 y within the last two centuries. As a result, we evolved such that our systems put a lot of load on us during our early years, because we could only expect to live to 10 y anyway (more often than not, something else would come along and kill us). Now that we've eliminated most of those things that claim us early, the design compromises that have evolved into us show up as aging.

It's not that death is one entity that sweeps down and harvests us. We're simply not built to last forever.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, there are some particular species of whales, turtles, urchins, and rockfish that can live around two centuries. Techniques gained from studying them are among the potential methods for decreasing senescence and making humans live much more than the 70 to 80 year life expectancies of developed countries today.

How is it deceptive advertising to say that the battle against aging will be a long, dragged out affair with absolutely no guarantee that we will ever conquer death, and quite likely will turn out that we definitely, provably, cannot conquer death, period? That's the unvarnished truth, dearheart.

Again, zero death is not expected, particularly not when there are unrelated causes of deaths like accidents, but each extra decade of life obtained is of great value.

An elephant everyone is already perfectly aware is there, but no one can do anything about until we manage to build an elephant gun, which (for the sake of the analogy) is something that we cannot be sure even exists. Until we understand why we age, how we age, and how to slow down and eventually stop aging, aging is something you're just going to have to deal with.

Life extension methods don't get developed automatically, not without more effort and funding. There is a lot of research today working towards a goal of curing cancer, but there is unfortunately not a tiny fraction as much focused on trying to determine how to treat its indirect root cause, senescence.

Meanwhile, we have all of these more pressing issues that almost certainly need more immediate and urgent attention, such as global warming. Global warming is something that has the potential of crippling and even destroying human civilization... and good luck reaching 30 under such conditions.

That is a false dilemma. Orders of magnitude more money is spent on cosmetics than on research directly focused on methods to reduce senescence!

Though off-topic, as much as continued usage of fossil fuels is undesirable, the above is a bit too much hyperbole, as even the worse-case sea level rise harming some coastal cities wouldn't destroy civilization.

Anyway, countermeasures to global warming would not be helped by failing to research life extension.

Deal with it. More pressing problems need our attention than your ability to play with your prick an extra 200 years.

Again the false dilemma.

Curing or reducing senescence so that a person lives decades or centuries longer is not of less value than curing a person from cancer. If anything, the former is of even greater value, as curing someone of cancer without treating the main problem would typically result in them dying from another senescence-related disease within a few years.

The most correct way of presenting this to the public is, as always, with the unvarnished truth. Liken the human body to a car tha is only designed to last so long before things start breaking down, one after another. Anyone who's owned a car for long will know exactly what you're talking about. Keeping such a car going "forever" is going to be damned hard.

Certainly reducing senescence is challenging, but it is not inconceivable that humans may one day live as long as the longest-lived animals or longer.

[Nate_A]

What about all the people throughout history who have been happy before they got old and died?

They're... not happy anymore; and they'll never be happy again.

But they got their happy. While they were on the earth, for the most part life was worth living, and some of them died satisfied with the life they led.

Obviously, a short happy life is better than a long miserable life. My point is that things would have to get very bad before resources become more important than years. Otherwise we would kill our seniors instead of giving them money.

I'm probably going to die at less than 100, but I'd rather that than go below the poverty line for 300 years.

What if you could live 300 years in poverty, then live like a king for 10,000 more?

Imagine the exponential growth of machines that can make copies of themselves in space - a population of robots doubling every year - then, in great numbers, setting to work exploiting the vast riches of the solar system. Imagine enormous factories producing everything we need, everything we want, without human supervision; and tiny machines repairing the human body at the molecular level.

That's what's great about life. It means hope. Seeing how much progress has been made in the last few centuries, I have a great deal of hope for the future. But there is no hope after death.

Well, like I said: hope. But Winston Blake was talking about three hundred years in the future. I think that leaves a little room for imagination.

You do realize that just getting into space requires an enormous amount of energy, do you not? The vast riches of the solar system will remain unaccessible while we're stuck at the bottom of this damnible potential energy well. Meanwhile, the resources of Earth itself are FINITE; there's only so much to go around, and if you squander your resources, you won't be living to 10,000 y in any condition.

That's why one probe is sent that can reproduce using energy from the sun and material from asteroids. Do you really think any of this will be impossible with twenty-second century tech?

First things first, Nate. Before potentially ballooning the population of humanity threefold, which means on average, everyone sees a 2/3 drop in the availible resources, let's make sure we can access the riches of space properly.

How is the population going to get that big? I threw out a few "for the sake of argument" examples; but I don't think life extention research is going to cause population problems.

Life extension only works to make people happier overall if we also properly exploit space (because only then can we bring the kingly life to all without making hash of our Earth). However, proper exploitation of space does not seem to require life extension to make people happier overall. I know which of these my money is on.

If that's true, then, obviously, we should work on both life extention and space exploitation.

I've only ever said that eliminating aging altogether would lower healthcare costs.

Not necessarily. 90% of a person's health care expenses comes at the last six months of life. (We found this out, to our dismay, when my grandmother was on her way out.) Only when the end of life is relatively swift, where little can actually be done to delay the inevidable (or when this choice is made volutarily) is the cost cheap. But end of life comes to everyone, even if the whole of your life is long.

But eliminating aging - or other diseases - statistically favors a swift death, such as in accidents. Also, six months, for a long lived person is a smaller percentage of total life than for a short lived person.

As for aging, you're pretending that we actually can eliminate it altogether. Human beings (and indeed, animals in general) are victims of planned obsolescence; humans only regularly started living past 40-50 y within the last two centuries. As a result, we evolved such that our systems put a lot of load on us during our early years, because we could only expect to live to 10 y anyway (more often than not, something else would come along and kill us). Now that we've eliminated most of those things that claim us early, the design compromises that have evolved into us show up as aging.

It's not that death is one entity that sweeps down and harvests us. We're simply not built to last forever.

If we have to rebuild every cell in the body from the ground up, we can. It's only a matter of sufficiently advanced technology. I know we can do it, because our own bodies do it ( they just don't do it very well after we get old ).

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.

I assume you mean that it shouldn't be advertised as a goal. Are you saying that deceptive advertising sould be used?

How is it deceptive advertising to say that the battle against aging will be a long, dragged out affair with absolutely no guarantee that we will ever conquer death, and quite likely will turn out that we definitely, provably, cannot conquer death, period? That's the unvarnished truth, dearheart.

The relevant text:

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.

It appears he is saying that life extention sould not be a goal "at all". So I gave him the benefit of a doubt by assuming he was only referring to marketing. What you said doesn't apply.

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.

OK, I now have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. He was just pointing out the elephant in the room!

An elephant everyone is already perfectly aware is there, but no one can do anything about until we manage to build an elephant gun, which (for the sake of the analogy) is something that we cannot be sure even exists. Until we understand why we age, how we age, and how to slow down and eventually stop aging, aging is something you're just going to have to deal with. Meanwhile, we have all of these more pressing issues that almost certainly need more immediate and urgent attention, such as global warming. Global warming is something that has the potential of crippling and even destroying human civilization... and good luck reaching 30 under such conditions.

Of course everyone is aware of the elephant. They just don't like to talk about it. They "tolerate" it. In fact, they tolerate it to such an extent that amost no money goes into any of the projects you mentioned. That is why it is important ( and why would it be "holier than thou" even if it wasn't? ) to remind people that it is barbaric and should not be tolerated.

Diseases are abnormal, but eventual death obviously isn't.

Who cares whether it's normal? It's bad!

Deal with it. More pressing problems need our attention than your ability to play with your prick an extra 200 years.

They're are a million pressing issues, and each one needs to be researched, and that research needs to be fuded, and that funding can be obtained by raising consciousness with videos on youtube and that is what started this thread! Now, do you have a point other than We have other problems, therefore it's silly to try to solve this one?

Look, if you want to talk about the best way to present this whole thing to the public, then that is interresting in its own right and should be discussed; but there is no question as to what the eventual goal should be. It's to plunge a flaming sword through deaths metaphorical head.

The most correct way of presenting this to the public is, as always, with the unvarnished truth. Liken the human body to a car tha is only designed to last so long before things start breaking down, one after another. Anyone who's owned a car for long will know exactly what you're talking about. Keeping such a car going "forever" is going to be damned hard.

Everyone already thinks that nothing can be done about aging. So, if we want to get funding for life extention we need to offer hope that something can be done. And there is hope. It's incomprehensible to me that, no matter how advanced technology gets, it will be remain impossible to keep a human body fuctioning forever.

[Wyrm]

But they got their happy. While they were on the earth, for the most part life was worth living, and some of them died satisfied with the life they led.

That does nothing to change the fact that a life with reduced senescence lasting longer would be superior. If you prefer a life expectancy of 80 years to one of 20, then you should see how a life expectancy of 200+ could likewise be superior to one of 80 years.

I prefer a lifetime of 80 y to 20 only if I can expect a reasonable quality of life during those eighty years. It's more than just being alive. It's also living.

You do realize that just getting into space requires an enormous amount of energy, do you not? The vast riches of the solar system will remain unaccessible while we're stuck at the bottom of this damnible potential energy well.

As I pointed out in this thread:

Energy/fuel costs are not the problem, not 1% of launch costs. Propellant is mostly liquid oxygen costing cents per pound. The electrical energy equivalent at $0.05/kw-hr of sending an object to orbit is $0.20 per pound before inefficiencies. Space Shuttle launch costs are a hundred thousand times greater: $26000+ per pound of payload.

When I said that getting into space requires an enormous amount of energy, I was calculating the whole cost of lifting you free of earth's gravity, not just paying off its gravitational potential energy. You also have to pay a toll for gravitational drag, and atmospheric drag, as well as carry along your life support. Non-human payloads can get away with less support, but not necessarily with less lift time. When you get out to the moon, you're still talking about energies comparable to a small atom bomb for a small manned vessel.

And I don't remember saying anything about monitary cost.

A very small fraction of world power production powering mass drivers could put a lot of equipment into orbit. The reason space is expensive today is not due to fuel/energy costs but due to launch vehicles having economic performance around the equivalent of throwing away a 747 after one flight.

It would... if we weren't for the small fact that we're living at the bottom of a really thick atmosphere that would rob the projectile of most of its velocity long before it got into space. Plus the small fact that such a projectile would be subjected to significant thermal stresses.

The mass-driver trick only works on bodies with at most thin atmospheres (best none). Earth isn't one of them.

If you are talking about oil, peak oil is probably going to happen long before life extension much increases population, as I implied above, so oil is going to be depleted anyway. As for other resources, there are billions of tons of uranium extractable from seawater for energy (nuclear), trillions of tons of iron and other key metals in the earth's crust, etc. As I pointed out before, people suffer today not from "overpopulation" but rather from violence, poverty, and improper technology usage. That is what matters; people were not richer when the world's population was a tenth of what it is today, rather far worse off. A nation would have to be relatively stable and prosperous to provide life extension to its citizens anyway.

I know all that, moron. Sure, one of the problems facing us is poverty, violence, ect., but what you miss is that every one of these problems is aggravated by overpopulation. You have failed to miss the big point; every environment can only bear a finite number of people. Otherwise, it becomes overstressed and collapses. That's Ecology 101, and it's true whether or not you have outside resources coming in.

Compared to the trillions of dollars presently wasted every decade, putting some money into research on reducing senescence wouldn't be squandering resources.

I'd rather have no waste at all, personally. I'm all for working to reduce the ravages of old age, but let's get our priorities in order here. Let's ensure that human civilization on earth has a future, before we worry too much about giving everyone as much time as possible to live in it.

See the above and my earlier discussion of "overpopulation" in this thread.

Space settlement is extremely desirable, but this is not an either/or situation. Working on both space and life extension is best.

See my reply. It's all about priorities.

Most health care costs are from those afflicted with senescence. You do not seem to have read this thread fully. In earlier posts, I showed how major life extension would reduce the senescence-afflicted fraction of a person's total lifespan.

Bullshit. The 90% end-of-life costs get incurred because your health is rapidly going downhill. The healthier you are, the easier it is to maintain that health. But at the end of life, health problems start compounding as you get increasingly debilitated, each complication aggravating another. A prolonged period of immobility can lead to bedsores, which can in turn lead to a slew of complications that can lead to renal failure and death, and deep pressure sores can take a long time to heal, if they ever do. More immobility also leads to reduced appetite, which causes its own set of problems, and muscle and joint stiffness, which (again) has it's own galaxy of complications.

The more things wrong with you, the more likely it is for other problems to crop up. Each new problem requires more care to control, but each new problem can trigger even more problems later on.

But end of life comes to everyone, even if the whole of your life is long.

As for aging, you're pretending that we actually can eliminate it altogether.

Obtaining negligible senescence is uncertain, but any substantial reduction in senescence would be of great benefit regardless.

This is not what's being sold.

Human beings (and indeed, animals in general) are victims of planned obsolescence; humans only regularly started living past 40-50 y within the last two centuries. As a result, we evolved such that our systems put a lot of load on us during our early years, because we could only expect to live to 10 y anyway (more often than not, something else would come along and kill us). Now that we've eliminated most of those things that claim us early, the design compromises that have evolved into us show up as aging.

It's not that death is one entity that sweeps down and harvests us. We're simply not built to last forever.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, there are some particular species of whales, turtles, urchins, and rockfish that can live around two centuries.

So what? Their bodies are built for a longer design lifetimes, but that doesn't mean that their bodies aren't collection of design compromises the same as we are.

Techniques gained from studying them are among the potential methods for decreasing senescence and making humans live much more than the 70 to 80 year life expectancies of developed countries today.

There's no guarantee that the reasons why those creatures live longer than us will apply to us. At least, without some cost. They live that long because their entire bodies have evolved as such; we have no such advantage.

Again, zero death is not expected, particularly not when there are unrelated causes of deaths like accidents, but each extra decade of life obtained is of great value.

Correction, each extra decade of healthy life, and it will not come without a certain cost.

Life extension methods don't get developed automatically, not without more effort and funding. There is a lot of research today working towards a goal of curing cancer, but there is unfortunately not a tiny fraction as much focused on trying to determine how to treat its indirect root cause, senescence.

Cancer isn't wholey a function of senescence. Otherwise, why do we have childhood cancers?

Meanwhile, we have all of these more pressing issues that almost certainly need more immediate and urgent attention, such as global warming. Global warming is something that has the potential of crippling and even destroying human civilization... and good luck reaching 30 under such conditions.

That is a false dilemma. Orders of magnitude more money is spent on cosmetics than on research directly focused on methods to reduce senescence!

Where did I give a false dilemma? Did I say that we cannot do research on senescence at all, or that cosmetics is something that we should spend as much money as we do on?

Though off-topic, as much as continued usage of fossil fuels is undesirable, the above is a bit too much hyperbole, as even the worse-case sea level rise harming some coastal cities wouldn't destroy civilization.

You are a stupid cunt. A rising average temperature by the magnitude predicted can be expected to cause severe disruptions of agricultural yields and ranges, cause species extinctions, worsening severity of severe weather like hurricanes and tornadoes, and other nastiness I find too depressing to list. Other civilizations have been plunged into dark ages for similar causes. We best not take this lightly.

Deal with it. More pressing problems need our attention than your ability to play with your prick an extra 200 years.

Again the false dilemma.

Who's posing one? I know perfectly well that we can divide our efforts. We already have work being done on the aging process, given how far our understanding of it has advanced in twenty years.

It all has the same goal: the maintenance and restoration of health.

The most correct way of presenting this to the public is, as always, with the unvarnished truth. Liken the human body to a car tha is only designed to last so long before things start breaking down, one after another. Anyone who's owned a car for long will know exactly what you're talking about. Keeping such a car going "forever" is going to be damned hard.

Certainly reducing senescence is challenging, but it is not inconceivable that humans may one day live as long as the longest-lived animals or longer.[/quote]

We already live longer than most animals. And personally, I don't want to live like a tortise.


Onto Nate_A:

Obviously, a short happy life is better than a long miserable life. My point is that things would have to get very bad before resources become more important than years.

No, dearheart. The problem of global warming is an immediate problem, dispite what the Bush Administration says. We really need to do something about it now, and by "now" I mean within the next five to ten years, or we will be in a very, very sorry state in as little as a century. That problem, in turn, is linked intimately with fossil fuels, the very resource that has enabled the high standard of living in the developed world in the first place. Global climatic change will not be pretty.

And don't even get me started on peak oil.

Otherwise we would kill our seniors instead of giving them money.

I don't see where you get that false dichotomy, moron. If we don't spend even one more red cent on aging research, then senior citizens are no worse off than before.

Well, like I said: hope. But Winston Blake was talking about three hundred years in the future. I think that leaves a little room for imagination.

True, but that doesn't give us licence for unbridled speculation, especially if we're planning to spend real green on it.

That's why one probe is sent that can reproduce using energy from the sun and material from asteroids. Do you really think any of this will be impossible with twenty-second century tech?

Yeah, just like those flying cars we now have that sci-fi writers in the 50's predicted we would have, but still using slide rules... oops! No flying cars and slide rules replaced with nifty and much more capable computers! Speculating about the future of science and technology is not precise. I wouldn't count on having any particular replication technology.

First things first, Nate. Before potentially ballooning the population of humanity threefold, which means on average, everyone sees a 2/3 drop in the availible resources, let's make sure we can access the riches of space properly.

How is the population going to get that big? I threw out a few "for the sake of argument" examples; but I don't think life extention research is going to cause population problems.

Then you're a moron. Unless you balance life extension with some means of restricting birthrate, life extension will cause population to balloon, for the same reason that a longer conveyor belt can hold more toys. Such birthrate control can occur naturally, by societal controls, or through the cold forces of Mother Nature, but if your population is not increasing although your lifespan is, then something's keeping populations under control.

Life extension only works to make people happier overall if we also properly exploit space (because only then can we bring the kingly life to all without making hash of our Earth). However, proper exploitation of space does not seem to require life extension to make people happier overall. I know which of these my money is on.

If that's true, then, obviously, we should work on both life extention and space exploitation.

We're underspending space exploration. We are not underspending life extension.

But eliminating aging - or other diseases - statistically favors a swift death, such as in accidents.

Conceeded. If you had a magic wand that eliminates aging, then lingering deaths do indeed go down.

As for aging, you're pretending that we actually can eliminate it altogether. Human beings (and indeed, animals in general) are victims of planned obsolescence; humans only regularly started living past 40-50 y within the last two centuries. As a result, we evolved such that our systems put a lot of load on us during our early years, because we could only expect to live to 10 y anyway (more often than not, something else would come along and kill us). Now that we've eliminated most of those things that claim us early, the design compromises that have evolved into us show up as aging.

It's not that death is one entity that sweeps down and harvests us. We're simply not built to last forever.

If we have to rebuild every cell in the body from the ground up, we can.

Prove that you can rebuild every cell in the body from the ground up. Even cells themselves don't rebuild themselves from the ground up; more often, they die and get replaced.

It's only a matter of sufficiently advanced technology.

Yes, it is. And I could seduce every woman in the world with a sufficiently advanced technologically enhanced dick. That doesn't mean the human being can build the Superdick.

I know we can do it, because our own bodies do it ( they just don't do it very well after we get old ).

No, they don't. Rebuilding tissue means killing off damaged cells and replacing them with cells spawned off stem cells. Those stem cells can only divide a limited number of times, because of their shortening telemeres. Eventually, they can't divide anymore, and as you get older fewer stem cells are availible.

The relevant text:

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.

It appears he is saying that life extention sould not be a goal "at all". So I gave him the benefit of a doubt by assuming he was only referring to marketing. What you said doesn't apply.

Conceeded.

Of course everyone is aware of the elephant. They just don't like to talk about it. They "tolerate" it. In fact, they tolerate it to such an extent that amost no money goes into any of the projects you mentioned. That is why it is important ( and why would it be "holier than thou" even if it wasn't? ) to remind people that it is barbaric and should not be tolerated.

"Tollerate"? Who the fuck tollerates loved ones dying? WHO?! No, we cope with dying and grieve our losses and finally move on with or lives, but we don't for a second believe that anyone thinks that such loss is to be "tollerated". And this is Mr. Conductor speaking; I know what it feels like to lose loved ones!

"Barbaric"? How is it barbaric to release someone from pain, at that person's request, that the would otherwise have to endure for months on end only to die anyway? What makes you think that anyone wants their loved ones to suffer? Yes, if the patient wants to fight to the bitter end, that's her choice, but if she wants release from unbearable pain caused by terminal illness after an otherwise satisfying life, then barbarism is forcing her to endure that pain.

If we "tollerate" the "barbarism" of being unable to cure death, then why the fuck are medical researchers studying the effects of aging in the first place, if not to improve the lot of people of the old? We know more about the aging process now than we did just twenty years ago. This is knowledge that will be useful, if we could only figure out how to apply it. The tone the website takes may not be quite "holier-than-thou", but it's damn patronizing.

WEBSITE: "We need to defeat aging!! It kills scores of people every day!"

MEDICAL FIELD: "Yes! Thank you, Captain Obvious!"

That's going to take money, and more importantly, time. Studies don't materialize instantly no matter how much money you throw at them, especially when getting old is the subject you are bringing under study; by its very nature, studies like this would require a lot of waiting around.

And I would like to stress again, human aging is not our most pressing issue. We need to keep our priorities straight and not lose more important things in pursuit of curing aging.

Deal with it. More pressing problems need our attention than your ability to play with your prick an extra 200 years.

They're are a million pressing issues, and each one needs to be researched, and that research needs to be fuded,

In accordance with its priority. I think it will take a long time for extended lifespan research to pan out, if it ever does. That makes it relatively low priority. On the other hand, human society, the greatest thing to happen to humans since its evolution, is facing an immediate, tough change that may destroy it completely if we fuck it up. This makes it a much higher priority. We're talking about people having a future at all, even if it's short.

and that funding can be obtained by raising consciousness with videos on youtube and that is what started this thread! Now, do you have a point other than We have other problems, therefore it's silly to try to solve this one?

Don't strawman me, fucktard. Yes, let's spend an appropriate amount of money on it, but let's not spend so much to drain that money from other, more worthwhile causes, causes more likely to create better quality of life in this world. Like reducing poverty, violence, and getting a grip on our technology. These are areas that we need to get right, and will probably do far more to create happiness in this world than life extension.

Everyone already thinks that nothing can be done about aging.

Since when? We've seen substantial lengthening of life in living memory. in 1950, average life expectancy was five years shorter, and my grandparents couldn't remember their own grandparents.

So, if we want to get funding for life extention we need to offer hope that something can be done. And there is hope.

There is hope that we will make great advances to stave of old age and death, but you will likely never see it. The problem is that Winston Blake was railing against a website that seemed to promise the total death of Death itself soon, in time for the investors to see benefit. That's not hope. That's deluded wankage.

It's incomprehensible to me that, no matter how advanced technology gets, it will be remain impossible to keep a human body fuctioning forever.

It is impossible, even in principle. Eventually, heat death, the big crunch or the big rip will extinguish all life in this universe. Even if you're talking about 'practically forever', something will get us sooner or later, and the most likely cause of your long-delayed death will probably be one very cures that extend our life, though being in the wrong place at the wrong time will aways cull us.

[Sikon]

I prefer a lifetime of 80 y to 20 only if I can expect a reasonable quality of life during those eighty years. It's more than just being alive. It's also living.

The amount of suffering needed for a life expectancy of 20 years to be better than 80 years is astronomical, not any likely situation. Having much longer lifespan with reduced senescence is extremely desirable. For you to argue that negative effects would overwhelm the benefits is an extreme claim, much as if you were trying to argue against cancer research.

If lifespan is much increased, the benefits are so obvious that the logical burden of proof rests upon those trying to claim it would be undesirable.

You do realize that just getting into space requires an enormous amount of energy, do you not? The vast riches of the solar system will remain unaccessible while we're stuck at the bottom of this damnible potential energy well.

As I pointed out in this thread:

Energy/fuel costs are not the problem, not 1% of launch costs. Propellant is mostly liquid oxygen costing cents per pound. The electrical energy equivalent at $0.05/kw-hr of sending an object to orbit is $0.20 per pound before inefficiencies. Space Shuttle launch costs are a hundred thousand times greater: $26000+ per pound of payload.

When I said that getting into space requires an enormous amount of energy, I was calculating the whole cost of lifting you free of earth's gravity, not just paying off its gravitational potential energy. You also have to pay a toll for gravitational drag, and atmospheric drag, as well as carry along your life support. Non-human payloads can get away with less support, but not necessarily with less lift time. When you get out to the moon, you're still talking about energies comparable to a small atom bomb for a small manned vessel.

Escape velocity of 11.2 km/s is 0.06 GJ per kg of kinetic energy. Even 12 km/s total delta v is enough to go from earth's surface to lunar orbit within days. There are also inefficiencies with a launch system. However, such is still not that astronomical compared to my earlier illustration of a long airline flight using up to around 17 GJ per passenger. A mass driver can be between 30% and 90% efficient.

Launch vehicles have low efficiencies, primarily because only a few percent of total original mass is payload, but the the energy involved is still not astronomical.

Let's illustrate for an actual rocket design after all inefficiencies / losses. A rare launch vehicle design using only a single propellant combination, the Rombus is easy to analyze (ref.,ref., & ref.). That giant rocket would have used 5511 metric tons of LOX/LH2 at a 7:1 mixture ratio. For this future scenario, suppose the hydrogen is made by electrolysis of water. That is relatively energy-intensive. Even so, even after inefficiencies, the total electrical energy required to produce the 689 metric tons of LH2 would not be more than double the 0.14 GJ per kg energy content. No more than 190 TJ is thus enough to produce the LH2 to launch the 450 metric-ton payload to LEO. The energy involved in producing the liquid oxygen is much less. An upper limit is 0.5 GJ of electricity producing the propellant used to launch each kilogram of LEO payload.

As an illustration, at that rate, the electricity producing enough propellant to launch the 400 metric ton final mass of the International Space Station (ISS) would be 200 TJ, 5.6E7 kilowatt-hours. Some nuclear reactor designs cost as little as $1000 per kilowatt. Each billion dollars of nuclear power plant capital cost can produce up to around 4.4E10 kilowatt-hours of electricity over a 5-year period. Such would be like producing the rocket propellant needed to launch 800,000 times the mass of the ISS for $100 billion.

That would be 300 million tons!

Yet the ISS is estimated to mass 400 metric-tons and cost $100+ billion upon completion. That illustrates what I keep saying about the current problem being costs too many orders of magnitude beyond necessary energy costs.

Observe the preceding is based on a real rocket design, after all atmospheric drag losses, all gravity losses, etc. Even if one looked at almost any other launch vehicle design, the overall picture wouldn't change. The problem is not fuel costs but rather other costs.

The "hard part" is getting enough equipment into LEO. Once in earth orbit, solar or nuclear powered interorbital transfer vehicles can help transfer equipment to higher orbits or to trajectories through interplanetary space.

In practice, far less than 300 million metric tons of equipment could be enough to start a space civilization. Indeed, even a NASA study for building a 10 million-ton initial large spacestation only involved the launch of 0.2 to 0.3 million tons (ref.). Between hundreds of thousands of tons and a few million tons of initial equipment could work. Use of extraterrestrial materials results in an enormous potential mass payback. For example, here is a relevant quote from one analysis:

The cost to launch payload into LEO from Earth can be reduced by the payback factor. The lunar ice/nuclear heated steam rocket architecture has the unique potential to provide high payback. Estimates suggest 20 to 100 tons of mass for this architecture, launched from earth, would be able to return 14,000 tons per year, and 140,000 tons of mass to LEO during the operational lifetime (reference 3,4). Thus, a mass payback of approximately 1000 times the launched mass appears to be possible. This is equivalent to orders of magnitude drop in the cost of rocket propellant and mass in space.

So what is the point of all of the preceding discussion?

The energy involved in getting out of earth's gravity well does not prevent space colonization. A mass driver system could consume even much less energy than the preceding rocket example. Actually, its main potential advantage is not in energy but in cost.

And I don't remember saying anything about monitary cost.

You didn't. But excessive monetary cost of current launch vehicles and space hardware is the problem, not fuel/energy use, as my preceding discussion with the ISS example illustrates.

A very small fraction of world power production powering mass drivers could put a lot of equipment into orbit. The reason space is expensive today is not due to fuel/energy costs but due to launch vehicles having economic performance around the equivalent of throwing away a 747 after one flight.

It would... if we weren't for the small fact that we're living at the bottom of a really thick atmosphere that would rob the projectile of most of its velocity long before it got into space. Plus the small fact that such a projectile would be subjected to significant thermal stresses.

The mass-driver trick only works on bodies with at most thin atmospheres (best none). Earth isn't one of them.

No. Here is one random example of ablative and velocity losses for a suitable terrestrial mass driver projectile, in this case for one reaching escape velocity:

The theory of ablation in a dense atmosphere had received recent attention in connection with the outer planet probe program, and two members of the Ames team applied the resulting software to the problem of the Earth launcher: Chul Park and Stuart Bowen. They found, much to everybody's surprise, that an Earth-launched vehicle [projectile] would not have to be prohibitively large to survive: a vehicle the size and shape of a telephone pole could be launched out of the Solar System with a loss of only about 3% of its mass, and 20% of its energy to the atmosphere.
[...]
A reference design telephone pole launcher would have the specifications shown below.

Vehicle: Telephone Pole Shaped, Mass of 1,000 kg
Launch Velocity: 12.3 km/s
Velocity at Top of Atmosphere: 11 km/s (escape velocity)
Kinetic Energy at Launch: 76 x 109 joule
Ablation Loss, Carbon Shield: 3% of mass
Energy Loss: 20%
[...]
Charging Time From 1,000 MW Power Plant: 1.5 minute
[...]
The energy cost of the launch would only be about 65 cents per pound, but amortization of capital would add 10 to 20 dollars per pound, even if the launcher were used continuously, day and night, every 12 minutes.

Source

In most mass-driver studies, projectiles would have small rocket engines onboard for the final small delta-v needed to put themselves into the appropriate orbit and to meet a collector. However, such could be a small cheap low-performance rocket engine as it needs to provide very little delta-v. The difference is not quite that between a $10 model rocket engine and a $1 billion Space Shuttle launch, but it is very major.

If you are talking about oil, peak oil is probably going to happen long before life extension much increases population, as I implied above, so oil is going to be depleted anyway. As for other resources, there are billions of tons of uranium extractable from seawater for energy (nuclear), trillions of tons of iron and other key metals in the earth's crust, etc. As I pointed out before, people suffer today not from "overpopulation" but rather from violence, poverty, and improper technology usage. That is what matters; people were not richer when the world's population was a tenth of what it is today, rather far worse off. A nation would have to be relatively stable and prosperous to provide life extension to its citizens anyway.

I know all that, moron. Sure, one of the problems facing us is poverty, violence, ect., but what you miss is that every one of these problems is aggravated by overpopulation. You have failed to miss the big point; every environment can only bear a finite number of people. Otherwise, it becomes overstressed and collapses. That's Ecology 101, and it's true whether or not you have outside resources coming in.

No future nation would manage to provide advanced medical care like life extension to its population without having as much prosperity as the developed countries of today, more likely more. That allows a good quality of life even if population density is a little higher than presently "overpopulated" places like Africa. Indeed, for example, Japan has a population density of 300 to 500 persons per square kilometer (million square meters) compared to 0 to 50 in Africa.

The level of population increase occuring within the first century after life extension research eventually succeeded could still keep overall world population densities much less. Indeed, for example, if it was 10 to 20 billion people, that would be an average future (22nd century?) population density of 60 to 130 people per square kilometer of world land area. Such is less than that of most European countries today as shown here.

For a prosperous future civilization, that is not an extreme amount. Here is a relevant quote from one of my earlier posts:

As for food, if there ever was an actual overall shortage of cropland available, a NASA space station study here estimated that the right techniques can make only 49 square meters of food production area needed per person. Aside from the 24-hour sunlight, all factors involved in that production density could readily be reproduced in greenhouses on earth if the moderate extra expense was really worthwhile. To put that in perspective, even at a quarter of that production density, only four thousandths of earth's 5.1E14 square meter surface area would be enough to produce food for 10 billion people.

I also pointed out the almost unlimited resources of space:

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.

Finally, I pointed out that population wouldn't even increase a huge amount necessarily, as what really matters in the long-term is the number of births per woman, above or below the replacement rate:

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.

Preventing research increasing life expectancies beyond 80 years would be no more a solution to the issues blamed on overpopulation than trying to prevent other people from living beyond 40 years.

Compared to the trillions of dollars presently wasted every decade, putting some money into research on reducing senescence wouldn't be squandering resources.

I'd rather have no waste at all, personally. I'm all for working to reduce the ravages of old age, but let's get our priorities in order here. Let's ensure that human civilization on earth has a future, before we worry too much about giving everyone as much time as possible to live in it.

See the above and my earlier discussion of "overpopulation" in this thread.

Space settlement is extremely desirable, but this is not an either/or situation. Working on both space and life extension is best.

See my reply. It's all about priorities.

Let's get more specific.

Do you think funding specifically targeted on finding and testing methods to reduce senescence should be increased, kept the same, or decreased?

Most health care costs are from those afflicted with senescence. You do not seem to have read this thread fully. In earlier posts, I showed how major life extension would reduce the senescence-afflicted fraction of a person's total lifespan.

Bullshit. The 90% end-of-life costs get incurred because your health is rapidly going downhill. The healthier you are, the easier it is to maintain that health. But at the end of life, health problems start compounding as you get increasingly debilitated, each complication aggravating another. A prolonged period of immobility can lead to bedsores, which can in turn lead to a slew of complications that can lead to renal failure and death, and deep pressure sores can take a long time to heal, if they ever do. More immobility also leads to reduced appetite, which causes its own set of problems, and muscle and joint stiffness, which (again) has it's own galaxy of complications.

The more things wrong with you, the more likely it is for other problems to crop up. Each new problem requires more care to control, but each new problem can trigger even more problems later on.

Ironically, though your figure of 90% costs in the final 6 months isn't accurate, it would still give the right conclusion that life extension can reduce health care costs as a portion of the total economy. It allows the ratio of unhealthy people to the healthy workforce to be less. For example, if a person consumes X amount of health care during his final 6 months of life, the average annual cost from such would be X / (2 * 200) if he lived for 200 years, much less than the X / (2 * 80) if he lived for 80 years.

Out of approximately $2 trillion total annual U.S. health care costs, it is not the case that 90% are spent treating people in their final 6 months of life and only $200 billion is spent on all other health care. What is the case is that senescence-afflicted people consume more health care costs. The average health care cost per capita is $7000 despite many young people like me who consume under hundreds of dollars a year. That is because there are many people consuming tens of thousands of dollars a year. The bulk of those people are the senescence-afflicted elderly who need much care and often have multiple health problems. In a hypothetical world where senescence was drastically reduced, many of those people would no longer be in nursing homes and hospitals. In the nestled quotes above, you state my discussion of the effect of senescence on health care costs is "bullshit," but it is correct.

But end of life comes to everyone, even if the whole of your life is long.

As for aging, you're pretending that we actually can eliminate it altogether.

Obtaining negligible senescence is uncertain, but any substantial reduction in senescence would be of great benefit regardless.

This is not what's being sold.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, there are some particular species of whales, turtles, urchins, and rockfish that can live around two centuries.

So what? Their bodies are built for a longer design lifetimes, but that doesn't mean that their bodies aren't collection of design compromises the same as we are.

Techniques gained from studying them are among the potential methods for decreasing senescence and making humans live much more than the 70 to 80 year life expectancies of developed countries today.

There's no guarantee that the reasons why those creatures live longer than us will apply to us. At least, without some cost. They live that long because their entire bodies have evolved as such; we have no such advantage.

Some species show almost undetectable rates of senescence, and obtaining negligible senescence is not scientifically impossible (not against physical laws). There is hope that sufficiently advanced future technology might obtain it. Genetic engineering, gene therapy, cell replacement, nanorobots (far future), and other techniques are all worth investigating.

Even if negligible senescence is not obtained, any major reduction in senescence is beneficial.

Potential benefits are so astronomical that there is no need for guaranteed success within a particular timeframe for more research to be worthwhile.

Correction, each extra decade of healthy life, and it will not come without a certain cost.

Nobody would live for centuries unhealthy and heavily senescence-afflicted, as the rate of senescence-related diseases would be lethal before then in that case. If people are much afflicted with senescence, like 65+ year-olds today, the rate of senescence-afflicted diseases kills usually within 1 or 2 decades. For example, not 1% of people today survive longer than 2 or 3 decades beyond age 65. The one way in which major life extension is possible is by reducing senescence, by increasing the healthy lifespan, in the process decreasing the fraction of the population in nursing homes.

Cancer isn't wholey a function of senescence. Otherwise, why do we have childhood cancers?

More than 99% of cancer deaths occur to people over 50 (ref.). That is close enough to 100% to illustrate that cancer is one of various diseases primarily indirectly resulting from senescence. Senescence indirectly kills people by greatly increasing the rate of cancer and other senescence-related diseases, while deteriorating the body. For example, if a 100-year-old is cured of cancer, he unfortunately does not have even a 1% chance of surviving 10 more years before dying from another senescence-related disease.

Meanwhile, we have all of these more pressing issues that almost certainly need more immediate and urgent attention, such as global warming. Global warming is something that has the potential of crippling and even destroying human civilization... and good luck reaching 30 under such conditions.

That is a false dilemma. Orders of magnitude more money is spent on cosmetics than on research directly focused on methods to reduce senescence!

Where did I give a false dilemma? Did I say that we cannot do research on senescence at all, or that cosmetics is something that we should spend as much money as we do on?

In the context of your post (see nestled quotes above), the average reader would judge you were suggesting life extension research would be undesirable by excessively diverting efforts from global warming and other issues.

If you support research on methods to reduce senescence and recognize that having a good number of doctors work on it doesn't harm nuclear power plant construction or other global warming countermeasures, you can say so.

Though off-topic, as much as continued usage of fossil fuels is undesirable, the above is a bit too much hyperbole, as even the worse-case sea level rise harming some coastal cities wouldn't destroy civilization.

Anyway, countermeasures to global warming would not be helped by failing to research life extension.

You are a stupid cunt. A rising average temperature by the magnitude predicted can be expected to cause severe disruptions of agricultural yields and ranges, cause species extinctions, worsening severity of severe weather like hurricanes and tornadoes, and other nastiness I find too depressing to list. Other civilizations have been plunged into dark ages for similar causes. We best not take this lightly.

As much as global warming is undesirable, one's position against it is strengthened by not engaging in unreasonable hyperbole. When you talk about global warming potentially "destroying human civilization," then give "worsening severity of severe weather like hurricanes and tornadoes" as one of the main causes potentially making it difficult for people to reach age "30 under such conditions," you weaken your arguments with unnecessary exaggeration.

Species extinctions are undesirable but because of the biodiversity loss in itself, not because one really expects such to make mankind extinct or otherwise destroy civilization. On agriculture, an effect of major global warming would be causing temperate regions to become more tropical, while making arctic regions be more temperate. If an effect was wheat being grown in northern Canada and Brazilian sugarcane being grown in the southern U.S., the ecological changes are again undesirable but not accurate to describe as "destroying human civilization." It doesn't help the case against global warming to use hyperbole that many people can easily realize is inaccurate. There are better, more convincing arguments about why global warming and continued fossil fuel use is undesirable.

As mentioned before, life extension research does not harm global warming countermeasures anyway. Indeed, part of the irony of your arguments is that actually extended lifespan might make people care more about long-term environmental issues.

Deal with it. More pressing problems need our attention than your ability to play with your prick an extra 200 years.

Again the false dilemma.

Who's posing one? I know perfectly well that we can divide our efforts. We already have work being done on the aging process, given how far our understanding of it has advanced in twenty years.

It all has the same goal: the maintenance and restoration of health.

Your statement shown in the nestled quotes above did not demonstrate support for life extension research, and the average reader would judge it was suggesting that such would harm efforts on "more pressing problems."

There is very limited funding presently. For example, the Methuselah Mouse Prize for experiments extending mouse lifespan is perhaps the most famous effort, but its funding right now is several million dollars, literally not a millionth as much as the many trillions of dollars of other medical and health care related spending each decade.

Certainly reducing senescence is challenging, but it is not inconceivable that humans may one day live as long as the longest-lived animals or longer.

We already live longer than most animals. And personally, I don't want to live like a tortise.

There is not some particular limit to future technology prohibiting people from living as long as the 211-year maximum longevity estimated for one other mammal: Balaena mysticetus, the bowhead whale (ref.).

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

The problem that needs to be argued against is not excessive funding for research against senescence but rather too little. There is little to lose and much to potentially gain by a more appropriate increased level of funding. Curing or drastically reducing senescence should become as much a national research goal as curing cancer. Even just 0.01% of world GDP, a few billion dollars, would be vastly beyond current efforts on methods to reduce senescence. There is no dilemma between either countering global warming or researching life extension, as both can be done.

Progress doesn't occur by only looking for problems instead of solutions. People aren't going to look back at this century in a thousand years and lament the "waste" if 0.01% of GDP was spent on research against senescence. Yet funding the proper research might lead to one of the greatest accomplishments in human history, a lot better than a huge fraction of the population still being in nursing homes centuries from now.

Longer, healthy lives with less senescence is automatically desirable. Nobody has the right to try to prevent it based upon incorrect assumptions about "overpopulation" costs exceeding the enormous benefit, a potential benefit far greater than even curing cancer.

[Sikon]

EDIT:

I noticed a minor correction to make.

This has a couple extra zeros in the wrong places:

As an illustration, at that rate, the electricity producing enough propellant to launch the 400 metric ton final mass of the International Space Station (ISS) would be 200 TJ, 5.6E7 kilowatt-hours. Some nuclear reactor designs cost as little as $1000 per kilowatt. Each billion dollars of nuclear power plant capital cost can produce up to around 4.4E10 kilowatt-hours of electricity over a 5-year period. Such would be like producing the rocket propellant needed to launch 800,000 times the mass of the ISS for $100 billion.

That would be 300 million tons!

It should be instead:

As an illustration, at that rate, the electricity producing enough propellant to launch the 400 metric ton final mass of the International Space Station (ISS) would be 200 TJ, 5.6E7 kilowatt-hours. Some nuclear reactor designs cost as little as $1000 per kilowatt. Each billion dollars of nuclear power plant capital cost can produce up to around 4.4E10 kilowatt-hours of electricity over a 5-year period. Such would be like producing the rocket propellant needed to launch 80,000 times the mass of the ISS for $100 billion.

That would be 30 million tons!

The above doesn't really matter at all for my point about expansion into space if population increase is preferred, but it is still better for each figure to be correct.

[Nate_A]

Obviously, a short happy life is better than a long miserable life. My point is that things would have to get very bad before resources become more important than years.

No, dearheart. The problem of global warming is an immediate problem, dispite what the Bush Administration says. We really need to do something about it now, and by "now" I mean within the next five to ten years, or we will be in a very, very sorry state in as little as a century. That problem, in turn, is linked intimately with fossil fuels, the very resource that has enabled the high standard of living in the developed world in the first place. Global climatic change will not be pretty.

And don't even get me started on peak oil.

I don’t know what global warming has to do with this. My only purpose in bringing this up was to point out that if we can eliminate aging, then we should, regardless of the affects on population. Did I not make myself clear, or do you actually disagree with that statement?

Otherwise we would kill our seniors instead of giving them money.

I don't see where you get that false dichotomy, moron. If we don't spend even one more red cent on aging research, then senior citizens are no worse off than before.

My point was that if it weren't worth extra resources to keep old people alive, then we shouldn't give hand-outs to old people who can no longer support themselves. I don't know where I got the "kill" from. I concede that.

Well, like I said: hope. But Winston Blake was talking about three hundred years in the future. I think that leaves a little room for imagination.

True, but that doesn't give us licence for unbridled speculation, especially if we're planning to spend real green on it.

How much green? Much of your post seems to be based on the assumption that I advocate massive spending on life extension technology. Is this in response to the fable of the dragon?

That's why one probe is sent that can reproduce using energy from the sun and material from asteroids. Do you really think any of this will be impossible with twenty-second century tech?

Yeah, just like those flying cars we now have that sci-fi writers in the 50's predicted we would have, but still using slide rules... oops! No flying cars and slide rules replaced with nifty and much more capable computers! Speculating about the future of science and technology is not precise. I wouldn't count on having any particular replication technology.

I'm not counting on it; but I do think it's probable.

How is the population going to get that big? I threw out a few "for the sake of argument" examples; but I don't think life extension research is going to cause population problems.

Then you're a moron. Unless you balance life extension with some means of restricting birthrate, life extension will cause population to balloon, for the same reason that a longer conveyor belt can hold more toys. Such birthrate control can occur naturally, by societal controls, or through the cold forces of Mother Nature, but if your population is not increasing although your lifespan is, then something's keeping populations under control.

If significant life extension is not achieved, it will not impact population; and, if it is achieved, then it will be worth it. Hopefully technology will keep pace with increasing population, as it has in the past. If population exceeds our ability to support ( and that could happen with or without life extension ) we will need to find a solution – hopefully one that does not involve shortening peoples lives. Honestly, I don’t think any of this has much to do with life extension.

We're underspending space exploration. We are not underspending life extension.

How do you figure that?

Prove that you can rebuild every cell in the body from the ground up. Even cells themselves don't rebuild themselves from the ground up; more often, they die and get replaced.

All of the materials in your body were produced by something. Which proves that it is possible to produce those materials.

It's only a matter of sufficiently advanced technology.

Yes, it is. And I could seduce every woman in the world with a sufficiently advanced technologically enhanced dick. That doesn't mean the human being can build the Superdick.

Well, actually, it does. Don’t think that you can disprove the principle by creating a sufficiently silly example. If you say that it is possible, then, in my mind, you admit that is only a matter of time before we figure out how to do it.

I know we can do it, because our own bodies do it ( they just don't do it very well after we get old ).

No, they don't. Rebuilding tissue means killing off damaged cells and replacing them with cells spawned off stem cells. Those stem cells can only divide a limited number of times, because of their shortening telemeres. Eventually, they can't divide anymore, and as you get older fewer stem cells are availible.

Yes, but, for a time, those cells produced and organized all of the proteins needed to keep the body running. If this can be done by evolved organisms, then surely it can be done by intelligently designed machines.

Of course everyone is aware of the elephant. They just don't like to talk about it. They "tolerate" it. In fact, they tolerate it to such an extent that almost no money goes into any of the projects you mentioned. That is why it is important ( and why would it be "holier than thou" even if it wasn't? ) to remind people that it is barbaric and should not be tolerated.

"Tollerate"? Who the fuck tollerates loved ones dying? WHO?! No, we cope with dying and grieve our losses and finally move on with or lives, but we don't for a second believe that anyone thinks that such loss is to be "tollerated". And this is Mr. Conductor speaking; I know what it feels like to lose loved ones!

Believe it or not, there actually are people who view aging and death as some beautiful, circle-of-life thing. And many would find the idea of super-long life spans frightening ( My sister, for example ). And the rest tend to keep quiet about the issue. In this atmosphere, it is perfectly appropriate to point out the obvious.

"Barbaric"? How is it barbaric to release someone from pain, at that person's request, that the would otherwise have to endure for months on end only to die anyway? What makes you think that anyone wants their loved ones to suffer? Yes, if the patient wants to fight to the bitter end, that's her choice, but if she wants release from unbearable pain caused by terminal illness after an otherwise satisfying life, then barbarism is forcing her to endure that pain.

I'm talking about aging, not death. Death can be good. Aging never is.

If we "tollerate" the "barbarism" of being unable to cure death, then why the fuck are medical researchers studying the effects of aging in the first place, if not to improve the lot of people of the old? We know more about the aging process now than we did just twenty years ago. This is knowledge that will be useful, if we could only figure out how to apply it.

I am quite thankful for the progress made in this field. And I wish to see this progress continue, and accelerate, in the future. This can be best achieved, not by pouring money into it, but by raising interest in the field. Which I took to be the purpose of the video ( if not the Fable ).

The tone the website takes may not be quite "holier-than-thou", but it's damn patronizing.

I think this is the main disconnect. Where you thought: “Duh, I already new that!”, I thought: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying!” Fascinating, I wonder if Winston Blake was thinking the same thing.

WEBSITE: "We need to defeat aging!! It kills scores of people every day!"

MEDICAL FIELD: "Yes! Thank you, Captain Obvious!"

Thousands of people, if you’ll pardon the nitpick.

That's going to take money, and more importantly, time. Studies don't materialize instantly no matter how much money you throw at them, especially when getting old is the subject you are bringing under study; by its very nature, studies like this would require a lot of waiting around.

And I would like to stress again, human aging is not our most pressing issue. We need to keep our priorities straight and not lose more important things in pursuit of curing aging.

Human aging is, right now, threatening to kill everyone. I’d say that is one of the most pressing issues we face. The only excuse for not exerting enormous energies in fighting aging is the fact that, as you say, we have no way of doing so. This is a good excuse; but still, what we can do, we should.

There are a million pressing issues, and each one needs to be researched, and that research needs to be funded,

In accordance with its priority. I think it will take a long time for extended lifespan research to pan out, if it ever does. That makes it relatively low priority. On the other hand, human society, the greatest thing to happen to humans since its evolution, is facing an immediate, tough change that may destroy it completely if we fuck it up. This makes it a much higher priority. We're talking about people having a future at all, even if it's short.

Agreed, many things should get higher priority than aging ( Potential payoff must be tempered by probability of payoff. ). I never said anything to the contrary.

and that funding can be obtained by raising consciousness with videos on youtube and that is what started this thread! Now, do you have a point other than We have other problems, therefore it's silly to try to solve this one?

Don't strawman me, fucktard.

Sorry about that; but I really didn't see what your point was. I think I have a better idea now.

Yes, let's spend an appropriate amount of money on it, but let's not spend so much to drain that money from other, more worthwhile causes, causes more likely to create better quality of life in this world. Like reducing poverty, violence, and getting a grip on our technology. These are areas that we need to get right, and will probably do far more to create happiness in this world than life extension.

How much is appropriate is an interesting question; and one very difficult to answer. I don't see why you are so confident that "we are not underspending life extension."

Everyone already thinks that nothing can be done about aging.

Since when? We've seen substantial lengthening of life in living memory. in 1950, average life expectancy was five years shorter, and my grandparents couldn't remember their own grandparents.

I was referring to the popular attitude toward aging – not statistics.

So, if we want to get funding for life extension we need to offer hope that something can be done. And there is hope.

There is hope that we will make great advances to stave of old age and death, but you will likely never see it. The problem is that Winston Blake was railing against a website that seemed to promise the total death of Death itself soon, in time for the investors to see benefit. That's not hope. That's deluded wankage.

No, Winston Blake’s fable implied that life extension was a pointless, even depressing, endeavor – even if life span could be quadrupled. ( That is how it comes across regardless of what his intentions were. ) I now understand that it was about death rate, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the plausibility of life extension either.

And how do you know that it’s deluded. You yourself pointed out the unreliable nature of predicting future technological advances. We don’t know whether it will take fifty years or a thousand years – or even which one is more probable. With such enormous uncertainty, we need to take each possibility seriously.

It's incomprehensible to me that, no matter how advanced technology gets, it will be remain impossible to keep a human body functioning forever.

It is impossible, even in principle. Eventually, heat death, the big crunch or the big rip will extinguish all life in this universe. Even if you're talking about 'practically forever', something will get us sooner or later, and the most likely cause of your long-delayed death will probably be one very cures that extend our life, though being in the wrong place at the wrong time will aways cull us.

Damn, I meant to say “indefinitely”. Conceded.