I loved the annoying app installation prompt, the irrelevant stock ticker, and the survey nag that pushed the actual article title down below 85% of the page.
I also loved only being allowed to read the first five sentences of this article because I have not sent money to this website.
Why are people allowed to link to paywall sites on HN? How is this different from linking directly to someone’s patreon or PayPal donation page, with a clickbait title to get them there?
I demand that all WSJ links are banned from HN immediately along with the accounts that shared them. People need to learn not to do this.
DNA has a half life of 521 years. Even if a human could be maintained at a biological age of ~30 indefinitely, would the natural decay of his DNA not kill him in the long term?
It depends; if you could hypothetically buy yourself a few hundred years, that might be long enough for other techniques to preserve consciousness. Brain state backups, say. Not saying that will happen, but it's not inconceivable.
Not on its own, but it would be the final piece in living effectively forever, since it could protect against accidents that would eventually take out even people who never aged or got sick.
Unless you mean that a copy of your brain would not longer be 'you'. In that case I just disagree. We don't know the level of fidelity required, but it seems extremely likely to me that if my brain were copied to a sufficient level of precision, whatever that level might be, the copy would continue my subjective experience.
> the copy would continue my subjective experience.
it may, but it wouldn't be "you". "You"'d experience death, and something else will exist independent of "you", but with most of the same features and memories.
I agree with this - but Altered Carbon had this interesting couple scenes where more than one copy of a dude exists. What’s “you” in that event? If we can guarantee teamwork of the clones, we have a new status symbol - else we have created some severe ego/identity problems.
Yeah I agree with this. As soon as two copies of you exist, your life experiences immediately diverge, and I wouldn’t say you could reasonably be considered the same person.
I also think that copying your conscious state from one body to another creates a new person in any case. Everybody except you (including the copy) may consider the new person to be exactly the same as you, but you will now be dead.
Somewhat tongue in cheek, but the point remains. What leads you to believe this? As another reply touches on, there's a straightforward way to verify whether that is the case (for oneself, and not an external observer): Given a perfect clone, uploaded copy, etc, are you as aware of the clone's experience as you are of your own?
If the answer is no, why would that change if the original ceases to exist?
If the answer is yes, the first thing I'd want to know is _how_ exactly the information (of awareness) is possibly synchronized between hosts (presumably in realtime, at that!).
I think we have different perspective on this than you. To me, having my clone doesn't make it "me", no matter how perfect copy he would be. Him having joy doesn't make me having joy.
Same with kids - they are basically our clones with genes mixed from both parents. They go on their own path and experiences. Although it it supremely rewarding to see them succeed in life, they are not "me", they are "they".
My clones living forever ain't any more rewarding/fulfilling than seeing my kids spread my genes and... live "forever". And we already have that.
Except that the clone carries your memories. Even if we put aside the question of whether it's really 'you', can we agree that the copy would believe that it's you? Say you go to sleep, then have a copy made. The copy with your memories would wake up, and would remember going to sleep as you and then waking up. So it would feel and believe that it is you. My question then is, in what practical way is it not you?
> can we agree that the copy would believe that it's you?
Absolutely. I think this is a presupposition of the entire scenario.
Practically speaking, the only thing that is in question is whether the original's subjective experience extends to the clone. If it doesn't, the clone is useful for those who aren't the original, as a means of backup for important individuals. But, such a clone isn't a viable way to pursue immortality (for the original), as you'd still die if you are cloned in such a fashion; 'your' experience would end as the clone succeeds you, much like the case of having children.
I'm reminded of the case of blindsight here, can something be called immortality if it is the equivalent through another body?
My take is that the only reason we have a feeling of a continuing thread of subjective consciousness is due to memory. The cells in our bodies are continuously being replaced, and there are breaks in our consciousness when we are asleep (or otherwise unconscious). So if a being has an identical brain structure to mine and identical memories, it IS me as much as I am. If you simultaneously delete me and create this copy, it's as much still 'me' as if I'd simply moved my body to a different location. The fact that it's comprised of different physical matter is irrelevant. It would have all of my abilities, thoughts, feelings, memories, and beliefs—it would be me. It would happily continue my subjective experience, relieved that the procedure to prolong life via this backup procedure apparently 'worked'.
If you created multiple copies, they would all be equally 'me', although obviously yes, as they then went on to live different lives, they would become different people from each other, just as there are many different paths my life could take looking into the future now.
If you have an identical twin, is your twin "as much you" as you are yourself? If not, at what point between the fertilisation of that single egg cell and today did you become distinct persons?
How does that compare to creating an exact replica of you today (assuming that ever becomes possible, which personally I doubt)? At the moment of replication, which of the two is really "you" (can anyone, including you, tell?), and how will that identity develop into the future as the two have divergent experiences? If one of them is destroyed, is the remaining one automatically "you" from then on?
>If you have an identical twin, is your twin "as much you" as you are yourself?
No in pretty much all meaningful senses; there was never a point where you and your identical twin had the same memories.
>At the moment of replication, which of the two is really "you" (can anyone, including you, tell?), and how will that identity develop into the future as the two have divergent experiences?
This is where the concept of personal identity itself gets tricky. I would say that in a way both of them are you. As far as my subjective experience is concerned, what makes me "me" is primarily my memories, and both instances would share that at that point in time.
This also means that, as two instances exist with diverging experiences, their "identities" diverge as well.
An outside observer might view the original and the copy differently, but personally I view subjective experience as the most important factor here.
It's really bizarre that people who don't believe in "souls" somehow think that they would be alive if a sufficiently similar mind existed somewhere. Like, okay cool, nice to know a similar mind will be out there in some computer, but that's not me, so why does that help me?
Is to be human to be a fleshy meat bag? If the only thing that is actually human about us is our consciousness and we can figure out how to extract that into a digital device then I don't see why there's theoretically any time limit to our existence other than the ability to procure materials.
I think this is generally where our species is heading..., we are going to continue to further blend ourselves with technology.
I like the idea of a fleet of nanobots that transparently and progressively replace defective neurons with API endpoints, until ultimately I get a chat message, "Hi MonkeyCanType, just wanted to let you know you've been 100% software for two years now. Would you like to chat about your options for printing a new body? We currently have specials on fire engines and triceratops."
I can buy the accident thing on a long enough time scale, even though I would imagine that emergency medicine would improve over time so it would have to be increasingly more severe of a problem. However, the “get depressed and kill yourself” argument holds no weight to me. Depression is a common thing, but such severe depression that you have suicidal tendencies is not in the cards for most humans.
Humans are extremely flexible, and it really seems like some people don’t have naturally severe depressive episodes even with strong external tendencies. Beyond that, I can say that depression is often combated, in some of the less extreme cases, by recognizing it incoming and developing tools to keep yourself from spiraling.
I’ve dealt with depression, and have had plenty of external things start a spiral. After many years of dealing with it, I have learned how to prevent it from getting overwhelming. I really don’t see the end of an indefinitely life occurring via suicide, assuming you’re not in isolation or alienated, or some crazy circumstance.
This argument doesn't hold water. This assumes that depression is purely something you must be born with, and you can't get it from environmental factors.
The thing is, if you really lived for hundreds of years, society would be radically different. Imagine... You can't get promoted because no one above you ever retires. You can't get an entry level job, because everyone has 200+ years experience!
People struggle to work the grind until they are 65 already. But you can't retire, because your death is so far away. You need to keep grinding another 500+ years...
That kind of world would likely have a lot of systemic issues with depression.
Screw depression, overpopulation due to nobody dying, yet birth rates not declining is what would have killed us long before that, through all the wars and famines.
Even bigger could be a lack of progress and stagnation, due to the dominant paradigm sustaining itself indefinitely.
As the saying goes "graveyards are full of indispensable men", and "science advances one funeral at a time". This could mean a total lack of evolution in science, technology, philosophy, and so on.
I think this misses the bigger picture a little. Given infinite time, everything that can possibly happen will eventually happen. Presuming that there are in fact some circumstances under which you would kill yourself, you only need to consider the likelihood of them occurring. If most other causes of death have been eliminated, then the only thing that could stop you from eventually killing yourself would be if you died by some other means before that happened.
This is a societal issue that has nothing to do with a longer lifespan. The thought that you need to keep doing what you do for ten years is already plenty depressing, yet people make it to 65 just fine.
> By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.
> The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
That half-life probably applies if the molecular machinery inside each cell does not repair the DNA anymore. DNA repair is a skill that is as ancient as life itself, and thanks to it there are organisms (so far only plants and fungi though) that can live on for thousands of years.
Most cells, yes. All? No. Most neurons in your brain will have to last your lifetime, and IIRC some of your stem cells will have to last with the same dna strands for most of your lifetime.
However if some bases in the DNA molecule get chemically degraded then error correction mechanisms should kick in and (mostly) correct them.
The cells DNA is still the source of all information for it's functioning, when a cell has to make new protein it reads the sequence from the DNA first.
Over long enough time scales, replication errors and base pair flips will accumulate, and it's likely these effects will become problematic way before the stated in vitro half life of 521 years. However, since we're talking about technologically enhanced life anyway, this opens the door to employing correction mechanisms that will actively repair such defects in vivo. In the end though, risks keep accumulating, both external and internal to the body. Intelligent biological life without digital backups does not seem to be the right platform for surviving time spans in excess of, say, a few hundred years.
The most exciting thing about dramatic age increase, at least for me, would be how potentially transformative the wisdom and intellect of society could be. 140 year old Albert Einstein might have been writing an email, right this second to say, 161 year old Max Planck.
As topics become more sophisticated, the time to competency and insight increases.
Someone for instance, truly committed to studying the entire corpus of thoughts on political economy, from the Frankfurt school, Chicago school, Stockholm school, Austrian school, Keynsianism, Marxian, Monetarism, New Classical, Public Choice, Georgism, Bachuninism... Each of those are hard and complicated. A sincere dedicated study of all of them would likely take decades.
If you had 300 years then not only could you do that, but you could also make meaningful contributions to the field.
Imagine public policy by people who were able to dedicate 100 years to its study.
50 or 100 year studies which currently have to be chaperoned across multiple generations of researchers could be done by a single team.
The accumulated wisdom that manifests itself in the written word would be far more potent with centuries of accumulations. In a way, genius is a measure of speed and time, the quickness of ones assimilation of the topic. With enough time, the plane of genius might be accessible to nearly all.
Other, much longer efforts would be engaged with more frequently. For instance, The art of computer programming, started 51 years ago, would be one amongst a much larger number of works of similar breadth, if taking a century to complete something was feasible for all.
The differences this would manifest would be likely as stark as if someone from the 18th century descended upon a modern urban metropolis.
I wonder though, after decades of study in numerous fields, how much would you actually be able to remember?
No doubt some events in your life might stick around in your mind for a long time, but by your 100th, 300th, whatever year would 50% of it just be a hazy memory?
Or maybe this technology could give you super memory, I mean even currently some people are born with the ability to remember tons of information, but often at the expense of other brain facilities.
Memory is more structure than stuff, providing foundations of future thoughts. Meaningful insights shape your interaction with the world and change how you interface with reality. the details fade but the evolution of mind's empowering constraints continues on.
On the flip side, what improvements would we see just from tripling or quadrupling our training time? It'd be the human equivalent of "left it running over the holidays and now it's state of the art".
Social progress would change slower though. Actually even quoting Max Plank:
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it
I suspect that, if a scientist in his fifties knew that his cognitive function would remain at the same level up to at least age 150, he would be a lot more willing to spend years rethinking things and familiarizing himself with new and better conceptual approaches. Something similar could probably be said about programmers that seem attached to old and allegedly inferior tools.
Basically what you're describing is the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Depending on situation in life and age people tend to lean towards one or another.
But that's partly because as people age, their brains get less flexible and open to learning new things. There's already been some work on fixing that specifically.
This happens with neural nets as well. As they progress in their training, epoch by epoch, accuracy plateaus. There is always a tradeoff between keeping on learning and applying knowledge. Companies have the same dilemma between research and production - if you keep researching too much, you never get to produce anything, and vice-versa.
So your solution is just that the whole population must die younger than necessary, then? Is that really the best we can do?
I don't know, maybe we could put a hard limit on academic positions of 50 years or so. We could figure something out. I like that solution more than, effectively - kill them, and everyone else!
I guess the question is, if people lived to 200, would that mean a 50 year old's approach to new information would be the same as that of a today's 50 year old, or that of a today's 25 year old.
Basically are we just keeping old people alive longer or are people growing old slower.
If we are just treating causes of death then we are just keeping people alive for longer. What David Sinclair is doing is trying to keep people young for longer.
> 140 year old Albert Einstein might have been writing an email,
140 year old Albert Einstein might have written an actual letter to 161 year old Max Planck because that's what they both knew and had known for more than a century, so why change things? Many of the technological and societal changes have come up because of old people dying, including the smart ones.
Maybe because email is far better than physical mail on any axis not primarily driven by nostalgia? Take a look at the actual old people around you, they all use tech too.
All the old people that I know at even half that age do not use any tech they are not familiar with (so yes to a landline telephone, no to email). Perhaps you live in an area with very progressive old people.
There are 30-year-old "old" people who don't want to learn anything they don't already know. And there are 80-year-old "young" people who gladly learn an interesting new tech.
Your comment assumes smart people stop learning things when they get old, which is demonstrably incorrect. I also doubt your statement that many changes have happened because old people died. I suspect new minds had more to do with making changes than the old ones dying. And it is unknown if we would have had more or better changes if people had longer lifespans.
I imagine if you have a longer future to look forward to that also changes the incentives for investing in yourself. So not only would the people who invest in their futures be able to use their knowledge for longer, more people might invest in their future as well. The fixed costs of building a life are pretty high (let's say 25 years) and they're expected to pay off over the following 40 years of so - if this 40 becomes 70 or 100 that changes a lot.
I'm not sure how you read that in my comment. Maybe you could, but I think in general regardless of the length of a life it makes most sense to have most of the investment phase in the first part of your life (although when science/tech evolve you need to stay up to date of course).
Maybe the costs are not fixed at 25, but 1/3 or 1/4 of life.
If you could live to 300, competition would eventually make it that you have to spend 150 years "building a life" (but hey, you still get 150 years of a good life).
I think that's exactly the point that I'm trying to make. Most of the population ends up spending a much larger time of their life investing in skills and knowledge. So the total amount of knowledge in society would end up being far larger.
That would be true for the wrong type of knowledge also -- politics, manipulation, power accumulation and so on.
If you think the 0.5% are bad enough now, wait until they can live to 500.
Rather than the potential accumulation of wisdom, I would be far more concerned with the continued concentration of wealth and power by the already wealthy and powerful.
Would the world be a better place, if Vanderbilt, Pullman, or Stalin were still alive? What would be the benefit to the world of, say, a Putin still in control a hundred years hence?
Is there anything special about the (absolute) number 30? Surely it's just saying roughly 'for the first [resp. last] half of your life'?
Tangentially, is that actually 'a Hindu saying' - all I can find are other people quoting Jobs and claiming the same - or is it just something a guru said that Jobs happened to like and remember?
Anecdotally my grandfather from India used to tell my father something similar as a child (and then him me), and he was born in the 1910’s in a village and very unaware of Jobs throughout his life. So I am confident that it’s from some Indian/Hindu school of thought. Only difference was he said “work hard first 30//enjoy next 30”.
Escape the universe into what? And who are the "we" who will escape trillions of quadrillions of years hence? Time changes us, whether we like it or not. Eternity is an abstract concept that will never be realised. What people desire by all these wishes to extend life is continuity, yet given enough period of change, there won't be much continuity to savour. People imagine they are only their thoughts and memories but those very things are dependent not just on our bodies but also our environments. Given enough change in the latter two then our thoughts and memories will become so discordant that the "you" will no longer be continuous. In effect: death, which you tried so hard to avoid.
This article talks about a potential way to increase lifespan and quality of life by a very modest amount, by a process that if it is feasible at all for humans (which it likely won't be), will only be available in the somewhat distant future. Digitizing yourself is several orders of magnitude removed from that, both technologically and in terms of what it would mean for the individual.
> you're still limited by the ultimate end of the universe.
There is a huge chasm between the prospect of an increased your lifespan and the notion that existence should never end, even if that increase in life expectancy would happen to be extreme from our current point of view. Just because literally eternal life is not in congruence with physics (or most practical definitions of intelligence for that matter) doesn't mean the idea of living far longer than currently possible is invalid. I would even say these two have very little in common.
> (which seems to be the fantasy of many posters here)
It's an aspirational fantasy that I share. I recognize the fact that this will not become feasible in my lifetime, but I do not think it's a fantasy in the sense that it is unattainable if we work towards that goal. Given the choice, I would do it in a heartbeat. It's possible that we as a civilization will just opt to not pursue the matter further, the same as with any other scientific or technological goal.
Somehow I expect my life to be plenty valuable with its ending around age ~80, despite the inevitable heat-death of the universe. Existential and emotional issues are quite different from medical/public health ones, so trying to substitute the former for the latter comes across as, in a way, snobby.
Imagine telling a pair of newlyweds, "oh, may you have long life, good fortune, and good health, but also some day the sun will burn to cinders and everything will decay into fundamental particles as entropy overtakes all." The latter is only even relevant to the former as a way of showing that you think inhuman universal things are somehow more important than human things.
I was addressing a few posters on this article who were specifically taking about 'uploading' themselves into some kind of digital repository as a means of finally overcoming biological shortcomings of easy mortality. I'm not saying anything on the value of slowing the ageing process to buy a few more decades or centuries. That's a different matter. Plus in the ultimate analysis human beings are no more or less valuable than anything. Yes, that's my personal view so I don't speak for anyone else.
I think whether it's a "different matter" is up to, well, those guys who are gonna do that stuff. To me at least, there's a pretty firm separation between lifestyle choices, almost no matter how radical and just plain fucking weird, and universal existential theorizing about the cosmos.
You are both correct. Obviously a factor is specific to each individual, as to the cost benefit ratio of that person.
Oh, come to think of it, that could be a concern in some countries. Maybe in say, China, if your social score is not high enough, it might be illegal for you to extend your life.
How are people reading this article? I only read a paragraph before the site asked me to subscribe and pay them money. Surely everyone else isn’t doing that?
WSJ links should be banned from HN, and anyone submitting them should be banned as well. Surely I would be banned if I linked directly to my Patreon with a clickbait title and claimed you could access my blog article related to the title if you start paying me.
extending life too much could have detrimental effects in terms of evolution as the gene mutations will take longer meaning we can't adapt fast enough.
That is absolutely not how evolution works at all. Mutation, such as it is, occurs at the moment of conception. It's not a very helpful word - "random and imperfect mix of two data sets" is a better way of thinking about it.
Anyway, evolution is a very confused concept in modern society. None of the old factors apply any more.
yes people with longer lifetimes will put off having children which means conception events for each generation will have longer time intervals in between
It's still a moot point however. There is no meaningful human evolution anymore in terms of adaptation to anything in nature. Human biological fitness these days, outside hunter gather societies I suppose, is about beauty or intelligence and not a whole lot else.
So, war has now been abolished, so there's no advantage to being healthy enough to run away from the fighting and survive to reproduce?
And famine is no longer possible? Being small enough to survive on limited food is no longer of any use? (Or alternatively, being big enough to take other people's food...)
And a deadly pandemic is now impossible? So a good immune system doesn't give you any advantage? And an innate tendency to behaviours that reduce the chance of infection won't help you?
And the big one... Do all the beautiful and intelligent people now have the same number of children? Or do some have none, and some have ten, for reasons that may well be genetically influenced?
Your first three examples are speculative edge cases, to say the least.
But your last is interesting - and touches on something I was going to type but didn't. Yeah, evolution might be happening there, and not in a good way. There's evidence that smart couples have less children, because they're busy with careers. There's evidence that religious people have more children than non-religious. So yeah, to the extent that evolution is still in play in modern society - we're probably going backwards.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadI also loved only being allowed to read the first five sentences of this article because I have not sent money to this website.
Why are people allowed to link to paywall sites on HN? How is this different from linking directly to someone’s patreon or PayPal donation page, with a clickbait title to get them there?
I demand that all WSJ links are banned from HN immediately along with the accounts that shared them. People need to learn not to do this.
The oldest wooden houses are only one thousand years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkjub%C3%B8argar%C3%B0ur The human body is way more delicate and less likely to survive.
Even with extreme motivation, no human will see the death of our Sun, let alone the heat death of the universe.
Unless you mean that a copy of your brain would not longer be 'you'. In that case I just disagree. We don't know the level of fidelity required, but it seems extremely likely to me that if my brain were copied to a sufficient level of precision, whatever that level might be, the copy would continue my subjective experience.
it may, but it wouldn't be "you". "You"'d experience death, and something else will exist independent of "you", but with most of the same features and memories.
I also think that copying your conscious state from one body to another creates a new person in any case. Everybody except you (including the copy) may consider the new person to be exactly the same as you, but you will now be dead.
Somewhat tongue in cheek, but the point remains. What leads you to believe this? As another reply touches on, there's a straightforward way to verify whether that is the case (for oneself, and not an external observer): Given a perfect clone, uploaded copy, etc, are you as aware of the clone's experience as you are of your own?
If the answer is no, why would that change if the original ceases to exist?
If the answer is yes, the first thing I'd want to know is _how_ exactly the information (of awareness) is possibly synchronized between hosts (presumably in realtime, at that!).
Same with kids - they are basically our clones with genes mixed from both parents. They go on their own path and experiences. Although it it supremely rewarding to see them succeed in life, they are not "me", they are "they".
My clones living forever ain't any more rewarding/fulfilling than seeing my kids spread my genes and... live "forever". And we already have that.
Absolutely. I think this is a presupposition of the entire scenario.
Practically speaking, the only thing that is in question is whether the original's subjective experience extends to the clone. If it doesn't, the clone is useful for those who aren't the original, as a means of backup for important individuals. But, such a clone isn't a viable way to pursue immortality (for the original), as you'd still die if you are cloned in such a fashion; 'your' experience would end as the clone succeeds you, much like the case of having children.
I'm reminded of the case of blindsight here, can something be called immortality if it is the equivalent through another body?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight
If you created multiple copies, they would all be equally 'me', although obviously yes, as they then went on to live different lives, they would become different people from each other, just as there are many different paths my life could take looking into the future now.
How does that compare to creating an exact replica of you today (assuming that ever becomes possible, which personally I doubt)? At the moment of replication, which of the two is really "you" (can anyone, including you, tell?), and how will that identity develop into the future as the two have divergent experiences? If one of them is destroyed, is the remaining one automatically "you" from then on?
>If you have an identical twin, is your twin "as much you" as you are yourself?
No in pretty much all meaningful senses; there was never a point where you and your identical twin had the same memories.
>At the moment of replication, which of the two is really "you" (can anyone, including you, tell?), and how will that identity develop into the future as the two have divergent experiences?
This is where the concept of personal identity itself gets tricky. I would say that in a way both of them are you. As far as my subjective experience is concerned, what makes me "me" is primarily my memories, and both instances would share that at that point in time.
This also means that, as two instances exist with diverging experiences, their "identities" diverge as well.
An outside observer might view the original and the copy differently, but personally I view subjective experience as the most important factor here.
There are known trees whose ages easily exceed a thousand years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_trees#Individ...
I think this is generally where our species is heading..., we are going to continue to further blend ourselves with technology.
Humans are extremely flexible, and it really seems like some people don’t have naturally severe depressive episodes even with strong external tendencies. Beyond that, I can say that depression is often combated, in some of the less extreme cases, by recognizing it incoming and developing tools to keep yourself from spiraling.
I’ve dealt with depression, and have had plenty of external things start a spiral. After many years of dealing with it, I have learned how to prevent it from getting overwhelming. I really don’t see the end of an indefinitely life occurring via suicide, assuming you’re not in isolation or alienated, or some crazy circumstance.
That seems like a big assumption over centuries.
The thing is, if you really lived for hundreds of years, society would be radically different. Imagine... You can't get promoted because no one above you ever retires. You can't get an entry level job, because everyone has 200+ years experience!
People struggle to work the grind until they are 65 already. But you can't retire, because your death is so far away. You need to keep grinding another 500+ years...
That kind of world would likely have a lot of systemic issues with depression.
As the saying goes "graveyards are full of indispensable men", and "science advances one funeral at a time". This could mean a total lack of evolution in science, technology, philosophy, and so on.
While not ideal, stagnation at least brings stability of sorts.
This is a societal issue that has nothing to do with a longer lifespan. The thought that you need to keep doing what you do for ten years is already plenty depressing, yet people make it to 65 just fine.
I'm very happy you can feel this way, but yes, on a long enough time scale, depression will get all of us.
We currently cant keep our minds from becoming dependent on an external source of what it can naturally generate.
> The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.1...
[0]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/does-body-replace-itself-s...
However if some bases in the DNA molecule get chemically degraded then error correction mechanisms should kick in and (mostly) correct them.
Edit, spelling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGLL77wYxe8
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negl...
As topics become more sophisticated, the time to competency and insight increases.
Someone for instance, truly committed to studying the entire corpus of thoughts on political economy, from the Frankfurt school, Chicago school, Stockholm school, Austrian school, Keynsianism, Marxian, Monetarism, New Classical, Public Choice, Georgism, Bachuninism... Each of those are hard and complicated. A sincere dedicated study of all of them would likely take decades.
If you had 300 years then not only could you do that, but you could also make meaningful contributions to the field.
Imagine public policy by people who were able to dedicate 100 years to its study.
50 or 100 year studies which currently have to be chaperoned across multiple generations of researchers could be done by a single team.
The accumulated wisdom that manifests itself in the written word would be far more potent with centuries of accumulations. In a way, genius is a measure of speed and time, the quickness of ones assimilation of the topic. With enough time, the plane of genius might be accessible to nearly all.
Other, much longer efforts would be engaged with more frequently. For instance, The art of computer programming, started 51 years ago, would be one amongst a much larger number of works of similar breadth, if taking a century to complete something was feasible for all.
The differences this would manifest would be likely as stark as if someone from the 18th century descended upon a modern urban metropolis.
No doubt some events in your life might stick around in your mind for a long time, but by your 100th, 300th, whatever year would 50% of it just be a hazy memory?
Or maybe this technology could give you super memory, I mean even currently some people are born with the ability to remember tons of information, but often at the expense of other brain facilities.
"I have this daddy issue, probably, but I don't really remember my dad..."
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it
Aka science advances one funeral at a time
There needs to be the luxury of time and the space to fail, two things we don't have.
The technology of longevity won't fix this problem of culture, sure. But it would make such a fix a lot more meaningful
But once we have those, won't they be considered not luxurious, instead, standard?
And won't the argument still be that we lack the luxury we need?
I think we should improve the handover instead of pretending there will be no handover.
I mean seriously, emacs lisp looks so much more sane than vimscript, I've been telling myself to switch for 10 years now...
I don't know, maybe we could put a hard limit on academic positions of 50 years or so. We could figure something out. I like that solution more than, effectively - kill them, and everyone else!
I hope my post didn't imply I thought killing people was a solution...
Basically are we just keeping old people alive longer or are people growing old slower.
140 year old Albert Einstein might have written an actual letter to 161 year old Max Planck because that's what they both knew and had known for more than a century, so why change things? Many of the technological and societal changes have come up because of old people dying, including the smart ones.
There are 30-year-old "old" people who don't want to learn anything they don't already know. And there are 80-year-old "young" people who gladly learn an interesting new tech.
People who give up are doomed, regardless of age or other living conditions.
If you could live to 300, competition would eventually make it that you have to spend 150 years "building a life" (but hey, you still get 150 years of a good life).
Would the world be a better place, if Vanderbilt, Pullman, or Stalin were still alive? What would be the benefit to the world of, say, a Putin still in control a hundred years hence?
Death is an equaliser and a recycler.
“For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.”
I'm not sure that making that last phase ten times longer is a good investment.
Tangentially, is that actually 'a Hindu saying' - all I can find are other people quoting Jobs and claiming the same - or is it just something a guru said that Jobs happened to like and remember?
This article talks about a potential way to increase lifespan and quality of life by a very modest amount, by a process that if it is feasible at all for humans (which it likely won't be), will only be available in the somewhat distant future. Digitizing yourself is several orders of magnitude removed from that, both technologically and in terms of what it would mean for the individual.
> you're still limited by the ultimate end of the universe.
There is a huge chasm between the prospect of an increased your lifespan and the notion that existence should never end, even if that increase in life expectancy would happen to be extreme from our current point of view. Just because literally eternal life is not in congruence with physics (or most practical definitions of intelligence for that matter) doesn't mean the idea of living far longer than currently possible is invalid. I would even say these two have very little in common.
> (which seems to be the fantasy of many posters here)
It's an aspirational fantasy that I share. I recognize the fact that this will not become feasible in my lifetime, but I do not think it's a fantasy in the sense that it is unattainable if we work towards that goal. Given the choice, I would do it in a heartbeat. It's possible that we as a civilization will just opt to not pursue the matter further, the same as with any other scientific or technological goal.
Imagine telling a pair of newlyweds, "oh, may you have long life, good fortune, and good health, but also some day the sun will burn to cinders and everything will decay into fundamental particles as entropy overtakes all." The latter is only even relevant to the former as a way of showing that you think inhuman universal things are somehow more important than human things.
If we stopped ageing, how long would we live? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937047
Oh, come to think of it, that could be a concern in some countries. Maybe in say, China, if your social score is not high enough, it might be illegal for you to extend your life.
Anyway, evolution is a very confused concept in modern society. None of the old factors apply any more.
It's still a moot point however. There is no meaningful human evolution anymore in terms of adaptation to anything in nature. Human biological fitness these days, outside hunter gather societies I suppose, is about beauty or intelligence and not a whole lot else.
And famine is no longer possible? Being small enough to survive on limited food is no longer of any use? (Or alternatively, being big enough to take other people's food...)
And a deadly pandemic is now impossible? So a good immune system doesn't give you any advantage? And an innate tendency to behaviours that reduce the chance of infection won't help you?
And the big one... Do all the beautiful and intelligent people now have the same number of children? Or do some have none, and some have ten, for reasons that may well be genetically influenced?
But your last is interesting - and touches on something I was going to type but didn't. Yeah, evolution might be happening there, and not in a good way. There's evidence that smart couples have less children, because they're busy with careers. There's evidence that religious people have more children than non-religious. So yeah, to the extent that evolution is still in play in modern society - we're probably going backwards.