> The winners will have to prove by 2030 that their intervention can turn back the clock in older adults by at least a decade in three key areas: cognition, immunity, and muscle function.
And we will pay incredible amounts for them. The Danish central bank is holding interest rates below that of the ECB due to how successful Ozempic and Wegovy are [1] [2]. It's expected to be a $100B market by 2035 (assuming "one and done" gene therpay doesn't fast takeoff [3]).
Just in case: The Danish Central Bank is reacting to the economic success of the drug maker which impacts the currency flows and thereby the currency peg they are managing. (Not some health benefits thing by the central bank).
America exporting the disorder of the US healthcare system and crashing currencies as we help companies become larger than their nation state GDPs. Kind of funny actually.
That would be like investing into a single stock, and hoping that your investment pans out. You diversify your investments to reduce the risk of catastrophic loss.
I would like to encourage maximum effort into maintaining my health while waiting for interventions to develop. This is all on top of competing priorities such as projects I am working on.
No I'd say by being active you are being the best you can be and also maintaining as best you can your body but it will still degrade. If you're out of shape so you decide to be more active, eat well, you fell better. You will gain muscle lose excess fat eventually you arrive at a level of health that is normal. You will be as healthy as we all should be.
This is something I think many people miss about being active. When I was in my 20s and 30s the gym was a social thing, to see and be seen. Plus being 20s you can build muscle, get fit, do anything and recover in a day. In my 40s I felt I was ahead of most people in overall health no gut no out of breath from menial tasks. By health I don't mean the "swol bros" or the gaunt 1% fat people.
But in my late 30s early 40s my routine suffered and then stopped going due to a new job with odd hours. Although I did feel I had momentum of all those years but it faded quickly. It was the consistency of going more than anything that I think was a benefit to my health. I wasn't a power lifter, a marathon runner, a body builder, one of those squash players I was just going to maintain my overall health.
Really it's a bit like countries with socialized medical care. You go often and catch problems early so you are better overall not near death's door when you finally go to a doctor. Same for a dentist you go frequently to catch problems since you can't regrow teeth it's too late then. Old age without being active in the previous decades is like that it's too late.
Need creatine monohydrate maybe around 5-12g daily depending on age. I have seen MANY 60+ that look like late 30s simply keeping a daily creatine supplement religiously. Weight lifting prefer especially having bones being stressed compare to cardios.
I think having guaranteed healthcare and shorter work weeks would be a more effective means of extending a healthy life. Maybe not for the uber-wealthy, but definitely for the rest of us.
> The winners will have to prove by 2030 that their intervention can turn back the clock in older adults by at least a decade in three key areas: cognition, immunity, and muscle function.
<checks math>: that's 10 years of aging progress in 7 years. I'll take it! I'd be ecstatic if I netted 3 years younger for every decade going forward. Of course, I'd actually expect that to accelerate, but given my current age, I'll happily take anything that is breakeven right now.
Forgive me if I'm reaching, but I had absolutely no idea what this discussion was saying. This is my best bet understanding:
User implies we should wait 5-10 years to cure aging. Implication being that we want someone near death to actually die. Shot in the dark because people are boring: guessing Trump or Biden.
Your response seems to imply that all that would be needed to have that person ignore the technology would be to say that it tracks your location. This seems to imply that you assumed they were talking about Trump, because he's associated with conspiratorial thinking.
Did I understand this thread correctly or am I having a stroke?
Completely unrelated to either the GP or GGP. My take was that GGP was making a joke on mathematical induction: wait 5-10 years, and when you get there wait 5-10 years again, etc. So, a roundabout way of saying "just don't do it". To which the GP answered "start a rumor about anti-aging tech invading your privacy", and then even if it gets done, it doesn't get used, so the end result is the same.
Can I.. vote against this? Death has historically been the only equalizer and return to the mean that has saved us from Tyrants and excessive concentration of power and control.
I'm fine with having the life expectancy that I have, am I the only one?
This research would protect us from aging, but not from bullets or poisons. The likes of Hitler and Stalin would have still died at about the same time had anti-senescence treatments been available to them.
Many tyrants have been multi-generational. Many have been deposed, so death can't be the "only" equalizer. And many modern "tyrants" are organizations and systems, not individuals. And who knows, maybe tyrants will act more sensibly if they expect to live in the future they're harming (wishful thinking perhaps).
If you take antibiotics when you're sick or choose your diet based on health concerns, you're not fine with the life expectancy you have. Natural lifespans (my words, not yours) don't make any sense with the level of intervention we do.
I like to imagine that choosing how and when you will die will one day be right there with self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Meet the new tyrant, same as the last tyrant. It doesn't really equalize anything. All that means is churn. There's no guarantee that changing to a new tyrant will result in something better. It might even be worse.
All though human history, we have kings, emperors, knights, and so forth. Now dictators and elected politicians. Some of them enacted absolute calamity and caused the death of millions. This can continue before they either die in office or are assassinated or overthrown.
Human societies are always changing, even under dictatorships. Political collapses are always going to be possible if you have a system that continue to deteriorate. The mistake that people make is living forever is assuming that power structures don't change. Humans are not rocks. We change and react and have agencies.
How successful have precious iterations of the XPrize been? IIRC, there was (is?) one for landing a rover on Mars and another for cleaning up the ocean.
Have those companies yielded tangible benefits or even spurred innovations in their respective fields?
For transparency the below is entirely from GPT-4. All successful except for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. It's notable that these prizes ranged from $7M (Ocean Discovery XPRIZE) to $30M (Lunar XPRIZE), so the stakes have really gone up for this one.
Ansari XPRIZE (2004): Aimed at private spaceflight, won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures' SpaceShipOne, demonstrating private manned spaceflight.
Progressive Automotive XPRIZE (2010): Focused on energy-efficient cars. Edison2’s Very Light Car won in the Mainstream Class, and Li-ion Motors’ Wave II and X-Tracer Team Switzerland’s E-Tracer won in the Alternative classes.
Google Lunar XPRIZE (Not Won): Targeted private teams to land a rover on the moon. Although the prize expired in 2018 without a winner, several teams continued their lunar missions.
Global Learning XPRIZE (2019): Sought solutions for children to teach themselves reading, writing, and arithmetic. The prize was jointly awarded to Kitkit School and onebillion, both developing child-friendly learning applications.
Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE (2014): Focused on health sensing technologies. The DMI team won for their invention of a lab-quality blood testing platform.
Carbon XPRIZE (2021): Aimed at converting CO2 emissions into valuable products. Two teams, CarbonCure Technologies and UCLA CarbonBuilt, won, demonstrating concrete production methods using CO2.
Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE (2019): Aimed at advancing deep-sea technologies. The GEBCO-NF Alumni team won, developing autonomous ocean mapping technology.
At least several of them must have a winner, so long as someone participates, as there is no hard goal and a winner is chosen from the participants. (For examples, "improve" and "build better" are soft goals.)
This is probably a controversial opinion, but I think we should be careful what we wish for. Death is a necessary part of life. Without it, society will stagnate, overpopulation will become even more rampant, resources will become more scarce, and dictators will hold power for unbounded lengths of time.
As hard as it is to say for someone whose mom is battling cancer, I feel similarly about a complete cure for cancer. Death ultimately needs a way to come for us all. The alternative is so much worse.
We don't even know what a world with less death would look like, if we could be able to delay death, why wouldn't then be able to focus on stagnation, overpopulation and resources. And if something can be done I believe it will be done, if we want it or not.
I'm really sorry to hear about your mom. It's tough to see a loved one going through something like that. Wishing her strength and recovery, and hoping you get to spend many more happy moments together.
check out season one of "Altered Carbon" for an imaginative take on life extension. The rich are immortal, and keeping you alive can be used against you, resuscitating you against your will.
This is probably a controversial opinion, but I think we should be careful what we wish for. Death is a necessary part of life. Without it, society will stagnate, overpopulation will become even more rampant, resources will become more scarce, and dictators will hold power for unbounded lengths of time.
No. The controversial opinion is saying that death is unnecessary. Your opinion represent the 'mainstream' opinion. I would argue that it's status quo bias, or justification and rationalization for having death.
Humans are very good at justifying things after the fact.
But taking a look at the individual objections, it either falls apart or a lot more complicated than you think. For example, the fear of societal stagnation. I think this is an overblown concern. People are always changing, however slowly and imperceptible it may be. An 80 years old is going to think very differently than 8 years ago.
People are always worried about overpopulation, but you know who pollute the most? Rich countries. The richer you are, the more meat you eat, the more 'resources' you consume. Currently, overpopulation is really about pollution than running out of raw resources, such metals and minerals and energy. We would overheat ourselves before running out of space. Obviously, there's going to be a finite limit, but that limit is so far off that it's basically ludicrous to think about.
Dictatorships holding power for unbounded length of time? Sure, dictators might live forever, but it's clear that their society often basically 'stagnate', more like went backward. If you see North Korea and South Korea, you know that South Korea have more lights. Plus, just because you're a dictatorship doesn't mean it's a stable governing structure. There are dictatorships and military junta that are short lived or had been overthrown. Dictators can blunder into serious strategic mistakes, like Mr. Putin. Some even voluntarily democratized, like Taiwan!
Human societies are inherently dynamic system that changes over time. It would be difficult to imagine a system that somehow managed to keep things exactly the same. There's always room for disruption.
When a dictator dies, there is tremendous disruption that often leads to a replacement of the ruling junta.
Taiwan's government lost a fight with the communist revolutionaries and allied themselves with whoever they needed to to survive. Elections were a means to an end for Taiwan.
Overpopulation is a nonsense concern. The world population is on track to peak at a level only marginally higher than the current population.
The parts of the world rich enough to afford state-of-the-art medical treatments mostly have declining populations and the exceptions are only growing through immigration.
If anything, anti-aging treatments likely would mitigate some future population concerns by giving more time for the economy to adapt to a shrinking population.
The most important book written in the 21st Century is Dr. Robert Zubrin's "Merchants of Despair." Just read the first chapter is all you need to absorb.
OTOH, I would love for someone to disprove Dr. Zubrin's claims.
Worth noting that the criteria being measured for success, while they may indicate "reverse aging" by decades, probably won't delay death by anywhere near as much.
In other words, extending healthspan is not the same as extending lifespan.
Consider the many causes of death that may not be strongly negatively correlated with the particular metrics being targeted here, like accidents, heart disease, or stroke.
An improved immune system response (aimed at infectious diseases) may also do well at suppressing cancer rates (2nd leading cause of death), or if not, may at least improve remission or survival rates for treatments, but that is somewhat speculative, and you might also (or instead) get an increase in various autoimmune problems.
So, from a "reversal" of a decade or more of aging by those measures, you might find that longevity is only increased by a couple of years.
This is just about age, not all forms of mortality. Even if you cured all diseases as well aging, humans would still have a roughly 50% chance of dying from accidents and homicides and suicides in any given 1000 year period… assuming current rates for homicides, suicides, and fatal accidents, which is a terrible assumption given how much they changed in the previous 1000 years.
> resources will become more scarce
No more so than the same total population aging normally. And as we're already below replacement rates in developed nations, no risk of that happening before some other radical change to the human condition (like mind uploading, WW3, Von Neumann probes on the positive side, or the consequences of existing consumption on the negative) gets in the way first.
I've just realised I put WW3 in the positive list, thanks to not proof-reading correctly. And now the edit window has closed, I'm suck with that forever…
53 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadCan't you already get that just by exercising?
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/21/business/ozempic-wegovy-deman...
[2] https://fortune.com/2023/09/22/obesity-drug-market-ozempic-w...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38495653
(if I can get the benefits of exercise without exercising, "shut up and take my money"; success is about outcomes, not effort)
I would like to encourage maximum effort into maintaining my health while waiting for interventions to develop. This is all on top of competing priorities such as projects I am working on.
This is something I think many people miss about being active. When I was in my 20s and 30s the gym was a social thing, to see and be seen. Plus being 20s you can build muscle, get fit, do anything and recover in a day. In my 40s I felt I was ahead of most people in overall health no gut no out of breath from menial tasks. By health I don't mean the "swol bros" or the gaunt 1% fat people.
But in my late 30s early 40s my routine suffered and then stopped going due to a new job with odd hours. Although I did feel I had momentum of all those years but it faded quickly. It was the consistency of going more than anything that I think was a benefit to my health. I wasn't a power lifter, a marathon runner, a body builder, one of those squash players I was just going to maintain my overall health.
Really it's a bit like countries with socialized medical care. You go often and catch problems early so you are better overall not near death's door when you finally go to a doctor. Same for a dentist you go frequently to catch problems since you can't regrow teeth it's too late then. Old age without being active in the previous decades is like that it's too late.
<checks math>: that's 10 years of aging progress in 7 years. I'll take it! I'd be ecstatic if I netted 3 years younger for every decade going forward. Of course, I'd actually expect that to accelerate, but given my current age, I'll happily take anything that is breakeven right now.
User implies we should wait 5-10 years to cure aging. Implication being that we want someone near death to actually die. Shot in the dark because people are boring: guessing Trump or Biden.
Your response seems to imply that all that would be needed to have that person ignore the technology would be to say that it tracks your location. This seems to imply that you assumed they were talking about Trump, because he's associated with conspiratorial thinking.
Did I understand this thread correctly or am I having a stroke?
This sounds great, even the visibility will help a lot.
$100M is tiny for a problem that can increase the economy by trillions of dollars, but it's still great.
I'm fine with having the life expectancy that I have, am I the only one?
If you take antibiotics when you're sick or choose your diet based on health concerns, you're not fine with the life expectancy you have. Natural lifespans (my words, not yours) don't make any sense with the level of intervention we do.
I like to imagine that choosing how and when you will die will one day be right there with self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
All though human history, we have kings, emperors, knights, and so forth. Now dictators and elected politicians. Some of them enacted absolute calamity and caused the death of millions. This can continue before they either die in office or are assassinated or overthrown.
Human societies are always changing, even under dictatorships. Political collapses are always going to be possible if you have a system that continue to deteriorate. The mistake that people make is living forever is assuming that power structures don't change. Humans are not rocks. We change and react and have agencies.
Perhaps there is a better way?
How successful have precious iterations of the XPrize been? IIRC, there was (is?) one for landing a rover on Mars and another for cleaning up the ocean.
Have those companies yielded tangible benefits or even spurred innovations in their respective fields?
Ansari XPRIZE (2004): Aimed at private spaceflight, won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures' SpaceShipOne, demonstrating private manned spaceflight.
Progressive Automotive XPRIZE (2010): Focused on energy-efficient cars. Edison2’s Very Light Car won in the Mainstream Class, and Li-ion Motors’ Wave II and X-Tracer Team Switzerland’s E-Tracer won in the Alternative classes.
Google Lunar XPRIZE (Not Won): Targeted private teams to land a rover on the moon. Although the prize expired in 2018 without a winner, several teams continued their lunar missions.
Global Learning XPRIZE (2019): Sought solutions for children to teach themselves reading, writing, and arithmetic. The prize was jointly awarded to Kitkit School and onebillion, both developing child-friendly learning applications.
Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE (2014): Focused on health sensing technologies. The DMI team won for their invention of a lab-quality blood testing platform.
Carbon XPRIZE (2021): Aimed at converting CO2 emissions into valuable products. Two teams, CarbonCure Technologies and UCLA CarbonBuilt, won, demonstrating concrete production methods using CO2.
Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE (2019): Aimed at advancing deep-sea technologies. The GEBCO-NF Alumni team won, developing autonomous ocean mapping technology.
At least several of them must have a winner, so long as someone participates, as there is no hard goal and a winner is chosen from the participants. (For examples, "improve" and "build better" are soft goals.)
As hard as it is to say for someone whose mom is battling cancer, I feel similarly about a complete cure for cancer. Death ultimately needs a way to come for us all. The alternative is so much worse.
I'm really sorry to hear about your mom. It's tough to see a loved one going through something like that. Wishing her strength and recovery, and hoping you get to spend many more happy moments together.
No. The controversial opinion is saying that death is unnecessary. Your opinion represent the 'mainstream' opinion. I would argue that it's status quo bias, or justification and rationalization for having death.
Humans are very good at justifying things after the fact.
But taking a look at the individual objections, it either falls apart or a lot more complicated than you think. For example, the fear of societal stagnation. I think this is an overblown concern. People are always changing, however slowly and imperceptible it may be. An 80 years old is going to think very differently than 8 years ago.
People are always worried about overpopulation, but you know who pollute the most? Rich countries. The richer you are, the more meat you eat, the more 'resources' you consume. Currently, overpopulation is really about pollution than running out of raw resources, such metals and minerals and energy. We would overheat ourselves before running out of space. Obviously, there's going to be a finite limit, but that limit is so far off that it's basically ludicrous to think about.
Dictatorships holding power for unbounded length of time? Sure, dictators might live forever, but it's clear that their society often basically 'stagnate', more like went backward. If you see North Korea and South Korea, you know that South Korea have more lights. Plus, just because you're a dictatorship doesn't mean it's a stable governing structure. There are dictatorships and military junta that are short lived or had been overthrown. Dictators can blunder into serious strategic mistakes, like Mr. Putin. Some even voluntarily democratized, like Taiwan!
Human societies are inherently dynamic system that changes over time. It would be difficult to imagine a system that somehow managed to keep things exactly the same. There's always room for disruption.
When a dictator dies, there is tremendous disruption that often leads to a replacement of the ruling junta.
Taiwan's government lost a fight with the communist revolutionaries and allied themselves with whoever they needed to to survive. Elections were a means to an end for Taiwan.
The parts of the world rich enough to afford state-of-the-art medical treatments mostly have declining populations and the exceptions are only growing through immigration.
If anything, anti-aging treatments likely would mitigate some future population concerns by giving more time for the economy to adapt to a shrinking population.
The most important book written in the 21st Century is Dr. Robert Zubrin's "Merchants of Despair." Just read the first chapter is all you need to absorb.
OTOH, I would love for someone to disprove Dr. Zubrin's claims.
What makes you assume that trajectory will continue if the average lifespan suddenly increases 3-5x?
In other words, extending healthspan is not the same as extending lifespan.
An improved immune system response (aimed at infectious diseases) may also do well at suppressing cancer rates (2nd leading cause of death), or if not, may at least improve remission or survival rates for treatments, but that is somewhat speculative, and you might also (or instead) get an increase in various autoimmune problems.
So, from a "reversal" of a decade or more of aging by those measures, you might find that longevity is only increased by a couple of years.
> resources will become more scarce
No more so than the same total population aging normally. And as we're already below replacement rates in developed nations, no risk of that happening before some other radical change to the human condition (like mind uploading, WW3, Von Neumann probes on the positive side, or the consequences of existing consumption on the negative) gets in the way first.