
How Long Do You Want to Live? - rosser
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/sunday-review/how-long-do-you-want-to-live.html
======
reasonattlm
Well, that's another data point to suggest that we remain a culture of
suicidal, negligent barbarians - quick to accept the suffering and death of
billions, and happy to condemn our future selves to the same.

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/05/when-did-we-
becom...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/05/when-did-we-become-
suicidal-negligent-barbarians.php)

Any present horror is accepted, indeed mandated, by the ape inside - conform,
conform, it cries, so hungry to belong and be inside the visible peer group
that this instinct overrides any rational consideration of what it actually
means to age to death, and just how much might be done to prevent that from
happening in this age of biotechnology.

~~~
soup10
Nobody is quick to accept aging or death. But it's understood that we are very
far from medical technology that can tackle the problem. Aging is deeply
ingrained in our DNA. So far the world has spent countless billions trying to
cure cancer and has largely failed. We can't even control the growth of a few
measly cells with mutated DNA. Yet we are composed of trillions of cells, all
'programmed' to deteriorate over time. The idea that we can cure aging with
some miracle cure is a pipe dream until we have a far better understanding and
control of biological processes.

~~~
MikeCapone
> Yet we are composed of trillions of cells, all 'programmed' to deteriorate
> over time.

That is incorrect. The diseases of aging are the result of evolutionary
neglect, they aren't 'programmed in' as if there was a timer running. They're
a bug, not a feature.

I suggest you have a look at:

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312367066>

[http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...](http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbA1pFvfNp4&feature=gv...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbA1pFvfNp4&feature=gv&hl=en)

[http://michaelgr.com/2011/10/24/aubrey-de-grey-on-the-
diseas...](http://michaelgr.com/2011/10/24/aubrey-de-grey-on-the-diseases-of-
aging-video/)

The lack of progress so far certainly doesn't mean that we can't make
progress, especially if we take a different approach and we use tools that
weren't available before (and never underestimate using a different
angle/mindset -- as long as we consider aging itself 'normal' and just
something to be slightly delayed, we certainly won't make progress). The SENS
'engineering' approach mean that we don't have to understand metabolism or fix
everything that goes wrong, just to periodically do repairs on whatever long-
lived molecules are accumulating over time to cause pathologies. That's a lot
easier than the past gerontological approaches of trying to understand and
cure everything.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is where I think we're headed. We're going to figure out exactly what all
the moving bits do in our DNA and mitochondria and we'll be in a position to
re-write it at will. When that happens, the question of what it means to be
'you' is going to get very pertinent, a safe example if it turns out your love
of certain foods is a result of wiring in your brain due to your DNA makeup,
do you change it? Do you add new foods? Do you delete old foods?

What happens to social justice when one person can afford gene therapy to make
their children 99% more capable than average and others can't? If you ever saw
the movie Gattica (not a great movie but it tried) don't worry about people
who are born 'perfect' or born the 'natural' way, think about people who re-
write their own genetics to have the mutation that gives Sherpa in the
Himalayas more, and more efficient red blood cells. Very scary tech talk at
Google on this once where a researcher in gene therapy was getting approached
by trainers already.

~~~
brador
Got a link to that tech talk?

~~~
ChuckMcM
I scanned through Youtube but it does not look like that one made it out of
the Googleplex, sorry.

------
nyan_sandwich
First reaction: What kind of stupid question is that? I want to live as long
as possible.

Having read the article: less than 1% share my view. Yikes.

I think for most people, questions like this are what I'd call a "philosophy
landmine"; say certain things and it causes people to stop thinking and repeat
some standard cultural tropes or go spinning off into faux-philosophy-land.

Kind of depressing.

~~~
btilly
Have you had to take care of an aging relative?

What does it matter if your body is OK when your mind is gone?

~~~
adrianN
My mind is a function of my body. Living healthily for centuries to me implies
that my mind stays normal too.

~~~
pjscott
Which again brings us back to the "philosophy landmine" aspect of the
question. If you ask people if the mind is a function of the body, most of
them will emphatically say no. These same people will have no trouble
accepting the existence of Alzheimer's disease.

------
joe_the_user
I suspect that when you ask someone a question about something that is far
outside their range of experiences, exactly how you frame that question is
going to make a big difference in determining their answer.

"Would you like to live 500 year with the body of a twenty year old?" might
give different results from "if the technology existed to avoid aging, would
you use it?" and both might give different results than this poll.

~~~
MikeCapone
Indeed. People also need to realize that you live one day at a time, and if
today you are healthy and having fun, you'll want to live until tomorrow.
Asking people "do you want to live 500 years" makes people look at all those
years at once rather than at how these years would actually be experienced.

If everybody died at 25 and you asked someone "do you want to live to be 100?"
it would seem like a very long time and I'm sure people who thought it wasn't
possible would rationalize and find excuses why it's not desirable anyway and
it's better to die at 25 ("makes life more meaningful" or some other BS).

------
melling
Isn't this kind of a stupid question? If age were truly just a number, I don't
think people would bother asking it.

If you looked and felt like you were 30 at 130, would you say to yourself,
I've lived long enough? You could have several careers. For example, you might
decide to be a writer or do research that takes decades when you are 80.

How much imagination does it take to want to live for centuries? I just bought
a Wacom drawing tablet today. I can't draw a straight line. I think I'll need
a decade just to learn how to draw.

~~~
dredmorbius
There's a great quote from "Beat the Devil": "Time. Time. What is time? Swiss
manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is
money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a
crook."

We just lost Armstrong (Neil, not Lance). And Phyllis Diller. And Sally Ride.
And Scott McKenzie. Just to name a few. Even if we were to live far longer,
there would be deaths (accidents, suicides, murders, sudden medical
conditions). And changes to neighborhoods and buildings and art and music.

With time, you come to realize that there _are_ ghosts, but they're in your
head, not out in the world. Doesn't stop you from seeing them.

But it wears on you with time.

------
mattmaroon
"This surge comes mostly from improved hygiene and nutrition, but also from
new discoveries and interventions: everything from antibiotics and heart
bypass surgery to cancer drugs that target and neutralize the impact of
specific genetic mutations."

No. This is a common misperception that's easily debunked with two minutes of
Googling and I'm shocked to see this in an NYT article. The change is almost
entirely due to reduction in infant mortality.

[http://www.livescience.com/10569-human-lifespans-
constant-2-...](http://www.livescience.com/10569-human-lifespans-
constant-2-000-years.html)

~~~
peaigr
I wouldn't say "almost entirely." A couple more minutes of Googling brought up
this:

<http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db88.pdf>

which says that yes, the greatest reductions in death rates were for infants
and children, but for every group under 85, mortality dropped by at least 50%
from 1935 to 2010.

Also there are some tables at

<http://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Tbl_6.html>

which seem to say that those who are 18 today expect about 15 more years than
they would have in 1900.

Not to mention nutrition, hygiene, and antibiotics are probably reasonably
important in reducing infant mortality. I do agree that for an article
specifically about aging they might have been more careful about those
numbers, though.

~~~
saalweachter
Yeah, the only thing I would add is that "people living longer" historically
hasn't been about prolonging life so much as preventing early death. Some
people have always lived to be 80, 90, 100. What we've really accomplished is
that _more_ people live to be 80, 90, 100 than ever before. For me to live to
be 80 or 90 probably just takes reasonably good luck and staying in the upper-
middle-class, instead of a one-in-a-million kind of luck.

I am hopefully about the future, but I won't really be confident until I start
seeing people live to be 120, 130, 140. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of
time. The most optimistic test I can think of for an anti-aging drug is to
take a large number of 80-year-olds, who are common enough you should be able
to find a number of good, healthy, but old test subjects, and give them anti-
aging treatments. If a large number of them live to be 120, I feel comfortable
saying we're on track to beat death.

This experiment takes 40 years to run. Granted, you can do a lot of other work
before it finishes, like examine tissue samples and various health metrics to
show the treated 80-year-olds aren't aging like the control group. But for
even a young'un like me to actually see 120-year-olds before I myself am 80,
this experiment has to begin in the next 10 years, which I find terribly
unlikely.

So while I'm going to cling to life as bitterly as I can as long as I can --
my own goal is to see the tricentennial, the dawn of the 22nd century, and
maybe the transit of Venus, which I missed this year -- my personal
immortality likely depends on not just discovering a safe way to halt aging
and prolong life, but a way to reverse senescence and restore youth. I think
it's possible, but forecasting it as happening before I die is a bit cliche in
this domain.

------
meric
Most older people seem to be less likely to adapt to changes to society. E.g.
Elderly people are less likely to take up new technology. Perhaps it might be
related to the fact that babies' brains form new connections at a much faster
rate than a thirty year old's whose brain form new connections at a much
faster rate than an eighty year old's?

If you've played with machine learning, many machine learning algorithms are
able to "learn" quickly initially but later on, it can less quickly adapt to
changes. (Someone more knowledgeable may correct me here).

Consider the possibility that old people can have young bodies forever, but
their brain / world view / whatever will not fundamentally change from when
they were teenagers. i.e old people will continue to think outdated ideas and
use outdated technologies, and _not die_. Whenever we talk about the
_establishment_ , congressmen thinking in outdated ways, these are the exact
same people! Unless we can find a way to keep the brain young without
continually causing amnesia, people with control over society to its detriment
will continue living, _forever_.

Do you want to be a 250 year old who thinks that the world is wrong and you
are right, that the old ways are best, while everyone else tries to convince
you to move on?

I'd like to live as a 22 year old forever, but unfortunately that is not
possible without freezing time (or resetting my brain using version control
every birthday).

~~~
MaysonL
As a 66 year old, who just finished the Coursera machine learning course with
a score of 750/700 on the programming assignments, and is currently ranked in
the top 8% in the current Caltech online ML course, I think you're talking
prejudiced and prejudicial BS.

Some people can't adapt to new ideas at any age, and some remain flexible,
mentally and physically. My mother was mentally alert and engaged up until her
death at 99, although her body was failing.

Many 22 year olds have lousy judgement compared to adults - I know that I did.

~~~
meric
" I think you're talking prejudiced and prejudicial BS"

There's a difference between deciding someone represents exactly their
stereotype (prejudice), and looking for patterns based on one's observations.

"Some people can't adapt to new ideas at any age,"

These are the people I'm talking about.

~~~
pjscott
Since the topic of machine learning came up in this thread: what you've said
is a special case of Bayesian inference, as applied to demographic groups.

------
gojomo
We are the 99%! What do we want? To die! When do we want it? After 80-150
years of life, but no more!

We've had enough life and we're not going to take it anymore!
#occupyCemetaries

------
padobson
_Even if I asked them to imagine that a pill had been invented to slow aging
down by one-half, allowing a person who is, say, 60 years old to have the body
of a 30-year-old, only about 10 percent of audiences switched to favoring a
life span of 150 years._

Bring it on. If you can double my lifespan, I can do twice as much good.

~~~
JoshTriplett
More than twice; experience makes you increasingly productive over time.

------
sown
From my own experiences and thoughts on this, I think part of the problem is
that this would give people unpresented amounts of freedom in defining their
own life. I can barely figure out what to do with my one pathetic life span,
with only a couple or few decades of productivity if I do things right (and by
all accounts I am not doing it right; I can barely summon the strength now).

What would it mean to have several or perhaps an infinite amount of time and
_freedom_ to figure out what to do with as many lives as you want?

I think most people can't handle that responsibility at this stage in human
history so people kind of reject the question.

~~~
MBlume
Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical
Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm
willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.

\-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden

------
bloaf
I remember this webcomic whenever the subject of longevity comes up:

<http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1384>

Specifically the quote "Hey, since we live for millions of years, let's go
make some staggeringly beautiful art that can only be created by synthesizing
thousands of years of experience, hopes, fears, triumphs and failures into one
transcendental expression of life!"

I think the problem with the question as posed by the author is that he offers
no "very long but finite" life span. Most people reject (correctly, I think)
the possibility of living forever; "living forever" is actually code for
"living until some accident kills you" or "living until society breaks down to
the point where your life-extension technology is irrelevant." Moreover,
people may realize that there may come a time at which they have accomplished
everything they want to do. If you live forever, however, you would be forced
to carry on living with no goal in life. Could you endure 10 years of life
without a purpose? 100 years? In other words, people may ultimately _want_ to
die even though they are healthy. An "infinite" lifespan raises the
possibility that you might just kill yourself at some point.

A better set of numbers might have been 100 years, 1000 years, 10,000 years,
etc.

------
fingerprinter
People have already said this, but to reinforce: what a dumb question. The
surrounding context is more important than the actual question. Very few would
choose to live to any age if it required massive medical intervention, and
very few would ever choose to die if they were happy, healthy and general
content.

------
SteveC
I am totally in favour of removing limits on human life span and think it's an
inevitability rather than a possibility (although I don't expect it to happen
in my lifetime). Here is why I disagree with some of the objections made to it
in this article.

No Jobs for the younger generation - I think the notion of requiring someone
being forced to have job to earn a living is another concept that will
eventually be regulated to the past. However, that's my post scarcity fantasy
and it's very likely life extension will come before that. We're at 7 Billion
people now we're still find jobs for them. An economy is about people, and
more people means more economic activity.

The planet won't be able to support all the people - This is correct, although
the planet can support more than we think, especially with cleaner and more
efficient energy sources. Even if it turns out to be a huge problem, it would
hopefully have the benefit of pushing us to expand to other parts of the solar
system and universe. An extended or unlimited life span it would make it
viable to for people to travel the long distances involved.

Evolution will stop - I'm of the belief that mankind's real evolution is now
happening in its shared intelligence. We're already starting to gain the
ability to bend DNA to our will. Biological evolution through natural
selection is not the way forward for us.

Boredom - Perhaps. We really don't know. Hopefully the lack of a natural death
would force us to finally create sensible laws regarding the ending of one's
existence. It would be nicer to have a choice when to leave the party, rather
than be forced out the door.

------
stfu
_Less than 1 percent embraced the idea that people might avoid death
altogether._

Actually wasn't Kurzweil promoting the idea of a downloadable brain? Is this
just wishful thinking or is there actually any hope for that?

This would be somewhat an acceptable alternative, i.e. to live forever as a
digital element. Otherwise I guess by best try is still with the cryonic guys.

~~~
sp332
Aubrey de Grey cataloged 7 main ways people age, and he thinks we can fight
all of them. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81752> So we could live
(more or less) naturally, and stop aging.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence)

~~~
kanzure
or instead of wikipedia maybe just read some papers:

<http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/longevity/Aubrey/>

<http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/aubrey.jpg>

------
kamaal
Living forever/longer doesn't make much sense, when:

1\. You have to take 15 pills with every meal you eat to do so.

2\. You have to work 15 hours a day to make ends meet, pay your bills and take
care of yourself to what one would describe a good life.

3\. You have no strength in your bones, you feel weak all the time. You can't
eat much because your teeth have fallen off.

4\. Law of diminishing utility with regards to world kicks in, your spirit
dies away but you body just lives on.

I would be happy to live up to 65, in full health without requiring to eat
pills and depending on other people to do so. Its my perspective, yes.

Also nobody is taking into account problems due to lack of exercise, physical
work and food we eat. There are also things like diabetes and hypertension
which is almost at a level of epidemic in the world today.

Another thing is research might be giving us better machinery for healthcare,
better pills and doctors. But if our lifestyles are messing up our health,
there is little help somebody else can offer.

------
jostmey
Death is so scary because so little of our conscience self is passed onto the
next generation. All of our experiences, memories, and feelings cease to
exist. Only a fraction of our heritage is passed onto the next generation.
That is all that survives of our mind.

Compare this to our genetic code. Approximately half of our genetic code is
passed down in each offspring. Death only partially erases our genetic makeup,
and so no one is scared of their genes being lost when they die.

Death is scary because we have no means to pass on our memories and
experiences to the next generation. It is as if we were meant to be scared of
death, so that we fight against it.

------
jseims
I'm torn by the prospect of a technological solution to aging.

On one hand, _I_ certainly don't want to get old and die -- at least, not on
nature's time table.

On the other hand, if no one else got old and dies, we'll quickly become an
over populated, stagnant society. From a more "objective" perspective, there's
something beautiful about life because it's so temporary.

------
bloaf
I'm pretty sure that much of our improvement in life expectancy over the past
century is due to the reduction in infant mortality.

[http://www.livescience.com/10569-human-lifespans-
constant-2-...](http://www.livescience.com/10569-human-lifespans-
constant-2-000-years.html)

~~~
maxerickson
Absolutely. Life expectancy at birth (in the U.S.) has increased by more than
20 years since 1900. Life expectancy at age 65 has still increased by ~10
years though:

[http://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Body.html#wp1...](http://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Body.html#wp1171598)

------
lathamcity
This is something that my friends and I talk about often, and it's a subject
of particular interest for me. In particular, here are some of the things that
I find to be obstacles to the idea of living forever, or at least for a
tremendously extended period of time:

-Population growth. Right now it's pretty well established that three generations will be in the world at any given time, with around 25-30 years between each generation. If we were to live to 150 (much less 750), suddenly that's five or six generations instead of three, potentially doubling the world's population, and that's assuming that people still follow the custom of having an average number of children between the ages of 25-35 and then stopping.

-On that note, if we are given the capability to remain sexually active for hundreds of years, then one person will be capable of multiplying into far more new people, rapidly increasing population growth. If we are not given that capability, then we'd all end up miserable as the period of our lives in which we have sexually fulfilling relationships becomes small.

-If we conquer diseases with such efficiency, then the tragedy of random, accidental deaths becomes greatly more pronounced. People may die from heart disease and cancer at a far reduced or nonexistent rate, but people will still die from car crashes, drug-related violence and suicide at the same rate they do now. Those deaths will become a lot more significant and difficult to handle, and we as a society will become either super-anxious and paranoid about the possibility of losing our lives or either perpetually in mourning (as our lives become longer we will have more connections and friendships and familial relationships, so we'll have more people whose deaths will affect us) or somehow immune or numb to the pain as a coping mechanism. The idea of war will become far more barbaric as suddenly instead of taking 60 years and a family away from a young man, you're taking hundreds of years and whatever else he could have done in that time.

-Any disease we are unable to cure with the potential to permanently affect people will instantly become far more terrifying. Non-fatal sexually transmitted diseases, loss of limbs or appendages, and debilitating mental diseases will be far, far more damaging given the greater lifespan that they will affect.

-Medical care will still, presumably, be as expensive and challenging as ever; however, we will have more people who need it and more reasons that those people need it. Most of these reasons will probably be expensive - for instance, if cancer treatment ends up being very very expensive, everybody will still want it - so our society is going to have to find some way to handle that. In a best-case scenario, most of the money we made would end up going to medical care, and we would never retire. The proportion would probably be far from that though, with 99% of people being unable to feasibly afford to maintain their own lives. Furthermore, we would need far, far more doctors, and therefore we would have to develop even more incentives for people to take that path in life and stay on it for as long as possible.

-Concepts that we have now (some of which I mentioned tangentially above) that are based on the idea of a 70-90 year lifespan and that we rely on will no longer exist. These include the eventual death of all dictators/tyrants, fairly consistent sizes in the nuclear and extended families, the age-based progression of opportunities and decisions, life sentences for crimes, marriage (would you want to keep the same spouse for 500 years?), retirement, etc.

That's what I think, anyway.

~~~
pjscott
You make some good points, but I think I prefer all of those problems to dying
before I've even lived for my first century. :-)

 _> If we are given the capability to remain sexually active for hundreds of
years, then one person will be capable of multiplying into far more new
people, rapidly increasing population growth._

People can be sexually active without being able to have children. Ask anybody
who's infertile, or uses contraception.

 _> Any disease we are unable to cure with the potential to permanently affect
people will instantly become far more terrifying. Non-fatal sexually
transmitted diseases, loss of limbs or appendages, and debilitating mental
diseases will be far, far more damaging given the greater lifespan that they
will affect._

That is as it should be. Horrible things are horrible; that they are
overshadowed by worse things does not make them any nicer.

 _> Medical care will still, presumably, be as expensive and challenging as
ever; however, we will have more people who need it and more reasons that
those people need it._

While it's _possible_ that medical care will continue to cost the same amount
for the next few hundred years, it seems kind of unlikely. A lot can happen in
a century.

------
jere
So he prepped them by reminding them such life extending technology might not
exist (at which point they feel like it's a test) and then, _shocker_ , they
didn't opt for nonexistent tech?

------
njharman
For however long I am able to move under my own power. Whether that's legs,
arms->wheelchair or mind->computer->mech I'm good.

------
stretchwithme
As long as it takes to do it right :-)

------
RexRollman
Since I do not believe in an afterlife, I want to live as long as possible.

------
marshallp
really interesting comment about life extension on reddit
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yswxw/what_techn...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yswxw/what_technology_do_you_see_emerging_in_the_next/c5yk35l)

