
Billions’ worth of high-tech research seeking to make death optional - jseliger
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever?mbid=social_twitter
======
jupiter90000
When I see things like this, I'm reminded of a story an old co-worker told me
who was a war veteran years ago in his home country. He and many others were
made to go to war for their country and risk their lives. However, those who
were wealthy and/or well-connected could find ways out of being compelled to
go into the military and risk their lives.

One of the wealthy, well connected young men he knew who got out of going into
military was killed getting hit by a bus in an accident. The guy telling the
story actually went into a bloody war seeing people get killed around him, yet
he somehow was alive today to tell the tale.

What's my point? I don't think it's pointless to research life-extending
technology. It seems like some forms of death couldn't be avoided 'post-hoc',
if one had a particular accident or the like, no matter how many resources
were at your disposal, however. I guess lowering the overall probability of
dying of 'something' in general would be nice though.

~~~
mr_overalls
I agree. Even if you conquer conventional biological aging via nanobots in
your bloodstream or whatever, you'd still be vulnerable to random space
elevator accidents, particle beam malfunction, etc.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's still better to have an _option_ of dying than to have a _certainty_ of
dying[0]. Also, avoiding accidents and even malicious actions becomes an
engineering problem to be solved too. Maybe we'll end up having mind backups,
so if you die in that elevator, you'll get restored from last night's copy
into a freshly-grown body?

\--

[0] - sure, when lifespan approaches infinity, the probability of dying due to
external factors will approach 1 anyway, but it's still better than having
your lifespan capped at 120 years or something (last decades of which barely
qualify as living).

~~~
mr_overalls
Right, I agree that pursuing life-extension is worthwhile. Even living a few
more decades at the height of our productivity would benefit society
immensely, given how long it takes to train humans to be experts at anything.

I'm just trying to inject a little reality into the more starry-eyed
Singularitarianist fantasies about living for millions of years among the
stars as an uploaded member of a hive-mind or something.

I'm not a "deathist" by any means, but I accept that one day, it is
overwhelmingly likely that my consciousness will end.

~~~
RivieraKid
I think that if we could defeat aging, living one million of years wouldn't be
that hard to achieve. People would just focus more on preventing fatal
accidents. Plus, more accidents would be survivable because healthcare would
be much more advanced too.

------
BadassFractal
Probably no better chance for humanity to transcend its current perennial
state of warfare and short term thinking than to make people live for a few
centuries. Imagine a world where life is precious and they have to live with
the consequences of their choices rather than having the next generation deal
with their decisions.

~~~
closeparen
Look at the values of the people who ruled a mere hundred years ago. It's a
damn good thing for "savages," women, LGBT folks, etc. that ruling classes, no
matter how authoritarian, eventually abdicate by dying and that the next
generation views the world a little differently.

Could you imagine being governed the way that your 500-year-old elders deem
fitting? We wouldn't need violent extremists to try to reimpose 16th century
public morals. They would simply never have left.

To support this, you have to believe we are _perfect_ now, that there are no
more controverises between the young and the old that the young need to win.
Otherwise, this is one of those moments where society pulls up the drawbridge,
comes full circle. We'll have leaned so far into science and technology that
the next time the elders cry "Witchcraft!" they will never go away.

~~~
BadassFractal
Suppose I could imagine being ruled by people from a couple of millenia ago
when homosexuality was normal. Morality progresses and regresses all the time,
unfortunately it is not guaranteed to go in the "right" direction either way.
See what happened to same sex relationships in Western history. There were
plenty of young folks who deemed it to be worth killing for at one point.
Unfortunately the young are much more likely to give in to the latest moral
fashions and mob mentality than they are to do a fully informed historical
evaluation of the current state of morality.

~~~
TeMPOraL
My current belief is that morality is indirectly related to the progress of
technology, by being directly related to the stability and wealth of the
society. Basically, when most people aren't afraid of going hungry or getting
invaded by their neighbours, they suddenly have time to discuss issues like
homosexuality and generally relax the social norms that in the past were
necessary for survival (by maintaining group cohesion).

------
reasonattlm
What really aggravates me about this article is the exceedingly disingenuous
dismissal of SENS rejuvenation research programs it puts forward.

The author settles on allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes in the cell
nucleus as an example of a project so difficult it is impossible. But
allotopic expression is a very poor example to pick for something that is
alleged to be "a doomed labor." The work has been accomplished for three of
the thirteen genes needed; this is a capability that exists, and is underway
towards completion. The allotopic expression of mitochondrial gene ND4 is the
basis for a therapy that is currently going through clinical trials in Europe!
It exists, it works! Yes, it took effort to get there, effort funded at the
early stages by the SENS Research Foundation and those who donated to it, I
should note, but so does everything else.

This is one of the things that frustrates me immensely about many of the
critics of SENS - they willfully ignore some of the progress that has been
made, pretending it doesn't exist.

Yet their behavior for progress that is so compelling they can't ignore it is
in many ways worse. Let us look at what is said - and, more importantly, not
said - about senescent cell clearance, something that de Grey and other SENS
advocates have been promoting as a path to treat aging for the past fifteen
years, on the basis of strong evidence, that they assembled from the various
groups who created it across the research community, laid out, and made the
argument for. It is right there in the SENS outline; hard to miss, and has
been from pretty much day one back at the turn of the century. Senescent cell
clearance is a core part of the SENS agenda.

Fortunately for all of us, targeted removal of senescent cells has finally
taken off these past few years, the evidence for a significant impact on aging
has grown to be nigh irrefutable, and near everyone in the research community
is enthused. Yet SENS and many researchers' past vocal rejections of senescent
cell clearance as a part of SENS is swept under the rug, never to be
mentioned. It is unconscionable behavior, and it happens in this article:
despite covering UNITY Biotechnology, the senolytics company, no mention of
senescent cells is made in connection with the SENS vision. It takes some
brass to claim SENS to be a doomed effort and then roll right on in the next
paragraph to a discussion with one of the UNITY co-founders on the topic of
removing senescent cells to treat aging.

~~~
RichardHeart
SENS was right, and they're not getting credit for being right, when everyone
else was wrong. Let's hope their other predictions come true as well!

------
ganadiniakshay
I actually believe its highly important we achieve this sooner rather than
later. Because we are currently limited by death for a lot of things. One
example is Inter-Planetary Space Travel. If you could live longer then you can
travel farther and explore more.

~~~
rublev
As if it's not going to be exclusively available for the ultra billionaires.
Immortality will be the final divider of the classes.

~~~
philipkglass
It's not going to be exclusively available for ultra billionaires, if it is
possible at all. There are lots of things that would be powerful advantages if
only a tiny elite had access to them: vaccines, antibiotics, anti-retroviral
drugs, digital computers... but if a thing is demonstrated possible at all,
others will figure out how to do it again. And if the first inventors refuse
to sell or share the technology it will just be spread by the second or third
group to figure out the trick.

~~~
jacquesm
Already wealth is a big factor in longevity.

------
apapli
The financial impact of this is an interesting angle to me.

Considering that many of us hope to retire (or at least not _have_ to work a
stressful job) a lot of effort goes into saving up enough money to last just
~20 years after finishing work.

I'm not sure how most of us would be able to ammass sufficient wealth to be
comfortably retired even for 60 years (ie live to "just" 120-130 years of
age).

~~~
lumberjack
If you have to worry about that you won't be able to afford these treatments
anyway.

~~~
kasparsklavins
Strangely, this is both reassuring and scary at the same time.

------
petecox
If the ages of dogs and cats don't increase accordingly, the smart money would
be on domesticating longer lived species of pets. e.g. Tortoises live up to 2
centuries.

I'm only in my forties and I've buried 5 pet cats already! I'm not sure I
could live to 130 and go through the trauma of outliving quite a significant
number more.

~~~
hwillis
More likely would be parrots, which can in some circumstances outlive humans,
and are much more intelligent and social than tortoises. Unfortunately most
birds are fundamentally fractured in their braincases and they are insane
uncontrollable maniacs. They act like they are controlled by a twitch stream.

[https://np.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingJerks/comments/42vlvs/ne...](https://np.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingJerks/comments/42vlvs/neighbourhood_bullies/czdvkhl/)

"A side note, I am fully convinced that ALL cockatoos are insane. They are fun
to own, they are adorable to watch, but deep inside that tiny feathered skull
is a scratched, perpetually skipping warped record playing the soundtrack to
Silent Hill backwards. If you could experience the brain of a cockatoo first
hand, you would probably feel like you had dropped 1,000 hits of premium acid
and boarded the scariest roller coaster ever imagined. I love each and every
one I have ever met, but they are ALL insane."

------
a-guest
Supposing an incredible anti-aging pill is invented, what do you suppose the
chances are the pill-taker begins to feel like one Bilbo Baggins? "I feel
thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

------
Aron
_Amy Wagers, a researcher at Harvard, told me, “Part of the meaning of life is
that we die.”_

I wouldn't want to live forever if I had to keep hearing this.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'd happily wait until all who keep believing that die of old age.

------
jinfiesto
On a large scale, I don't have any objection to seeking to end human
mortality. However, I'm skeptical of our ability to maintain a functional
society given the existence of immortal humans. I can't even imagine the
levels of inequality when portions of the population can live forever.

Never mind the ethics of figuring out how to dole out immortality, and to
whom.

------
phkahler
One of the recent discoveries is mentioned:

He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out
genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by
which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood,
and within weeks becomes younger.

When I originally read about that work I pictured some people with money and
no moral compass kidnapping children and getting a similarly minded surgeon to
perform the procedure on themselves. A recent spike in child trafficking could
be a direct result of this. It makes for the most frightening villain I can
think of. So lets hope they figure out how to get these benefits without
grafting the young onto the old sooner rather than later.

------
du_bing
This is the ultimate necessary thing to do actually for human beings. All
economics and social activities stem from the quest to live forever, though
it's impossible to implement before. But today, technologies have made this
promising. Believe me, it's not absurd at all.

Think about all religions, they come from the quest to live forever deeply
inside human's unconscious, but today, technology and science have become the
new religion, and its goal, in fact, is still the same here, because human
beings never change much.

Combine biology and information theory, I think this can be done before 2500
A.D..

~~~
tps5
> _All economics and social activities stem from the quest to live forever_

This is quite an assertion.

> _Think about all religions, they come from the quest to live forever deeply
> inside human 's unconscious_

Yeah, I don't agree with this one either.

I have no expectations about this stuff. I suppose I find it all pretty
fantastical and I probably will until there's hard evidence all this hype is
actually leading somewhere.

~~~
literallycancer
>> Think about all religions, they come from the quest to live forever deeply
inside human's unconscious

>Yeah, I don't agree with this one either.

Follow the commandments and you are guaranteed to live forever in heaven. It
doesn't get more concrete than that.

------
mikemike5000
"In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is
unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain
irrelevant to much of humanity."

-Paul Farmer

------
Animats
What the article doesn't discuss is genetic engineering to make longer-lived
humans. That's more likely to work than a rejuvenation scheme. But it's a
tougher sell; it benefits only the unborn.

A major genetic redesign might require generating a new species, one that
doesn't interbreed with old-style humans. Or maybe several new species; Squibb
people and Novartis people might not interbreed. That's a social problem for
50-100 years out.

------
Chinjut
When finally science unlocks the secret of immortality, they'll raise the
retirement age correspondingly…

~~~
josephg
Official retirement age? Once you build up some passive income sources you can
retire whenever you want. And you can do that as simply as having a nest egg
sitting in an investment portfolio.

~~~
owyn
Oh, it's just that easy? And I can do it whenever? I just need a nest egg?
What is that exactly? Oh, but I also need a passive income source? That's all?

So explain how exactly does "anyone" pull this off, or explain how there a
massive gap which prevents most people from doing this. Bonus points for
explaining how one or the other situation is better.

~~~
josephg
Its simple, but that doesn't make it easy.

The most tractable way to pull it off is to dramatically lower your expenses.
How much do you need to live? If you can get a consistent 5% interest from
your assets (-2% inflation) then $1m will net you $30k of spending money per
year without digging into the base. Saving up that much money in the tech
sector over an entire career (especially one thats been extended due to anti-
aging research, which is what we're talking about) is very doable. Lots of
people pull it off, they just call that asset 'their house' and call saving
money 'paying off the mortgage'. If you sell / rent out the house and move
somewhere cheap then you can be pretty comfortable living on less than
$30k/yr, depending on what you want to do.

If you want more information:

[http://www.mrmoneymustache.com](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/](https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/)

~~~
literallycancer
Doesn't it take some time to take care of the assets though? Or are you able
to get those returns without touching them at all?

~~~
josephg
There is a plethora of companies who will solve that problem for you, in
exchange for a small cut of the investment returns.

Eg, [https://www.betterment.com](https://www.betterment.com) for stocks &
bonds, and [http://www.ipmanagers.com.au](http://www.ipmanagers.com.au) for
managing property. (For property you obviously want someone local to your
area.)

------
_rpd
Or rather, humankind's quest to not die quite so very quickly.

------
nsxwolf
Just don't forget - eventually the universe dies, and your immortal body along
with it.

~~~
projektir
I never understand why this always gets brought up. Yes, let's worry about the
universe dying after a few billion years when people are currently dying at
~100 if they're lucky. Talk about scale mismatch.

~~~
noonespecial
I think it's because existentially, it doesn't really matter if you live 80
years or until the final heat-death of the universe. When you get to the end,
you'll still want to live longer and marvel at how fast it all went by.

The miracle is that we existed at all, and that we recognized ourselves (or
whatever consciousness is). Next to that, duration is insignificant. A scale
mismatch.

------
jodrellblank
How successful are humans at rejuvenating large codebases back to when they
were new and small and fresh? (Without rewrites or replacements)

Surely human bodies will be easier to rejuvenate than that, eh?

------
philipkglass
Some of these "benefits" of death are just ridiculous. If you don't like a
long life you can always end it. It's not like anyone is going to invent
mythology-grade immortality and then chain you to a rock to be tormented by an
eagle tearing at your liver.

I don't expect that anti-aging research is going to significantly extend my
own lifespan or healthspan. Biology is really complicated. But that doesn't
justify sugar-coating age related morbidity and mortality. They are _really_
bad. The only thing worse than death is great pain. Old age deals out both:
pain _and_ death. It torments and finally kills you. People trying to defeat
death may be delusional about their prospects for success, but they are at
least trying to do the best thing humans have tried to do in generations.

~~~
AQuantized
If you are under 40 I don't think the prospect of a fair amount of additional
healthy years as a result of this research is a particularly delusional one.
Actual immortality seems unlikely to me, however.

~~~
louthy
Dammit, I'm 41. Oh well, death it is.

~~~
hwillis
He actually does have a point. It's pretty difficult to actually reverse aging
once it has started, as everything kind of feeds back into itself. There are a
few exceptions- Alzheimer's may be reversible, but things like heart damage,
immune weakness or DNA degradation may not be. The way it looks right now it
may be easier to stop aging from starting than to stop the damage from
occuring. Once it starts happening, even if aging stops the damage will still
accrue.

~~~
the8472
From a computational POV DNA damage should be trivial to repair. You have so
many redundant copies in your body. Of course building a fault-free copy,
creating stemcells from that and coaxing those into fixing any defects without
causing cancer is still scifi, but not the physics-violating kind.

------
sebnap
Read up on Near-Death-Experiences, go with the natural and relax.

------
andrewfromx
"Can billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech research succeed in making death
optional?" No, because you were never alive in the first place. Well not that
in the way you thought you were. Insert Alan Watts quote.

~~~
jodrellblank
I have a tough time seeing that worldview as anything much different from
solipsism ("it's my brain which creates the world as much as the world creates
me, it's you who makes the sun bright, it's you who makes the sky blue, it's
you who makes rocks heavy - so you can't say anything objective about
anything") and nihilism ("everything is subjective and relative, nothing
matters, not joy, not torture") and fatalism ("you can't change yourself to be
better, because you don't know what better is, and the you which is supposed
to do the changing doesn't exist either").

As he says, you start _learning_ that you are one with everything, because you
don't realise that you always were one with everything and can never have
become separated from it. A skillful person operates on two levels
simultaneously.

And then he enlightenedly cheated on his wife, married again twice, and drank
himself to death. (Which is not to ad-hom his position, but to point out that
for all his studying and meditation, he doesn't seem to have had all the
answers)

Well we do have a label of what death is, and we might have a chance of
changing it, and if we prefer that, what does it help to say "you weren't
alive"?

~~~
bamboozled
Ok, the OPs post wasn't fantastic, but I have to be honest, the logic you're
applying here is a little confusing.

If I understand you correctly, you're point is Alan studied Zen Buddhism but
didn't take it as the gospel, therefore the original teachings are false.
Which doesn't really seem correct to me

I'm by no means an Alan Watts fan, it just seemed like strange reasoning.

~~~
jodrellblank
My main point was: Alan Watts explicitly said that concepts don't go away once
you realise they exist in your head not in the world, and concepts are useful
- 'skill' is being able to see both interpretations simultaneously. Well we
have concepts of life and death. The parent post saying "you can't put off
death if you were never alive" is like saying "you can't take colour photos
after you realise the colours exist only in your heads". But you can. It
sounds connected, but it's unconnected, it's crossing over two worldviews in
one sentence. In one worldview you are alive and can die and can apply medical
intervention to try and live longer, in the other view a rippling part of the
universe that you call 'medical intervention' connects with a rippling part of
the universe that feels like 'you' and the consequence is that the ripple
ripples for longer.

And it's .. the same thing. You can't really use that view to argue that it
can't happen, or that it shouldn't happen.

(Intermixed with meanderings about how that worldview seems pretty dismal in
some respects, and I don't really get it).

~~~
andrewfromx
Watts also said you are the Big Bang. Think of an ink bottle thrown at the
wall and BOOM ink goes in every direction on the wall, and the tiny little
bits of ink at the ends are us. We are the Big Bang, and before it went boom
it was 1 solid object. That's the "real you" that can never die. And the
illusion you have for 100 years is that you are this separate create called a
human with the name John Smith etc etc. but it's all intentional amnesia by
the real you. Because, try this, it's absolutely impossible to surprise
yourself. You can't sneak up on yourself and go boo and actually be surprised.
You need someone else. So, just for fun, the real you broke into different
selves. And once you realize this (satori) you laugh and laugh and relax and
enjoy the ride to "death" which really isn't death. Therefore drinking lots of
alcohol and bringing on this death quicker isn't disallowed. Or 2nd wives or
any other sin you want to name.

~~~
jodrellblank
Watts also said 'praise and blame go together. If there was only praise,
everyone would get bored of it, it wouldn't mean anything. So long as you're
going to get a kick out of being praised then you have to go around blaming
people too. But if you see the folly of that, that praising and blaming are
just creating each other, then you don't praise and you don't blame, you just
dig the whole thing'.

But I feel there's something wrong with this.

Just for fun the universe broke up into pieces, OK. Go further -> just for fun
the pieces invented tribes and societies and languages and technologies and
'toys' of all kinds and companies and ... anything and everything above the
unified fundamental forces.

very Terence McKenna and the observation that the universe doesn't appear to
be 'winding down', it appears to be 'winding up', 'generating novelty', up
from the unified forces to the separate fundamental forces, up through matter
instead of only energy, up through the fundamental particles, through the
light elements and galactic clusters and stars, up through heavier elements,
up through solar systems and planets, up through geology and plate tectonics,
building on the lower levels, up through weather patterns and climatology and
elemental chemistry, up through single cell organisms and electro-bio-
chemistry, up through multiple cells and branches of life and sexual
reproduction, up through sea creatures and reptiles and land mammals and
socialisation, up through communication and languages, up through societies
and settlements, up through all kinds of technologies ..

and then why say it stops here? Why take the Buddhist style view that _this_
is the arbitrary place to stop generating novelty, to say that nothing
matters, to relax and enjoy the ride and get drunk? We should be increasing
the number of distinctions and their interactions, that appears to be the
direction of everything.

The universe has spent 14 billion years increasing complexity on smaller and
smaller scales, on smaller and smaller timescales, winding up and up and up.
Instead of seeing that as good or bad, what about seeing _that_ as inevitable?
Instead of relaxing and saying that nothing means anything it's all just
illusion, why not see the illusion as the whole point of the universe, more
important than anything else?

Each layer is harder to create, more costly, than the lower levels. It's
harder to get human teamwork than single interest, harder to get human
intelligence seeing things as separate and distinct and divided, than lower
complexity mammals, harder to get mammals than amoeba, harder to get meltwater
planet temperature than extreme heat or cold, etc. Each layer is more valuable
because it's more rare.

 _Therefore drinking lots of alcohol and bringing on this death quicker isn 't
disallowed._

The liberated, free human who sees the world is an illusion _and chooses
hedonism_ , isn't that falling into the spiritual gutter, rather than
attaining spiritual enlightenment?

[https://youtu.be/Jb8XDalyT0k?t=1030](https://youtu.be/Jb8XDalyT0k?t=1030) \-
he talks about the difference between people who go off the rails and turn to
slovenly living and surviving on thievery when they want to live an unplanned
life, vs people who don't.

He talks about what he wants - "I like drinking wine, but wine isn't me. I
like me and wine together" \- well you can have more things to enjoy if you
recognise more things as distinct and separate and create more things, surely?

~~~
andrewfromx
spiritual gutter? Well, it's your choice. If you want to avoid the gutter and
spend your 100 year dream doing very "pure" things and not indulging in
hedonism go for it. That's a valid choice. But so is mine. You have to ask
yourself if you are really not you, you are the universe, what did you want?
Did you want a 100 year boring dream or a 100 year exciting dream? How
exciting? And is the 100 years serious? Or is it all a big joke? Well, that
your choice. What do humans do when all the work is done? Sing and dance. And
the real question to ask: should this be allowed? Like how dare we enjoy
ourselves!

------
ronilan
_" Mama always said, dying was a part of life"_

\-- Forrest Gump

[https://youtu.be/nFvASiMTDz0](https://youtu.be/nFvASiMTDz0)

------
notliketherest
I just think that death gives life meaning and knowing/accepting that we will
die is a part of growing more self aware and focusing on the good things in
life like family and love rather than the wasteful things. Maybe that's an
unpopular viewpoint in the age of technology but I also think a lot of people
are scared to death that they spent decades of their life in a rat race and
are desperate to get those years back. All the money in the world can't save
you from death and time is our most precious resource.

~~~
reasonattlm
Everyone devotes resources to saving themselves from death each and every day.
Every time they go to the grocery store, in fact. If you are willing to
undertake that action, you should be equally willing to to visit a physician
to push back your day of death by a day, each and every day.

There is something about considering alterations in the current trajectory of
aging that makes people say strange things. People who exercise to improve
their health span, people who visit doctors to prolong their health span,
people who put off death in hundreds of small ways, constantly, all the time.
But suggest that perhaps aging should be modified, and people who are 100%
supportive of ending heart disease and Alzheimer's suddenly develop a deep
philosophical attachment to inevitable death on exactly the current schedule
for inevitable death. Seems a little suspect.

~~~
jodrellblank
Eating is pleasurable and I have a biological drive to do it.

I have no such drive, nor pleasure association, with visiting a physician.

------
djyaz1200
Until science has an effective solution for male pattern baldness I think the
idea that we're going to be able to cheat death is premature. (...and please
don't troll me and say Propecia or Rogaine, I used both and I'm still bald)

~~~
pharrlax
Propecia and Rogaine don't work if you're already bald.

Just like cures for death.

------
jlebrech
once we have a 3d cancer detection, we can gamma ray cancer out. and take
telomere enhancing pills. also we could replace our limbs and nonessential
parts so that there are less biological parts to get cancer or get old.

