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Ask HN: How would you solve mortality?
18 points by mastef on March 5, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 26 comments
Which current and future technologies would benefit fixing the human 'robot', and why is it currently not feasible?

E.g. would you approach it from the 'immortal jellyfish' perspective, from cell regeneration, 'transporting' into an earlier version, transfer of the mind, etc.?



May I ask why we need to battle mortality? People tend to forget our body's limitations and that all the extra years add to the end, not in the middle. Not to mention the implications it might have on reproduction. People wont want to have children and slowly our numbers will decline. Also this will bring up an issue depriving ourself's of new Isaac Newtons, Einsteins and all the other bright mind and great people who would have been born and now they aren't. We always forget that strength lies in diversity. And lastly, do we really want to give immortality to people who do not contribute anything to our society? How do we determine who is worth the while to live for hundreds of years? And how will we convince the other parts of society that this is beneficial for all of us? Too many questions on a human level which are ignored, or it looks like they are ignored...

Instead of spending all our time in the shadow of mortality why not we just step out in the light and enjoy life in its brief moment and make the most of it?

Don't get me wrong, I would like to live forever, but it might have greater risks for mankind then the benefits it holds.


I find the idea of immortality horrifying. People would become ridiculously risk adverse because they could live forever as long as they didn't have an accident. Imagine the sort of repressive policies those voters would support in order to remove risk.

I also think for society to evolve older generations need to die off. Peoples worldview becomes partially fixed in their youth, and for some it is entirely fixed in their youth. I wouldn't want to live with a bunch of geriatrics from the 1800's.


a) mortality deprived us of the Isaac Newtons, Einsteins and all the other bright minds already

b) why would there even be a discussion on 'who deserves' to be immortal? is there currently a discussion on who deserves to live based on what they contribute to society? crime would still be crime, and dealt with as it's always been dealt with

c) let's distinguish between mortality based on aging and mortality based on other unforeseeable causes ( violence, accidents, etc. )

d) mortality currently binds us to our solar system, and humanities' possible ultimate demise

e) we are at a stage where human evolution has stopped. the way to push it forward is now through our own means

my question was rather related to the technical issue - as it is a technical issue. not if it's desireable or not; that's besides the point and has to be dealt with separately


a)I understand it's a technical question. But as with every technical question, we have to ask what the changes will be on society.

b)Mortality gives way to other minds to step forward like Stephen Hawking and others. Would have been such a good thing to have an immortal Isaac Newton for a millennia? Would have he realised the the laws of physics outside of earth's standards. Could have an immortal Einstein refine his theories and change his mistakes and adapt to newer findings? Could have had a Stephen Hawking any chance to share his knowledge beside immortal Einsteins and Newtons?

c)It is a discussion about who deserves it. As for expensive treatments which aren't affordable by anyone in our society right now. We all now this. These treatments or solutions won't be free of charge. Only the rich will afford it. You know, money talks...

d)It's not only mortality that binds us to earth. It's our whole biological build up. Which fits only the life on earth. What about the warp drive, worm holes, etc... These aren't good enough for humanity to reach for the stars?

e)Also we don't have any clue about what effects it will have on the human body to live on another planet.

f)It is silly to say that evolution has stopped for the human race. We are biological creatures which can adapt to its surrounding as any other. But having immortality and not producing offsprings will actually lead to an evolutionary dead end. Having no genetic mutation will prevent the species to create natural immunity against diseases etc...

g)I only wanted to point out that maybe it is not the best thing to cheat death. It is natural. It's not a disease. Stop treating it like one.

As I said. As we are concerned about A.I., so should we concerned about this as well. Logic dictates to examine a possible solution from every angle as possible. Not to put ourselves and the whole humanity into a dead end.


a) that's not how technology works, that's not how progress is decided. somebody goes out there and makes it

b) that's just an ignorant way of thinking. similar to the poster below who wouldn't want to live with an older generation of people because of their ignorance - which just shows his ignorance; it's not up to you or us to decide how long people should live or playing out 'what if' scenarios and wondering if humanity is better off because somebody died. it's pointless

c) any technology that is available to rich people becomes with the progress of time more affordable and available to the masses

d) if you die before you reach the next solar system, what's the point of starting the flight? see the fermi paradox and the great filter. mortality could be one of the great filters for interstellar expansion

e) that's... completely besides the point of this discussion

f) we are currently at the state quite complacent and well-adjusted to our environment. no big hardships, no predators - we're the dinosaurs now. what different strain of the homo sapiens would have to evolve now randomly to surpass the current strain? dinosaurs didn't evolve into highly intelligent beings, although they've been around millions of years

g) that's a complacent and dangerous "it's always been this way". cells stopping to reproduce themselves are a malfunction, and it can be technically solved; the same way as we can repair robots, machines or other electronics

mostly fears, complacency and wrong assumptions. taken into account, but not useful as they act as distractions and take attention from the topic - which was the technological hurdles of fixing the human robot


a) the more we venture further into the unknown the more cautious we can get, and we should get. Even, if you say, that's not the way it is. It might be better. Not saying it IS better, but might be...

b) I just proven my point. Humans are ignorant bastards. You can't deny the fact that this will create massive problems in society.

c) Yeah, but during that time, wars will erupt and kill millions who already could have been saved. Lose money, lose the greed out of humanity and everything bad. Then we can talk about free immortality for everyone.

d) We are soooo far away from proper interstellar travel with technology, that putting a handful of people in a tube and sending them far away while the rest of us dies here whilst they're travelling. I still think we will find answers regarding how fast can we travel. What about huge colonisation ships, on which people can live for generations? The great filters are mostly speculations. Some stuff we look back on and go, 'Hey that was a filter. Thank god we survived it!'. And there are always more answers for one problem. Oh and you forget there might be another issue. Living in space during the venture. That is hard for the human body, even if you live forever. So unless you change into robot, which is not as good, because solar winds, radiation, etc... What if we let humans evolve into space life?

e) Maybe, maybe not...

f) That is silly again. Over the years much has changed in our body. Just go and have a look at old castles, houses in Europe. A few hundreds of years ago the people were much shorter. Our body structure changes and adapts, but so does everything else in us. We are still evolving as we speak. Maybe the environment for the dinos was a bit harsh. Humans couldn't have evolved in that. Not to mention live. That's why being a dino was they way to go. A lot of people agree that it is a freak accident, that we have such a calm few thousand years without any huge issues in climate and vegetation. Now it is better, because we can shape our surrounding. Of course this spirals down into us killing everything that moves and has meat, fur, tusks, whatever... Mother nature is not stupid, there was a reason why the dinos couldn't evolve but still they were the dominant species. And it would be foolish to say they didn't. Not every dino lived in the same prehistoric age at once. They evolved from each other. Only an alternative history would know what would have happened, if dinos remain here.

g) Ok, than why do we have organisms which live basically forever and we're not one of them? And why aren't these immortal creatures not the true rulers of Earth by now? I'm not a biologist, but I do see a relation here between the necessity of death and evolution. As we mix our DNA we create better and better offspring. Immortality kills the need for offspring.

This is not off-topic. It would have been off-topic for me to comment: ' Hey what about vanilla flavoured ice-cream? How the hell they do it!?'

Anyway I enjoy this argument. It wont hurt you get a bit out of your comfort zone. Sorry if I annoyed you in any way.

Oh and I would love to have a cyber-brain as they have it in the Ghost In The Shell world. If my body dies I could still transfer my brain into something else. Like a big robot or something, or just a jar. Maybe creating this kind of hybrid solution would be the answer. If we can continue with our current body to evolve, but have our brain picked out if we want to... Maybe that would help. And the human robot doesn't need fixing, it is good as it is and what it will evolve into. Stepping outside of it might be a better solution then fixing.


Giving up is not an option.


It's not about giving up.

It is about looking at mortality as some kind of disease and not a common thing that happens to all living beings.

As a human, I am afraid of death as the most of us. I like to toy with the idea living forever, or at least hundreds of years...

But looking at our society now. As the average lifespan getting higher, more people stay in jobs longer as usual. The young wont have any jobs, because their parent will stay in the positions. In the end the old would have to sustain the young and soon after that, no one would want to have a child, because who needs another hungry mouth.

Of course as the 1st world country citizens will afford living a longer life, 2nd and 3rd ones wont. This will create a massive gap between nations. Like we didn't have that already.

And we don't know how the human mind could handle this anyway. Maybe you would go actually mad after 200 years of living.

And as I said. The extra years always add up to the end. Maybe you live 200 years, but 2/3 of that is spent being old and useless.

As highly appreciated and acknowledged people warn us about the ramifications of A.I., so we should be extremely cautious about banning death.

To be honest I would be less afraid of A.I. as the consequences of immortality.


There are two options: A) Live B) Die

Choose your poison, however, living long enough to fight for a chance to change, defeat or restructure that poison, in whatever form it comes, is what I choose. Choice B) does not give you that option unless it's your understanding that:

C) There is another option

D) Choice A) will someday positively impact the reanimation of those who've selected Choice B).

Choose wisely.


It is good to have someone living as long as possible who actually wants to make the world a better place.

But, we all know who will be the ones actually benefiting from this.

The ones who don't give a rats ass about anything, only selfishly living longer just to make more money, have more power. Hoarders who are rather a disease for humanity then being useful.

In an ideal world it would be a fantastic thing. But we aren't living in one. We can try, but unless 90% of humanity stops acting like a maniac, it will divide humanity on another level.

We can't cope with the fact properly, if our neighbour has a bigger car then ours. Imagine how people would cope with the fact, that some of us can live for hundreds of years.

Immortality is a nice thing, but not until the minds are cleared, poverty, hunger, closed mindedness, are banished and humanity as a whole can act and decide without having constant internal struggles.

Just look at the idiots who are against vaccinations, religious nut-jobs, greedy, selfish, maniac, egocentric, etc...

All the beautiful traits of humanity. Do you want to give those power to live long, or maybe forever?

Would you prevent new generation to blossom and create something new, by selfishly clinging to life and not letting go to give way for the change? It is a common thing that the older you are, the less you can change, or keep up with trends. And this is not only about are ageing bodies. We might have the risk to stop evolving. To stop innovating, exploring, etc...

I advise to you to read "2br02b" from Kurt Vonnegut. A short story about our society perfecting immortality. It is very interesting.

And to answer your question. I would probably choose 'A', even if I fear that it will have a very negative impact on humanity.


I think it's something of a tragedy that sentient life-forms die before they're ready to do so, before they've crossed off the last item on their bucket list, so to speak.

Sure, "immortality" in humans would present a variety of potential problems, but new technologies often do. Should we not have created cars, planes, nuclear power, etc. because of the risks we foresaw? Let's deal with the issues as they arise, rather than use them as an excuse not to try in the first place.

How would I approach the problem? "All of the above." Follow all plausible and ethical courses of action to see where they lead. It's too early to tell which method(s) will be effective, but if something is physically possible in this arena I expect we'll try it sooner or later.


use baculovirus to serially and temporally express telomerase and keep the telomere count between 3000-8000 for all cells in the human body. Then figure out some way to flush out senescent cells


Apparently there's some work happening now with mice, to activate a gene that selectively eliminates senescent cells ( from Google ) - but gene manipulation after birth is unfeasible, isn't it? What other ways could there be?

RE: Baculovirus, have you seen any attempts at this?


Yes, plenty of labs use this regularly on mammalian cells and mice etc. Nobody has used it clinically though ...


Improve end of life care and the way people die.

Start making it acceptable for people to talk about death - how they'd like to die; what they want to happen to their organs or body after their death; what kind of funeral they want.

It's really important to let your family know how you feel about being hooked up to machines or how you'd feel about living with dementia or similar.


Transfer of the mind, definitely. Hardware independence. Plus possibility of backups. Even if your body is completely vaporized in a blast, you can come back if there is a backup of you.

Forget immortality through the extension of the biological life of the body; yonder lies folly.


The issue with backups / teleporting / transfer of mind is always the question if it's just a copy of you living on, or still the same consciousness. E.g. if you die on the spot, and a copy takes over for you with your memories.

However yes, that would be a much faster approach to space colonisation - it would remove the need for spaceships.


Reproduction


http://calicolabs.com

http://humanlongevity.com

http://genopharmix.com

http://sens.org

http://buckinstitute.org


Do you have any information on their current status and their biggest issues/blockers?

What I'm wondering about the different approaches is if they could receive bigger breakthroughs by sharing / crowdsourcing their issues and getting a wider attraction / reach. E.g. sometimes the answers to a problem lie in another industry

Like e.g. the fold.it game helped decyphering the crystal structure of an AIDS causing virus in 10 days, while scientists were battling it for 15 years


See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V48M5j-6zdE

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbYgza4NNk8

To name some of the top roadblocks:

- Cellular garbage collection

- Inner-workings of Mitochondria and cell death/apoptosis at the wrong time.

- DNA repair genes

- Telomerase production/use

Analyzing genomic pathways associated to these is key. Understanding why the expression of genes varies or decreases/increases at the wrong time is also key.

Being able to use Cogntive computing/biomicry/AI/Machine Learning etc to analyze the hidden connections and relationships between phytochemicals, genes, proteins, pathways and environment is the next frontier.

We're working on it and could certainly use additional crowdsourcing approaches.


Do you have any specific ideas of a massive road-block that would benefit from a Mechanical Turk approach? E.g. issues that would require an AI, but if split into a lot of tiny problems, that could be solved as a whole?


I've been giving this some thought and have some ideas on a few directions we can go in. For example, cognitive biomimicry/AI can be trained to predict certain things like answering "What is the capitol of Austria?"

With statistical inference and probability, a system can provide a number of answers to questions. A crowdsourcing component can be used to rate the answers the system provides thereby allowing the system to learn via feedback loops.

Apply this to Life Sciences, molecular biology, genomics/proteomics and we may have a system intelligent enough to produce new hypothesis in the area of life extension research or a system intelligent enough to combine two pieces of knowledge to come up with something new, a discovery or series of discoveries.

I have some other ideas too, look me up at biomimic@gmail.com if you want to collaborate on these.


We've proven we can increase the lifespan of nematodes by what is equivalent to 300 years in human lifespan. If we can at least make it 150, then we have a chance at 300 and if we make 300 we have a chance at 500 and so on.

We can then truly solve for space travel and populating other planets and we'll have lifespans that enable us to travel for extended periods of time - a Universal requirement for the human species.


On a sidenote : It's interesting to see Elon Musk advancing into space travel, whereas Peter Thiel advancing into trying to defeat mortality. Those seem very closely related industries that clearly do benefit from each other.

Re: The Nematode lifespan; What happened to the C60 buckyballs diet? Apparently rats that underwent a specific diet of C-60 fluids had nearly double the lifespan ( 22-26months vs 42 months ) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142961212...


Exactly. Space travel depends on lifespan. We have to solve for lifespan first. It's the largest human goal and most impactful.

Yes, we are almost there and I don't think people realize how close we are. Make the world a better place? How about making the Universe/Multiverse a better place!




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