A recent interview with Aubrey De Grey:

Why do you personally want to live forever?

It’s not really a matter of living forever, it’s just a matter of not wanting to die. One doesn’t live forever all in one go, one lives forever one year at a time. It’s just a case of "Well, life seems to be fun, and I don’t see any prospect of it ceasing to be fun unless I get frail and miserable and start declining." So if I can avoid declining, I’ll stay with it really.

Right. It's not a matter of living forever. It's a matter of living as long as one wants to live.

[Update a couple minutes later]

D'oh!

It's not that recent--it's from last spring.

Oh, well, in the context of living forever, it's not very long ago. And maybe there are some readers here who haven't seen it.

I did a personal survey about 5 years ago. I asked people if they could live to be 150 by aging slower (i.e., when you're 140 your body is about the same as a 70 year old's) would you take the option. I asked a second question too, if you could pick any physical age you prefer and remain that age for as long as you like would you take the option. The answers were 99% No for non-geeks and 50% No for geeks. This was shocking to me, as I thought everyone wanted to live forever. There's a stereotype that says teenagers all think they are going to live forever, but if you ask the same questions of them you'll find the statistics are about the same. The vast majority of people in our society would rather live less than live more.. even if they can be eternally young. I think this is a reflection of how poorly our society treats people. Geeks definitely "have it easy" compared to others. We get to spend all day doing things we enjoy.. at least moreso than most average people. I think that's why we welcome more life whereas average people welcome death.

My response to people like that is that if they think that death is so great, why wait? Why not just toss yourself out a window now? I think that they say this because they think it's what they're supposed to believe, not that they are tired of living.

Why wait? Because they feel a duty to do such things as having children or making a name for themselves or reducing the cost of space travel before they die. "Once I do X, Y and Z I want to relax and die peacefully in my sleep" is a response I actually got a lot.

Trent, old chap, you might want to consider adding a more optimistic group of folks to your existing base of friends and acquaintances in order to raise the average mood level a bit. Just a thought.

I recall my senior year High school English teacher would have a short essay question on the board most everyday we walked into class. They were often times questions of the sort: would you drink an elixir that lets you live 1000 years, what super power would you want to posses, if you knew you were going to die tomorrow what would you do, yadda yadda.

In particular the question about living for 1000 years was interesting because it did seem most of the class would have refused to drink the elixir. I agree more so with Rand however because when I started to hear the why to people's refusal response it seemed to be that they didn't want to come off as so greedy, arrogant, or self centered. A lot of people would take it as an opportunity to proclaim their faith and admit that this life was just a temporary stop over on our way to sit next to Jebus for eternity. Or, they were scared by the fact that they would be so lonely and depressed after a while cause all their lovers, friends, and family had long died and been buried.

I have so much interested in the future and how various singularity events are going to turn out that I'd love to stick around and see it all. Plus, just think how rich one could become just sitting around writing books about history.

I don't think it is going to be that hard to start making people live longer. I just fear that those opportunities to extend ones life will be retained by the elite few. Either it will remain so expensive that only the rich can afford it. Or, the power hungry will realize that knowledge is power and purposely skew the life extended population base to increase the value of their knowledge commodity.

It seems that just in the past 50 years or so our prevailing culture of consummerism and greed has changed our view of death from being simply a natural thing- to being a bad thing.

It seems that just in the past 50 years or so our prevailing culture of consummerism and greed has changed our view of death from being simply a natural thing- to being a bad thing.

??

There's nothing intrinsically good about natural things. This is the naturalistic fallacy. Anthrax is natural, as is cancer, as is ptomaine. Death has always been a bad thing, at least for individuals and their loved ones (though it may be a good thing for society).

Greed (as Gordon Gecko pointed out) is also a good thing. It's a major driver to human progress. So what's your point?

I suspect a great deal of the "I don't want to live (insert 'forever,''indefinitely' or other extremely long number)is a sour grappes thing. It's easy to say you don't want that which is unattainable, anyway. Through all but the last sliver of human history, they'd be right. But not everyone yet realizes that the real prospect is on (or barely over) the horizon. Already there are some ethicists and others who, seeing the handwriting on the wall, are beginning to take opposing stands. How they hope to say how much is 'enough' life, for someone in otherwise reasonably good health and of sound mind, remains to be seen ("Sorry Madam Caulmet*, you should have moved along 30 years earlier.")

I've long had a feeling that some people will sort of find themselves 'backing' into indefinite life, by expressing ideas like:

"I don't want to live forever...but I'd like my eyesight to be what it was."

"I don't want to live forever...but I'd like to remember and recall like I used to."

"....not feel so stiff anymore"
"....sex to be more like it used to be."
"....have beter skin tone."
"....run/jog/bicycle/swim like I used to"
"....have all my hair again."
"....have better hearing."
"....have better muscle tone."

Etc. In other words, have more and more of the characteristics of, say, a 20 year old, without asking for it outright.

Treat/fix enough 'symptoms' of aging, and after a certain point, you're at that indefinite life span potential, without actually admitting it. And who would deny you fixing any of the above, and other age-related characteristics, on an individual basis? Where's the line?

And why not cross it, anyway?

As Timothy Leary used to point out, space migration, intelligence increase and life extension, all seem to be converging on us at about the same time...and they strongly compliment each other. (Okay, Tim considered, but didn't follow through on cryonics, but the point's still valid.)

* Referring to Jeanne Caulmet, who made it to 121.

LOL, as I recall, Gordon Gecko is a ficticious character- not that heroes in fiction have not uttered great things, but it's not like... he's Machiavelli or Plato. My point is just that the driving force behind life extension seems to be- let's keep people around longer so we can sell them more stuff- and most importantly, collect more taxes from them. I'm not so sure that's a noble incentive.

My point is just that the driving force behind life extension seems to be- let's keep people around longer so we can sell them more stuff- and most importantly, collect more taxes from them.

Huh?

It doesn't seem like that to me at all. I've no idea why it seems like that to you.

The only driving force behind life extension that I see is people who want to live longer. Unless they fix the social security problem, the last thing that the government wants is for people to live longer, so your comment about taxing them more is a complete non sequitur.

My point is just that the driving force behind life extension seems to be- let's keep people around longer so we can sell them more stuff- and most importantly, collect more taxes from them. I'm not so sure that's a noble incentive.

Assuming this were true, so what? Are you invisioning some rosy future where we can live just as long as we want to continue to fill out credit card applications?

Great to see commentary that validates life and repudiates suffering and death. The bottom line is that the molecules in our bodies have gathered together and want to keep it that way. There is very little that goes on in our bodies that isn't somehow related to its survival and replication of either its DNA or its ideas.

People are hopeless in the face of the absence of a good explanation for why we suffer and die.. ie the meaning of life, and therefore will need some extraordinary proof to show them that extended healthy lifespans are possible. Once the spark of hope is lit I believe they will be remarkably easy to convince of the imminent demise of age-related disease. Aubrey de Grey has written extensively on the 'pro-aging trance' which many are under and the reasons for it. I tend to think that people are just numb to the horror of aging and death and prefer to just not think about the whole mess and deny its a problem.

The defeat of aging will take an all out war and the health research resources of entire countries. It will need to be broadly supported as there won't be a 'pill' but a panoply of incremental treatments aimed at the various major causes of aging. For this reason I don't believe that it will be something only the elite will have access to as it will take the taxes of everyone to develop the incremental therapies that will applied to aging constitutions.

The therapies will initially be highly dangerous and expensive and only the most desperate will try them while those who can afford to wait for safer and more effective interventions will do so. I believe that things will be moving quite a bit faster than even some of the most optimistic might believe because of the synergies which are becoming apparent between new technologies. It would be wise to begin thinking how such technologies will be supplied and to begin training physicians and health care delivery for the eventual clinical applications as trained staff might be the limiting factor once new techniques become available.

I hope you all have a chance to visit the Mprize website.. http://www.mprize.org and if you want to become part of the writing on the wall consider joining us!

Long life

Kevin Perrott

Life extension means more time to make up for that misspent youth.

One thing I always liked about the Highlander TV series is the way it illustrated the two biggest downsides to immortality: loneliness and boredom. I don't think the first would affect me too badly, as I'm pretty introverted and I need socialization with others about as much as a cactus needs water. But I'd be worried about the other one...

I remember in Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire how one of the vampires reflected the problem with immortaility is at some point you're simply at a loss to relate with the world anymore, having lost all frame of reference to what you knew from your own time. While to a degree I wouldn't mind seeing improvements to things that are familiar, at some point I could see how it would get overwhelming.

If I could live to 100, or maybe even 150, without my physical or mental health declining from its current state, and then die painlessly in my sleep, that I'd jump on in an instant. But I don't really think I'd want to live indefinately, losing all contact with anything I'm familiar with, and eventually run out of anything to keep my interest. It's believed by many part of the reason you don't stay awake 24 hours a day is that your brain needs to have downtime to maintain mental health. I think there's a reason why people only live so long... eventually you'd run out of anything to do. Maybe that's just me, but that would be my biggest fear of having too long of a life.

"The defeat of aging will take an all out war and the health research resources of entire countries. It will need to be broadly supported as there won't be a 'pill' but a panoply of incremental treatments aimed at the various major causes of aging. For this reason I don't believe that it will be something only the elite will have access to as it will take the taxes of everyone to develop the incremental therapies that will applied to aging constitutions."

Not just that, but if limited to 'the rich,' the existence of any anti-aging therapies would still be hard to conceal, as we see a small number of people declining slowly, if at all. And in the age of the Internet, it only takes one person with a slightly different agenda to spill the beans.

Besides, we're familiar with 'orphan drugs,' those pharmaceuticals that are (or aren't) developed, because the conditions they treat are so rare, that the company that did so could never recoup its R&D costs....

...but any anti-aging treatments are just the opposite of such drugs. *Everyone* ages, so *everyone* is a potential customer. Why refuse to serve the ultimate market? Greed works very much in our favor here.