Age Simulation Suit

Aging should be recognized as a disease already. It's long overdue.

Disease is abnormal to some "norm". When everyone has it, it's not a disease.

I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized to be not having your body rot away over time.

It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable. It strips away your quality of life until there isn't much left and then you die. It doesn't take any more than that for it to be declared a disease.

Whether it's "natural" or whether "everyone has it" is a distraction. If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.

> It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable.

Doesn't make it a disease. Dying is a normal part of life as well as the decline before that.

> If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.

No, then the people not having cancer would have the disease.

> I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized

That's not how a norm works. You get that by doing trials and statistics, not by wanting it to be different.

Starvation used to be "a normal part of life". So was having half your children die before they hit the age of 10. That was the normal, natural outcome of having a child - if you want to have grandchildren, just make more children! Some of them would live, surely!

This is how it was - until humans decided that this sucks and something should be done about that.

I see no reason not to dispose of aging at the earliest opportunity. And this starts by recognizing: aging sucks for everyone, and should be disposed of.

It's not fightable or optional, so it's less like starvation and more like gravity. Humans have decided that we'd like to "dispose" of aging, but unfortunately reality has this annoying habit of not responding to our categorization and despite thinking of it as a disease we cannot fight it like we can other diseases. Those other things you mentioned are considered outside of the usual because we have been able to make them less common through effort; despite all our effort though, aging isn't something we have that control over. We're all gonna die, of old age or a short-sharp-shock, at least until we figure out some wild medical breakthroughs.

Once we have those breakthroughs, sure folks might start thinking of aging as a disease that's not "normal" or a thing that we can actually avoid, but until then it's a fact of life, same as gravity, the sun, or the tides.

I’d argue we won’t get those anti aging breakthroughs unless we take it seriously as a disease.

It’s just biology. It can be fixed with enough research. There’s nothing magical or spiritual about aging it’s just another thing for humans to beat.

Lots of people get viscerally up feelings about it though for some reason. Not sure why. I’ve had people spitting purple angry when I say the above.

I wouldn’t call one of the most essential parts of the life process (moving towards the end of your life involuntarily) a disease.

It’s actually very disturbing how people seem not to be worried about the growing potential for immortality. THAT is a disease, if anything.

All living beings have protective mechanism against all the degenerative effects of aging, and this has been true for over a billion years now.

That protective mechanism is reproduction. Your viral infections, bacterial infections, broken bones, bad backs, polluted lungs, corrupted mind, and just general wear and tear, does not get transmitted. It's a clean start in life.

It's less "not fightable" and more "no one is seriously trying".

Compare the amount of funding aging research gets with something like Alzheimer's. Which is also a degenerative disease, and worth fighting against - but nowhere near as prevalent.

I don't doubt that it would be incredibly hard to stop aging altogether. But if the effort was there, we might get a way to reduce the severity of aging within a few decades of research. The sheer benefits of being able to reduce the severity of "aging associated" things in a world with aging population would be immense.

If you want to decay and rot and die a miserable death, that's your choice. If your genuine preference is that all of your friends and family and your own children should decay and rot and die a miserable death too, then that's your opinion and you can hold onto it.

But don't you dare force that outcome onto everyone.

In my eyes, "decay and rot and the inevitability of a miserable death is a good thing actually" is a fucking insane viewpoint to hold. The only possible reason I see to hold onto it is that it's the socially accepted cope. If you truly believe that nothing can be done about aging, then "death is good acktually" makes for a good coping mechanism.

I'd rather humans cope less and problem-solve more.

And the "protective mechanism" humans have against dementia is that they eventually stop being capable of feeding themselves and die.

Which does get rid of dementia alright. But I fail to see that as an acceptable solution.

If you want the world to be run by a 700 year old Xi jinping, if you want your children to suffer under a thousand year rule of monopolistic Bezos, if you want to see Altered Carbon become a reality, then that’s your opinion and you can hold on to it.

But don’t you dare force that on anyone else.

See how unconvincing these platitudes are?

I literally cannot imagine why you would want infinite life. The short timespan is 99% of the reason life is so valuable. We need to do what we can with the time we’re given.

I never said nothing could be done about aging anyways. I think we’ll reach the point where people only die when they choose to.

That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.

Imagine if King George were still ruling England. No rules can change ever - he’s the king. Hope you like eternal monarchy.

I sometimes wonder if people are so afraid of death because they never talk about it frankly? My wife and I converse about it regularly.

i’ll leave you with this to ponder.

It would be pretty weird if george washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc were here with us today. We’d probably still be debating if slavery is acceptable or not LOL.

People complain about boomers hoarding all the wealth and “never letting go” so younger folks can take the reins. Imagine how much worse it would be if those boomers lived until 200?

Imagine how much more fossil fuel we’d be burning if we all lived until 200?

You know how old people tend to get stubborn? Not all, but most? Now imagine if the U.S. government was comprised of mostly people age 100+. Imagine how they would do keeping up with changes that affect youngsters in 2025?

Imagine how bad the housing crisis would be in 2025.

Imagine how unmotivated people would be in day to day life if they knew they’d live to 200 years?

In summary…if everyone could easily live forever, that is not a good thing. It would drastically change society as we know it, and not 100% for the better. I’d argue it would actually make things worse.

Death is literally a biological process that affects all living organisms on this planet, and in the galaxy. Sorry if that’s hard to accept? I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.

What's worse: having a 700 year old Xi Jinping, or having an extra 600 years of entirely unmitigated aging worldwide - with all the death and suffering that entails?

There is plenty of politicians I truly hate. But I don't hate any of them enough to doom billions to an early grave just to get at them.

If you think that Xi Jinping should die, then I can't help but think that a better solution to that would be to actually kill Xi Jinping. Far less collateral damage involved.

>That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.

There's this tendency for people nowadays to take this kind of shitty Black Mirror logic, and assume that the inevitable outcome is the one that maximizes the grimdark factor.

In reality, there's no reason to expect that anti-aging treatments would work any different from something like Ozempic or laser eye surgery. Sure, those were hideously expensive to develop - but are now affordable to upper middle class, and fully expected to get more available over time.

You earn more by selling a $1000 smartphone to everyone than you could ever earn by selling a billion dollar megayacht to a dozen billionaires looking to buy one. With anti-aging tech, the economic incentive to reduce the costs and reach a wider audience is immense. The demand is going to be there: a lot of what the cosmetics industry does now is fight the mere appearance of aging, and that's an industry worth hundreds of billions by itself.

Xi Jinping is worse, by orders of magnitude.

Death is part of the necessary cycle of biology, and in no way is it bad. It’s certainly SAD, but in no way is it bad. Rotting isn’t this horrible mark on your body, it’s the beauty of nature recycling things so that the new has a chance.

Not only that, but could you imagine the absolutely incredible strain on Earth’s resources if we had 50 billion people instead of 8 billion? Global warming would’ve happened ages ago, and we’d be far, FAR beyond it now. In this scenario, it should be obvious nobody has a yacht, let alone a smartphone. There simply isn’t enough to go around here on earth.

There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides “well I won’t be sad about that one particular thing anymore”, which is… really lame when compared against the untold damage this will do.

I’m a little surprised you’re not taking any time to explain the benefits here, because I’m not actually seeing any besides you not having to cope with nature anymore.

Edit: I should also mention that I’m not looking for shitty black mirror outcomes, I’m just looking at the modern world, which continues to stratify massively, and pretty much has (with few exceptions) since time immemorial. Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?

I find it hard to imagine that an 80 years old politician today spends a lot of time thinking of what would happen 50 or 100 years down the line. And things like fossil fuel use are very much a "50 to 100 years down the line" kind of problem.

Now, if that very politician thought that with the way anti-aging technology is going, he'll probably live to 150, maybe 200 if he's lucky? That might change the equation - for the better.

I don't think that "kill everyone to avoid the risk of the political system getting marginally worse" is an optimal solution. I'd rather deal with aging and the shittiness of politics as two separate problems with a minor overlap.

>I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.

I think that this is nothing but socially accepted cope. A load of pseudo-profound bullshit that might be easier to accept than the idea that aging and death are really fucking bad and we aren't doing much to stop them. And that even if we did, we and our loved ones may not be the ones to ever benefit from it.

cope? it’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet. Including humans. Bit of a weird take if you ask me. I know my place so to speak…

I do agree with you that if politicians lived longer, they’d (hopefully) think long term. That’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered.

Lastly - nobody is suggesting killing anyone here. Feels like i’m being interviewed by a reporter with my words taken completely out of context. This is what being famous must feel like. :) If someone finds a way for humans to live longer I won’t be upset in the slightest. I’m just saying “be careful what you wish for”. That is all. There would be many unintended consequences. Viewing it as strictly a beneficial thing is naive i think.

Yes, cope. "It’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet" is cope. A literal "it's more okay if I rot to death if everything else does!"

Modern agriculture has enabled the human population to grow rapidly without people starving to death, which had "unknown unintended consequences" too. As well as the well known consequence of food being affordable and available to most people worldwide.

I'd take "unknown unintended consequences" over the well known consequences of the status quo. The current consequences is that everyone dies a miserable death. It's a very easy choice.

If you think that the evils of Xi Jinping outweigh the suffering of billions, you should consider killing Xi Jinping. Plenty of people tried killing Hitler, and Xi Jinping is apparently even worse?

>There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides

You mean, besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies? Besides that little incredibly unimportant easy-to-overlook thing?

>Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?

Can you explain why amazing technologies like cars and smartphones and air travel became available to the masses, instead of being hoarded by a dozen uber-rich uber-powerful billionaires?

The short answer is "economics". Do you expect anti-aging technology to be exempt from economics somehow?

My takeaway from this chat is that one of us is content, and the other is petrified of death. :-)

Anyways thanks for humoring me. Enjoy the rest of your day!

Aging is part of a natural process we are already able to slow down significantly. Calling it a disease just muddies the semantic space of pathology in my opinion.

Everybody understands already that slowing down or stopping the aging process is desirable. I don't see the usefulness in lumping it in with muscle atrophy, clogged arteries, or cancer.

I don't know, muscle atrophy, cancer etc. are all mostly caused by aging. The current paradigm is kind of whack a mole which won't take us very far.

We need to understand the aging better still like what is actually going on and what are the main drivers (even here is dispute among scientists)

I kind of agree but on the other hand I think it would also change the calculus a lot, if the dictator was going to live to 700, wouldn't it be more likely for someone to act and try to get him out because now the calculus might be that it's just better to wait it out than try to set anything up?

It's a bit hard to visualize that kind of world because so many other things would also be different, and if the politicians were chronologically like 500, they would biologically be still much younger so maybe the mind would allow for much more plasticisty and that would allow them to be more open to new ideas.

I can't see how there wouldn't be a revolution if the rich had all this anti-aging technology and the plebs would sit there and watch.

People like to cope a lot, they are fine with playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases and putting the 90 year old through chemo, but treating aging (the actual root cause)? OH MY GOD MUH NATURE

Holy cope.

There's way more aging research now than like 10 years ago, I think the field is also starting to understand that playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases on a 80 year old is not really the winning strategy.

There is epigenetic age reset that happens during the conception that "resets" the cells to their young version like kind of a factory reset that cleans up the aging marks and other offsets that have happened during life so they don't get transmitted to the offspring. Learning to apply this process to the living human is quite big research topic. Obviously nature had to figure some kind of mechanism how to not transmit the cellural damage forward.

Yeah, I dunno about you, but I’m not using the same kinds of stuff as billionaires.

It will be the same - because of economics. If you think you’ll be just as healthy as long-lived as them, you’re crazy. It’s literally not the case anywhere else in life. Food, housing, opportunities, healthcare ALREADY, transportation, and kitchen sinks.

> besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies?

Man, when you’re so melodramatic about something as benign as aging, you’re really hard to take seriously.

If you can’t see my point of view by now, and how it’s a hell of a gamble to hope we stop doing the thing we’ve been doing pretty much since the dawn of man, I don’t think I have anything else to add to the conversation.

I also just think it’s mentioning that you are your body, in its entirety. We almost certainly have more than one brain, at the very least.

You both have good and valid points of view but this site deserves a higher level of decorum.

We have a lot to thank for the passing of power from one generation to the next over the past millennia. We don’t know what we don’t know. I imagine the next enlightenment or the next freedoms to be won will require older generations to “move on.”

That's what aging is. Aging is the process of rotting to death in your own body. There's nothing "benign" about it.

Humans learned a lot of ways to sugarcoat it. Many ways to cope. But if I told you that I want to create and unleash something that would make billions suffer, getting worse over decades, and all afflicted people would eventually die?

You'd call me a twisted monster, rightfully so.

And yet, when I propose we do the opposite, you say "no, it's natural, it's benign, rotting to death is fine actually, everyone does it".

It is applied to the living human (or other being), when it is born.

Applying the process to already old people would be the abomination of desolation and turn this planet into a hellish dimension of unimaginable proportions, and it would of course exterminate humanity. You have to remember that when humanity is exterminated, that means forever.

Now this is some of that top-shelf cope I've heard about.

I wasn't going to respond because this comment is so dense, but I feel like it's valuable to the conversation to point out: wtf do you mean "people"? I've literally never met anyone who shares my view on this.

Less than the cope in this thread though. MUH NATURE, MUH WISDOM, MUH 8000 YEAR OLD PUTIN. Have you thought about the 5000 year old Kim Jong Un yet?

Conscious senescence makes up less than 0.01% of my self-aware life.

You're saying this as if there were no research going on about aging. We know why aging happens. That doesn't mean we can just stop or reverse the process, or that it is even possible to do so.