No technology has ever extended life. The so-called gains in life expectancy have only come about by reducing the causes of early mortality and slowing down the diseases of ageing.

I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but maybe they meant that we've only reduced early causes of death like disease etc, but not done anything to affect our internal biological processes that cause aging. As an example, reducing skin cancer by staying out of the sun keeps you from prematurely aging, but it doesn't stop your hair from turning white and your wrinkles from forming.

Drugs that change our metabolism can affect how much damage something does to your body, and you die because your body systems fail or degrade. So fixing some causes and symptoms should be able to increase your possible lifespan. Just like we can increase the lifespan of some simple animals, we could increase our lifespan through physical means. There's no magic spirit inside you that can only last 120 years, as far as anyone knows.

Today you can be healthier at 1, 20, 40, 60, and 80 than you could have been 100 years ago.

However, just like 100 years ago, you will almost certainly be dead by age 100. For certain by 120.

Why would you not want to stop people from dying?

You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity. Also, usually, the longer someone lives, the more their ideology defines them. Could be a problem too

Your argument is "we don't want more old people because I disagree with them ideologically." Shoddy at best.

That's not it. The problem is that individuals have cognitive biases. People rarely change their minds. As a society, this is offset by a slow, regular replacement of its members.

If you end that cycle of renewal, the rate at which our society reacts to change and adopts new ideas would significantly slow.

That's a problem regardless of how well the society aligns with my ideals.

People's brains change as they age. There are definite differences between the way older people and younger people think. This isn't a generalization about old people having bad politics, but rather a comment on the tendency of people's minds to be harder to change over time.

Personally, I think one of the biggest challenges to transitioning to a low-birthrate, ultra-long-lived society is that a constant influx of young blood seems to be a necessary engine for new ideas and progress. There's a combination of not knowing better[1] and not having as much to lose that makes young people more willing to take big risks and push for more egalitarian societies over time. Left to their own devices, accumulation of wealth and status tend to ossify people's belief systems and reduce their incentives to throw everything out and start over.

[1] by this I mean not having the same accumulated beliefs about what is best. Sometimes those beliefs turn out to be unfounded, and you discover that by challenging them.

If you re-read the post, that's actually not his argument.

He's saying that the older someone is the more their ideology defines them, which is itself probably inaccurate. And he says that that "could be a problem."

He's arguing about ideological stagnation. That's bad regardless of just about what the ideology is and whether you agree with the particular.

To quote Max Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time." That's as true of anything as it is of science.

Right, but that's different than saying he doesn't like old people because he disagrees with them.

I completely agree. There is no way to keep our population in check. After all, it is the natural life cycle. Order would be unbalanced.

Limited resources will always keep population in check. When population growth outstrips available resources, war (or some other catastrophic event that reduces population, eg. famine, drought, disease, etc.) is inevitable.

>Limited resources will always keep population in check.

Actually, the opposite is true to a degree. Limited resources increases the birth rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

That refers more to individual behavior. What I mean is that, simply, if the world runs out of food, people will die until the population reaches a level that can be supported by the available resources. I don't see how any other outcome is possible. This happens on a smaller scale in areas where food distribution is problematic.

The only way around this is advances in technology that improve food production/distribution, but if this were to occur, then population would no longer outstrip resources and a new balance would be reached.

Raising the standard of living does the trick quite well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

And the reasonable way of controlling the population is killing about 150000 people per day, many of them in quite unpleasant ways?

>>You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity.

Last time I checked space is pretty huge, we could move there.

And if you live long enough, you might not need a biological body to survive.

Aside from the economics of all this I'd suggest that on the basis of what we know about most humans, we'd end up with an appallingly ossified society. The Maos, Stalins, Kim Il Sungs[ list the dictators ] etc., in their 21st century forms will be ruling the roost for ever and a day. The last figure I saw on 'freedom of expression' across the world was (2016) 14%.

For example: "Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest and placing greater demands on the private sector to take down offending content. "

https://www.freedomhouse.org/issues/freedom-expression

Cancer articles have been trending on HN lately.

My father is a clinical oncologist/researche who is approaching "voluntary" retirement age. He's incredibly depressed about it given the sudden boom in successful research in the field. I believe the reason of the trend isn't just sudden interest, but quantity of production as well.

overpopulation? not enough resources? first let's solve these, so we can have number of humans exploding (exponentially, maybe).

if done incorrectly, this might end up in quite a disaster

Why would it? People always seem to assume that with extremely long lifetimes, humans would still reproduce at roughly the same age as they do now. I just don't believe that would be the case.

So many things change with lifetimes that long and it seems more likely to me that the human timeline would adjust to the new lifetime. Physically maturing into an adult may take the same amount of time, but now it's a tiny fraction of your overall life. You may spend 50 or 100 years in secondary education, then another 200 in a career at which point you should have enough money put away to live on the interest.

And it's at this point, when you're 300+ years old that you start having children. On this timescale, you'd still see more generational overlap than we have today, but no so much that overpopulation is a concern.

Does an increase in longevity by itself imply an increase in reproductive years?

We're in "hypothetical" territory there. So it could go either way.

I was speaking rhetorically.

In the case of men, sperm quality declines with age, so a man is more or less fertile his entire life, but that may not hold true in the case of extreme longevity. If this decline in sperm-quality is due to age damage, then an age treatment may also improve sperm quality. But this is not guaranteed and may require its own specific treatment.

Women produce all the eggs they will ever produce before they are born. Menopause occurs when a woman runs out of eggs. So in the case of females, an anti-aging treatment is unlikely to extend her reproductive years beyond the current age of menopause (although it may make pregnancy safer and more viable during the latter half of her reproductive years). Like sperm, a woman's egg quality also declines with age, creating further difficulty.

So the idea that women will put off having children for a couple centuries seems to be a nonstarter lacking other advances as well, but it may be a possibility for men.

Overpopulation is a myth. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-...