If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.
Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?
While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
- Possible in our lifetime.
- Affordable to the faithful.
You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.
But who says that's the endgame? Presumably an advanced enough medical technology could remove the internal byproducts of aging, and get your cells to stop dying / running out of steam / going cancerous. Obviously we have no idea how to do that, and maybe we never will, but it seems plausible.
The best possible outcome would be watching your digital copy having digital life, while you yourself wither away regardless. More akin to having a child than oneself preservation. Not really something special, having physical children still beats this.
I wouldn't personally do that unless I was already dying. But, I see no reason believe it wouldn't preserve the soul. Your organic brain is already doing it all the time on a small scale.
We also know germ line cells can give rise to new organisms which can give rise to germ line cells in an unbroken chain effectively forever.
This is quite far from making a human immortal but it shows that there appears to be nothing in physical law or intrinsic to biology that prohibits it. Therefore it is possible.
Star travel and terraforming Mars are also possible. Possible does not imply anything about difficulty. We don’t really know if radical life extension or borderline immortality are fusion hard, quantum computing hard, or starship hard.
Not in any sense that's applicable to humans.
The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3].
In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc.
Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals.
Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are?
In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body?
I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay.
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76371-0
1: # Greenland shark metabolism over entire lifespan
sh -c "units '((30mg/oxygen)*(mol/g))/hour/(1000/1000^0.84*kg) * (434kJ/mol) * 200year' MJ/kg"
2: # Greenland shark lifespan metabolism, alternate estimation
sh -c "units '192kcal/day*200year/126kg' MJ/kg"
3: # Human metabolism over 1 decade
sh -c "units '150W/100kg*10years' MJ/kg"
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesisBut really the your argument is already shifting to "there is no life ver similar to humans that do it, so it must be impossible" which imo is a much larger stretch then assuming it's possible.
The OP is also massively underestimating plant complexity. We aren’t much more complex than a tree either.
We are higher metabolism than both though, and with that the OP has a point. We are already long lived for a high metabolism animal. Our metabolic rate makes it harder for our repair mechanisms to stay ahead of oxidative and radiation damage. That will make extreme life extension hard for us, harder than if we were reptilians or arthropods.
Reproduction does result in new matrix/scaffolding being built but the cells build that (and can rebuild it if so directed).
Of course some things "we" care about exist exclusively in the matrix (configurations of neurons, learned behaviors, memories, etc) so that could well be a limit for those parts of the body where we care primarily about preserving the matrix.
Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
Then you're just arguing that we're already immortal, after all we reproduce, but I don't think that's what we're talking about when we talk about longevity. Longevity is the continued existence of a particular being, not its continuation through descendants.
This is not at all guaranteed until we actually manage to do it. And that's exactly what we're discussing, you can't just say "but it must be possible". There's no rule of the universe that says it should, and given life has been around for 4 billion years and there's no single species (specially animals which is what we really should consider here if we're talking about human lifespan) that manages to live for more than a few hundred years, I think that's strong evidence that life is approaching a fundamental limit here. Someone else said "maybe that's enough" - well, why?? Maybe 100 years is already quite enough then??
That’s not forever and it required a very specific environment, but biological degradation on that timescale can be effectively zero.
The fact we haven't seen an organism live forever is strong evidence that that's the case. You're the one making the case without any evidence!
> Like I don't know what the point of this argument is
The point of the argument is to stop people like you from making declarations about what is possible without any evidence
> Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out
Can you show me where anyone said we shouldn't find out?
> because it looks very possible
There's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case
It's because you didn't understand it
> 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot'
Cancer cells are damaged cells mutating without regard for function. It's pretty obvious that there is a difference between "living indefinitely in a mutated form devoid of original function" is different from a cell performing a specific function
No
> or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan
Let's pick an arbitrary timeframe and declare that as long
No, I don't think anything is impossible when you pick dates "for the sake of argument"
Also, some few (fairly primitive) animals are "biologically immortal," for example, lobsters (which are motile and vaguely resemble us more than, say, sponges and jellyfish) don't experience senescence.
That being said, I think we have a long way to go if we want to make any progress at all, and I doubt I will live to see it.
There is no "full understanding" of a complex system.
I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever.
Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.
I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
"So long as men die, liberty shall never perish."
Russia had term limits too. Once.
Hope is a feeling of expectation of positive outcomes, therefore illogical by definition.
Anyone who says "we will have within this generation technology to extend your lifetime indefinitely" is lying just as much as the priest who says he knows God exists is lying[1]. I would say it's more likely that the scientist liar is accidentally right, than that the priest is; that doesn't make either of them people you should trust.
At the current stage of technology, belief on this process is basically based only on hope. Belief in this is essentially religious.
[1] possibly they both believe they are saying the truth, so you could argue they are wrong rather than lying. They are still both standing on the same grounds.
But yeah, I think "within our lifetime" is a critical qualifier, and most people who are not writing it down are implicitly assuming that the qualifier is obvious. I have very limited interest in technologies that will not exist until centuries after I'm born, other than as entertainment.
Without that qualifier, almost any practical discussion about technology is moot. It's fun to talk about FTL or whatever, but we certainly should not be investing heavily into it... It might be possible, but most research on that direction would be wasteful.
Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?
For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.
(Context: I am firmly an atheist, but I also disapprove of the people who want to live forever. I think that's selfish and childish. People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
If funerals were in general the only way progress happened, every genocide would cause scientific/technological/economic revolutions.
Recessions are sufficient to clear bad leadership in the private sector; elections in democratic governments.
What does this have to do with a soul? The comment was about people treating life extension as a religion based on faith more than evidence.
Nothing to do with the soul, or heaven, or anything else.
Radical life extension has been demonstrated… in mice.
If you don't like my chosen examples, take any other religious statement and demonstrate it in a mouse. Have Anubis weigh their heart against a feather, pay Charon to cross the Styx, whatever.
Point isn't the specific it's compared against, it's the entire set that longevity definitely isn't in, because unlike those things it has been demonstrated (in mice).
Yep, here is the documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3804810/
An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world.
In both cases, technological changes intervened.
So what? We can't see into the future. The future is never like the past, not least because a lot of present tends to intervene.
Declaration such as:
“We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone."
is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity technology will look in 2070 or 2080, and yet the authors make such bold statements.
You could perform the same exercise substituting "perpetual motion" as `$X`, and come up with an forecast equally useless for solving current problems.
Also: you replaced "major breakthroughs" with "technologies" when paraphrasing. What do you think the difference is between those two different terms? Do you feel your refutation would be as strong if you spoke to the original point, rather than rephrasing it and responding to your own, differently-phrased version (essentially responding only to yourself) ?
On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later.
We can already rejuvenate individual cells and smaller samples of tissues in vitro. That is not yet a recipe for a functional treatment of a living organism, but it is a (necessary) step in that direction.
There is also Sima the rat, breaking the longevity record for Sprague-Dawley rats by living for 1464 days after Katcher's treatment. Out of 8 subjects total.
Could be a random occurence, but the chances to break the longevity record in just eight rats are very, very low. And if it wasn't a random occurence, we already saw a meaningful life extension in an ordinary mammal.
On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.
And I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. There is no way you can extrapolate from basic experiments like Katcher's to the year 2080.
Well, the study is literal science from a scientific institution, compared to an internet comment so... It wins here.
Feynman diagnosed this sort of cosplay as "cargo-cult science" decades ago.
But if you want to know when the next big technological leap will happen then you won't learn that by looking at what happened last time: last time is not this time, that's my point.
Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things.
https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293...
Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer?
Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before.
Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.
In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go.
I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100.
When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.
Yeah, they noticed when their lives kept getting longer and longer thanks to science and evidence-backed policy.
Science has helped reduce mortality at birth and manage or even eliminate a lot of diseases like malaria, HIV, small pox, polio and many more. Also for burns, broken bones and accidents. And continues to. I advocate vaccines. I myself took the Anti Covid shot 3 times. And use medicines and supplements regularly.
There’s another side to it though.
At what point do I just take an Adderall that’s prescribed to me? Or a pain killer? Rather than trying preventive lifestyle cures? We need a way to tell when to apply what but IMHO in practical life what gains ground is what serves the providers more rather than the beneficiaries. An interesting example is that Anaesthesia was a more quickly adopted invention than Anti-Septic. Even though the latter is more important for the safety of patients. But the former makes life easier for docs, hence it was adopted much faster.
There is a place for both and knowing when to apply which is key. You cannot trust HCPs using allopathy aka science backed by academia in every case cause they’re motivated by self interest and aren’t perfect! Even people like Gabriel Weinberg have acknowledged this in his book Super Thinking when touching upon inefficiencies in healthcare and academia.
I believe that to be able to trust science more we need to save science from p-value manipulation by self-interest groups…
This video by Veritasium also talks about how the accuracy of most published research is contestable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q
I don’t think this is an easy problem to solve or has ever been
Without the hysterical and scientifically illiterate people complaining about the COVID vaccines, we very likely could've had a renaissance of investment into next generation biotech platforms like mRNA. Instead, they "have" to be destroyed because the woke right can't read a scientific paper and real information takes more than a tweet or TikTok video to convey.
The word forward escape is borrowed from author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which as I understand it means just doing what you like and is good for you both as opposed to doing what you like but is bad for you aka vices which he refers to as backward escapes.
In the political sphere, some countries are tearing themselves apart on the question of immigration and identity. But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.
The only people who might require assistance and sanction are those who are so catastrophically ill that they cannot function independently at all. But MAID has already killed people who were able-bodied! (And some for stupid or trivial reasons: https://care.org.uk/news/2024/10/poor-lonely-and-homeless-op... )
By the time you think suicide is the better option, you are often already in a managed and locked down environment in which it is difficult to impossible to commit suicide in an acceptable manner. Believe me I know it.
Why would you care that it's "acceptable" by society which you will no longer take part of ? If your concern is pain, then perhaps that is your mind telling you NOT to end your life and seek therapy instead.
Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.
We should not be encouraging or celebrating suicide, it takes away innocent lives, especially younger ones. If you ask the survivors, many of them are glad they didn't go through with it.
As medicine and technology advance, assisted suicide will make sense/be required in nearly 100% of natural human deaths. With enough money, we will be able to keep people "alive" (on paper) arbitrarily long. It will be nothing like what people think of when they describe extended lifespan, but turning off all the robotic parts will still be tantamount to assisted suicide.
Wanting to avoid pain is very much not a reason to seek therapy, what an absurd thought.
Wait, how exactly does one "abuse" MAID?
People being so deep in poverty and addiction that they opt for MAID as an option isn't a symptom that it's "too easy" to access it, but rather that _society_ is failing them. And when those people finally say "Well fuck this shit I'm out", we reply "That's not allowed". Disregarding that companies won't hire them, rent & housing are ridiculous, they''re not allowed to put their tents anywhere and when they get kicked out their tents & belongings are trashed instead of being given back.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/16/dutc...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.
That's just assisted suicide with extra steps.
Unchecked immigration of people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values leads to a monoculture that is terrible for everyone. Multiculturalism doesn’t work when everyone’s culture is equal everywhere. And unless it wasn’t obvious, I firmly believe in multiculturalism, but I believe we (here in Europe in particular) have been misled about what it should look like. And no it’s not about ethnicity.
And that’s saying nothing about the impact on source countries as some other comments go into.
Also unchecked migration to Europe is down to 200.000 people per year so less than 0.1% of population.
> people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values
No culture should nor can stay stagnant. But if we allow in people who do not share or wish to share a majority of our cultural values, which vary a lot between European countries as well, then we deteriorate what made our countries lucrative destinations for these people faster than we can maintain it.
It’s not complicated. Why are all those people coming here if all cultures are equal?
Because they're coming from resource poor countries to those which are richer? Or from regimes that have been captured by an oppressive minority. Or because their nation is being attacked by an aggressive neighbor (or distant empire)?
I mean, realistically speaking, they'd be bitching about Pakistanis and Indians and Middle Eastern immigrants also, but in 2016 the British voted to exit the European Union, not the Middle Eastern Union. The hint is right there, in the name.
https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/britain-farage-migration-debacl...
Somewhere along the line we stopped looking to our own previous generations (which include European nations as, you know, we’re Europeans) for cultural identity and started following Hollywood as our cultural oracle.
Generations of this has lead to the mess you see unraveling in the UK at the moment.
The decline in Christianity in the UK probably has something to do with it, and that in turn is loosely correlated with WWI and WWII. That's also another historic factor - families destroyed, and fewer families and so on.
And then the elephant in the room - London.
Want a job? Move to London or the south east and leave your family behind. Born in the south east? Want to live in the same street as you parents? No chance. Same town? Unlikely. Do you know your neighbours? Maybe. Do you see them in the church any more, or even when you walk down the street?
Culture is alive and well outside of London, despite its drain on the rest of the UK.
Social, and economic mobility is good, but some of the side effects are only now becoming apparent. Successive short-termist poor governance for decades has been the problem.
The UK is large, so maybe either of us are just looking into a small bubble not representative of the whole, but the times I've visited the UK in the past, I didn't see much of what you seem to describe. Perhaps in the very center of London and its shopping malls, but those are not representative of the UK whatsoever.
A few Pakistanis moving in down the road doesn't stop British people practicing British culture. The reason they don't can be summarised as laziness and ignorance.
"The pub got turned into a mosque", maybe it did but it wasn't because the Moors invaded fgs. A successful pub gets to carry on being one - if it's not successful, maybe that's because people stopped using it.
And pray tell, how does the influx of a muslim, non-alcohol-drinking population, influence this?
But as far as I can see, they're working for the NHS, running restaurants and shops and so on, and buying/renting homes that come up on the market like everyone else. London's Muslim mayor was elected by an absolute majority even though Muslims are only about 12% of the city's population.
Nobody is stopping Brits from doing Brit stuff - it's our own fault if we choose not to.
Far as I can see, what's done a lot of basic pubs in is a combination of lifestyle changes, people who don't like the smoking ban, and younger people wanting to spend time down the gym instead of drinking.
As an outside that has visited your large continent a fair few times, yeah, you guys are pretty monocultural.
I know that such a statement is just literal nonsense to y'all and quite unbelievable.
And yes, you all have a different flag, and a different language.
But the day-to-day details are very similar.
Every day y'all wake up at pretty much the same time, everyone eats a light breakfast of some pastry or another and a lot of caffeine and nicotine. Then off to work on pretty much the exact same road in the same little cars. 10 rolls about and y'all fuck off to grab an espresso (Yes UK, you too, the tea thing is BS, you love coffee, we all see it) and a cigarette. You raff about for 30 min. Then back to work for a bit. Lunch rolls on by and it's carb and protein time for the men and salads for the women. By this I mean potatoes and something with a french sauce. More caffeine and nicotine. The afternoon is then set for either sleeping, or pretending not to (I love this about y'all). Work fucks off at about 4-5 depending, nothing on Fridays though. You all then fuck off to a place to get more nicotine and then alcohol or a few hours. Dinner comes after round 2-3, more carbs and meat this time, maybe pasta. Half cocked, you all end up in the same small homes. (yes, yes, but everyone is like this too!. No, you all do it the same way at the same pace, all of you.)
It's all the same sports (football), the same seasons, the same lives. Yes, you all think that your life is so different for your neighbor, but I'm telling you, the pace, the styles, the food, the drinks, the drugs of choice, the houses, the children, Europeans may not be brothers, but you are very close cousins. The rest of the world think you all mad that you hate each other so much when you're living in the same house, acting the same way. It's the same Euopean culture.
However there is a lack of law enforcement and lack of integration programs for immigrants.
The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into.
Aesthetic Traditions ≠ Culture. Traditions are just one aspect, but as Nietzsche wrote about the death of God, traditions are not a substitute for values.
America for hundreds of years has offered a shared vision of the future and values to immigrants of every background, and within <1 generation most immigrants become fully integrated.
When European identities are all built around stories from the past, and the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes (climate apocalypse, population decline, social welfare breakdown, economic malaise, technophobia), it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture. I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
When your sales pitch is: "we don't like new things here so there's nothing to create, but life here is easy, you don't have to do much because the state will take care of you!" I don't think you're attracting the best citizens.
I agree with this. Far too many European countries have no optimistic or even productive outlooks on the future, instead seeming to trade in a form of pessimistic reductionism. Eat less, do less, be less.
However:
> it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture
Then why do they stay as long as they can drain resources? I would never move to a country I don't respect, let alone stay to drain resources and give nothing back. That mentality is alien to me. That isn't to say every immigrant is a drain on resources, but the ones that do not buy into the culture, do not buy into the vision (or lack thereof), and do not contribute -- why are they here? Simply because despite all of that it's better than where they came from? If so, we're doing both ourselves and them a disservice by not denying them entry, because both parties end up miserable.
Hey, good for you. But there are many societies where making a living without working is something to be proud of. I know because I live in one.
This is one of the weirdest religions in modern Europe and I struggle to explain it. It's a performative self-loathing that accrues social capital in certain circles, with no real end goal. I want to ask these people...so once you eliminate the impact of the human species from the earth...then what? Wait for the asteroid to hit or the sun to engulf the earth, to restore it to its pre-life state?
That's fair and I think it's mostly true. At the same time, comparing "Europe" as a monolith compared to the US doesn't make a lot of sense, the history, languages and religions aren't shared for many countries, contrary to the US. We can circle back to saying it was and is a lack of vision from the EU to not have been more aggressive in creating this culture.
> I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
From what you wrote, I can somewhat understand this standpoint but this creates strong segregation between communities that aren't healthy and it sounds like a breeding ground for conflict as well.
And I personally fear where this is going. Because as much as I want to vet immigrants much more thoroughly and for a time hopefully have net-negative immigration in my country's case, I also know so many immigrants who came here to blend with our culture and are fantastic fellow countrymen. They've enriched our country and culture. When our representatives let it get as bad as it's getting, the ensuing conflict is one that I fear will end up harming indiscriminately, based on ethnicity and simple identifiable markers. All because spineless bureaucrats would rather not put their neck on the line, instead opting to let it all slide into the historically inevitable ugly conflict that seems looming.
I am actively looking into non-European destinations to emigrate to, and only ones where I feel I can be a net-positive on their culture and contribute to their economy and society. Because if my worst-case scenario for Europe comes to pass, I don't want to be here to be dragged into it. I don't want to be a contributor in that ugliness.
Likewise I never understood why we blame ourselves for a lack of effective integration when, particularly in Norway's case, we offer all the services you could want. But you have to _want_ to integrate, we can't force you. And if you don't want to, please leave.
Because the country of arrival is usually the stronger economic party. You have the capability of emigrating and integrating because you speak multiple languages, have most likely attained high education and you probably have the means to start a new life some place else. Honestly, good for you but not everyone has those benefits.
In the case of someone poorer, it might take a significant amount of resources and time they don't have, hence more of the burden being on countries integrating the immigrants. Let's also not kid ourselves, it's a trade for their labor in often bad conditions; not something from the grace of our hearts.
> But you have to _want_ to integrate, we can't force you. And if you don't want to, please leave.
This is imo a question the EU has struggled with for a long time. You'll want people to have their personal freedoms: culture, religion, language, etc. But you also want a cohesive whole where citizens can live and work together peacefully. This is a much more difficult question than "integrate or get out".
And I have every right to want you out of country and my taxes not to be wasted on the likes of you.
The more a society adopts socialist policies, the less friendly to immigration it becomes.
Both the US and most large European countries had roughly the same percentage of GDP driven by central government spending (socialism) in the 1960s...roughly 25-30%.
Socialist policies have steadily grown that percentage in both regions, with it happening more dramatically in Europe. The US is now at 35-40%, and Europe at 45-50%.
You can map the slowly rising anti-immigrant backlash in the US (and especially in Europe) to this perfectly.
I will keep it short because I value my time but here some things you might want to ponder:
- America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no actual American identity. The only things American have in common in the shared trauma of slavery and the civil war, and the founding myth which is why they remain so prevalent in the US modern discourse. Meanwhile, people will happily talk about "race" culture, half the country would be happy to slaughter the other half and culturally linked riots are a thing.
- Europe has a cultural entity doesn’t exist. The UK is different to France which is different to Germany or Danemark. Most of these countries immigration come from former colonies who already understand these countries social norms.
- Access to social welfare is severely limited to immigrants. Most of the system drain comes from people who were born in the country, not immigrants. Take any economic studies, you will see than immigration is a net positive in every European country. These are country where the population is aging fast. We simply need the immigrants to prop up the work force.
- Integration is a false issue. Most of the problems in France for example come from second generation immigrants who actually went through the French education system. The problem is mostly economic.
- The way Islam has been managed is an issue in itself. People deserve to be able to practice their cult freely and in good condition but most European countries have refused to take charge of the question. France for example left far too much space to extremist countries like Saudi Arabia. When most of your imams have been trained in the worst possible interpretations and mosques are financed by countries you shouldn’t want anything to do with, you have a major issue. There clearly is space for better solutions here.
- Plenty of political parties in Europe have strong visions for the future. Some of them are linked to social justice and preserving the environment, things you obviously dislike. The fact you can’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist however.
As an immigrant to USA, living here for 20 years, you're unequivocally wrong about this point. There is an American culture, and cult of "American dream". There are English as a Second Language programs, job integration programs, classes at every language of educations, rules and traditions for immigrant flow. The police, governments, and citizens of USA all know this is a country of immigrants and all have respect for immigrants, even if there is an "illegal" immigrant backlash right now. The threat of violence coming from political extremes absolutely does not represent the majority of people every day interactions.
In sum, American integration does exist, and I have first hand and second hand data to prove it. I'm not an expert on your other points, and I think you're trying to prove the sky is not blue, but genuinely, good luck.
>America integration doesn’t exist.
This premise
> The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture.
Contradicts this. You can't have both of those things. you EXTRA can't have them when you further talk about American culture in the same goddamned line.
> Europe has a cultural entity doesn’t exist.
This premise
>The way Islam has been managed is an issue in itself. People deserve to be able to practice their cult freely and in good condition but most European countries have refused to take charge of the question
Contradicts this.
And to be completely honest, this ending:
>Plenty of political parties in Europe have strong visions for the future. Some of them are linked to social justice and preserving the environment, things you obviously dislike. The fact you can’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist however.
Straight up makes me think you are not serious at all and straight up trolling. But in the off chance you aren't, I mean it when I say you are the problem you want to fight against.
Most European countries can fail at the same things while not having a shared culture identity. I have pointed you towards one example.
Same about America. This is not a contradiction. America purposefully doesn’t integrate people because there is nothing to actually integrate them into. America taken as a whole is from my point of view not a nation. It is a collection of groups often with little in common forming a country but in tension about how it should work. Some subgroups in the USA could arguably be considered nations with shared identities but certainly not the federation.
I will hasard you actually are the problem.
You are talking complete nonsense.
First, the idea there is no American integration is just funny, given millions of your countrymen moved to the US just 2-3 generations ago and yet French identity is essentially non-existent in the US.
In fact, there's more ethnically french people in America than in Canada, and yet Canada has very strong french cultural identity by comparison.
Second, I wasn't arguing against immigration and am not "far-right" (I'm absolutely pro-immigration), just explaining why Europe will never be able to do it en masse like the USA used to (they can't do it as much anymore either).
The reality: Socialist policy makes immigration an impossibility. The more socialist a country, the more aggressive its stance against immigration becomes. This is not a coincidence but a direct causal relationship.
People don't want to pay for random 2nd/3rd-world immigrants to suddenly get free healthcare, education and pension. It's that simple.
It's no secret that after America built its welfare state in the 1930s, this led to a dramatic shift to a closed immigration policy. And as the welfare state in the US has grown (from 25% of GDP in the 1950s to 35% today), the anti-immigrant sentiment just keeps rising.
European countries are no different, having grown their socialist welfare states dramatically over the past 60 years (from 25-ish% to 50% of GDP today). And thus, you get increasingly aggressive anti-immigrant backlash when times get tough.
The irony of the modern leftist is they don't understand the impossibility of their supposed beliefs. You cannot be both pro-immigration and pro-socialism. They are oil and water.
Either you believe immigration is a good force in the world, and thus want libertarian capitalist policy like the US pre-1930s. Or you want socialism, which leads to closed borders, and only pretend to like immigration to make people think you're a good person at parties.
Immigration in USA has multiple components, but it seems to be you're undervaluing the amount of opportunistic intellectual workers, who come here to participate in high level education, and entrepreneurial capitalism. But, here are the numbers across multiple sources (thx GPT):
- High-skilled (H-1B + EB green cards + PhD retention): ~200–300k annually.
- Low-wage (H-2A + H-2B + others): ~500k+ legally, probably >700k when including unauthorized inflows.
1. Take jobs an American would otherwise fill, which would not be a problem except 2. The economy disproportionately benefits the capitalist class (billionaires). Bringing over immigrants to boost the economy doesn’t help the median American, and it creates competition for natives
I’m not undervaluing it. Im saying it provides no value for the majority of Americans. And this on a purely economic axis - social and cultural angles are arguably all negative.
That's a big assumption. Yeah, take out all the H1b immigrant that came to this country since 1985, what do you think the US economy looks like, filled exclusively with Americans? Where do you think US economy would be? Where do you think the Silicon Vally would be now? Do you think US and Americans would be better off? Do you think that the economic input of the immigrants is net negative?
I don't think you need to answer. I think you've already said no, these workers, and their contibutions are net negative. I just don't see how that makes any sense, given they're clearly a big part of the economy.
This is obviously nonsense. "White" Americans are something like 57% of the population. The US is very mixed, and always has been.
https://www.iowadatacenter.org/datatables/UnitedStates/usstr...
You can search US demographic data from a plethora of sources to see this is not true. It’s a recent development enabled by modern laws and policies.
Only if it can improve life quality rather than length alone.
Of course if we make it so you can live to 200 in the body of a 24-year-old and then suddenly drop dead, the good news is there will be no pensions to pay any more and the bad news is you will drop dead at your 180th year at work.
Which is not to say I would not take that deal. Aging is brutal and I've just about had enough already!
You could imagine entirely curing cancer, heart disease, frailty and infection but not brain degeneration, for example.
Curing everything else except frailty also seems invidious, though with sufficiently good brain-machine interfaces perhaps that would be less of a problem: you can just float in anti-impact gel from 100 and 200 and mentally roam the wreckage of the internet! If AI takes over knowledge work, how you pay for your life support and data connection may become an issue.
I'm not sure that's a foregone conclusion. Loads of interventions put extra pressure on other body systems (often, but not always, the liver and kidneys). Sometimes to the extent that even if you may "manage" the original complaint, it comes at a substantial cost to overall health. And heart muscle is pretty special anyway, so it's quite possible it's a separate treatment to skeletal muscle problems.
And pretty much any system failing can kill you so if long term life extension comes from targeted treatments per problem, you need to hit bones and cartilage, muscles, skin, nerves, brain, GI tract, kidneys, liver, immune system, endocrine system, lungs, etc etc, but also not overstress any one with the treatments of the others and also handle almost-inevitable cancers.
Not in a sustainable way.
Immigration is only viable as long as the countries of origin are so bad to live in so it's "better" to migrate. This is not really a world we want, is it?
I don't have enough cruelty in me to demand that someone should stay in Sudan and try to "fix" what's happening there.
I say this as a someone who immigrated from a dangerous country to the first world.
The only way the current plan even approaches sustainability is if the brain drain on source nations is sufficient to keep them stuck and suffering. That should make it very clear that the humanitarian impact is a side effect and not the goal.
Selecting "the best people" is the often-overlooked step. A lot of countries just want to import cheap labor and get easy economic growth today, damned be the consequences.
But more importantly wealthy countries shouldn't depend on there being poor countries where women still have "too" many children but rather we should fix our own problems so we want and can have sufficient young people of our own (not said in a nazi way).
And we should also redistribute wealth so there aren't any poor countries to exploit for natural resources, crops and people.
You cannot discount the destabilising potential of immigration, and the lowering of societal trust it comes with. As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule. It will be especially harder to integrate people the way the demographic pyramid is looking right now in "developed" countries.
I would also question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged by the western, "developed" countries that will be hosting them.
I am an immigrant (expat?). I don't enjoy paying contributions for the welfare of the people who played in a huge role in the reasons I had to emigrate.
Is that true? Are you sure the edge cases where people didn't integrate aren't just bigger stories than the many many people who arrive and live normal boring lives?
> question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged
Maybe we could stop wronging and mistreating them? Or is that an important part of our European heritage?
This is why we need strong vetting of immigrants.
But even if I were an immigrant to the US from Venezuela or any of the tens if not hundreds countries that the US destabilised, I would indeed think of the majority of US's population as complicit. The people that are against such acts seem to always be the minority.
Russia and China have well above average lifestyles based on PPP. So do many South American countries, as well as Japan, and South Korea and other Asian countries. Also a number of countries in the middle east.
Yes, I understand the US is a very very bad country. I am also a very very bad person because I am very grateful, proud, and and supportive of this country for providing my family an opportunity to thrive even though it took decades for my "type" to be accepted and not discriminated against. My grandparents fled from other countries to be here, for a better life.
Note that I say "opportunity", because nothing was handed to my grandparents or my parents. They were given opportunity, not a subsidized life. They were also, as many immigrants have been, discriminated against for decades, but never complained or held grudges.
I am a huge believer in immigration, but have zero tolerance for those demanding to be supported or who commit crimes or those that choose to come here and bitch about this country. There are plenty of other places to go to.
We are also going through significant challenges right now - social, political, economic, foreign relationships.
We may or may not survive as a country. We may have a positive or adverse effect on the rest of the world as we go through what we must go through.
However, the rest of the world is simply not innocent.
Europe has a lot to account for. So does Russia, China, Japan. And lets not forget the Islamic and Ottoman empires, which easily matched and in many respects put to shame the slavery, colonization, genocides, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid of the American, European, and Asian empires.
Most of the worlds current problems are the result of the collapse of these empires about 100 years ago, payment for the failure of their insufferable mentalities over many centuries.
Right now the US is facing payment for its past, the rest of the world is still paying for its past.
"Europe" has nothing to account for. Western Europe ? Sure.
Have you ever asked yourself what the purpose is of what you call "workforce"? Exactly what work are they doing that is more important than the survival of the native population? It's completely dehumanizing, and I can't find the logic behind it. If a geographical place needs constant influx of people from other places because the "system" there is slowly killing the population, then for what purpose should that continue?
That “monetary cost” is not nothing. It represents a share of the finite resources your tribe has (individual/family/city/country) being spent on something with little return for future generations.
Developed countries are asking people who put in the effort to raise kids well to support those that don’t. That works when maybe 1 in 10 people don’t raise kids well, for whatever reason, but it doesn’t work so well when large portions of the population do not.
And there very well may be a justification to not raise kids well, but the math is going to be the math regardless of justifications.
Won't that just make the problem worse?
should be
"immigration or automation are the only things that can replenish their workforce."
A huge fraction of deaths in the developed world are from "lifestyle diseases" from obesity, poor food choices, sedentary behaviors, alcohol, tobacco, etc, all of which we could improve. We eat too many highly processed foods, added sugars, etc. We have places without infrastructure for clean water. We have gun deaths and traffic deaths, and we have bad gun laws and car-centric communities. We have flooding/hurricane/heatwave deaths and we have a climate-denial public policy. There are _so many fixable things_ that shorten people's lives, and we'd all probably also live happier lives if we fixed them.
https://www.science.org/content/article/do-blue-zones-suppos...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/04/are-blu...
But if you can get me 90 years where I feel like a spring chicken until 89, then that’s just fine.
I'd sign up for the same
I’d sign up for that.
At that age if you can avoid cancer the rest is stuff like “Strong enough so you don’t break a hip when tripping on the stairs”
88, feeling great!
89, feeling fine
90, less mighty*
91, not yet done!
92, don’t think I’ll hit 102!
He died a couple years later, just a few months after getting my grandmother into an assisted living facility.
*note, I struggle to recall the rhyme for 90, so this one might not be accurate!
I've definitely experienced mental states that were worse than being dead. I don't regret remaining alive because of all the positive experiences I've had afterwards. But if we are talking about extending suffering that's only followed by death, I don't see the point.
Beginning at some acute level of pain you actually want to detach from the failing body.
We need to remember that our bodies are evolutionarily optimized for getting to childbearing years, and then living long enough to get our children to a point where they can be independent. After that there are really no evolutionary pressures keeping us around.
Untangling all that and re-engineering ourselves (biologically) to overcome that is probably a pretty monumental task; starting from scratch with something simpler (and perhaps non-biological) might be easier, with sufficiently advanced technology.
Sure, we all like to complain about burrito taxis, dating apps and endless Zoom calls, but in terms of quality-of-life per unit of energy, it's a step change.
Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.
Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
It would not raise the life expectancy to 100 years but it would considerably reduce the health burden on the economy.
Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
Those will give you an entire life. Living while being healthy is an entirely different life than surviving while being unhealthy.
Compare it to being obese, wich can happen very young and is in part determined by how you are fed when you are a baby/child.
We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
I mean, sure, it doesn't scale as well as a magic pill as a business. But is certainly is O(n) with the number of people involved.
Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does just that, and the implementation difficulty ramp up gets brutal quickly. It's simple to suggest and hard to execute.
Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they offer good sublinear scaling on many of the inputs. They're extremely hard to develop, but they're often well worth it, because the implementation scales in a way those "simple" solutions don't.
A healthy lifestyle must be earned. It is a constant struggle against the fastfood industry.
Soon you'll see Coca-cola or Nestlé [0] selling both very unhealthy quasi-addictive food and drinks to kids and magic pills that cure obesity. Sounds scalable enough ?
[0] https://www.nestle.com/brands/healthcare-nutrition/medical-n...
If you think that being healthy should be a reward for a lifestyle of virtue, that's your problem, not mine. I'd rather have an actual solution than a blanket "those people don't struggle hard enough", pointed at the majority of US population that's overweight.
How about some regulation in the F&B industry? Reducing screen time at school? Those can be done now and don't really cost much.
And then make our cities pedestrian and bicycle friendly. More difficult but definitely a win.
Or would you rather pour billions hoping for a magic pill that solves it all? This is not realistic.
- noise pollution
- lack of fitness
- stimulant use during the day
- inability to manage a clean, nice sleeping environment
- obesity and sleep apnea
- a partner who can't sleep
- heat or cold in your bedroom
- mental illness
So, just from that list, we see that we'd need to overhaul housing quality so everyone has quadruple glazing and an air-conditioner, stop them chugging coffee, get them help with their laundry, fix their fitness and cure their obesity (which are themselves caused by poor sleep), and get them into therapy.
That sounds hard! Also, we're already working on a lot of it, but it's generally difficult or impossible to fix all of those problems.
Either way, a pill would scale better across all these people.
Because although longevity is a nice recurrent idea for everyone in theory, when the rubber meets the road people routinely want to optimize time spent in living in pleasure.
The pleasurable stuff is almost all about "YOLO!" in every domain. A candle that shines twice as bright ends up consuming itself twice as fast and all that
Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.
That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results.
Aging should get the same treatment.
I am not against trying to "solve aging", but I don't think we should think of it as just a disease, and there should be more plans on how to deal with the sudden "infinite" number of humans. While I may want to live forever, I would definitely not enjoy that in all circumstances.
That's beyond optimistic. What's more likely to happen is, we'll uncover some major pathways for aging and find a way to target them to slow aging down somewhat, at first.
People who get anti-aging treatments would live for longer, and would be healthier while they do. The adoption would be gradual, and it'll take a while for them to come down in price and proliferate worldwide - and it would still be up to people to decide whether they want them, although most doctors would recommend they do. The first generations of anti-aging treatments would allow people to live to the age of 100 fairly reliably, and remain healthier and more active while they do. Future generations would improve on that.
There will be no "sudden infinite number of humans" to deal with. Even if we started out tomorrow (for example, if it was confirmed that Ozempic has broad anti-aging effects), it'll take decades for this effect to become noticeable. Humanity can adapt to something like that easily.
You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision.
Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.
If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.
Sure, it would be nigh impossible to do something like cram "genetic resistance to cancer" into a grown adult with current day tech, but there are other surfaces to attack in longevity.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
Two decades of this kind of research spending add up to $100 billion. And most billionaires are closer to $5 billion rich than to $500 billion rich.
It would sure be nice to have an infinite money glitch billionaire who cares a lot about funding anti-aging research and lobbying for anti-aging efforts, the way Musk cares about space exploration and trolling people online. We're lucky that at least some neglected fields get billionaire attention like this. But we can't rely on that happening.
It's why I stress that aging should be recognized as a disease. If we had the likes of WHO and FDA in agreement that aging is unwanted and treating aging is desirable, even if it can't be done yet, it would shift the perception considerably.
It would make it easier for billionaires to contribute to anti-aging research as a philanthropic effort - but it would also open many doors in terms of research funding and corporate investment.
The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.
Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.
Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.
Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before then. You can’t patch it out completely without breaking something else.
This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in the past — and then some.
But you can’t fully fix aging. You can’t infinitely improve standard of living.
Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Once it gets at least the same kind of focus cancer or heart disease does now? Then we'll talk about how it's "impossible to fix".
In some species, it doesn't seem to happen at all. In others, it happens extremely slowly. Clearly, there are massive longevity gains left on the table - ones we'll never pick up if we keep whining about "life" being "a balance of tradeoffs".
I find it peculiar that you interpret my statements as "whining". I specifically wrote:
> My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs
What's whiny about that? Modern medicine has for a while been in a position of treating symptoms of symptoms of symptoms, often of its own making. That doesn't mean we should stop treating symptoms! But it means we have to look at the bigger picture and stop thinking everything is a "problem" to be "fixed", and work harder to understand why things work the way they do, and what the costs of altering them truly are. Sometimes fixing one thing isn't worth the tradeoffs in other areas.
You're out looking for "tradeoffs" that may not be there, or may not be worth caring about. There is no "balance of tradeoffs" in everything. There isn't an Authority on Biology that says "if you get good X then you must take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". There are just shitty local minima you get stuck in unless you manage to climb your way out.
Do you want to get 50% less cancer, or to live to 120? The answer is "yes". You can have both. Nothing forbids you from having both. Is it easy to get both? No. It's not easy to get even one of those. But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that.
~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's _hubris_. But to repeat myself: I am not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should expect no free lunch, and that the concept of tradeoffs for every alteration is a much healthier mental framework to work off of because _so far_ that's been the one consistent truth in all of biology.
For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence people's chance of reproducing and passing on their genes.
Conversely, evolution has had millions of years to work on fighting infectious diseases, which have been bigger killers for most of our history.
I think evolution did a damn fine job. And yes there's surely more we don't know than we know or understand, which might change the future just as much as bacteriology has, but let's also be humble and learn from what came before. Both things are possible.
What was natural selection selecting for, exactly? Longevity? Happiness? Quality of life?
Hahahahaha hahaha hahah ha no.
There is no "fairness" in biology, and natural selection isn't your friend. It's aligned with your interests sometimes - but if evolution could make humans reproduce much more effectively by making them live half as long and ten times as miserable? It would. There's just one primary metric that evolution cares about, and it totally would throw your well-being under the bus for it.
Evolution doesn't care much about whether humans live long and happy lives. Only humans themselves care about that. There are a lot of optimizations possible there, and humans have to be the ones to find them.
It's okay if you want to die, but I think I draw the line at demanding others want it too.
The only real, fully enforced tradeoff is "energy is always required to keep the lights on". And it's not like humans are strapped for energy.
Cancer is also a result of many other factors of which humans are more exposed to than elephants typically are, environmental and pollution being a major one, and food ingredients being another. A life expectancy of 70 years for a human isn't that great; in 2024 in Europe it was 79 years for males and 84 years for women, and that's with all the contributing cancer risk factors in society as mentioned earlier.
A more interesting species might be immortal jellyfish, but the simplicity of the organism might be a contributing factor in why it works the way it does.
We could apply that pressure, either through selective breeding over generations, or through direct genetic modification. Maybe we aren't quite there yet, but it won't be long.
Experiments on insects with selective breeding have easily tripled lifespans. How well that would transfer to mammals is hard to say, but a substantial increase is certainly possible.
We never know if it's their or not.
Famous people are just people who are famous and while the prenup rates are high, people who actually do the DNA test for paternity purposes are low as they are in the general population
You could argue the same forces are still at play at societal levels. People around the age of 50 have a vast economic impact, having accumulated experience and relationships over many decades. And the average age of soldiers in Ukraine is somewhere around 40-45. If one country had a population that stayed at the mental and physical fitness of a 50 year old for another 20 years that would be a drastic advantage, both in terms of skilled workforce and in terms of military capability. Even just another 5 productive years are a big deal in a world where the time you spend productively working is about twice the time you spend "growing up" and getting an education. And my nation doing well means my children can afford more children, spreading my DNA, making it favored by evolution
The life-span extension experiments I have read about specifically only allowed older adult insects to reproduce, pushing that age later and later. Adults that died early did not reproduce. Massive evolutionary pressure.
Losing your vision, your hearing, your mobility, and worst of all, your mind, doesn’t sound very appealing to me.
So unless we find a way to both live longer and to decliner slower, I just don't see the point for the majority of people who will unfortunately live lonely worse lives.
My great-grandfather was physically very active into his 90s, still running his businesses, working in his orchards, and generally being surprisingly productive. He was mentally sharp too; I remember him teaching me about the physics of vacuum energy at length. Seemed like he could go on indefinitely. Then his wife died and he died less than a year later.
I always have him as my model for what I want to be like when I am old. He was still in the game until he wasn’t.
The very reason you're expected to die in your 90s is that your body has decayed into a complete mess where nothing works properly anymore and every single capability reserve is at depletion. You die in old age because if you spend long enough at "one sliver away from the breaking point", statistics make going over it inevitable. Even a flu is a mild inconvenience to the young, but often lethal to the elderly.
To make it to the age of 150, you'd pretty much have to spend a lot more time as a healthy, well functioning adult.
Everyone keeps talking about health care but IMO it's really downstream of you attending yourself. It's almost a spiritual thing really. American health is so bad because Americans don't feel like they themselves are worth taking care of. The contrast between the people who disagree here gets extreme as they age.
So our current obsession with longevity through fitness and nutrition is new and we can't really tell what someone like Bryan Johnson will be like at 80. If he is significantly declined in 20 years despite his rigorous longevity routine then we will know.
20 years would be difficult, but 10 or so years would be very attainable.
Ed Thorpe is well into his 90s. Here’s an interview with him at 89. Seems quite healthy: https://youtu.be/CNvz91Jyzbg?si=VNj61A256ZOBM977
This 10 minutes deals directly with fitness and longevity: https://youtu.be/dzCpUbkC1dg?si=LqV-tUFyxyYMW0qC
The President, however, especially when Congress is forced to toe their line, is. No president should be permitted to be more than 20 years older than the median age of the general population when they’re done leading the country. In this case, they shouldn’t be more than 58y old when their 8y term is up. This way, they and their progeny need to live with the decisions made for at least ~20y after they’re out of office.
There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.
Yep, I am not a big fan of our military policy, but I have a friend who recently retired as an Army LTC.
At his level there are standard procedures - at each rank you have a timeframe, and the rule is "promote or retire". Precisely to ensure you don't break the assembly line.
Even in software. "We don't hire mid level/junior/associate engineers, only senior/staff". No pipeline can hurt. Yeah, you can hire for all that, but there's value of having junior staff within, when you promote those staff level folks to EMs and Directors.
Here’s one from 3 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34985088
You can always ask the AI:
Politics & World Leaders • Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) – Former President of South Africa, died at 95. • George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) – 41st U.S. President, died at 94. • Jimmy Carter (1924– ) – 39th U.S. President, currently 100 (as of 2024). • Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (1900–2002) – Died at 101. • Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921–2021) – Died at 99.
Arts & Entertainment • Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) – Actor, died at 103. • Olivia de Havilland (1916–2020) – Actress, died at 104. • Betty White (1922–2021) – Actress/comedian, died at 99. • Norman Lear (1922–2023) – Television writer/producer, died at 101. • Tony Bennett (1926–2023) – Singer, died at 96.
Science & Literature • Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) – Philosopher, died at 97. • Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) – Nobel Prize–winning neurologist, died at 103. • Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) – Architect, lived to 91. • Maya Angelou (1928–2014) – Poet and author, died at 86 (not 90s, but close). • Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) – Science fiction author, died at 72 (not 90s).
Business & Other Notables • David Rockefeller (1915–2017) – Banker/philanthropist, died at 101. • John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) – Oil magnate, died at 97. • Iris Apfel (1921–2024) – Fashion icon, died at 102.
You have no point.
Using a few famous people as examples is hardly a reliable metric. My aunt is still alive at 103 and will likely make it to 104 if nothing changes. She has fewer health problems than other family members in their 60s if you discount the fact that she’s basically blind, can't hear well, is stuck in a bed 24/7, and has severe dementia that prevents her from recalling things seconds after being told, aside from some specific memories from her youth. Meanwhile, almost all of her children died under very poor health conditions in their 70s and 80s. Her oldest daughter looked like she was a corpse at 80.
Some people just get lucky with their genes, and it doesn’t always pass on to their children or grand-children.
PS: For reference, she had 11 children, almost all dead now while she's alive and can't recall their names or ever having children.
I responded to someone who said that people in their 70s are already in decline.
How many good years after 70 did she have?
A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a friend and his 80-year-old wife. I would’ve never guessed she was 80.
During the Roman period, the average life expectancy was only 22-25 years old because so many babies were dying prematurely.
If you could make it past the age of 10, then you were expected to make it to about 50, which almost doubles life expectancy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empi...
And while I know some will contest the source, while intentionally conflating the mystical with the historical, even the Bible hits on the average age of man: "The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
Notably that is in Psalms, Old Testament, and so it was like written over the time frame of 400-1400BC. And I think it's fairly self evident that that segment was written in the context of plain historical observation with no mysticism implied or stated. Basically life expectancy once you leave childhood, let alone peak longevity, hasn't changed all that much over thousands of years.
Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology.
Wake me up when we can make headless, full body monoclonal donors for human head transplants. Antigen free / HLA neutral so immunosuppressants are a thing of the past. That'll cure every cancer except brain and blood, cure every other injury, and increase health span of everything but the brain.
The tough problems:
- religious ick and luddite ick
- artificial gestation
- deactivating the brain stem without impacting development
- keeping the body physiologically active and developmentally normative
- head transplants that preserve spinal cord function
- lots of other ancillary issues with changes to pulmonary and immune flux.
Lab-grown organs is doable, but the brain and spinal column just aren't modular in that way.
In-place system renovation and targeted replacement is a more likely way to yield results.
That's all they do
So for someone sitting around 24/7 maybe vaguely helpful
For someone active, they defeat stress adaptations, so your "gains" disappear or never happen in the first place
They also do nothing for disease, they may help avoid some disease but once the disease is in progress, they can't cure anything
There's going to have to be a "next gen" of such drugs, years if not decades away
The next-gen will probably deal with mitochondria function, enhancing and restoring/rebooting dysfunction, which actually might cure some disease
So hopefully investment will continue towards "next gen", it's a very long road
After 60 life sucks. Not always but very often.
So we should use Tim Urban's life-week calendar to being aware how little time we have and not waste it.
Some people would very much prefer if their consciousness wouldn't have an end date, after which they'll never experience or think anything and will just cease to exist.
Though it would be nice if they had the option of choosing that for themselves, instead of being told that they don't really want long lives and that they should kneel before biology. Whether they're content with 100 years or 100'000 years, that should be up to them.
Or, as others pointed out, if at least whatever amount they're gonna be around for was more dignified and they had a better quality of life, instead of their bodies slowly wasting away.
Utter bollocks.
Psychedelics for everyone!
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-pe...
"Accept death, it's beautiful" is cope. It's not beautiful. It's suboptimal horror.
I find it offensive that so many "universe experiencing itself" entities willingly accept a return to dust. Our sun dies, and with it everything on this planet will become metal inclusions in a decaying solar body. You know what doesn't matter in light of that? All other perspectives. Every other conception of death and meaning tends to zero.
I accept death personally. It's 99.9999manynines likely. But I would love to spend my limited energy trying to conquer it or to push forward the societal envelope. Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.
It's not like how any of us spends our time matters anyway. We're all already dead, geologically timespan speaking.
And who knows. Maybe the gods of the future will reverse simulate the light cone down to your femtosecond neurotransmitter flux. Maybe that's you right now. And maybe they'll pull you forward into an eternity of bliss instead of a read-only memory or sadistic eternal hell simulation. But probably none of those things given how more likely we are to accept doom.
I hear this claim often, but I never hear any particular reason for why it's so important compared to e.g. letting Alpha Centauri colonize where the lightcones overlap.
Practically speaking, I have no idea what I _personally_ can do except of accepting the inevitable.
Not like they long for it or whatever, but anxiety about it goes down, acceptance of it goes up.
We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved.
In the N-dimensional gradient from homeostasis to oblivion, N is high enough and the ground shakes often enough that it is not statistically feasible for there to be local minima. Only saddles, in one dimension or another other.
Cells from cancerous tumors do not prove biological immortality is technologically viable for humans, nor do hydras nor Greenland sharks, because the tradeoffs they have to make in order to obtain "immortality" (in only a very technical sense) would be wholly unworkable for the complexity and the experience of a human, as well as extremely destructive to human society.
Just think about this for a moment. "Cells from deadly tumors full of mutant hair and teeth refuse to die (until they kill their entire environment), therefore humans can be immortal?" Really? That's the argument you're going with?
People have been trying to explain this to you through this entire thread. But despite leaving 22 comments, you seem impervious to it. Personally, I think we should strive to be less like cancers, not more.
There is no Authority on Biology that says "if you want good X, you'll have to take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". It's just hard to get "good X, good Y, good Z" at once, and nature never really tried. That's up to us then.
That little "cancer" metaphor of yours is a worthless fluff piece meant to make you feel better about dying a protracted, miserable death before you hit the age of 100.
Personally, I think we should be coping less, and doing more about the problems we're facing - of which aging is one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypoth...
So… You're just approaching this with, like, zero reference to actual science at all? "My mind imagines I can have eternal life, and therefore I can, and anybody pointing out flaws with my position is worthless miserable fluff"?
Look, I don't like the limits of thermodynamics more than anyone does. But I think it says a lot that there are, you know, actual real diseases that people suffer from and we can make a cost-effective amelioration of with focused effort. And instead you're here raging that we as a society aren't spending billions of dollars trying to make you immortal.
I'm baffled by your desire to defend the status quo that involves you and everyone you love dying a long and miserable death before the age of 100. Even more so with the amount of "actual real diseases" that loop back around to aging.
Some generations ago that was likely also a reasonable approximation.
But with the hyper growth we see today, it becomes ever clear that we always work with sigmoidal growth.
We can see that because more an more system are in the latter half of the sigmoid.
Then for 1938-2000 they say it's 2.5 months per generation. If generation is 2-3 years we should already be at 100 year expectancy.
Also having 1900-1938 and 1938-2000 as the only points in time seem meaningless. Does the entire 1938-2000 have a single graident? What's the slope here?
They also mention that the main advancement in 1900-1938 is infant mortality. Which is really uninteresting for the old age.
Humans are biological machines. We know how to replace hearts with artificial ones that can last years. Soon they may start lasting decades.
We can replace many hormones with artificial ones.
I do not see any reason we can’t learn how to replace other organs and systems.
And in this case you may as well live 200+ years
Idk if we should study age as a disease but we surely should study the delusions of techno solutionists
Someday, I don't think synthetic intelligence will escape this facet of existence. After 84 humans call it the forth age, and things tend to stop getting better for ones quality of life. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
Edit: In the U.S. that is.
Only in the US whereas the OP "analyzed life expectancy for 23 high-income and low-mortality countries".
I think scientists currently are testing ways to "partially" reprogram cells to make them younger while keeping their function. Early studies in mice have shown some reversal of aging signs.
Seems like an engineering problem more than an absolute limitation.
This doesn't help overall. Mixing two roughly equally broken things just yields the mean of the two. But the trick is that roughly 60 to 70% of conceptions will not survive to birth. This rejection sampling is ultimately what makes children younger.
If you had a population of single cells that didn't undergo this rejection sampling at some point, entropy and Muller's ratchet would actually age the entire population and kill it.
What scientists usually mean by "cellular age" isn’t mutation load, it’s the epigenetic and functional state of cells. During gametogenesis and early embryonic development DNA undergoes extensive repair, telomere maintenance and global epigenetic reprogramming that wipes and rewrites methylation patterns. This resets the cellular "clock" even though some mutations are passed on.
So while mutation load drifts slightly each generation, the reason babies start biologically young is this large scale reprogramming. That’s also why researchers are trying to mimic this process in adult cells (Yamanaka factors etc) to reverse aspects of aging.
The only truly troubling one is the brain, and we're very much not sure if it actually is one or for example, suffers degradation from the degradation of the body its attached to - likely both - but we also know that the brain is not a static structure, and so replacement or rejuvenation of key systems would definitely be possible (certainly finding any way to protect the small blood vessels in the brain would greatly help with dementia).
And it makes sense, really. You can't have a functioning society if everyone is running around freaking out about death all the time.
But we're entering a weird time where we might actually be able to add more good years to our lives. One of the steps towards getting there is being a little more okay with people seriously exploring these ideas.
If not, the point in doing that is the enormous amount of suffering you create while thrashing against an inevitability.
That is not to say you should take naps and wait patiently for death, but it's a line to walk.
This is absurd. Of course mortality is inevitable -- eternity is a very long time -- but working to increase lifespan, prolong one's youth and vigor, and delay the inevitable doesn't cause an "enormous amount of suffering" (far less than the diseases of aging cause) and it's unfair to characterize it as "thrashing" when it can be approached in ways which are thoughtful and reasonable.
I tried to convey that I'm not saying "this is as good as it gets and it's wrong to try for longer life". Your "thoughtful and reasonable" approach was exactly what I had in mind.
What I say leads to suffering arises from denying that mortality is inevitable and tarring those who say otherwise as defeatists. Death is another part of life, as you acknowledged. It unnerves me to see denying that truth cast as a virtue.
This is unfair, and akin to branding anyone who takes medicine as being unhinged.
There is evidence we can extend our health spans. By how much and how are open questions. And if we can actually stop aging, versus slow it down, has not been demonstrated. Some people engage with this unhealthily, just as many terminally-ill cancer patients unhealthily engage with long-shot treatment options. That doesn’t make everyone taking those treatments delusional.
I’d hope we more mature as a society than decrying real medical research that could materially increase our health spans because they’re heretical.
The fact that something happens doesn't mean it's a law of anything. Cars didn't exist before we built them - no law of "no cars". People died of TB before we had a cure - no law of "TB". Same for various types of cancer.
In practice when someone says "live forever", they don't mean to imply they'll live the 10^100 (or whatever the guestimates are) years to the end of the universe. They mean they'll stop aging in the sense that we do now. Maybe we could live to 10,000 or 50,000 or whatever. You can always get hit by a bus, or get some strange disease from a bat, or whatever.
In fact we know how to live forever, control our telomeres. We know it works because cancer exists. We just can’t control it but controlled cancer is effectively immortality.
Lobsters aren’t truly biologically immortal. They “continue to grow throughout their lives,” with “increasing amounts of energy” being needed to mount ans they grow larger [1]. “Eventually the cost is too high and lobsters can die from exhaustion.” (That said, if our cells aged like lobsters we’d live something like thousands of healthy years.)
For true biological immortality, look to some jellyfish [2]. You literally can’t tell if a cell is taken from an old or juvenile.
[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-lobsters-immortal.html
[2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/immortal-jellyfish-secret-to-...
Technically “immortal” means “never dying”, it has nothing to do with age. You could be unable to die but continue to age and become ever more decrepit (although the Oxford dictionary does list “never decaying” in its definition), for sure there’s a sci-fi short story about that out there.
The mentioned creatures all age, they do get older, it just so happens their bodies don’t deteriorate, or they do but regenerate.
Hence my use of the term biologically immortal.
> mentioned creatures all age, they do get older, it just so happens their bodies don’t deteriorate
Were you really confused that OP was talking about stopping physical time?
That’s the second paragraph. I was specifically addressing only the first (the one I quoted). In that one you seem to be saying that “immortal means not aging”. That’s the only part of your post I wanted to address, the rest was very clear.
What is the oldest known living individual for each of these species, and for how long are they alive?
For the jellyfish, we don’t know. Their cells are indifferentiable by age and they’re bastards to study, with only one scientist in Kyoto having managed to culture them [1].
We don’t know this. We know of no creatures as biologically complex as humans that demonstrate biological immortality. That might be because nature never bothered. It might be because it can’t.
But you are generally correct: we have strong evidence healthspan-increasing interventions are not only possible, but proximate. That research could move faster with more funding, particularly from the public, since if we relinquish this funding to the rich it will not prioritize treatments which may be slightly less effective but much cheaper and thus broadly applicable.
(1) Yes we do have an example: us. Why is a baby’s cells young and healthy, and not the age of the parents? Dormant eggs are not the answer as you’d still get accumulating damage over time. Turns out there are mechanisms for cellular reprogramming which rejuvenates cells. There are mechanisms for making ages cells indistinguishable from young cells. We just haven’t fully harnessed this capability on therapeutics yet.
(2) The deeper point is one of logical necessity. No bird flies faster than the speed of sound, yet that doesn’t work as an argument for the impossibility of the SR-71 or Concorde. No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet).
You’re speculating too far beyond what we know to speak so definitively. Plenty of biology and even thermodynamics suggests there may be limits. That doesn’t prove they exist. But it’s in the same category as saying there are no know physics which prohibit time travel or transcending the human condition into a state of pure consciousness. Like, sure, there aren’t, but to use your analogy, ancient Romans didn’t know about the speed of light.
Diseased old cells have accumulated damage in a multitude of different forms, as well as accumulated junk. Fix the errors and remove the junk. It is as easy and as hard as that.
Nothing in thermodynamics or organic chemistry prevents this from being possible in principle.
Thermodynamics is not a limit on an intelligent agent reconfiguring atoms on Earth for the next several billion years.
Given that that the universe hasn't an indefinite life span there is at least physical reason why we can't live indefinitely.
It’s one component, but not the only reason [1].
Naked mole rats’ telomeres do “not shorten with age but rather showed a mild elongation” [2]. They are long lived, for rodents, and don’t degrade into balls of cancer [3]. They nevertheless age.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence#Theories_of_aging
A species that lives forever must adjust to reproduce relatively slowly to not overwhelm the local environment. A species that lives short lives will reproduce at much higher rates. So at any time the fewer “immortal” individuals would be vulnerable to competition from the many “mortals”, or to predators.
Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans but with implications we can’t even think of now. Maybe our limitation will not be biological but societal.
> but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering
Feel free to be specific. Start from here and describe your revelation about my “confusion”:
>> Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans
Natural life o overwhelmingly selects for well defined, limited lifespans. Engineered human life likely won’t see any natural pressure but rather societal pressure to set a well defined, limited lifespan.
I truly don’t know how to respond to this. If you want to die on a rigid time table, fine. Don’t take the rest of us out with you.
[0]: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/the-fable-of-the-dragon-tyran...
And my cat recently had his one hundred eleventieth birthday, based on one cat year = five human years. (He's now about 23.)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DF54G8F9/
For reference: the movie "Soylent Green" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/
Something to think about, HN.
I think we could get the average life expectancy up to 100 if we did a better job of all the preventative things:
* Prevent airborne disease by having all indoor spaces getting 50 air changes/filters per hour.
* Prevent waterborne disease by having all tap water RO treated in homes, and by heating all shit up to boiling point before it leaves toilets.
* Large scale animal and human trials of every chemical used in daily life to find those things like a pacifier which gives you cancer 60 years later. It is far better to do an 'unethical' trial of a chemical than the current system of just putting it in all products and going bankrupt later.
* Prevent spread of other diseases like the common cold with daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone, with the government bringing you food and paying you to stay home if infected with any spreadable disease.
* Work on many more vaccines and give them out for free to the whole world to eliminate more diseases like we did with smallpox (that vaccine has saved around 800 million lives).
* Dramatically reduced effort on individual treatment (cancer, care homes, etc) by putting a 200% tax on healthcare, and funnelling that money into preventative things so the next generation doesn't get the health issues at all.
Seriously, when your one large oreo shake has 2600 calories, no wonder your obesity rate is 35% and isn't slowing. Driving to the toilet instead of walking also doesn't help. Then your hospitals get overrun with preventable diseases and healthcare gets expensive. This isn't a 'caring' problem when getting fat is the only option for most people, the way most people life is specifically designed to make you obese.
We already know the link between cervical cancer and HPV, various cancers are caused by EBV, hepatitis virus often causes liver cancer, herpes virus also causes some cancers.
Plenty of viruses are also linked to a substantially increased risk of heart disease, including the common cold.
I suspect that nearly all cancers are caused by viruses, and are often just viruses that have no other symptoms and might take decades to cause the cancer. If we can stop the transmission of those viruses, cancer rates will eventually drop.
The challenge is how to do that smartly - not having half the population sitting at home twiddling their thumbs because they have some symptomless virus and 'feel fine'.
How would you prevent people from abusing this system? Covid tests were simple to get to show a positive result, and I know some people who would make this instantly unsustainable.
That decision can be made based on fraud risk, but also on the benefit to society of that person not spreading that disease further. For example if a disease has already infected most of the town in the last few weeks, it makes no sense for someone to stay home because local immunity is already probably high and further spread unlikely.
However the first case in a new town would 100% be worth staying home for to avoid infecting thousands of others.
If a little propofol in my brain can make me not exist, I'm pretty sure when I don't even have a brain I will definitely not exist.
That’s only intriguing if the answer is “yes”. Otherwise it doesn’t matter.
Interesting story on this theme:
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
- Seneca
Nowadays one lifetime isn’t even enough to read every book one would find interesting, and reading might be your favourite thing in the world that you do at literally ever opportunity. Long enough… Pft… Seneca clearly wasn’t familiar with the essentially infinite world of fan fiction. He surely would’ve judged it if he had.
Just to drive the point home: The comment is tongue in cheek. I agree with your first paragraph.