Slightly horrific and as other comments have suggested - quite dystopian, but the idea that they will surpass the need for actual blood - which they'd need to at scale and for many people ethically - that sounds pretty good.
am I the only one who thinks this is pretty great? that ambrosia company seems pretty dodgy, but the field overall - who wouldn't wanna cure old age? surprised at all the negativity in this thread...
I mean, the blood is harvested today, but someday it's gonna be synthetically produced, probably. you gotta start somewhere!
How about we focus our efforts and money on improving the quality of the lives we have today? Get rid of mental illnesses, pull everyone out of poverty, solve the cancer problem, clean up our planet so it's actually a desirable place to live. Make the worst quality of life on this planet something that people could happily spend multiple lifetimes in.
Once the minimum quality of life is at a point where a young someone from SV wouldn't mind living it (and, incidentally, knocking off 4 of the top ten causes of death), we focus our time, money, and intelligence into extending lifespans.
Of course, that won't happen. It's easier to throw money at re-selling plasma or stem cells than it is to actually improve people's lives.
Nope, looking forward to having some quality of life and increased life span down the road courtesy of some cool biochemical cocktails, dna hackery, and ample supply of spare parts for things that are clearly at risk of needing replacement at some point.
Are you answering to the question "who __would__ want to cure old age"? Because having kids or parents usually means that you don't want them to die ever.
Remember that time someone made a healthier and cheaper food but made it a liquid and bottled it and they attacked him?
It seems there are like 3 or 4 things you can’t innovate on without being vilified as some out of touch, Mr Burns-style caricature.
Food is one. Blood of those younger than you seems to be another. Suggesting that jurisdiction shopping to avoid all possible compulsory-military-funding is a good thing is another.
I’m probably missing a few more. What else is a tradition that tampering with freaks people out on an irrational level? Probably something to do with daily routine like showering or sleeping or pooping or health maintenance.
>Anyone over 35 with the necessary cash was eligible to receive two liters of plasma donated by young adults, which Ambrosia purchases from blood banks.
Is this taking blood from donations from people with more genuine needs?
Yes, I mean I don't see how it couldn't be since everyone says blood donor supply is always lower than what's needed in almost any big city I've asked about.
Baby boomers unexpectedly living to their low 80s has massively destabilized the economy of the US and the distribution of both wealth and income. Now imagine if the richest 20% could live to about 130.
The dystopian society and the crazy stuff ultra rich people do in the novel/show Altered Carbon is a direct result of people living much longer than "natural" which allows the wealth gap to widen to the point where the rich are literally living in the clouds.
> allowing the rich to live longer and accumulate more wealth, from a societal standpoint
Accepting this line of reasoning means accepting that there are situations where society is allowed to kill some people for some greater good, which is deeply wrong.
The argument also depends on several assumptions about the way this technology will work, which are likely to be wrong (e.g. that price of extending life will never be reduced enough to be available to poorer people, that having more time to learn, won't help poor people to become richer, that reduction of the fraction of resources spent on reproduction won't help society to become more stable and more wealthier).
But even the worst case scenario, when everything on earth belongs to old people, is actually good, because it means there is more incentive for other people to go explore other planets and stars!
The problem with such a topic is that you cannot discuss it without walking through a galaxy sized minefield where you're guaranteed that every step will land on a mine. It's deeply subjective and tied to values that are different between the societies each of us might belong to.
But I think I can mention some facts without pointing at any conclusion:
- Not allowing people to live longer than is otherwise natural is not the same as killing.
- Societies today are allowed to kill some people for some greater good via the death penalty. A vast majority of people on the planet live in such societies: US, China, India, Pakistan (most of Asia), most (all?) of the Middle East, most of North-Eastern and Central Africa, etc.
- Having to leave your planet because you're being "pushed out" is not what I'd call an incentive or good (for who?). At least not more than the bank taking away your house is an incentive to explore living in an underpass. It's rather just a disincentive to stay.
- Not allowing people to live longer than is otherwise natural is not the same as killing.
The problem with this argument is that it is not clear what is a "natural way". By that logic one can argue that letting half of the children to die before reaching 5 years, and not spending money on accessibility infrastructure is good, because the natural way is for all these people to die.
The only logical solution is to accept, that not allowing life extension, because one wants to get specific distribution of people in society, or because a corporation wants to get money for copyrighted drug, is murder.
> - Societies today are allowed to kill some people for some greater good via the death penalty.
In more civilised parts of world (e.g. Europe, Russia, Mexico, some states in USA:) death penalty is not allowed. And in general the fact that something is allowed in many places is not a good argument for it being ok, since from history we know many widely accepted things that are considered abhorrent now.
> - Having to leave your planet because you're being "pushed out" is not what I'd call an incentive or good
Having to leave your planet (and explore underworld) because there is a law that forbids you to get resources required to sustain your life, is way worse than young people looking for better place to leave going somewhere else. It's actually the most natural things for all living beings as most of the young always have to leave their place of birth, and find a better place to live.
I agree that there is a lot of subjectivity in topics like this, but it mainly comes from not knowing the tradeoffs a technology like this will introduce. But if life extension doesn't make people less smart, societies that disallow life extension will lose, because people simply will run from there to societies that allow life extension.
There's no logic in the conclusions you're reaching or the arguments you're using. It's very clear what "natural" means: the limits of what nature can achieve without artificial help. And while you could argue that an all natural human would live to be 70 not 80 years old I'm finding it hard to believe you can find a natural way for a human not to die or even to live to 150. Hence "natural". Is it clearer now? I think I only defined it for you 3 times so...
How many examples of individuals in nature that never die can you mention? You're giving me examples of "societies" and "spending money" to contradict my "natural" argument? Try to grasp the concept: all life on Earth has a natural cycle to maintain a balance between life created and life ended. All your examples are completely besides the point. They are NOT natural, they are human constructs. If you put bacteria in a Petri dish they will multiply and die (natural), they will not spend money on infrastructure (unnatural).
While we're doing unnatural things like saving a kid from dying at 5, we don't really change that balance in a significant way. It simply means a person doesn't have to try 10-15 times to get one successor. Queen Anne had at least 17-18 pregnancies [0]. Take a gander on how many survived infancy? One (1). Do you honestly think she would have had 18 children with modern medicine being able to save the first 2 or 3? Helping an individual get past infancy is not that unnatural. Kids and animals do it all the time. Now you tell me how many immortal people you know?
> In more civilised parts of world [...] death penalty is not allowed
And yet most of today's population lives in societies that allow it. And you still somehow believe that being banned from using artificial methods of prolonging your life past any human in history is like killing you. Do you also feel that anyone refusing to give up an organ for transplant is basically killing a patient? Is wearing a condom like killing a kid? This is the "logic" you used.
The "incentive" to explore the planets is the same as getting kicked out of your house by squatters is an incentive to find a better house. As long as not all people can use the life elixir and only the unfortunate get "incentivised" to go explore living in a cave on Mars I guess that argument flops.
The subjectivity here comes from the fact that you seem to make up arguments on the fly. You expect to get some magic explanation on a forum instead of reading a book. And you're willing to skew the definition of "logic" to death so you can claim "natural cycle of life" and "paying money for infrastructure" are in some unimaginable way in the same category of "natural things".
Offering humans immortality is a guarantee that you will create a few Gods (people that simply manage to accumulate so much power they are Gods) and a whole world of shadows.
> The argument also depends on several assumptions about the way this technology will work, which are likely to be wrong (e.g. that price of extending life will never be reduced enough to be available to poorer people, that having more time to learn, won't help poor people to become richer, that reduction of the fraction of resources spent on reproduction won't help society to become more stable and more wealthier).
I think you’re being overly optimistic. First of all, we already have a society where the rich have access to life extending services. The life expectancy gap between the rich and poor is 20 years[0] in the United States. While in theory we absolutely could provide this to the poor and they would probably accumulate wealth and reproduce more slowly, politically and socially I see zero evidence that this would happen.
Second, the price for a life extending treatment will be arbitrary. How much do you think a company that can tack 30 years onto your lifespan will charge? Again we could force them to sell cheap, but we can’t prevent ERs for charging $200 for aspirin, the political will just isn’t there.
> Accepting this line of reasoning means accepting that there are situations where society is allowed to kill some people for some greater good, which is deeply wrong.
A good point. However I’m a utilitarian at heart, if trading the rich only having 80 years keeps us from going into revolution or neufeudalism, I am will to accept that trade, even if I’m in the group who could probably afford said treatments.
> But even the worst case scenario, when everything on earth belongs to old people, is actually good, because it means there is more incentive for other people to go explore other planets and stars!
Or wealth could concentrate into few hands, and people could start binding themselves to richer patrons to guarantee access to life saving food and medicine, and the world descends into neufeudal torpor. Humanity has killed off massive amounts of itself for dumber reasons, don’t assume that a new tech will lead to your desired outcome just because it’s futuristic.
Even if you stick with the article I linked above, living in a poor part of the US takes 20 years off your life expectancy, which is still my point. The US can and does restrict the poor from access to resources that will add decades to their lives.
The U.S. doesn't restrict the poor from access to anything, besides illegal drugs. We can already tell from the Oregon health care experiment that access to Medicaid doesn't really matter the way you'd be expecting. What drives life expectancy gaps is what you put in your body, what you do with your body, and, especially with the bottom 1%, causation in the other direction, which is the effect of bad health on your income. It's literally impossible for a healthy person to be in the bottom 1% by income unless they choose not to work. So you're comparing regular rich people to a set of people that pretty much by definition have major substance abuse and health problems.
If other countries have better stats in this regard it's because they've less opportunity for functional people to pull themselves out of the bottom 1%.
There’s no functional difference between “you can’t have this” and “this is too expensive for you”. Neither affects my original point in the slightest.
“The poor do it to themselves” is an argument that you can take back to the Victorian era where it belongs.
In the terms of drinking, smoking, and obesity, they in fact do. That's the real world you live in.
We already do have healthcare programs for the bottom 1%, like Medicaid.
A better analysis would be to compare the overall population variance in life span, between different countries or years. This gives a direct measurement of how unequal life outcomes are, instead of being affected by the way the economy sorts people into wealth brackets.
Because it doesn't fix an issue that's otherwise out of the ordinary (like a disease, or an accident). It tries to address something that was always considered a hard limit and the perfectly natural thing to happen throughout the history of life to almost every living thing: death of old age.
Pushing that back could have some devastating results on society in the long term. There are plenty of movies on this topic so no need to go into details :).
> It tries to address something that was always considered a hard limit and the perfectly natural thing
Death being "perfectly natural" is not a good argument, having slaves, eating people, not allowing women to vote, all have been considered perfectly natural at various points in time, and some time soon accepting aging will be considered equally backwards, as these other things.
> There are plenty of movies on this topic so no need to go into details
I am asking because i have not seen a single pro-aging argument that had made any sense to me, in the best case they are about some people killing other people to get their stuff, which is not directly related to aging, in the worst they are "fox and the grapes" kind of rationalizations saying that the thing people want but can't get is probably not worth it.
> having slaves, eating people, not allowing women to vote, all have been considered perfectly natural
I think we're talking about different kinds of natural. What I meant (an clearly mentioned) is that almost all life on Earth since the beginning of life followed a natural cycle: it was "born" (a cell, an individual), lived a certain relatively predetermined period, then it died. Your examples are about an individual, a species, a society. I'm talking about all life.
> i have not seen a single pro-aging argument
I'm not sure what you're saying, you have not seen any good argument that supports the idea that we should age and die? With uncontrollable rise in population you have everything that accompanies it coming from the lack of resources and limited space. What happens to people who want to live on this planet but no longer fit, or have food? An "incentive" to buzz off the planet, right? Where? What if there is no planet able to support you?
What happens if you are ever unhappy with something and want to change it but the person you're fighting has 200 years of experience, power, and wealth under his belt. They are for all intents and purposes Gods walking on Earth.
If you haven't seen any "good" reasons against eternal life than I think you weren't really looking. ;)
>And yet I have to wonder, would future generations see it that way?
Sometimes we need to have morals that go beyond what a period thinks.
Whatever way future generations see some things, they would still be bad.
It might not be easy (or possible) to go against one own's era morals, but moral relativity in this sense shouldn't be an argument for the present era ("yeah, we think it's bad now, but in 2500 they might consider it ok, it's all relative").
> Whatever way future generations see some things, they would still be bad.
That's too absolute for a concept so relative. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
Imagine equal right for all people, a concept past generations would have discarded and lunacy. Someone 200 or 2000 years ago might have said "whatever any future generation might say about equality it will still be bad".
>Someone 200 or 2000 years ago might have said "whatever any future generation might say about equality it will still be bad".
Well, the only way your example works is if you ascribe to what I said. Because you imply that those persons were wrong -- and thus that "equal rights for all people" is the correct choice. Not just for now, but for then too -- they just didn't know it.
That's kind of what I'm saying too.
I can't guarantee that anybody's morals are valid. Or that they will be considered valid in the future.
I just say that we shouldn't relativistically lax our morals just because "the future might think differently on this matter". That's the future's problem. Except if its some trivial matter. Some stuff we should consider bad for the ages, even if the ages disagree with us.
To answer the dead comment below: "Homosexuality was considered bad 2 generations ago, are [y]ou saying it should have been fought tooth and nail then?"
No, I'm not saying this or that particular moral is wrong or that this or that period got it right.
Just that it can't be trivially dismissed because it might change or have changed in the past.
Obviously one could just as easily reverse the question: "are you saying it was correct for them to consider homosexuality bad 2 generations ago just because those were the morals of their day?".
If you say "no, it was bad then too", then you got to my point. Morality might be changing over time, but we should not merely "adapt to the times" but go with what we really think is the best moral option for all ages.
I just used the example as "whatever you think, it's relative". And it's relative to what society around your time period belies as a whole. So whatever society believes today it's "perfectly correct" by virtue of this relativity. I don't expect this should change based on some hypothetical future.
But opening the door to such morally or ethically questionable endeavors usually has to be done when they are still considered as such, questionable. So what I'm saying is that this might be deeply disturbing today but maybe that's how it should be so something good can come out of it in the future.
There was such a time for teeth. Read about George Washington's dentures. I like The Oatmeal's take embedded in their explorarion of the backfire effect. [1] But you can go on a google run; it was common for upper class gentlemen at that time to use human teeth in dentures, bought from the poor or even forcibly extracted from slaves.
Fantine in Les Misérables sold her hair and then her teeth to pay for medicine for Cosette. It was her last recourse for money before falling into prostitution. A detail in a work of fiction, but not a stretch to believe it's drawn from real life.
Imagine a dystopian future where there is vampires. The vampires being super wealthy individuals who have resorted to feeding on the young and vulnerable. Sending out blood hunters to grab people and then drain them.
Others prefer the convenience of an ontap blood donor, living in their houses and being well looked after.
Peter Thiel will have founded another company called Blód which he manages from his real life reconstruction of Orthanc.
There he uses data crunching to source the healthiest and most vulnerable blood donors.
There he uses data crunching to source the healthiest and most vulnerable blood donors.
This is a plot hole. Healthiest and most vulnerable are directly at odds. Extreme vulnerability (and poverty) does bad things to one's health. Good health is a good antidote to vulnerability.
This is one of those cases where evil is its own solution or antidote because this fundamentally doesn't work, a la "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
Am I not mistaken that in the US it's already common to get paid for blood donations? (Here, in Poland, you only got a couple bars of chocolate for it). So, people in the US are already ok with selling their flesh (at least the part that does it for money, and not to help others).
> Am I not mistaken that in the US it's already common to get paid for blood donations?
My understanding is that it in the US, it is common to be paid for blood plasma, but highly uncommon (I've never heard of it happening) to be paid for blood.
The only thing wrong with vampires is that they unnecessarily kill people, if they used their amazing tallants productively (working as historians, spies, converting people into vampires, or just touring) they would easily earn enough money to buy more blood than they need. (though to be honest even considering their mistakes, they are a nice bunch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv568AzZ-i8)
> Imagine a dystopian future where there is vampires. The vampires being super wealthy individuals who have resorted to feeding on the young and vulnerable.
