Today's medicine is focused to treat the diseases, refusing to admit that people at 70-80 years old die not from disease, but from the old age.
Everybody but a few enthusiasts refuse to treat ageing instead of cancer or heart diseases. People in general refuse to treat ageing as a disease, thinking it is something natural.
I would not want a couple more miserable years on earth, I want a few million years of a healthy young life.
"Be fine with dying of old age or else you're a villain" is this weird, fundamental, Christian part of our common mythos/ethics/stories. The evil villain seeks immortality. The kindly old witch or wizard or Pope dies peacefully because it is right.
Aging is bad. We might be able to fix it. There are a thousand downsides and challenges that come with a solution to old age, but that doesn't mean leaving aging in place is better.
Why did you feel the need to slam this as “Christian?” There’s nothing in Christianity that speaks against medicine or trying to extend life. The only thing that is different for Christians is they believe death is not the final end, and thus have less reason to be afraid. They still don’t want to die.
Would you be comfortable slamming other religions in the same causal way? If not, why not?
Hacker News is US-centric. The US is Christian-centric (religiously and culturally). And there has been a truly bizarre push almost entirely among evangelicals recently to just accept mortality where its absolutely not needed (e.g., during the pandemic).
Well, particularly early Christianity hero-worshipped martyrs, and seeing as how death brought about union with Christ, there is no tradition of prizing life in the body above death.
There's a long tradition of wealthy people with various delusions of having the secrets to defeat death, from Steve Jobs to Howard Hughes and beyond. The Christian tradition scoffs at that because it always fails, and exposes the fragility of even massive earthly wealth, where the Christian priority would be to reject the riches of this world in order to build wealth in the next. That doesn't seem so weird to me.
If there is a tiger chasing you, wouldn't you try to escape or fight? Or just give up and let the tiger eat you? It is natural, tiger also want to eat, right?
They're not suicidal. But they have this big inconsistency in their ethical framework.
I mean, if an elder gets into a car accident, shouldn't we try to save them? If a fire starts in a nursing home, shouldn't the residents be evacuated and the fire put down? How come that everyone understands the importance of saving lives, but some flip 180 degrees on it if the cause looks "natural" enough and the victim is old enough?
No, my point is that I personally am very afraid of death, and would fight death from the selfish reasons.
People who support the notion of death seem not to constantly fear it themselves, but view it as something hypothetical, that they wouldn't have to face themselves in the near future (likely several decades).
I don't think I particular fear death. Fear of death is a monkey brain thing. I don't want to die because I enjoy living. But if I had the choice between dying immediately or living for a few more minutes while being pushed through a meat grinder, I think I, and everyone alive, would choose to die immediately. It's not too difficult to imagine torture and pain so horrific that even monkey brain prefers death.
Human brain can make that judgment wherever it wants. I think the general case that shitty medical routes are just not worth it is often true.
> There are a thousand downsides and challenges that come with a solution to old age, but that doesn't mean leaving aging in place is better.
Sure, not by default, but on the merits of those downside, you probably should conclude that it is in fact better to have people age. Especially if it serves to only be available to the rich and powerful. That's just a shortcut to utter dystopia.
I think most people would think that a poor person under the rule of a despotic king is still better off alive than dead. So how come that, if the king were to live for hundreds of years, that poor person would suddenly be better off dead?
I feel this line of reasoning boils down to, "if we can't have perfect equality, everyone should die".
You're assuming that the poor person gets immortality too. That's generous. Or even if they do, that they live in conditions that don't result in them dying from unnatural causes. Or just kill themselves because life is awful.
From its earliest days, following the edicts of Jesus, Christianity encouraged its devotees to tend the sick. Priests were often also physicians. According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, while pagan religions seldom offered help to the infirm, the early Christians were willing to nurse the sick and take food to them, notably during the smallpox epidemic of AD 165-180 and the measles outbreak of around AD 250; "In nursing the sick and dying, regardless of religion, the Christians won friends and sympathisers".[6]
Following the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, leading to an expansion of the provision of care. Among the earliest were those built ca. 370 by St. Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea Mazaca in Cappadocia in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), by Saint Fabiola in Rome ca. 390, and by the physician-priest Saint Sampson (d. 530) in Constantinople, Called the Basiliad, St. Basil's hospital resembled a city, and included housing for doctors and nurses and separate buildings for various classes of patients.[7] There was a separate section for lepers.[8] Eventually construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun.
Christian emphasis on practical charity gave rise to the development of systematic nursing and hospitals after the end of the persecution of the early church.[9] Ancient church leaders like St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547) emphasized medicine as an aid to the provision of hospitality.[10] 12th century Roman Catholic orders like the Dominicans and Carmelites have long lived in religious communities that work for the care of the sick.[11]
Some hospitals maintained libraries and training programs, and doctors compiled their medical and pharmacological studies in manuscripts. Thus in-patient medical care in the sense of what we today consider a hospital, was an invention driven by Christian mercy and Byzantine innovation.[12] Byzantine hospital staff included the Chief Physician (archiatroi), professional nurses (hypourgoi) and orderlies (hyperetai). By the twelfth century, Constantinople had two well-organized hospitals, staffed by doctors who were both male and female. Facilities included systematic treatment procedures and specialized wards for various diseases.[13]
Medieval hospitals in Europe followed a similar pattern to the Byzantine. They were religious communities, with care provided by monks and nuns. (An old French term for hospital is hôtel-Dieu, "hostel of God.") Some were attached to monasteries; others were independent and had their own endowments, usually of property, which provided income for their support. Some hospitals were multi-functional while others were founded for specific purposes such as leper hospitals, or as refuges for the poor, or for pilgrims: not all cared for the sick.
When and where the first hospital was established is a matter of dispute. According to some authorities (e.g. Ratzinger, p. 141), St. Zoticus built one at Constantinople during the reign of Constantine, but this has been denied (cf. Uhlhorn, I, 319). But that the Christians in the East had founded hospitals before Julian the Apostate came to the throne (361) is evident from the letter which that emperor sent to Arsacius, high-priest of Galatia, directing him to establish a xenodochium in each city to be supported out of the public revenues (Soxomen, V, 16). As he plainly declares, his motive was to rival the philanthropic work of the Christians who cared for the pagans as well as for their own. A splendid instance of this comprehensive charity is found in the work of St. Ephraem who, during the plague at Edessa (375), provided 300 beds for the sufferers. But the most famous foundation was that of St. Basil at Cæsarea in Cappadocia (369). This "Basilias", as it was called, took on the dimensions of a city with its regular streets, buildings for different classes of patients, dwellings for physicians and nurses, workshop and industrial schools. St. Gregory of Nazianzus was deeply impressed by the extent and efficiency of this institution which he calls "an easy ascent to heaven" and which he describes enthusiastically (Or. 39, "In laudem Basilii"; Or. fun. "In Basil.", P.G., XXXVI, 578-579).
Dude. Nobody has the slightest idea how to effectively treat "aging". The billionaires that engage in that fantasy might be pushing the state of the art a little bit, sure, but they do it from a starting position of absolute ignorance, and their efforts are mostly in vain.
It's like that old joke about a group of PMs that have "invented the general AI". Now all that's left to do is for some researchers and engineers to create it.
There are some ideas, in fact. They are not very well developed, though, because such research is very expensive, and even the very educated people on this side fiercely fighting the idea that extending people's life is a good thing.
Until the general public accepts the necessity of the age-related research, there won't be any effective mechanism for age reversion.
NIH yearly budget is 35B dollars. Half of that they spend on cancer research, the other half divides between the other diseases. Age research is a tiny fraction of this budget.
Until NIH spends at least 1/3 of their annual budget on fighting aging, there won't be any significant progress.
You could achieve more life by reactivating more regeneration, but DNA replication is costly when you do it over and over again, damaging telomeres.[1]
And uncontrolled regeneration can give you tumors [citation needed], so there is no easy path other than your own genetics or having a good lifestyle.
Telomeres are only one part of the equation, and they likely natural mechanism for controlling the cell differentiation. My understanding they resemble natural breaks that prevent cells to divide uncontrollably where they shouldn't.
I doubt they are the primary cause of ageing.
I prefer the theory explaining ageing as an epigenome misregulation that David Sinclair describes.
Is it fair to future generations who are yet to be born to write off the possibility of their ever being born because we're selfish and want to live forever? There is some limit to the number of humans we can support on earth, so if everyone is living millions of years (or more realistically let's say hundreds of years) we would have to drastically cut the world's reproduction rates.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I feel like that is the classic hubris of mankind to aspire to become gods. We want to control nature and life, yet our limited knowledge prevents us from understanding the ramifications of our actions until it is too late. (Under a White Sky is an interesting read on the subject)
> I feel like that is the classic hubris of mankind to aspire to become gods
Gods were invented by people who refused to admit their ignorance of things they couldn't understand or explain.
Every year the list of unexplainable things gets shorter and shorter. Maybe we'll never be able to explain everything, but I do believe it's within reach to understand the aging process to the point of being able to reverse or even halt it. It may not happen in our lifetimes, and the society that figures it out may not be able to deal with the ramifications properly, but they will learn over time. Just as we've done with scientific and technological advancements in the past. Sometimes you can't figure out how to deal with something until you have to deal with it.
> I feel like that is the classic hubris of mankind to aspire to become gods. We want to control nature and life, yet our limited knowledge prevents us from understanding the ramifications of our actions until it is too late.
But we are becoming gods. The problem isn't with the aspiration, the problem is that we currently suck at being gods and need to get better at it.
Aging is natural the same way heart disease and cancer are natural. Some people get unlucky and develop cancer at a young age, but we don't throw up our hands and say whelp it's just nature.
We should treat aging the same way. Some people's bodies fail them at 80, but others live to be 100+. If we develop good treatments there's no reason that everyone can't live to be 100 in relatively good health.
> Aging is natural the same way heart disease and cancer are natural
How are heart disease and cancer not natural?
Aging is also slightly different in that it's how our bodies are supposed to work as far as I understand it, which is not very well (Possibly as a cancer prevention mechanism).
The parent isn't claiming that; they are pointing out that heart disease and cancer are just as natural as aging. We spend a lot of effort to cure heart disease and cancer, so why not do the same with aging?
Ageing is natural and harmful. Hunger is natural and harmful. Earthquakes, hurricanes, plaque are natural and harmful. We should mercilessly fight all of those, and ensure either of those maladies cause people to die.
Everybody but a few enthusiasts refuse to treat ageing instead of cancer or heart diseases. People in general refuse to treat ageing as a disease, thinking it is something natural.
I would not want a couple more miserable years on earth, I want a few million years of a healthy young life.