Aging.fyi - Quick start guide for longevity industry and your place in it

Aging is Malleable

According to current science

Both human¹^,²^,³ and animal⁴ data show that aging can be slowed down. There are species that do not age⁵, and some subspecies age 10x+ slower than their close relatives⁶. There's no fundamental law of biology preventing us from making humans a negligible aging species⁷^,⁸.

Why target aging?

and not diseases

Aging is either the root cause or an important factor in 10 out of 10 leading causes of death worldwide⁹^,¹⁰^,¹¹. Under the current paradigm humanity spends 10% of world GDP ($9.8 trillion)¹² on health, and the bulk of this enourmous sum goes to treat age-related and chronic diseases. If just a fraction of this money goes to longevity biotech R&D, the world will be a much healthier place—we need to fight the cause, not the symptoms.

How you (yes you!) can contribute

to accelerate the field of longevity biotech

Company list at Longevity list
Company list at Agingbiotech.info
Company list at Spannr

New discoveries at Lifespan.io
New discoveries and opinion at FightAging.org
Startups and business at Longevity.technology
Business and personal longevity at Spannr

Common Objections to Life Extension

and how to refute them

Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Europe’s richest man at the time, died in 1836 of a simple infection that could have been easily treated with penicillin a century later. The cost of medical treatments plummets with economies of scale and technological refinement, and there is no reason to expect that life extension should be an exception. Dystopian sci-fi such as Elysium or Altered Carbon might be entertaining, but has historically failed to predict reality.

Life extension is about giving people choices - not “forcing” anyone to live against their own will. If or when you get tired of it all, you can check out permanently or freeze yourself for a few centuries. But imposing an arbitrary execution date on every last human? That sounds rather psychopathic.

The entire point of life extension is to multiply healthy lifespans, which implies sustainably high physical and mental function. People on life support are not healthy, being at risk of death from trivial infections. Aubrey de Grey calls the notion that the world ends up in a “global nursing home” the Tithonus Error.

Almost no money is spent on life extension research, whereas solving it will entail gargantuan savings from much lower healthcare and pensions spending. These savings can go towards tax cuts, foreign aid, space research, or whatever else you care about.

In a society where most people have the brains and bodies of 25 year olds there will be no need for pensions.

The main driver of population growth are births, not deaths. And the defining feature of global demographics today isn’t runaway population growth, but fertility collapse, which has spread beyond the First World and East Asia to now encompass most of Latin America, India, and even parts of the Middle East. At least so far as the 21st century is concerned, life extension will avert population decline in the developed world and reverse its soaring dependency ratios.

This essentially equates to sentencing people to death on account of allegedly regressive moral views held by their age group. Not only is this morally dubious, it will also be irrelevant in practice. Brain rejuvenation will be part and parcel of any comprehensive life extension solution. Not only will old people preserve their accumulated stock of knowledge and experience, but they will regain the fluid intelligence and capacity for learning of youth. The result will, if anything, be an explosion in creativity and innovation.

It is unclear why life extension should privilege dictators over democracies. Although dictators might no longer die of aging, they would remain vulnerable to accidents, coups, and assassinations. Long-lived dictators - surviving ones, at any rate - might also be expected to exercise greater caution, avoiding wars and totalitarian excesses that mobilize coalitions against them. Finally, life under almost dictatorship is preferable to death - just avoid talking about politics, and/or emigrate.

In reality, not rhetoric, we steeply discount the welfare of our distant descendants. Life extension gives us a direct stake - skin in the game - in the long-term health of our civilization and global environmental sustainability. A society of immortalists will by definition be a society of longtermists.

To paraphrase Patrick Hayden, life extension raises serious philosophical issues, and resolving these issues may require many centuries.

We short-circuited evolution when we escaped the Malthusian trap after the Industrial Revolution. You can be consistent and argue for a return to subsistence agriculture, but I for one prefer not dying from cholera.

Aging.fyi

Contributors: Alexey Strygin, Stephan Hähne, Anatoly Karlin