i love the reverse framing (creating aging to solve overpopulation) to expose the status quo bias in the argument! great content as always andrew :)

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks!

@hereisjohn

7 ай бұрын

I totally agree - that was a technique to remember

This channel is criminally underrated. I'm very glad I accidentally found it though, since the videos are very fascinating and well done!

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you! Glad you accidentally found it, and hope a few more people do! :)

@fr3zer677

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele I hope so too. I saw your book is on audible too. Now I have a good reason to finally give that app a try :)

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

@@fr3zer677 Haha thank you! I hope you enjoy the book, and Audible :)

If you want to know more about the ethical questions which treating ageing would raise, good news! There’s a free bonus chapter of _Ageless_ which covers some of the most commonly raised issues, from inequality to whether we’d all get bored. Read or download it FOR FREE (did I mention it’s free?) at ageless.link/ethics

I can only imagine how much more efficiently and creatively we could work on serious problems with a population that is able to work healthier and longer throughout their lifespan.

@DrAndrewSteele

11 ай бұрын

Agreed, it frustrates me that so many people overlook this!

Great essay! You’ve presented articulate yet concise versions of all the points I try to convey to my friends and family about what looks to be the end of our CULTure of slow death. Thank you! You have my sub.

@DrAndrewSteele

11 ай бұрын

Thanks! I tried to make this video the best version of this argument I could. If you’ve not already seen it you might enjoy my free book chapter about the ethics of treating aging: ageless.link/ethics :)

@tablab165

11 ай бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Thank you for responding. Yes, I'll give it a read ASAP!

@DrAndrewSteele

11 ай бұрын

@@tablab165 Hope you enjoy :)

I agree that curing aging would save a lot of things including the world. And I agree that aging is expensive like to get medical treatments for diseases and stuff. So who would want those diseases in the first place.

Would be very interesting to see a video on the potential physchological impacts of this (both positive and negative) , how it may impact life stage progression and societal design.

Fascinating video, it addresses a lot of the ethical dilemmas that I've been struggling with. It was really refreshing to finally hear the opinion of someone versed in socio-economical struggles as well(see the discussion of racism, women empowerment etc.). You really cleared up the blind spots that purely technical science communicators often have. Just a small point of advice tho, I'd be careful with labeling people as a burden on society(see the financial burden of aging people). Similar rhetoric often gets used to argue against disability and minority rights, as seeing people as a burden on society can be a quite efficient way to start dehumanizing people. In short, one has to be careful with labeling people as burdens, as this often gets used by the far-right as the gateway into a discussion/movement/etc. Would be a shame if they would taint so a great force of good ^^ Looking forward to your next video, keep it up!

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks! And I completely take your point about labelling people as a burden…that wasn’t my intention but I can see why you think it’s a poor choice of words. Definitely one to bear in mind when talking about this in future. :)

@circuitbreaker7860

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Glad that I could help. The quirks of our society and minds that get abused are often hidden in plain sight, but quite non-trivial to see.

@leonniceday6807

2 жыл бұрын

with respect to those of "burden" to society: I think the point was to show that the goal of ageing eradication is exactly the empowerment of those people. When that is done, there will be no such category, thus not even a need to avoid such a word ... Similarly to people with disabilities, that medical science could and should eradicate such things.

@circuitbreaker7860

2 жыл бұрын

@@leonniceday6807 Oh, I got what he wanted to communicate and I'm all for the empowerment. What I wanted to communicate is that one has to be careful around these topics with their goals and how one formulates them. I consider the "anti-aging" position to sit under the wider trans-humanism umbrella. I'll mention the empowerment briefly later, but I want to explain my intentions/thoughts first. And from what I've seen thus far, trans-humanism has two major ways of failing, which I'd like to avoid this time. The first is if it is based on mostly fear and self-disgust. E.g. one does not want to live longer to lead a long happy life, but rather sees it as a way to run away from the question of mortality, or one got stuck way to deep in one of the central ideas that western culture throw around, that one isn't allowed to make mistakes and should be 110% productive all the time. One can then either admit to themself that their just a humans, that humans have limitations and weaknesses and that's okay(and continue working on self-improvement on a position of self-love), but that's really hard, because it requires letting go of old thoughts and runs counter to the societal current. Or they can carry this societal ideal to the extreme and arrive at trans-humanism from self-hate. So we have people with negative emotions, that society never thought them how to deal with in a healthy way on the one hand and the almost mythical believe in the superior, flawless humans, that many trans-humanists tend to, often coupled with degrading normal humans. This mix is one of the most fertile grounds for the ideas of people that know how to play with peoples fears and angers to achieve a position of power. Aka fascists. So you have to be really careful to a) define trans-humanism positively, instead of negatively and b) throw out every fascist that pops up. If you don't do that your trans-humanist movement will probably degrade into a nazi movement overtime, at which point the fascist have become the bigger problem than e.g. aging. Do not underestimate fascists. Their ruthless, smart and power hungry. The other usual route is the often well-intentioned, but misguided route of eugenics. This often comes from peoples desire to help others, but assuming that you know (better) than they themselves what they want and need, so assuming but not asking them. The solutions that they come up with then often run counter to what minorities and disabled minorities need and want, ironically dis-empowering them often. The first factor is the question: What is considered a disability? This question is very dependent on the current societal current. For example, a few decades back being gay was seen as an illness and peoples goal was to "cure" them of an fundamental part of their identity. Nowadays we see trying this, against their will, as an inhumane act. So even if we separate into "true disabled people" and "people being seen as broken, due to society(their are many political factors involved)" how sure can we be that we really selected only "real" disabled people this time, instead of also having innocent minorities being swept up as political scapegoats? The next factor is that disability is a spectrum and many disabilities come with up- and downsides. A good example is high-functional autism, e.g. aspergers .Life is often a bit more stressful, because the autistic brain has way weaker filters, which leads to stress being a bigger problem, overload situations being easier to produce and social skills needing more upfront work. But on the other hand, the weaker filters lead to a very different ways in which information is processed and thought patterns, which often leads to technical finesse and insights that would have been extremely hard if not down-right impossible for a non-autist. The autism is so deeply a part of the person, that you couldn't cure it, without their consent, without effectively killing the person. What autists need is not to be cured of themselves, but to be accepted by society, e.g. not being forced to work in loud open space offices. Under these circumstances autists can be extra-ordinarily productive members of society. For other minorities, like e.g. blind people their disability is also an integral part of who they are. The adaptations they choose, the different perspectives on the world that they acquire etc. In a way, for many of them their disabilities are a good part of what made them who they are. The problems that these groups face are often mostly societal, e.g. lack of inclusivity in a society that condemns any kind of weakness. You can remove these people from society, or stop them from being born, but all you'll have done is denied people a right at life and not created a better world. You'll still have a cruel, unforgiving society that causes most of the suffering in this world. Now, I'm all for empowerment tho. People should be free to improve and change themselves as they want. A blind person should for example have the option to remove their blindness. It just shouldn't be a) required or b) they shouldn't be prevented from being born. If you do not account for either fascists or politicians using the argument of "people being a burden of society" to push through far-right policies to make societies more authoritarian over time, these two groups will ABSOLUTELY corrupt your trans-humanist movement. At which point the movement would have become the greater evil to fight, not aging or sickness etc. It's less about the goal that we have, but more how we'll get there without creating a dystopia. Maybe we'll be so wise as a society that we can tackle the question of what disabilities and divergences from the norm(which is btw. also a quite arbitrary concept) only cause suffering and should be removed. But we're still far from that point as a society. Tackling this question now will only lead to more suffering and are more unjust world, as it did last time.

I think curing aging would have an enormous benefit for climate change instead of making it worst. I don't have numbers but I imagine there is an staggering amount of resources we spend on treating aging but also on taking care of the elderly and children. From the typical lifespan of someone only about half is spent on working. And I'm not saying we should all just slave away at work for our entire existence, but if we didn't have these burdens, maybe we could spend a lot less time working on average. Less hospitals, less schools, less people who spend their lives caring for elderly, etc...

@DrAndrewSteele

11 ай бұрын

I agree! It’s frustrating that people so often focus on only one consequence of longer lives (and usually a negative one!), and not the full gamut of effects.

Great video, Andrew!

@DrAndrewSteele

5 ай бұрын

Thank you!

This is a really good video, I thought for sure it'd have millions of views but no- only a few thousand. Keep up the work, your content seems legit 👍

@DrAndrewSteele

6 ай бұрын

Thanks!

Damn, you explained the overpopulation part so well. Wow, never seen anyone do that!

Either we let ourselves die,and we will die. Either we fight,and maybe we will still die or maybe not. And this "maybe" is worth all the sacrifices, because we know what is really at stake in the end

Great video!

While I’m not happy about getting older, I don’t think I’d want to live longer. I’ve had an incurable autoimmune disease since childhood, causing me to have serious health issues nearly my entire life. Living longer would honestly just mean more years of struggling, more years of working to pay for medical care, more years of being In nearly constant pain. For me, death isn’t a scary or sad thing; it’s just the end of pain and hardship.

There might be another argument that is linked to the idea that we might have a more long-term outlook on life. I agree that that is hoping too far. One thing that happens as we age, though, is we become fearful of the future, of change, and we become nostalgic for a time that, though more dangerous, feels more comforting because we were a child and were shielded from the travails of life. Is there an argument to be made that, without the affects of aging making us more tired and more decrepit, that we might maintain our more reasonable levels of risk aversion from our 20s and early 30s?

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

Maybe! I also wonder if we might see the reverse…if we can live to 150, or 1000 (to take an extreme example) we might be very risk-averse because not to be so could deprive us of centuries of life! That said, I think this would probably be a good thing: war, road traffic accidents etc would become increasingly intolerable, and I think that making life better would outweigh any small losses from us avoiding risky activities. :)

Thanks. ♥ We need to start to listen our emotions and connect them with logic (10:18)

Love the content! I think with aging being less of a problem in the future, we coule buy ourselves a generation-long period of prosperity since we could work longer and require less healthcare once life-prolonging drugs are introduced. That will be quite necessary because of the collapsing demographics we'll face this century when we have huge amounts of old people but very few young to care for them.

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

I very much hope so, and am surprised that people don’t take the other side of the population possibilities-ie underpopulation, as you mention-more seriously!

Thanks for dedicating your professional life to this cause! Your content is great!

Wow! You wrote a book!? I've been subscribed to your channel for a year and didn't know that...

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Haha yes that is the main reason my upload schedule has been…well, would you even call it a schedule?! :)

Well explained! We certainly need to find ways to make the public aware that ageing is not normally and just as terrible as cancer.

“…neglecting population growth leads to a skewed and misleading vision of reality. This not only holds for lower-middle and low-income countries, but also for high-income ones, where even the relatively low population growth of the last 30 years was sufficient to nullify the effect of the reduction in per capita emissions and the efforts of many countries to promote technological change and “green growth”. *Developed nations with stable or declining populations should hence quit fighting these trends and instead embrace them.* Just as a little population growth in rich countries can drive big emissions increases, population decreases in rich countries could have big emission-related benefits going forward.” _An Analysis of Three Decades of Increasing Carbon Emissions: The Weight of the P Factor_

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

Nowhere in this video do I suggest we should ignore population growth!

Excellent content, thank you!!

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

Very nice video and excelent points. IMO, one should counterask: why are you worried about overpopulation?... because?... people will get to live worse? will start dying? (of hunger etc...) -- but hey, stoping ageing is trying to exactly solve this general problem: people dying and suffering. Ageing is the biggest cause for this dying/suffering. And the overpopulation: is mainly and largely driven by birth-rates, not how much one lives. For example, if every family had only up to 2 children, then the population will not grow without bounds, but approach a constant. If, at worst, it comes to ethical choices, then people should rather try to have less children (i.e, not more than 2), than letting people age and die.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Excellent points right back at ya! :)

incredible that this view has only 4.8k views one year after being published. :|

fascinating info, never thought that way😊

Great video

Way too optimistic, the later half of this century is going to be a total nightmare, there will likely be billions die from starvation due to resource depletion - the resources related to growing food AKA modern farming methods. We currently rely on taking stupid amounts of mineral resources from the ground to farm with, when those resources start to deplete food production will halve - and then people starve to death.

Yeah but will it be affordable to everyone?

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Short answer: I hope so, and I think it could be! Long answer: that will be the subject of my next ethics of ageing medicine series so subscribe not to miss it. :)

@SirTenenbaum

2 жыл бұрын

Michael Greve is head of a fund portfolio called Kizoo and explains how these therapies are intended for everybody: kzread.info/dash/bejne/nYKuqrN9ncyqfLw.html

@KManAbout

Жыл бұрын

There's a Stanford philosophy article on it

Do people want to live forever? Surely depends on quality of life. Highest percentage of suicide is in those aged 85+

Population needs to be in balance with jobs, resources, nature and the environment. Having a bigger population in any country than the country can support makes no sense. Access to food, water, shelter, energy and jobs should guide population levels. The worlds population is still expected to add another billion people to feed, clothe and produce pollution. Humans are crowding out all other species of plants and animals. Education and birth control are key to reducing poverty and hunger. Having a child that you can not provide for yourself is cruel and irresponsible. We need solutions not just sympathy. Endless population growth is not sustainable on a finite planet. Every country needs to "TRY" to be more self sufficient. When there are not enough resources to sustain a population something has to give. Countries need to focus on quality of life for their citizens and not just quantity of life for cheap labor. Why import fossil fuels when wind and solar energy can be produced locally and solar energy can power electric vehicles. We need solutions not just sympathy.

1:28 We shouldn't ignore the fact that the the richest countries in the world have far greater access to medicines of all kinds (cf. the current vaccine hoarding) so they would presumably gain disproportionate access to anti-aging medicines too. That is, the worst emitters of CO2 will have the greatest access to a form of technology that could potentially increase the number of bad CO2 emitters. I agree that the problem isn't population increases per se but population increases in high-emitting countries.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

Did you watch the rest of the video? :) The key response to this is that the population increase won’t be all that significant, and I very much hope it will be outpaced by reductions in per capita CO2 emissions. I completely agree that this should go into a more detailed model though-time to enlist some demographers!

@cavalrycome

2 жыл бұрын

​@@DrAndrewSteele Yes, I watched the rest of the video. I thought that ignoring the disproportionate access that wealthy people will have to the technology was a particularly glaring omission. I appreciate that you can't fully defend your position in such a short video, but there were also several other points that I found unconvincing, particularly where you only focused on best-case scenarios. At 3:56, for example, you talk about a net zero world, and point out that zero times any number of people will still be zero, which is of course technically true, but we're exceedingly unlikely to reach net zero any time soon so it's a moot point. A large population will remain an exacerbating factor in the climate crisis for a very long time, and even if we manage to devise the as-yet-unknown technology that would allow us to reach net zero in the distant future, the technology required probably won't scale to infinity making the "zero times anything" argument an inappropriate model of reality. There's also the fairly obvious problem with extrapolating from birth rates in a non-ageless society to birth rates in an ageless society. I don't think we can do that with any confidence. Just as you're calling for demographers to treat aging science more seriously, I would urge you to treat the work of sustainability researchers more seriously because there are strong arguments that suggest that we won't be able to simply technology our way out of these problems. I would dearly love to live in a world without the suffering generated by cancer and aging, but if there is even a minute chance that this could lead to complete environmental collapse, we should tread extremely carefully. I don't think it's fair to label those who are expressing doubts about this as heartless for not wanting to cure diseases, or anti-feminist, or racist, or any of those things. There are people, like me, who care very much about all those things, who also have concerns about the unintended long-term effects of anti-aging technology.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

@@cavalrycome I think you’re being overly negative here! I literally say that the net zero argument is an oversimplification in the next sentence, and at the start of the next section I say it’s inarguable that a smaller population would make things easier. :) I don’t think we will be able to ‘technology our way out’, I talk about social and economic changes too. And I never call anyone racist, anti-feminist or heartless. Rather than just gainsaying my points, I think it would be more constructive to quantify your objections: would you rather healthspans stayed as they are now to make tackling climate change a few percent easier?

@cavalrycome

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele Yes, you say it's an oversimplification in the next sentence, but what does it contribute to the discussion if "zero times anything" is never likely to be relevant? Your video is filled with what I view as unrealistic best-case scenarios that allow the viewer to imagine a world in which an ageless society all works out fine, and of course you do mention some possible negative outcomes, but I don't think you were sufficiently motivated to find holes in your argument so please forgive me for being negative/adversarial. No, you don't specifically call anyone those things, but you describe the view that overpopulation is a problem as 'racist', claim that support for an ageless society is 'feminist', and so on. Presumably the people who hold racist views are racist and people who hold feminist views are feminists. As for whether I would "rather healthspans stayed as they are now to make tackling climate change a few percent easier", there are several assumptions embedded in that question that make it hard to answer. First, I don't think it's safe to assume that it would be a few percent given how radically different an ageless society would be. Second, even if it is only a few percent, we're on such a tight timeline at the moment that I don't think we can afford that. Third, climate change is only one of many negative consequences that could be exacerbated by an ageless society. The arguably larger environmental problem that usually either gets lumped in with climate change or completely ignored is the current mass extinction event that the planet has been going through since the industrial revolution (rates of extinction that are literally as high as many of the previous five). This is largely due to our agricultural land use independent of greenhouse emissions but it is of course made worse by climate change. Subjectively, I would definitely like to live healthier for longer and for the people I love to do the same and if I were ever in the position of having to decide whether to save the life of someone I loved (under the threat of cancer or the effects of old age), I probably wouldn't be noble enough to resist helping them even if I knew that if everyone else did as I did that we would end up experiencing a catastrophic ecological collapse down the line. It is true in some sense that all medicine is anti-aging medicine insofar as it extends life, but as we get better and better at saving lives, the unintended consequences will start to be more and more foregrounded. We are used to framing the dramatic advances in medicine since the scientific revolution as great achievements, but they have always been shadowed by a negative side-effect. Without them, we would not have seen the massive population growth of the last two or three centuries, and without that population growth, our environment probably wouldn't be in crisis today. Can we have the good stuff without the bad stuff? I don't know.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

​@@cavalrycome I don’t think it is never likely to be relevant-we need to get to net zero, or net really quite small, very soon, or we’ll be in big climate trouble, as I said in the video. The IPCC scenarios laying this out are optimistic but realistic, in my opinion. And population control by any means other than faster development and empowering women is an unacceptably high price for what would be a marginal reduction in burden on the environment. I think killing people should be an option of last resort, and therefore letting them die of ageing should be too. We should factor this into climate and other ecological models, and campaign all the more aggressively to reduce our footprint on the planet, rather than implicitly advocating for people to die, IMHO. I am genuinely really concerned about the climate and other ecological issues. I just also really strongly believe that stopping medical research isn’t even in the top 10 ways we should be fighting for them.

Mr. Steele, what do you think about the problem of this: If we cure aging, we could still die by horrible genetic diseases. Not gonna name any names of them to scare anyone here as that's not my intention. But if genetic diseases are just a few dna mutations away, given enough time on this earth, we will all get diagnosed with them eventually. So given this knowledge, shouldn't we spend more efforts focusing on curing those horrible diseases first before we attempt to live forever?

I doubt we will get far beyond 9 billion

One thing worth mentioning is that developed countries and their lifestyle is continuing because of immigration. Without immigration Europe's population would be far lower and with that, would have lower carbon footprint. For example 'native' Germans in Germany are less than 60 million and will decline to less than 20 mil by the end of century.

@DrAndrewSteele

11 ай бұрын

Overall, this may be a good thing for both welfare and carbon emissions-incoming people from low-income countries benefit from a much higher GDP per capita, and that higher GDP per capita allows rich countries to decarbonise more rapidly too.

Cool

Something about your frame is just so preylike.

Of course the effect of overpopulation won’t be big by 2050 if we cure aging in 2025. But what about 2100, 2200? I think the population will double by 2200 or even earlier

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

It might not be as bad as you think! The difference between the low and high variants is higher than the difference caused by curing ageing, even by 2100. You can see all the calculations here: htmlpreview.github.io/?github.com/ajsteele/ageless/blob/main/output/population.html

@leonniceday6807

2 жыл бұрын

even if that were true, the solution is to simply encourage people to have less children (just max 2), than to let people die (of ageing or other causes). Prevent the problem from the outset.

@jormun

Жыл бұрын

​@@DrAndrewSteele according to this, population will be 11.7bn by 2050 and 18.4bn by 2100, so actually it's even worse than @Семен Филатов thinks. Even if it only continues to rise linearly (6.7bn/50 years)which is an extremely optimistic assumption) it will be 31.8bn in 2200 and we will be 100bn by the year 2700!

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

@@jormun Copying my response to your other comment below in case anyone comes here first: > The reason I decided to talk about 2050 is that we need to be at least well on the way to net zero by then and, as I explain in the video, zero times any population is still zero carbon emissions or whatever. If we still have substantial per capita carbon emissions by 2100, we’re in big trouble regardless of medicines for ageing. And I don’t think it makes any sense to go out as far as the year 3000 or whatever-the social, technological and other changes between now and then will be unimaginable, so we’ve got no idea what the world will look like, and projecting forward population and its impact based on any assumptions that look reasonable now is a fool’s game IMO.

Crisis = Danger + Opportunity

"We can't bring everyone in the world up to a Western standard of living without crashing the planet." Yes, that would be the definition of a population problem. * billion people, 11 billion if we top out where Hans Rosling predicted, is unsustainable without poverty, which is why we should be actively trying to reduce population growth in a fair and equitable way _in the Western developed countries_ because population growth doesn't matter in undeveloped countries where they aren't using resources to a degree that's impactful. We should be doing what we can to extend people's healthy lives, we should also be moving to renewable energy sources, but neither makes any difference if we don't reverse the unprecedented population growth of the last couple of centuries. The choice otherwise is one, leaving the majority of the world in abject poverty, or two, everyone living in abject poverty, or three, human beings not living at all.

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

This doesn’t make sense as a strategy. I don’t agree that 11 billion people is ‘unsustainable without poverty’ but if it were, given the incredible resource-intensiveness of wealthy westerners’ lifestyles, we can’t even sustain one billion people at current consumption levels in high-income countries. And getting population below that, even if that were desirable, would take us well beyond 2100, which is far too late for the planet.

@NoWay1969

Жыл бұрын

Well, if we can't sustain the planet with 1 billion people, then we sure can't sustain it with the 11 billion that Rosling predicted was the point where it levels out. The idea that people in the West are going to decide to live in mud huts and eat tubers is a non-starter. It just isn't going to happen. We need to move to renewables yes, but that isn't going to be sustainable with 11 billion people who have any kind of desirable standard of living.

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

@@NoWay1969 We don’t need to live in mud huts and eat tubers, that’s ridiculous hyperbole. But, let’s assume you’re right: what’s the plan to get us down to…what, a few hundred million people at most? By…when?

@NoWay1969

Жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele There's no perfect solution. It's like climate change, we should have been on this for 20+ years. Best guess at what to do now? Probably Western nations should start disincentivizing having more than one child. We combine that with aggressively moving to renewable energy sources and hope for the best. I don't think we're going to do this though. I think we're probably going to continue using oil and growing the population until we have a crash. IDK, maybe we manage some kind of hail mary pass and crack the fusion nut or something comparable.

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

@@NoWay1969 Think about some of the numbers here and whether this makes any sense at all! World population passed one billion not 20 years ago, but in 1804… And, as I say in the video, women in the EU are already having less than 1.5 children each. We cannot solve this by trying to control population, and to suggest so both ignores the numbers and disempowers us towards the real solution of radically decreasing our footprint on the earth. I too hope we crack nuclear fusion-but there’s plenty else we can be doing in the meantime.

While I completely agree with your arguments, and I am engaged in research related to treating aging, I do have a concern on extending lifespans that I rarely see addressed: progress. Far too often, progress is delayed due to older people far too often being conservative and stubborn in their beliefs and delay the changes (as Planck said, "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"). It's definitely not an absolute, and the opinions of older generations are often tempered by experience that is very valuable, but far too often, older generations crap on younger generations because they are doing things differently than they did, and they are, as a whole, often resistant to change. Will extending lifespans reduce the rate of social change? Or will it be tempered and moderated by the advantages of people living longer and having the opportunity to learn more?

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

Great questions, and I’m not sure we can know for sure…but I’m not too worried about it, and certainly think such worries are dwarfed by the suffering caused by aging itself. I might make a video going into a bit more depth but for now the best summary of my thoughts on this (and lots of other ethics stuff!) is in the bonus chapter of my book, which you can read free online at ageless.link/ethics If you want to get straight to the relevant bit, ctrl-f Planck-I use that quote!!

12:32 the reason we probably separate anti-aging treatments into a whole separate moral category is that plenty of individuals don't like the idea of others living beyond "natural life spans" out of jealousy. SpaceX caused a switch to be flipped in so many people's outlook toward space exploration & colonies. Before spaceX, other than a handful of people who went on a Russian rocket the access to space was really a domain of elite hand picked individuals who worked for the government. Now that wealthy but regular people are able to go to space you see articles that talk about how the rich will leave the rest of us to suffer to society's problems, the harsh critics don't think that the wealthy would be able actually to solve the problems but the critics want the wealthy to suffer like the rest of us would. Now that commercial space flight is a thing the door to space was swung open. It's a slow trickle but eventually Space Flight will become a common place like how people use to make their kids wear expensive clothes on a air travel flight because it was consider a special occasion like a wedding. Today stories of people getting arrested for starting a fight on a flight is a common story. People would rather have other people die off to aging than to allow somebody who's more wealthy than they "cheat" death. People would rather not have space colonies be a thing in the future if they currently can't afford to go themselves. We have individuals who would take pride & joy knowing that your parents lose the control of their mind & bodily functions if it meant that in their children's life aging will become largely a thing of the past, all because it would be denying somebody who's better off in life the opportunity to "cheat death".

@mihtas4304

2 жыл бұрын

Orrrrrrrrrr they aren't jealous but they think that anti-aging treatments differ from "normal" medications, by the fact that normal medications treat existing diseases or prevent you from getting diseases. They don't interfer in natural processes like that cells will get old and won't work as efficient when you get older. Imo changing old cells for new ones is a whole different category of medicins than for examaple cancer treatments. And for the whole "the poor people are just jealous" thing, who do you think will be the first (and probably for a long time the only) people who will stop aging? Either giga rich people like Jeff Bezos who built their fortune by exploiting millions of peoples from third-world countries, or politicians, who have enough power that they can pull a stunt like living "forever" without having to fear getting removed by the people. So before the "many poets and scientists who will bring humanity to another level" (like Andrew Steele said in his video) will have a longer life, the only people who will survive us will be despotic tyrants or/and modern day slave-drivers. And I don't know if I want to live in a world, where the only certainty that I have at the moment - that no matter how cruel a person is, they will die in the next ~100 years - is gone... But if you want this, have fun with your ever-living Hitlers, Kim Jong Uns and Jeff Bezoses. :) (Sorry for language mistakes, English isn't my first language)

@jmd1743

2 жыл бұрын

@@mihtas4304 "But if you want this, have fun with your ever-living Hitlers, Kim Jong Uns and Jeff Bezoses. :)" Yeah, Reddit says that they would rather shit their pants when they get old & forget the names of their children than to allow the rich such Jeff to live to the age of 200. It would be revolutionary with the way we prioritize having a family & a career if we could double the life span. Instead of going to college at the age of 20 you'll be able to focus on a family during your younger years before going to college in your 40s or 50s when you have higher wisdom in life. Not only that but it would get people trapped in dying industries such as coal plenty of time to retrain themselves & to start a new career. The world won't become over populated, Mexico has gone from nearly 7 babies per woman to 2.1 babies. Africa is showing social-economic trends where young adults are moving away from high-birth rate rural areas to urban areas to provide a better income for their children.

@mihtas4304

2 жыл бұрын

@@jmd1743 I'd "rather die, shitting myself" if that means that all humans have more or less the same lifespan, not out of jealousy but because I think, that the only people who would live longer were people who would be really bad for humanity. If the cure to ageing would be available to all humans at the same time, it would be a different discussions, but as long as thats not the case, these cures would probably at first be only available for the richest countries (who are mostly rich, white countries), which would divide humankind into white, long-living people and non-white, not-that-long-living people. I don't think that this would be very great. To your point that it would lead to a totally different approach to life, where we go to college at 50, it highly depends if the cures for ageing would just add years at the end of our lives or if they would "stretch" our lives in the sense, that we for example would be children until we are 20, teens until 30 and adults when we are 40. Because if not, I think Boredom would be a huge factor. We humans always need a drive, a goal in the future to achieve, and if we would "give" everyone 30 years between your beginning adulthood and the start of your studying/working, I think many many people would become depressed because they dont have a clear goal/lifepath. Another thing to consider is of mental ageing is delayed aswell, because there would be no benefit to start studying at 50, when a lot of mental abilities like fluid intelligence peaks at ~25 and decreases afterwards. For an enjoyable expanded lifespan, you'd have to guarantee that the mentan developement would be much much slower, which is hard to achieve I think. To your point that we won't overpopulate because birthrates are decreasing, I wouldn't be so sure simply because of the goals of people who want to expant lifespans. They don't talk about adding 25-100 years, they have much bigger goals. The german party "Partei für Gesundheitsforschung" (party for health research) has recently hung up posters stating "where do you want to live in 500 years? With future medicine we will be able to live for thousands lf years".... In this Video the guy said that overpopulation wouldn't be a thing because over the span of 25 years the population would only increase about 16 percents, but if you talk not only about 25 years but about 500-1000 years of lifespans, the population would exponantially grow and overpopulation would be pretty soon a pretty big problem. Thank you for your answer and sorry that my reply became so long. :)

@jmd1743

2 жыл бұрын

​@@mihtas4304 So you'll let let a child die of bone cancer if everyone can't afford the treatment?

Healthier old people need less young people who take care of them. Solely this makes treating aging a no brainier. Everyone who thinks different really doesn’t know what he is talking about imo.

I completely agree with the notion that availability and utilization of resources is the main issue. That I think is spot on in the video. However, calling the word overpopulation itself racist is just plain wrong in my opinion. The notion that overpopulation is somehow Africa's fault is racist. But the notion of overpopulation itself is not. Any decent person would want people all around the globe to have similar living standards. That is a given. Now that automatically means that more people equals more resources used. Thus, overpopulation is a problem. Every new human being (black, asian, white, purple..) should aspire to have, electricity, air conditioning/heating depending on the climate he inhabits, clothing, food etc. regardless of skin color. Thus overpopulation can be an issue. Exactly, if we look at it from a non-racist perspective. I felt this comment is needed because of the ridiculous woke trend to label everything as racist. Even words. To sum up. If anyone thinks only Africans should bring down fertility rates that is blatantly racist. But worrying about the number of people on the planet in general is a problem exactly if we have equal distribution of resources in mind.

The virus wiped out a large number of elderly people.

Yes. Even Alan Watts disgusted this in the 70's. I won't get into, but we will (obviously) only because huge money issues. Who will pay for who?

@leonniceday6807

2 жыл бұрын

"Who will pay for who" - goal of antiageing science is not jsut to keep people alive, but reverse ageing, to make people healthier and able to work and pay for themselves.

How would curing aging reduce cancer by that much? People are still being exposed to UV rays from the sun, ionizing radiation, carcinogenic compounds, and accumulated random mutations of other origins.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

I’d reverse the statement here: if we’ve not reduced cancer by that much, we’ve not cured aging, by definition! To be slightly more specific…we need to improve humans’ DNA damage repair capabilities and remove mutated cells to address the problem directly (see Chapter 7 of my book!), and reducing the biological age of the immune system will make it more able to spot pre-cancerous cells (some scientists contend that the loss of immune surveillance with age is a more significant factor than the accumulation of mutations). And, on a more practical note, treating mice with senolytic drugs reduces their cancer risk as well as other manifestations of ageing, so clearly it can work, whichever mechanism that primarily leans upon. :)

@LaMirah

2 жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele I beg to differ. The definition of stopping aging would be disabling the senescence mechanism present within (most?) eukaryotic cells, which are the root cause of a large number of "symptoms" associated with aging. Curing cancer is a whole different kettle of fish, requiring either somehow checking for errors in the genetic code of every single living cell or understanding cellular metabolism well enough to design redundancies to the mechanisms which, when disabled, allow cancer cells to not be attacked by the immune system, which would also probably require large-scale genetic manipulation of humankind, which would be by itself an ethical nightmare.

@DrAndrewSteele

2 жыл бұрын

@@LaMirah I’m afraid that’s not really right! Some of the most promising anti-ageing treatments kill senescent cells rather than disabling their mechanism, and we wouldn’t need to check the genetic code of every single cell to prevent cancer (thankfully!). However, the details would take more than a KZread comment to explain, so I recommend you check out my book. :)

@aceflamez00

2 жыл бұрын

@@LaMirah Read the book lol

@leonniceday6807

2 жыл бұрын

checkout the rates of cancer in young vs old people.

We're already massively over-populated.

faulty argument. a 0 carbon emissions lifestyle via renewable energy can support the planet on a macro scale even if there were 20 billion humans but increased population would cause discord over other scarce common access resources leading to horrible civil problems. Overpopulation would lead to absolutely decreasing yield as the number of users of the common access resource would skyrocket. the quality of life for the average human would hence obviously decrease contrary to your argument in the video. For example, increased demand (and hence prices) for atlantic cod would cause it to go extinct, leading to lesser food options for humans and negative effects on ecosystems, leading to worse off quality of life for us. Maybe if we'd cure atlantic cod ageing too then this wouldn't happen😅

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

I agree, there’s far more to having a net zero impact on the planet than cutting carbon emissions! But, as I said in the video, this is just an example-otherwise it would just have been a three-hour tour of ways to reduce our impact on the environment. :) There are definitely ways we can cut down on our other impacts, from the technological (in the case of the example you give, alternative proteins from vegetable proteins to bioreactors to lab-grown meat could reduce the need to eat fish) to sociological (we could simply decide to eat less to reduce our impact on fish populations!). None are without challenge-but all are significantly less problematic than letting people suffer to death via ageing. Also, your final suggestion of curing ageing in cod unfortunately might not work! Some fish species already don’t age thanks to unusual population dynamics caused by reliance on a handful of older females for most reproduction-there’s a lot more about this in Chapter 2 of my book. I’m not sure anyone’s studied cod specifically but it might be that they already don’t age and so there’s nothing to cure!

@chad7928

Жыл бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele nah man, fundamentally the idea of letting human population increase simply does not work out economically. There would be skyrocketing demand for every good, especially as human population would exponentially increase to a much higher equilibrium, in the process degrading the environment and depleting resources faster and faster. and of course while prices increase, price incentive will increase, leading to producers completely disregarding expensive net zero means of production and reverting to the classic carbon emitting methods, likely leading to much much more carbon emission than now. a global example of the tragedy of commons. And down the line, on a personal level, even if people could live longer lives, I doubt those lives would be enjoyable. With sky high prices, diminishing quality (and quantity) of goods and services, huge emissions and degrading air quality, worsening infrastructure and so many more things, I doubt the everyday man would be happier. However, I reckon a way we could stop ageing sustainably would be to simply ban having children if you took the treatment! Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

- 1:07 And there's your problem, you're thinking too narrowly. The people ARE the problem, not the resources. Overpopulation causes _every_ problem in the world, and only _some_ of those are about resource shortages, most have nothing to do with resources and only exist because there are too many humans (already, let alone if there were more). - 2:05 That's the worst part; the "developed" countries have already reduces their birth-rates, but the "developing" ones are still blasting forward and filling up their own countries and also spilling out into all the other countries, where they become consumers à la their new home but bring their previous reproduction habits and feel free to continue populating since there isn't the same pressure as back home, so they take up the birth-rate slack and then some, causing the population to accelerate, not slow down. Look at Mauritius which has had its majority completely replaced.

@DrAndrewSteele

Жыл бұрын

Did you actually watch the video? If the poorest half of people are only responsible for 10% of the CO2, in what respect is it sheer numbers of humans that are the problem? And your second point doesn’t stand up to statistical scrutiny either: less than 5% of people live outside the country they were born in. EU birth rates are all sub-2.0 despite migration. And so on.

Total rubbish

Ageing doesn't require a cure, just you to stop being a crybaby and accept it

@DrAndrewSteele

3 ай бұрын

Do you think cancer patients are crybabies who should just accept it?

@biomuseum6645

3 ай бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele comparing pears to apples, cancer is a different topic Cancer attacks suddenly while aging is something even toddlers know will come eventually

@DrAndrewSteele

3 ай бұрын

But most cancer is caused by the aging process (and actually it doesn’t attack suddenly-the first driver mutations that eventually result in cancer typically appear decades before the disease). We want to come up with medicines for aging to prevent cancer (and heart disease, and dementia, and frailty, and…), which seems like a laudable goal to me!

@biomuseum6645

3 ай бұрын

@@DrAndrewSteele a childish goal, death is part of life, for you to have existed someone else had to die Most elders don't get cancer Rather than making inmortal people, a more realistic goal is to make aging easier but still necessary to preserve society

@DrAndrewSteele

3 ай бұрын

Why is it a childish goal to want to prevent disease?

No, old people are not wiser, that's a silly ageist comment and as such I can counter with old people are the least likely to want to change their ways in order to lead more sustainable lifestyles.

Just shout of the population of the USA then the problems solved