> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates.

Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure end relies on the bottom of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model where the model is known to be wrong. (LNT is useful for public policy - you should seek to minimize the exposure from any industrial processes and materials to zero - but it is bad for public health in telling people that any exposure increases their cancer risk.)

In terms of your first point, I'm not sure I understand how the overall cancer rate being increased by dubious activities on the part of some people implies that efforts to cure cancer on the part of others are "not entirely noble". On the surface, this seems like a non-sequitur -- could you explain your reasoning further?

> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this

>a measurable contributor to cancer rates

Source: greenpiss?

Hormesis is more likely.

Radon, a perfectly natural source of radiation, cause more cancer than all the other nuclear sources combined. Stop it with the nuclear fear mongering!

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot."

He is wrong though.

Aging exists because the human body is optimized to survive and reproduce in a resource constrained environment with many threats. Our predecessors eked out just enough calories to survive to the age of 15, when we could begin reproducing. Any traits that made it more likely for us to survive until that point, even if those traits resulted in damage that would eventually accumulate and wear us down after our reproductive window, was selected for. We are all basically running the biological equivalent of overclocked CPUs without investing in proper cooling.

We no longer exist in a resource constrained environment and have access to massive amounts of energy from the sun which makes entropy a negligible concern. There is no good reason to not at least try to prevent or reverse senescence.

Death is a natural sweeper that allows progress, evolution, rapid change and adjustment to new situations. The opposite brings, well, the opposite.

The life well lived is a life thats easy to let go, regardless of your beliefs. The more people messed up the more they desperately cling to it (I know its vastly more complex, but this is the core of what I see around).

I am not claiming we shouldn't be trying to make lives better, or longer. But immortality will be humanity's doom - there is endless row of puttin' and trumps and hitlers and stalins and maos in every single generation, and the only real working solution is inevitable death, none of them went or will let go power on their own from the bottom of their good hearts. That is unavoidable since it comes from base character of humans, whether we like it or not.

I'd say we should shoot on sight all researchers and VCs pouring time and money into directly immortality, that's much safer bet than some immortality bringing long term prosperity for mankind.

I think those 70–80 year old politicians would be much less short-sighted if they expected to be around to reap what they're sowing.

> Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve.

We're not undoing death, dying healthy would be better than aging the way we do right now.

Increasing healthspans as a society would be great in a more family integrated society rather than an individualistic one.

I'd love my retirement years to be spent helping my kids and grand-kids instead of the other way around.

A senior community that can stay involved actively has been part of the "it takes a village" until very recent times.

What interest I have in anti-aging is less about living forever than alleviating suffering on the way out. Living to 80, 90 or 100 seems like plenty of time on earth but making that last half of our lives less achey, infirmed and delirious is a noble goal.

I rather think that terms like "nature" or "evolve" are better at describing what has happened rather than some guidelines to adhere to.

One could say air conditioning is similarly "unnatural" but it will be saving lives this summer.

That is a much more philosophical point than I was trying to make, but it definitely raises some interesting questions.

By that logic, why not just execute everyone over 35? They're just slowing down human progress.

Aging doesn't exist because it benefits us, we did not choose 70-80 to be the ideal lifespan, and my back doesn't continuously ache to give new ideas a chance to spring forth.

> For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.

Sure but that's because the US voting demographic is old. It's the tyranny of the majority [1]; as the largest generation the baby boomers can vote and do vote for things that advance their interest. I'm not sure this phenomenon works if people live out to 150 years as the generational bubbles would be relatively smaller.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

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Perhaps it was unwise to use the term dna damage yes. I used it to mean any deviation from the initial dna of the fertilized egg, including breakage, point mutations, missing chromosomes, viral insertions and probably more I can't think of right now.

Edit: I suppose those are all called mutations. Somehow I thought mutation meant a small local change only.

Wouldn't it only be cancer if your immune system doesn't destroy it? If your immune system can handle it, that's just normal.

The DNA damage that the parent was talking about would lead to cancerous cells which your immune system cannot handle, which is different from the ones that your immune system can handle

Interesting recent news about diabetes!

Type 1 has been reversed through pancreas and islet transplants, recently in at least one individual by stem cell transplants, now he makes his own insulin.

For some type 2 individuals diagnosed early enough, blood sugar can be managed through diet and exercise, and insulin response can be normalized back to typical levels. This seems to work best when caught early, and when the person has the ability to make long lasting lifestyle changes. And the risk of relapse seems to remain much higher than in the general population.

I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's.

Wouldn't a treatment for Alzheimer's be more accessible to the wealthy than the poor, making it unethical by your definition? Isn't it good that evil rich people often lose their cognitive capabilities thus limiting the harm they can do?

https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY

> It is a very specific, high-effort kind of ... whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.

Yep. Welcome to like 99% of cutting-edge medicine, stretching back into prehistory.

> But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.

There aren't many ailments that affect rich folks but don't affect any poor folks. I'd rather the rest of mankind wait twenty years for the treatments than to never have had them at all.

"It's important that you must die, so that the rich can also die" -- you. Can you really not come up with better solutions to psychopaths having too much power than everyone must die?

One intuition pump that always works well in these discussions is to imagine that death is already solved, and all your worst nightmares are true. So we live in a world where a small number of humans own and control everything forever. What is your proposed solution? Kill everyone who is old? Really? That's the best you got? Literally just force everyone to die?

We already live in a world where most people's lives are made shit by the whims of a few rich psychopaths, it's just that right now the specific set of rich psychopaths randomly changes every so often. So? Why is that better? Why does it matter to me that the boots on my neck belong to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos instead of John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt?

Dude, let's not jump the gun here. If a fear of an entrenched immortal oligarchy is your justification for the idea of forbidding billionaires from funding medical innovations that extend life and health-span, you're being a huge bit too optimistic, to the point of absurdity.

We'll be struggling, failing and incrementally advancing with medical advancements that merely stave off the vast hellscape of age-related and degenerative diseases for a moderately longer healthy life long, long before we discover a way to enable a reality of immortal billionaires.

That aside, even if we did, I have my massive doubts about the inevitability of all you predict. The vast range of technologies already available to billionaires today would make a medieval king or Roman emperor salivate at having them with dreams of total control, yet if anything, the technologies they do have (and which states have), have only increased the complexity and Swiss cheese nature of the modern world in the direction of also expanding basic freedoms and instabilities of power of all kinds for more people than ever, often directly at the cost of former power monopolies.

What's more, right now, both massively wealthy states and huge corporations administer much of what happens in the world, and both could arguably claim to have much more power, resources and even in a certain way near immortality than any hypothetical immortal billioniare oligarch as per your prediction, yet hysterics aside, I don't see either totally killing off democracy at all.

People still protect, governments still change and fall, big companies still go bankrupt or lose market share, and no one power center is nearly as in charge as some paint it to be. If it were, you wouldn't be predicting, you'd be speaking in the present tense perhaps.

Either way, the groundwork of you fear already exists in a fashion, and it's not creating quite the total boogeyman you're trying to depict.

Don't let sci fi guide your perception too much, reality is so much more complex and counterbalanced all over the place.

It might not be the mainstream on HN, but most popular polls I've seen show similar trends of a lesser proportion of people wanting to live longer, citing the same societal collapse concerns. In any case, whether something is espoused by the majority or the minority doesn't really add much weight.

I don't think there is an "anti-aging agenda". Not everything needs to be seen through the lens of an ideological movement. But I do think that there is an unhealthy persistent cynicism underneath the current popular culture. This cynicism makes people not want to be optimistic/idealistic in fear of being wrong or looking naive. I am not suggesting we should all tint our lenses rose colored, but I do think allowing people to expand their optimistic ceiling is warranted; especially when it is so easy to imagine a dystopic future currently.

Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed your sardonic reply.