kanex
发表文章数: 860
武功等级: 弹指神通
(第六重)
内力值: 343/343
为何应解决衰老问题？【转贴】
Why should you do whatever you can to expedite the defeat of human aging?
(excerpted from Aubrey de Grey SENS)
Because saving lives is the most valuable thing anyone can spend their time doing, and since over 100,000 people die every single day of causes that young people essentially never die of, you'll save more lives by helping to cure aging than in any other way. (Some people can make more difference than others, sure, but don't underestimate how much difference you can make: look here first, and also think hard about what you might be able to do that I don't mention there.)
The rest of this page is a rebuttal of some of the more common reasons people give for not buying the above argument. If you aren't convinced that I'm right by the time you leave this page, I encourage you to email me with your reasons. If you are convinced, email me too -- that way we can work together to make the best use of your talents (including, perhaps, improving or adding to the arguments presented on this page). Which means that if you don't email me, you think it's OK not to work to cure aging and it's also OK not to be able and willing to say why it's OK. Don't forget that.
You're not talking about saving lives, you're talking about extending lives"
There's no difference between extending lives and saving lives. When we save someone's life, we give them the opportunity to live longer than they would otherwise have had the opportunity to live. Period. If you think you can state a clear-cut distinction between saving and extending someone's life, send me it. And don't forget that the life that rejuvenation therapies will allow is not one with extended frailty at the end of it, but one with no frailty, even at the end.
"I'm too old to have any chance of benefiting"
So what? Are your children too old? All lives are valuable. Consider the passengers on flight 93, who overpowered the hijackers. They can't have thought they had much chance of saving their own lives. They must have acted as they did because they knew they were going to save a great many lives on the ground. Did they know whose lives? -- clearly not. And they didn't care.
"It's more urgent to feed those who are starving today"
There are three errors in this idea. First, the question each of us must ask is how much difference we can make. Since the main problem with curing aging soon is getting the science done, the vast majority of people can make more difference to it than to starvation in the third world simply because the latter involves overpowering enormous political and economic pressures to preserve the status quo. Second, even if there were a choice between feeding the starving and curing aging, the arithmetic of healthy years added to people's lives by the two policies (see the last paragraph on this page) argues that we should put most of our effort into curing aging. But the third error is the most decisive: the idea that curing aging isn't urgent is based on the fact that it'll definitely take a couple of decades at least, whereas feeding the starving saves lives immediately. This is not logical. Consider two ways that someone (A) might kill someone else (B): A might shoot B, or A might build a house for B and purposely make the roof unsound so that it falls in and crushes B in bed a year later. The interval between A's action and B's death in these cases is different by perhaps seven or eight orders of magnitude, but is A's culpability any different? No. It's not different if B sells the house in the interval and the person who dies is C, either -- nor if by a fluke the roof falls in when there's no one home. So long as there is a pretty good chance that an action today will bring the cure for aging closer, that action today is saving lives.
"Curing aging is so far away that our actions today are irrelevant: serendipitous future discoveries will determine when aging is cured"
No short answer to this could be persuasive; my answer is strong by virtue of its attention to detail. To learn why I claim that we are likely to cure aging within 30 or so years if we start trying, see my detailed science pages, starting with this one.
"Overpopulation ... boredom ... only for the rich ... immortal tyrants"
There are two types of answer to these and other reservations about curing aging based on possible social consequences. One is to examine each such reservation in depth and construct a detailed argument for how we might avoid the scenario in question. I think that's a valuable approach; I adopted it myself here and many others have done the same, often better than me. But I also have a more general response, which among other things avoids objections of the form: "Well, yes, that's a strategy, but what if it fails?". Namely: pay attention, people -- we're talking about lives here, 100,000 lives a day. What do you do at the moment if you're bored? -- kill yourself? I didn't think so. Society has always had problems and doubtless always will, and it works to minimise and solve them, just like technological problems. Pretending that we will be so unable to cope with future problems that it's better to condemn indefinite billions to the puny lifespan of their ancestors is a sick joke anyway, but even sicker when we consider how implausible it is that such problems would be any worse or harder to tackle than those that we've tackled in the past. It's not as if the problems we have successfully tackled in the past seemed less daunting, either. For example, who would have thought in 1850 that society would be willing to submit to the indignity of wearing absurd rubber contraptions every time they had sex, just to arrest the population explosion that followed the near-elimination of infant mortality? Yet, that's just what happened throughout the industrialised world, with no coercion other than the simple fact that children who are still alive are very expensive.
One social argument is perhaps worth singling out, however: the idea that we would have difficulty paying all those retirement benefits. Retirement benefits are for frail people. There won't be any frail people. Also, people who still (or again) have the vitality that they had in their 20s and 30s will not want to play golf all day forever, even if we did have the money to let them do so. (This is not to say retirement will cease. Rather, it will be a voluntary, periodic thing -- maybe ten years every 50, two years every ten if you prefer.) This is one of the most tangible and unambiguous benefits of curing aging: far from being increasingly consumed by the elderly (as is happening with the pension situation today), wealth will be actually contributed to society by all people, of whatever age.
"Finitude gives life meaning .... the natural order is best"
This type of "ethical" argument is possibly the most absurd of all -- a strong statement, I realise, given the stiffness of its competition -- because of the enormity of what it overlooks within its own scope. To stand back and (by one's inaction) cause someone to die sooner, when one could act to let them live a lot longer at no (or even at some modest) cost to oneself or anyone else, is arguably the second most unnatural thing a human can do, second only (and then by a very small margin) to causing someone's death by an explicit action. (Of course, there is plenty of departure from these ethics in the world, but that's not the point -- abandonment of the law of the jungle is what most fundamentally defines humanity, and also what defines civilisation.) Thus, to ask humanity to accept the "naturalness" argument against life extension, and on that basis to delay the development of a cure for aging, is thus to ask it to transform itself into something as un-human as can be imagined. Even if such concerns were to turn out to be valid, it is for those who experience this diminution of their existence to act to restore it (e.g., by rejecting rejuvenation therapies that are on offer), not for us to make their choice for them.
"I do other things that save lives; I can't do both"
If you're saving lives at all, you're in a small minority; but before you reject the possibility that maybe it would be even better to cure aging, do some arithmetic. Saving of lives should really be measured not in number of lives extended but in aggregate number of life-years added. If you've seen my timeframes page you will know that I think people who are around long enough for serious rejuvenation therapies will live indefinitely: the cusp between the development of the first generation therapies and the attainment of "escape velocity" will be very brief indeed. Putting this in concrete terms, the first 1000-year-old is probably only five or ten years younger than the first 150-year-old. (The question we can't yet answer, but can influence, is how old they are today.) Also, let me emphasise again here that these extra years would be youthful -- our physical and mental functions would be maintained in as good a state as when we were young adults, right up to the time when we make a serious mistake crossing the road. Even if we don't become a lot more risk-averse as a result, that means such people will have a life expectancy (i.e., average age at death) of around 1000 years, by virtue of being only as likely to die in any given year as we currently are to die at the age of (say) exactly 12 if we don't die before that. So that means that if you accelerate the process of developing a cure for aging so that it happens even one day sooner, you'll add an average several hundred years to the lifespans of over 100,000 people -- so you'll be adding about 100 million person-years to people's lives. (It's worth stressing here that the same applies to work targeted to making rejuvenation therapies widely available as fast as possible once they are developed, which will be a lot more successful with a bit of forward planning.) And that's just one day; given the rather small number of people currently working actively to cure aging as soon as possible, each newcomer to the cause will surely do better than that, whatever their talents. Can you really come anywhere near that number in any other way?
Récoltes et semailles
| 发表时间：2006-08-03, 03:11:52 |
 作者资料
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kanex
发表文章数: 860
武功等级: 弹指神通
(第六重)
内力值: 343/343
Re: 为何应解决衰老问题？【转贴】
http://www.sens.org/concerns-cn.htm
常见的反对意见皆在此得到驳斥。不过中文翻译非常差。
1. 治愈老化将引起可怕的人口过剩。
2. 返老还童疗法将只为富人而备。
3. 我们将永远不能退休。
4. 暴君将永生－如同《勇敢新世界》。
5. 年轻人最有创造性，所以几百岁的人会思想僵化。
6. 我们将失去进取心。
7. 我们将不得不放弃风险高的娱乐。
8. 死亡是人之所以为人的关键。
9. 逃避老化是违背自然的，是试图扮演上帝的角色。
10. 这不是挽救生命，而是延长生命。
11. 我们会忘记年轻时的很多事情，我们将不再是同一个人了。
12. 我太老了，没有任何受益的机会。
13. 我们应当先集中精力治愈疾病，和解决世界上的饥饿。
14. 生命已经足够长来做生命要我们做的全部事情。
Récoltes et semailles
| 发表时间：2006-08-03, 03:54:00 |
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龙门镇
发表文章数: 27
武功等级: 野球拳
(第三重)
内力值: 101/101
Re: 为何应解决衰老问题？【转贴】
最好的方法是吃唐僧肉。不知道唐僧肉汤是否有效，有待验证。
| 发表时间：2006-08-03, 05:39:50 |
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