This makes perfect sense to me. If I were a billionaire, I'd very quickly drop down to millionaire because I'd be putting 99% of my funds into solving the "our bodies and brains are ridiculously failure-prone" problem. And I'd be begging every other billionaire to do the same.
I raised $27M for longevity research (SENS.org). Summary of pro death arguments:<p><pre><code> Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
Bad for society
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.)
Old people suck. (death is an inferior cure to robustness.)
Bad for individual
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
People will force you to live forever (they aren't able to do this now, why would they begin to be?)
</code></pre>
Do you think less people make progress faster? What's your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years?<p>More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.<p>Man up, save your family, save yourself.<p>P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.
If I look around me - and I'm more at the bottom, at grassheight relative to billionaires and UHNWI in general on skyscrapers - I see a host of other immediate "longevity issues".<p>For one there is a substantial amount of people just trying get by and being like 50/50 on the choice of rather being dead already or trying to get through somehow 'till the next day, ad infinitum: from depressives who are stuck in a loop of ever growing void of meaningless in "wealthy" countries to factory workers serving as means to an end kept away from "jumping to termination" by saftey nets.
And of course those infamous 10% in absolute poverty which nowadays is more like a definition game by statisticians sponsored by the World Bank showing steady progress since the 1800s.<p>From a psychological point of view it becomes exponentially difficult to not have an inflated ego with more and more wealth. If I would win the lottery today my ordinary psyche would not be able to process it adequately, I would inevitably grossly overestimate my contribution to it, we are simply not finetuned to handle gigantic orders of probabilites.
So it comes off as a childish thing for most of us mere mortals trying to overcome your "lifetime" limitations without taking into account your environment the "soil of decaying and growing matter" in a biosphere going around an unimaginable ball of pure "fuel" in its dimension and age seperated by a vastness of nothingness in between.<p>At some point in the "success-intoxicated" linear chase of an ever increasing personal "lifetime" I would speculate that one would reach a critical point, a no point of return in which the sense of the self would ultimatley shatter, your (biographical) memories become obliterated beyond "recognition", so just another death-life cycle we are seeing and studying already in all life around us.<p>So, I would appreciate the more sober tone of just improving life in general like addressing immediate, mundane and unspectcular things like e.g. the wealth gap instead of playing on the reptilians chords of our brains by searching the "cure of aging" which kind of gives off a vibe of an coke head.
<i>> What differentiates SpaceX from NASA, or SpaceX from Blue Origin, is people and culture. We are not trying to build an institute or academic minded organization where papers are more important than products. Our goal is to build an ambitious, well run, for-profit company that will deliver revenue generating products on the way toward accomplishing its much bigger objective.</i><p>It is debatable whether they truely understand the financials of biotech. The grind of basic research will never go away. Many successful biotech company essentially acquihire researchers and work that is already 80% complete, the role of the company is to bring it to production. That itself will make up the bulk of the company's workload. Similarly, SpaceX had the benefit of leveraging an existing pool of talent and resources; you cannot build a heavy launch company in Zimbabwe. If they want to do both active basic research and at the same time trial therapies, then they would need an enormous amount of funding (on the software unicorn level). You will need scale on the same magnitude as Pharma giants like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson and Johnson to be able to acquire companies, run trials, and discard ideas that do not work. In the current bull market, this is the perfect company to build with Coinbase's founder as the chief fundraiser.
I'll take any opportunity to post this William S. Burroughs essay: <a href="https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2015/03/immortality-by-william-s-burroughs.html" rel="nofollow">https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2015/03/immortality-by-wi...</a><p>Only Burroughs could truly capture the ghastly consequences.
I'm not criticizing the effort nor being sarcastic: was there any measurable progress by any of the companies working on increasing longevity? I'm talking about actual increase of lifespan, not promising ideas.
Imagine you are "filthy rich", what would be your main worry? Having money without having time is meaningless. Consider also that "crypto millionaires" are often sophisticated "lottery winners", they didn't get their money like Bezos or Musk.
The bright side is that society as a whole will profit from this also.
Frankly, this is what America has always been about - A combination of science, technology and capitalism. We need a lot more of these moonshots attempted at a massive scale. So what if it may not work out? People can not stop for the fear of failure. If founders have money and resources, by all mean I for one welcome these with open arms.
On the one hand, try to live forever with this.<p>On the other hand, accelerate the burning of the planet by giving more people access to an energy-wasting ponzi scheme.<p>Your 2 goals are incompatible with each other, Brian and Blake.
We know how to make people live longer – provide them with good healthcare from cradle on, reduce pollution, help them out of poverty etc.<p>Biggest problem with people living longer is the costs of supporting them increase dramatically, and who's going to pay these costs?<p>Increasing longevity places a burden on our children, and their children
There is something dystopian, childish, naive, desperate, arrogant, sad and tragic about billionaires founding and funding longevity companies and projects. They think that they've got it all, but deep down there's still this gaping hole of meaninglessness. They can control evertything. Everything but death. If only they can find a way to live longer, maybe even a way to never die of natural causes, everything will be better.<p>I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging such as dementia and various cancers. But when I read this announcement I feel an air of arrogance that fucking annoys me.
SpaceX is titering on bankruptcy so I don't know if your really want to be the "SpaceX of living for ever".<p>Also asking your employees to work over the holidays (SpaceX Company email) because of your management failures is not a good company culture.
Mixed feelings. On one hand I can imagine situations where longetivity and its development might really be useful, for example when (if ever) we enter the human space travel era, where the human lifespan will eventually start to factor in. On the other, its hard to not consider the deeper meaning of such pursuits. After all, death is what gives life meaning and pushing it further raises lots of possible negatives e.g. 1) less sense of urgency 2) traumatic death will be even more traumautic, especially in the early years of life… I do wish I can live healthily to the end of my days, but its really a sort of miracle in todays world if the reaper doesn’t collect you before aging runs it course.