Op, consider using fewer absolutes. Many people have worked on aging science to identify how to prolong human lifetimes.
You're getting at an answer, but I'm wondering why we haven't.
Adjacently sure I want to know why more people aren't working on it.
You have to really step back and consider that we live in a world where people pay rent, buy groceries, have jobs, believe in gods, and watch the news. We can do things. We do do things. We're choosing it this way. Is it so bad to wonder why not something else?
Especially when it comes to the one topic that affects us all, that we may be the only ones able to actually answer (in the entire Universe)?
Examples of absolutes in your question: "everyone" "impossible" "nobody seems to care" "Nobody wants to talk" "wonder why nobody else cares?" "why nobody cares"
> why we haven't.
We don't really know what we're doing. We still don't today, but when I graduated, talking about life extension directly rather than specific old-age diseases like dementia and cancer was basically a sign someone didn't understand how hard the problem was.
In my lifetime I've seen: the invention of mammalian cloning; full genome sequencing (not just human genome, the first non-virus full chromosome was a yeast chromosome in 1992, the first full organism was a bacteria in 1995, the first animal was the nematode worm in 1998); CRISPR for (still basic but better than retroviral) gene editing; the Nobel prize for (if not the original discovery of) telomerase and its role in lengthening the telomeres that seem to force the Hayflick limit; what feels like an endless sequence of headlines about how lab rats have various multiples of life extension from calorie restriction, genetic engineering, and senolytic drugs (those which kill senescent cells); headlines about metformin and rapamycin potentially having anti-aging effects; and of course a few versions of AlphaFold which took us from "you can get a PhD by figuring out how just one protein folds" to "here's the folding of nearly every one of the 214 million proteins known to mankind plus a bunch of complexes between multiple proteins, RNA, DNA, ligands, ions, etc.".
We have a lot more work to do to get this ready for humans. Even with optimistic assistance from AI, I don't expect to see anything* on the consumer market until the mid 2030s, though it's possible to rush a lot of this stuff with a "move fast and break things" culture. (Between Kennedy in the USA and China's lax attitude to human rights, such a culture may in fact happen).
* except metformin and rapamycin and things like them, because those are already available for other conditions, so may end up as per GLP-1 drugs for obesity
Because we have no clue of how to, yet.
But I agree that we could throw more people and resources at the problem, if aging didn't seem just natural and the idea of a defeating it didn't seem a bit crazy. But it's also true that the knowledge, tools and methods that might make it possible are only very recent acquisitions.
I can't imagine having this mentality
Of course aging is something we will solve - probably within the next 1000 years.
We will look back on these times like before humans wore clothes and had language.
First of all, there is a lot of work already going in to slowing and eliminating aging. Every "please don't smoke" campaign is actually a "smoking causes early death so not smoking prolongs life" campaign, if you think about it. Healthy eating, cancer prevention and treatment, dementia etc treatment and prevention, brain training, physical and mental rehabilitation training -> all are efforts to reduce odds of untimely death meaning all are efforts to expand life expectancy.
Outside of this, consider the magical curing of age related death tomorrow. Do people with unbearable conditions now have to live with them forever? With their quadrapligia, lack of long/short memory, parkinsons, etc? Suppose we can magic hand-wave our way around those.
What of births? Approximately 130-140 million children are born globally each year. That's another billion in ~8 years. We already struggle to feed our current population with ~700million facing food insecurity, and estimates say that using all available space, not wasting, and being more efficient with our diets we could perhaps support 20 billion on this planet. This would, however, require perfect cooperation between everyone on earth deciding to share perfectly and agree to move to plant based diets where required. At current birth rate, we'd have less than 100 years to solve food waste and build out the capacity. Or is birth now controlled a la China? Who gets to decide? What happens when the decision turns out to be wrong and leads to inbalance of viable mating pairs? Do we pivot to global sterilization? No more births until we colonize Mars?
And where does everyone live? If we are maximizing use of arable lands, humans can then only live in un-arable lands because we need farms and greenhouses on those lands. So we have to live above the green-line on mountains, tundras and permanent ice, and deserts. And the more food we have to grow, the less land we have to live in, meaning density increases meaning that the odds of a super-spreader disease increases meaning that people will die regardless because in all of this we never cured death but only age-related death.
>And when I look at the problem... it seems entirely solvable!
If that were the case, that you really saw a clear path, you'd write the proposals and get the funding. If it is the case, rather, that what you have is simplistic hope/belief that it "should" be solveable, then you're in the same boat as everyone already doing the research, minus any actual research contribution.
Since on 1 hand you got an afterlife, eternity, and what-not.
And on the other, well, it's a bit like before you were born!
I guess to your point - why am I not interested in the problem of those who are not yet born? Hahahah
Enjoy your Sunday
You asked about the existence of God, not the existence of an afterlife.
In any case, if there is some sort of afterlife, then eternal material life would impede us as a species because it would prevent attaining it. If there is no afterlife, then eternal material life would impede us as a species by preventing growth and adaptation.
This is amazing.
Yes, death prevention is a huge part of it!
And to your point - even if you solve something like consciousness, I could still be blown up and we wouldn't know how to build me back.
Humpty Dumpty out
I once read that we could in theory produce things like synthetic organs, but something like a synthetic liver would be the size of a 50,000 sqft factory requiring a full staff of chemists, would need a refinery complete with boilers, smokestacks, chemical waste facilities, and so-on for each individual person.
Think of kidney like a dialysis machine, or a heart like an advanced blood pump, lungs like aerators, muscles, bones - we can reverse-engineer most of it.
But there are still many mysteries in blood production, cellular function, digestion, hormones, genetics, and consciousness, to name a few areas.
It's humbling, we are at the very earliest stages of the biological sciences. But it's something nanotech and funding could chip away significantly at IMO in our lifetime, potentially solving many of the organ-related issues like diabetes, cirrhosis, cancer, and other things.
Suffering, absolutely. But I think there is more nuance to death.
Idk if I'll ever get it.
Death and aging seem like very clear and basic problems to solve, like inventing a roof to get out of the rain.
And lol, easily solvable? Scientists have been trying to figure it out for well over a century (and non-scientists probably since the origin of the man race). They’ve made marginal progress so far.
Go do a web search or two.
Where is progress halted in your opinion?
Consciousness/mind?
Basic cellular understanding?
Senescence?
But knowing there’s plenty of research going on (mostly in mice and in cell cultures) takes little more than reading the headlines in the HN “New” feed for a few weeks.