If you’re fundamentally optimistic about the future (envisioning a world where technological progress continues marching on, standard of living continues to rise, novelty of experiences expand, and science enables the unimaginable), here’s a proposition:
Assuming the optionality to live an addition unit of time is worth something no matter how much time you’ve already lived, it would make sense that we should place an incredible amount of emphasis on maximizing healthspan (longevity + health), likely much more than we already do.
The first order of reasoning on extending lifespan involves having more time to do things you enjoy OR the belief that the future will carry a higher utility per unit of time versus the present (due to the optimism premise). E.g. There’s a ton more people living close to Rockefeller’s standard of living today than during Rockefeller’s time. Or in a more present day example, it may be better to be an average person born today in 2021 than to live through Jeff Bezos’ life as richest man on Earth and being born in 1964 (his birth year); since by the time the baby is 50, the world may be a place in which via virtual reality / neural-linking, this person could literally live through Jeff Bezos life optionally, so by that thinking, the set of joys/utility may already be a superset of the Jeff Bezos option. By that time this baby is 50, Jeff Bezos may already be long dead.
Now one point of contention is on how much optimism does one need to carry to buy these arguments. Maybe one is generally optimistic but doesn’t believe the acts of improving healthspan would extend life long enough for the positive changes of progress to make these arguments relevant. The following is what I think that is often missed.
For each unit of additional time you have the option of adding to your life, there’s also an additional increase in probability that you will have the option to extend your life by another unit of time, and so it cycles on. This is because in that additional time, society may have discovered some knowledge or developed some product to allow you to live incrementally longer. And in that new incremental addition, the same applies where in that period, there could be more discoveries and developments. The kinds of things that may be involved in these developments to augment healthspan consists of things which may be hard to imagine in present day. We shouldn’t just judge the chances of these incremental developments happening by evaluating the latest in genomics or physiology or biochemistry research. The potential for innovation in one field to impact disparate fields can’t be overstated. Maybe a development in physics or mechanical engineering enables a different form of cryogenics that increases revival success rate by 10%. Maybe in those few seconds they’re able to revive you for, since it also happens that the year is 3100 when they revived you, tech and science has progressed so much that they have the tools to bring those few seconds of revival to centuries of life.
It could also be as incremental and small as new discoveries involving optimal nutrition or lightweight medications (e.g. Metformin / Rapamycin) that give you a few years boost. It could be as wild and crazy as using time dilation to give you an extra year which happens to be all that’s needed to wait for that new drug to come out which extends your life further by a few years which allows you to benefit from more long term high potential research that’s taking longer to come to fruition.
All in all, the optionality to live for one more year could snowball into having the optionality to live indefinitely.
So.. to frame this a little more concretely to help internalize these ideas — currently it’s much more popular to spend considerably more time/energy to try to reach a net worth of tens of millions or hundreds of millions than to try to live to ninety or a hundred while remaining highly functional mentally and physically. In the bosom of long term thinking, that pursuit might be very irrational. To pursue something that’s probably less likely and also worth much less. Plus, with more years of high functioning life, attaining high wealth is way easier (most boring case being compounding interest) and the utility per unit of time is greater at that point in the future (due to optimism premise). ;)
Attaining greater healthspan is a confusing journey full of ambiguity that regularly diverges from simply following the popular notions around “being healthy”, but I think more people should at least expend some effort to learn about the mechanisms involved and try to follow the findings. Be wary that performance is often orthogonal to longevity (my writing on that here).
Also published on my substack.
