On investing in life extension
Reply to Charles Peralo, who had argued that anti-aging research deserved a billion-dollar investment along the lines of Aubrey de Grey’s SENS program, since “essentially everyone” would eventually be a customer. The original message was a point-by-point exchange; Peralo’s side has been omitted here, but the gist of each prompt is preserved by Alyssa’s replies.
The relevant point for investing is not “is X physically possible?”, but “is X practical to do and sell within the relevant timeframe?” Essentially the whole intellectual community agrees that interstellar flight is both physically possible and a good idea in the very long run, but it’d be totally impossible to invest in it, because it fails the second question.
I definitely agree that it’s awesome stuff to talk about, but again, talking is really different from investing.
Whether something is physically possible isn’t the relevant question. We knew flight was physically possible in Roman times (after all, birds flew), but it wasn’t possible to invest in the airplane industry back then.
There’s already an existing market for AIDS and cancer treatments that don’t cure them, but do improve prognosis etc. Correspondingly, there’s already a huge market for anti-aging creams, anti-cholesterol drugs, etc., which an anti-aging medicine program could target. So, it would be entirely possible to invest in, e.g., companies that are developing anti-heart-attack drugs that treat some of the root causes of aging. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are no such companies, nor are there credible plans to build such.
Saying “invest a billion dollars in Aubrey, and let him cure aging” is a totally unrealistic plan, even if you could somehow convince people to put the money up. To list some of the problems with that: Curing aging, as far as anyone knows, would take decades from our current science/technology base. Research projects which take that length of time to reach their original goal seem to be empirically non-existent. The Manhattan Project took about five years, Apollo and Human Genome Projects took about ten, but what’s longer than that? Do you know why there apparently are no such projects (I have no idea why, I’m just making an empirical statement), or how those reasons could be overcome?
Who would the team consist of who would do the job? Is Aubrey personally capable of managing dozens or hundreds of people? Most people, even most great scientists, are not, which is why Oppenheimer was so unique. If not him, who would?
How would you protect against classic startup failure modes, given so much cash on hand? To quote Paul Graham: “Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear. Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few are overfunded, which is like trying to start driving in third gear.” Given that much money to play with, there’s an ever-present temptation to give everyone million-dollar salaries, hire an army of people to sit around having meetings, etc.
How would you protect against the project being hijacked for something else? As you likely know, Drexler succeeded in popularizing “nanotechnology” during the 1990s … only to find that the word was promptly hijacked until “nanotechnology” just meant “anything cool”, and the actual stuff Drexler was interested in couldn’t get funded.
Saying “invest a billion in a cancer company, and let them cure cancer” is equally unrealistic, but from an investment perspective, it’s still a fairly good deal, since they might (say) invent a new form of chemotherapy that makes a few billion, having done that a bunch of times before. Laplace’s law of succession.
That means nothing . If you time-traveled back to 1800, you could just as well say that the market for electricity was just about everyone, since (today) just about everyone uses it. It would still have been impossible to invest in, because there would be no practical way to build a sellable product.
“Medicine” is such an absurdly huge category that pointing to it doesn’t mean anything. You might as well say “people invest money in power generation, so it’s clearly possible to get them to invest billions in perpetual motion machines”. Of course, anti-aging stuff is physically possible and perpetual motion isn’t, but it’s the same logic in both cases (investment in category implies investment in a very obscure subset of category).