# Lottery winner What-If, but new angle **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 19, 2018, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094 "2018-02-19T02:01:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2018, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/41 "2018-02-21T23:43:52Z")
Maybe so. But my belief is that “aging” is really just “the accumulation of diseases that kill old people”. Aging isn’t any one thing, it’s everything. The only way to stop aging is to stop the hundreds of ways your body breaks down over time. You can stop one or two or three or a hundred, but eventually two hundred things are going to accumulate and you’ll drop dead. So if this view is correct you could only stop aging through constant intervention. Creating naturally unaging human beings would require rewriting cell and tissue and organ development from the ground up. It wouldn’t be take a pill and become young again, because that would require replacing all your organs with brand new tissue from stem cells. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/42 "2018-02-22T00:52:07Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Maybe so. But my belief is that “aging” is really just “the accumulation of diseases that kill old people”. Aging isn’t any one thing, it’s everything. The only way to stop aging is to stop the hundreds of ways your body breaks down over time. You can stop one or two or three or a hundred, but eventually two hundred things are going to accumulate and you’ll drop dead. And that belief might be true. Or it might not. Maybe we figure out how to make little telomere-regenerating nanobots and we’re done! Take this pill and you’re (biologically) 20 years old forever. People still die. I mean, even 20-year-olds get cancer sometimes. And there’s still trauma. But it’s not impossible that we can actually cure the root cause of aging, not the hundreds of things that go wrong when your cells aren’t young anymore. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/43 "2018-02-22T04:16:10Z")
This thread seems to have gone way off topic. ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/44 "2018-02-22T05:37:23Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Maybe so. But my belief is that “aging” is really just “the accumulation of diseases that kill old people”. Aging isn’t any one thing, it’s everything. The only way to stop aging is to stop the hundreds of ways your body breaks down over time. You can stop one or two or three or a hundred, but eventually two hundred things are going to accumulate and you’ll drop dead. > > So if this view is correct you could only stop aging through constant intervention. Creating naturally unaging human beings would require rewriting cell and tissue and organ development from the ground up. It wouldn’t be take a pill and become young again, because that would require replacing all your organs with brand new tissue from stem cells. What an ultimate fix would have to look like : For some of your organs, some of your cells would be withdrawn, reset back to stem cells, reprogrammed or reset to back to a young adult age, and hacked to not age again. Then you’d use the stem cells to build new organs, and transplant them in. Surprisingly, this has been demonstrated and is feasible. To “academic research lab” feasible, at least. Though a more industrial, efficient approach would be to make organs that are all the same, from a centralized stock of human cells, and ‘just’ replace the person’s immune system when you do the first transplant. Surprisingly, this also has been demonstrated, but there are a lot of problems with immune system replacement. Notably, the current methods often result in death. But it’s not an intractable problem. What you would need to do is grow in some kind of lab-apparatus a section of bone marrow, where you are mixing bone marrow from the patient and immune cells from the donor. Basically all the immune cells that would attack either the patient or the donor’s organs get filtered out. For tissues you can’t do this with, like the brain, you would need to use a genetic modification device that resets whatever flags tell those cells they are “old”. It would presumably be done with a lot of catheters and needles that reach every area of these tissues. Like a long snakey robot that explores the major arteries of the brain, inserting a needle periodically to deliver the genetic modification agent. This assumes the wear and tear hypothesis is wrong. For any damage that is wear and tear, the only fix is surgical replacement. Replacing brain axons would be the most difficult thing I can think of - there is no natural way to replace these, and you would literally need nanoscale snakes to do it. (really, really, really long and skinny robots that basically drag their way through the brain without damage, pulling a new axon behind them) All these things seem physically possible, but I will concede that at the present rate of progress, it would take centuries to develop. As a side note, the rich would _not_ have exclusive access to these kinds of treatments. In order to safely treat a billionaire, you would need to practice these treatments on millions of other people. So at a minimum, if you’re middle class, you could probably get anti-aging as a test subject/beta tester. Also, I don’t know about you guys, but if anti-aging were available, and not obscenely expensive to physically do, I’d take up arms if I had to to get it. Denial of treatment would literally be a death sentence. ---
**Author:** ![edwardcoast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/cab0a1/32.png) [@edwardcoast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/edwardcoast)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 8:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/45 "2018-02-22T08:41:44Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > As a 30-year old, I am not far off from the OP’s hypothetical. So if I won the lottery today, or if I won it 5 years ago when 25: Do what I can to make the money last as many generations as possible. I would get myself as much education in finance as possible. Learn everything about annuities, bonds, stocks, investing, banking, etc. Tithe, get family retired, etc. Then also eat as absolutely healthy a diet as possible. Get LASIK, exercise, buy lots of houses in growing urban areas and get ready to flip them for a profit a decade or two from now. Go on a few cruises, vacations, etc. But mainly back to Financial 101: Educate myself furiously about all that finance stuff. (Which I could, technically, do right now on my income right now but I haven’t got the motivation to do so, not before or unless actually winning something big) 😃 You said you’d get as much education in finance as possible, so I’ll give you a head start. Annuities are for suckers. ---
**Author:** ![actualliberalnotoneofthose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e79b87/32.png) [@actualliberalnotoneofthose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/actualliberalnotoneofthose)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/46 "2018-02-22T11:33:24Z")
Hookers and coke and nothing wasted on the kids. ---
**Author:** ![pkbites](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pkbites/32/204_2.png) [@pkbites](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pkbites)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/47 "2018-02-22T12:09:21Z")
> [@ASGuy](#): > > I’m not going to respond to the child raising inquiry. But what I _would_ do is take the payments spread out over whatever period the lottery authority provides; 25 or 26 years. By doing so you have taken care of your family if you die the next year. I’d do the same but I’d also put a portion into some kind of 30 year bond or note every year. That way when the lottery payments stopped the mature notes would start paying out. I’d have a high income for a total of 60 years instead of 30. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/48 "2018-02-22T16:52:13Z")
> [@edwardcoast](#): > > You said you’d get as much education in finance as possible, so I’ll give you a head start. Annuities are for suckers. Except generally with lotteries the $X over Y years is a much better deal than the lump sum payout. Agreed though that if you had a pile of money it wouldn’t be a good deal to buy an annuity with it. You can avoid a lot of the “how do I invest and protect this money” if you just take the $X over Y. Your money is automatically protected and invested for you. You think you’re such a financial whiz that you’ll beat the system by getting a lump sum? Maybe you are, but probably not, and even if you are a financial whiz you’re going to have to work for that money. I thought the point of the lottery was that you got free money that you don’t have to work for? I mean, it makes sense to work like a dog for your first million dollars. But if you have already have a million dollars, does it make sense to work exactly as hard for your second million? Your second million isn’t worth as much as your first million. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/49 "2018-02-22T17:51:28Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > Yes, but as long as people are actually still dying of infectious diseases and malnutrition, it makes sense to focus on those people. > > That is all true. But anti-malaria and anti-polio helps poor people right now, and at a much better return on investment than future cheapening of new treatments that will first benefit old rich people. > > If you believe as the Gates Foundation claims that all lives are of equal value, it’s clear that something that immediately benefits the poorest people who die the earliest is the place to focus. > > That does mean that anti-aging research isn’t valuable. It just means that it’s not the best way to accomplish Gates’s stated goals. You’re implying that there is a set fund of money and it can only be split between anti-aging research and anti-poverty efforts. I don’t see that as the case. The global economy is over $100 trillion in PPP, about 78 trillion in nominal dollars. I think human civilization spends something like $50 billion a year on ice cream. That is far more than is being spent on anti-aging research, and far more than groups like the Gates foundation are spending on anti-poverty efforts. The global market for luxury items (luxury goods and services) is $1.8 trillion. A tiny fraction of that 1.8 trillion is more than enough to healthily fund both anti-poverty and anti-aging efforts. The world has more than enough financial capital and human capital to bring down poverty rates and research anti-aging simultaneously. It isn’t either-or. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2018, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094/50 "2018-02-22T18:04:22Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > You’re implying that there is a set fund of money and it can only be split between anti-aging research and anti-poverty efforts. I don’t see that as the case. The global economy is over $100 trillion in PPP, about 78 trillion in nominal dollars. The question that started this particular conversion was “Why doesn’t Bill Gates spend his money on anti-aging research”. And the answer is that he has a finite amount of money and time, and he spends it in other ways, more consistent with his values. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/lottery-winner-what-if-but-new-angle/809094.md?page=2)