Let’s call that 30, because if I’d had a family at 25 that would have meant not getting my engineering degree. In turn that would make me as not-me as if I were a Maori male.
It would have meant financial independence; I would have taken the long-term payments as that means a big part of the “OMG how do I invest this?” would be solved for me. A lot of decisions about where to live would evidently have been marked by my imaginary husband, but in any case we would have been able to take jobs based on “this one looks interesting” a lot sooner than I eventually was able to do it. Assuming that it happened to be The Bestest Boyfriend, we would have been living in the US and probably stuck around the South (he has lived mostly in Georgia and Florida).
Holy crap!!. I am living on the Riviera or somewhere in France. Forget the White-house, who needs that head-ache?!?
I would donate to good causes, though.
I have no children, so that’s not much of a question.
I’d definitely live on the interest and keep the principal invested and making a return. I’d probably squirrel away enough money in a trust for my parents that they’d be fine. I’d travel, but not extravagantly (though I’d be more likely to call a car from Heathrow to my hotel than take the train, little luxuries like that). I’d be able to research and write full-time, help out friends to an extent (though I’d have to draw a line to avoid being taken advantage of). I’d plan to donate 30% of the annual interest to charity - again, though, I’d leave the principal alone.
I joke with my friends about hookers and blow, but that’s not really my personality. Travel, sure, but more for fun and learning than debauchery.
ETA: This is not really in keeping with the OP, granted. I’ve never been 25 with a young family, and now I’m twice that age, so my imagination is less apt for such things than it once was.
If you don’t have kids, you could pick a few deserving ones and donate to their education. Extended family or neighbors.
Or create a scholarship in your name, even better!
Going back to the OP: when I was 25, I was married, finishing my MA, and talking about starting a family. I dragged my heels on the last part, so my wife left me and was promptly impregnated by a fellow she’d hung around with in college and probably cheated with whilst married to me. Not sure how that worked out; I think they’re still married. She found some child porn on his computer at one point and called me about it. Like I said, not sure how that worked out. Ergo, you can see why I’m a little skittish about speculating what I’d do if I were 25 with a young family.
Altering reality to give 25-year-old me a toddler (and knowing at least some of what I know now), I’d probably sock away a $10M trust fund for the little one and a $5M trust fund for my wife (distasteful as I find the idea now). The rest would enable us to do what we wanted: write, continue graduate education, make art, live life. Nice house, but no mansion.
The problem with scenarios like this is that my spouse would have some claim on both my money and life course, not to mention the education and well-being of our children, so I can’t make the absolute plans that I would as a happily single man.
At 25, I would have finished my PhD and then tried to get a job as a professor. Once I had the title, I would try to go on half time teaching for half pay and spend most of my time on math research, just as I did in any case. Or maybe take every other year off on unpaid leave, whatever. I retired 18 years ago (at age 63) and that is what I have done. But I still like to keep my university affiliation.
I know a man who was a CS professor at Stanford and one of the founders of Sun. When he cashed out, he had about $100 million. He kept his job until he was 55, when he could retire and become emeritus. Since then, he still does his research. Until he retired, the only difference I could see in his lifestyle was always pick up the check when a bunch of people went to dinner together. But he always got the $4 lunch at the Vietnamese soup canteen in the basement of his building. Once he even allowed me to pick up his $4 check.
I don’t know what I truly want to do with my life. So I’d experiment and travel until I figured it out.
After I did, I’d do that.
$100 million is good money and should keep a lot of people happy for life. But for the kind of philanthropy I’d like to do I’d need way more. I’d like to do something like Paul Allen did and fund brain research. I’m not smart or hard working enough to do the research myself, I’d rather write a check if I were a billionaire.
Would you donate half your winnings to anti-aging research?
What if you were at a club with a bunch of your rich friends, and you managed to get a pledge where all of you would ultimately spend half your fortunes on anti-aging and brain preservation research. Would you join the pledge?
Reason I ask is that for those few who have “won” this economic game, aging and death are their only major enemies. I wonder why Bill Gates hasn’t funded anti-aging research with half or more of his fortune. 40 billion would fund a lot of separate efforts.
Or even better, use a big chunk of it to fund a lobbyist group and coax the government to fund that research with even more taxpayer money.
And brain preservation research, because aging is a ridiculously complex topic we may not be able to solve anytime soon, but preserving someone’s brain is a much simpler task. Not as good as stopping aging (since even perfect preservation, your mind is now a “dead rock” and revival probably means turning that rock into a computer simulation by slicing it to bits and scanning it) but better than nothing.
There are a handful of billionaires funding anti-aging research.
Not a lot but Thiel, Ellison, Brin, Itskov, Glenn, etc. are all invested in it.
I do wonder if the first generation of anti-aging research will increase lifespan and healthspan by 5-10 years. That is about the same amount of increase that would come from curing all forms of cancer and vascular disease.
I think the best way to get anti-aging taken seriously is to alert western europe and east asia about how expensive it will be to have a bunch of crippled old people draining social welfare programs. The governments of China, South Korea & Japan could really kickstart anti-aging research.
Yes. My best hope is AI. It’s too complex to explain how, but I think that AI…not “Hal 9000” AI, just some machine learning systems no more advanced than already demonstrated…could speed up biomedical research by at least an order of magnitude.
Right now it’s so inefficient, with these separate labs and separate teams and their only means of coordination being these awful papers that are inefficient, inexact, incorrect, and the whole endeavor can take decades with no meaningful reduction in uncertainty.
One of the key ways that AI will change everything is actually simply that if the bioscience experiments are done by robot, you can record the procedure in a way that can be replicated better than anywhere else.
Robots and AI are obviously becoming huge in Asia. And it is the next logical thing - now they are solving their transportation and pollution and food and other essential needs, it is the next logical step.
I guess in the USA our country instead become enamored with military might for the last 70 years (we better build more fusion bombs to threaten the russians with! Oh no they built their own!) and religion. (no worries, folks, all these millions of people who are dying are definitely in heaven or hell, and if you think otherwise you’re a communist!)
Because anti-aging research primarily benefits the rich, and Bill Gates is trying to help the poor. If you go to the the Gates Foundation website, it says, in giant letters “All lives have equal value.”
If you’re the kind of person who likes having someone else handle the bed, may I propose this little place?
Well, the general neighborhood…
Yeah, for an immense amount of people the biggest anti-aging factors are access to clean water and perinatal care. Those of us who already have them included, but we take them for granted.
I hate to take the minority position on this. But if you could get life extension or brain preservation to work, in 1000 years from now, some number of people who were alive today might be alive then. Same 10k years, 100k years, a million years.
The reason the time is so long is that if the initial life extension tech only gets you to, say, 130, but new tech is being invented. You might turn 125 and the civilization then can just replace your failing organs completely with newly made ones. And then you hit 150 and they can patch your failing brain with new cells that are hacked to never age again. And you hit 200 and they’ve found a way to rebuild your body totally all the way back to 20.
Ok, what about accidents and murder? That’s why the smart ones would probably keep their physical bodies in bunkers, surrounded by robotic waldos able to administer medical treatment. They would access the real world via surrogates.
In the further future, eventually it may be possible to copy your memories and store them to a hierarchy of remote backup servers so that under no plausible circumstances can all backup copies even be found, much less destroyed. You would be respawned on death.
What about all the billions living in the third world now? They are all going to die under almost every possible future. Whether Gates saves them from malaria now or not.
Also, another view is that if Gates personally could live even 10 more years as a result of his research, that is 10 more years he gets to appreciate the consequences of his actions.
Note that most life extension procedures would be accessible to tens to hundreds of millions of people, but not everyone.
I don’t think I could be as generous or socially minded as Bill and Melinda Gates, or even JK Rowling, but I would try to help people in some way with most of it. I think it would be something along the lines of the generous benefactor Phil Knight who keeps the stop-motion animation company Laika going, employing hundreds of creative artists, letting them make movies (Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings) without regard for a profitable return.
Hopefully that would instil the same level of thoughtful judicious philanthropy in my children.
Thats really not true. The main cause of death in most middle income nations are diseases of old age. Cancer, vascular disease, diabetes, dementia.
Global poverty rates are declining, which is good. But once a country stops dying of infectious diseases and malnutrition, they start dying of old age. And the % of people dying from poverty keeps going down. Life expectancy in Vietnam is 76 years at birth for example. Even in most African nations, life expectancy at birth is 55-65. Which means many are dying from old age diseases.
Also biotech depreciates rapidly. Like cell phones, the first generation will only be for the rich. Then the middle class will afford them. Not long after, even the global poor will have them. In the 1980s only the rich in big cities in the US had cell phones. By the 2010s they were in the poor parts of Africa.
AI plays a role I’m sure, but I’m not sure when we will have AI that can meaningfully contribute to scientific R&D. It seems right now it is more of a limited tool, but as time passes it’ll get better. It may be the 2030s before what you describe exists. I don’t know what the timeline is.
Even now there are a variety of reductionist biological pathways that are involved in aging, and various existing ways to alter those pathways to delay the aging process. But again, these will probably only add a few years at most.
Note that the same hadn’t happened with landlines. Part of the reason cellphones spread the way they did was that the land-based part of the infrastructure is physically smaller and easier to watch over and maintain than for landlines. Copper cable got stolen; cellphone towers don’t.
What counts as “rich” is always a big discussion, but by comparison to the almost one billion people below the poverty level globally who die of malaria and unclean water and childbirth, countries where most people survive to old age count as “rich”.
Furthermore, the people who will first benefit from new anti-aging treatments will certainly be the actual rich, since such treatments will be expensive, experimental, and not covered by normal insurance or socialized medicine.
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.
What exactly is “anti-aging research”? It means, we find out what kills people, and then stop that from happening so they don’t die and keep on living.
When people used to drop dead of a heart attack at 65, we used to say they died of old age. But we don’t say that anymore, because we have treatments for that, and your heart attack at 70 is preventable. Now you won’t die at 65, you’ll live until 73 when you die of liver failure. But why can’t we prevent that liver failure? So now you live to 86, and die of lung cancer. So we prevent the lung cancer, and so on and so on. But the failures just keep coming, faster and faster and eventually your body just gives up. My Grandmother had liver cancer at 89, and there was no point in treating it, they just let it take its course.
So every realistic type of anti-aging research is really just basic biomedical research. Treating an 89 year old woman’s liver cancer gives her only a few more years or months of life, treating an 8 year old kid’s malaria gives her another 70 years.
We’re never going to have “take a pill and stop aging”, because that’s not how human bodies work.
That’s not necessarily true. All the examples you give are of treating the proximate cause of death. But we can do more than that. We know that there are organisms that don’t age the way we do. Their bodies can repair themselves at any age, just like young people can repair (lots of) damage that old people can’t. There’s a reason that old people get cancer more than young people, and if we can figure out how to make them not be old, then they’ll get cancer (and all sorts of other health problems that old people get) lots less often. If there’s actually a way to treat the root cause (getting old), it might just fit in a pill.
Or it might not. You’re definitely right that if we just treat the proximate cause of death, eliminating the things that kill young people is a better investment than treating things that kill old people. But anti-aging research is more than just “treat prominent diseases that kill old people”.
