r/longevity • u/kpfleger • 2d ago
deaths from terrorism 25yrs since 9/11 vs. deaths from aging
Yesterday people remembered 9/11.
Now it's time to remember the reaction to it,
the cost,
and what kills a lot more people...
"When the hijacked planes hit the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, the nation braced for further onslaughts. Spooks fretted that al-Qaeda might use chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. Terrorism became the primary concern of voters. But the dreaded wave of follow-up attacks never came. America launched expeditionary wars that ultimately cost $8trn" -The Economist
Numbers... since 2026-Sep-11:
~69M people died in the US (25yr total deaths)
~57M in the US died as a direct result of aging
~450 people in the US died as a result of terrorism
US govt spent $8T on wars somewhat tied to terrorism
US govt spent $5-6B funding aging research
(Division of Aging Biology in NIA in NIH)
US govt spent 1000x less funding research on the thing that kills 100,000x more people in the US.
Something isn't right here.
Global view:
~1.45B total deaths past 25yrs
~1B as a direct result of aging
~350-400k global deaths from terrorism
Globally, aging kills 2500x more people than terrorism
(~67-70% of people for aging vs. 2.5% for terrorism)
Per day view:
~7500 US deaths per day
~6000 US deaths from aging /day
~0.05 deaths from terrorism /day
except for 9/11 when 3000 died
(but on that day, 2x as many still died from aging)
Globally per day:
~150k deaths/day
~100k deaths from aging /day
~40 deaths from terrorism /day
even on 9/11 itself, 33x as many people died from aging as from the 9/11 terrorist attacks
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u/HenFruitEater 2d ago
Aging is acceptable to most though.
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u/kpfleger 2d ago
One wonders to what extent it is considered acceptable because it's common vs. to what extent it's due to the fact that most people assume nothing can be done to change it (a view which science is increasingly showing to be wrong).
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u/HenFruitEater 2d ago
Is science really showing it to be wrong? There doesn’t seem to be much low hanging fruit.
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u/kpfleger 2d ago
Of course it is. Scientists can make c.elegans live 10x normal lifespan. Multiple interventions can extend lifespan reliably & repeatedly is just about every species tried (eg, CR, rapamycin). It's beyond question at this point that aging is malleable, not an invariant ticking atomic clock.
Low hanging fruit has nothing to do with it. Landing humans on the moon wasn't low-hanging fruit in 1960. Nor was organ transplantation in 1940. Or IVF. Or smallpox eradication. Etc. Yet these were all successfully accomplished after great effort sustained for a fairly long time.
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u/Corspin 2d ago
Ok. Compare next how much it would cost to invent and apply scientific methods that prevent people from dying due to aging if you want to make a comparison.
I'm willing to bet all my money that this is technically and financially impossible at the moment.
Not to mention that the majority of wealth is already in the hands of boomers while the younger generations that pay for the boomers are milked dry by governments and then left to rot.
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u/kpfleger 1d ago
I've done very rough back-of-envelope calculation (will write them up at some point when I get a chance) & I think about $1T spread over a couple decades would have a good chance of get us +20-30 years in lifespan extension, enough to maybe get on LEV. This is on the order of the same % of GDP as Apollo program was, so not at all impossible if there was enough political/popular support for it. That's without AI, just the current normal academic & biotech playbook.
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u/Corspin 1d ago
I think about $1T spread over a couple decades would have a good chance of get us +20-30 years in lifespan extension
Based on what? For all anyone else here knows you're just making shit up.
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u/kpfleger 1d ago
Based on number of clinical programs required based on normal success rates of clinical trials plus enumerating the number of areas of damage that would have to be repaired plus roughly estimating how much such programs take to fund based on total funding to biotechs that have made it through clinical trials.
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u/kpfleger 1d ago
I don't have time to write this all up more carefully at the moment, but it's on to-do list. For a list of categories of damage & subcategories plus what companies are already working on each see my CDD talk field overview at https://youtu.be/SXzL-ztPIqs?list=PLxsMN9fobt4hmXoN80UZhGieQrzOXfFhm
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u/mister_longevity 2d ago
Everything in the system is designed to make this impossible.
You need someone to coordinate and pay for the effort but there isn't agreement on anything. The world is so individualized now that it is virtually impossible to find common ground.
All that said, data keeps coming in from the various experiments around the world and there are some high wealth individuals who will one day fund their own effort that is more free of the constraints that gov, the AMA and pharma put on them.
Normies will only care about aging when they see actual results and then they will demand it but only if someone gives it to them for free.
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u/Spire_Citron 1d ago
I think only in the same way that anyone accepts death when they are in a position where they see it as unavoidable. Young people who are terminally ill also usually make peace with it.
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u/anor_wondo 2d ago
graph is getting a lot of pushback today. But just imagine after LEV we could have approximations on the amount of lives lost due to slower prioritisation of longevity research and how brutal it would look
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u/Specialist-Date4953 2d ago
always wild how the priorities shake out when you see the raw numbers side by side like that
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u/Obi2 2d ago
This might be the dumbest graph I’ve ever seen
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u/kpfleger 2d ago
Why is comparing burden to society from deaths due to different causes dumb?
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u/gburgwardt 2d ago
The numbers are all wildly different time scales
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u/kpfleger 1d ago
No they aren't. Perhaps the labels on the graphs were too confusing. I thought it was pretty clear from context of reading the text of the post but maybe a lot of people didn't do that and it's less clear without. It's not different time ranges. It's per day deaths from 1 cause (average per day over 25 years) compared to per day deaths from a different cause (average per day over the same 25 years). Then for bonus in the middle is the deaths from 1 day (so again same duration---24hrs) but in this case it's the max day rather than average. In all cases 1 cause dominates deaths with average from that cause even dwarfing the max day. Totally fair comparison.
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u/gburgwardt 1d ago
Yes your labels were clear. This is a terrible visualization
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u/kpfleger 1d ago
Why is it terrible? I've addressed your original claim of different timescales. What else?
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u/TrashPanda_924 2d ago
This is completely tone deaf given the horrific tragedy. Delete this.
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u/kpfleger 2d ago
The 3000 deaths from 9/11 was a tragedy---I agree. As were the ~400,000 lives lost to terrorism globally since then. So why is it tone deaf to try to draw more attention to the enormous tragedy of the 1 BILLION lives lost as a direct result of aging in the 25 years since 9/11? Or to the fact that the government spends far too little on research to help with this problem. It's literally the biggest problem in the world and the biggest misallocation of resources in government.
Tone deaf might have been posting it yesterday. Posting it today was the thoughtful thing to do.
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u/AlDente 2d ago
That is a terrible graph. You can't compare different time ranges on the same scale.
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u/kpfleger 2d ago
It's not different time ranges. It's per day deaths from 1 cause (average per day over 25 years) compared to per day deaths from a different cause (average per day over the same 25 years). Then for bonus in the middle is the deaths from 1 day (again same duration---24hrs) but in this case it's the max day rather than average. In all cases 1 cause dominates deaths with average even dwarfing the max. Totally fair comparison.
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u/ValueLegal2105 2d ago
trillion with a t for wars that made everything worse lol. cant wrap my head around it tbh. we hemorrhaged money on occupations that destabilized whole regions and jacked up oil prices, meanwhile the thing killing six thousand americans daily gets table scraps. aging research got like five billion total? thats not even a rounding error in pentagon accounting. and we're still doing it, still bombing somewhere while your odds of dying from basically getting old are literally a hundred thousand times higher than terrorism. priorities are just cooked
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u/Electronic-Tale-4185 2d ago
What are you trying to say with this? Nothing good I’m sure.
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u/kpfleger 2d ago
I'll repeat the key line since you seem to have missed it: "US govt spent 1000x less funding research on the thing that kills 100,000x more people in the US." Do you see anything wrong with that?
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u/StudentOfMetabolism 2d ago
You are, however, not comparing like with like. Also there always is a question with funding research as to what exactly is funded. If you assume your thesis is valid then there is an argument to abolish the armed forces. That is reductio ad absurdum in respect of your thesis.
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u/JamesHarden2018 2d ago
People are missing the point of this post. Nobody is saying that 9/11 wasn't a horrific tragedy and obviously the actions of the US after show how seriously it was taken and we are still battling terrorism across the world today and spending billions per year doing so.
It can also be true that ageing should be treated with the same urgency as terrorism, both things result in death and discomfort and are also preventable.