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Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

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Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#181

Post by Taek »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #100
a13n wrote: post #56

I'm not a billionaire and I'm not old, but I am so excited about anti-aging. I know Hacker News is super negative, but who doesn't want to live longer?! Of all the pain points humans experience, you'd think death lies pretty high on the list. Why are people fighting this?

I absolutely, 100% do not want to extend my life. And for the record, I am quite pleased with my life. I do not fear death, I do not worry about it, it does not concern me. Therefore I do not feel the need to combat it in any way. The good truly does not exist without the bad, life without death, and so on. Walking the path of "controlling" your life and/or death like this seems needy, egotistical, and pretty sad, im…

Surely you can respect though that other people feel differently though? Everybody has their own way of life.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#182

Post by ryuker16 »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #89
pointytrees wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes talk about wanting to live forever and get weird stares. Are you joking me?? I want to hike every trail in the world. I want to climb every mountain. I want to play every video game. I want to beat the hardest raids in every expansion of WoW. I want to learn multiple langauges. I want to spend several years living in every biome. I want to learn all of the programming languages. I want to go back to schoo…

Thankfully death comes along and sorts through the wants from the willing. It has a nice way of making space for a newer generation of thinkers. Old prejudices die, new thinkers arrive. There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else. I guess this is the rub I get from most people that extol the Silicon Valley dream of extending the…

I'd imagine a society with 200 yr old people would be much wiser and sanely run.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#183

Post by Taek »

meerkats1 wrote: post #8

I would love to get involved with a company like this, however I am only a software engineer with no background in the biological sciences. Is there a feasible path that does not involve going back to school for many years? I am not afraid of learning new things or doing the hard work I'd need to do, I just feel like that route would be highly inefficient. I would really like to contribute towards meaningfully extend…

I'm sure most labs would kill for a 'don't care about the salary' skilled software engineer. You might start out just following orders but once you're on the ground floor you'll pick up the jargon, you'll see what research is currently 'hot', and if you pay attention and stay informed you'll find yourself moving in the direction of industry expertise.

As long as you can get your foot in the door there's no requirement to go back to school.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#184

Post by Taek »

farresito wrote: post #128
Chinjut wrote: post #126

I want desperately to live longer, or even to recapture youth, and yet, my worry: When finally science unlocks the secret of immortality, they'll just raise the retirement age correspondingly.

The concept of retiring will disappear relatively soon. I don't even think we will be working 8 or 10 hours every day. I think society will make a shift when it comes to work.

People can't help themselves. I don't think we're very close to retiring, it's just not in our social coding.

Today, to live free of work, you need about $500,000. There are groups of people dedicated to achieving this (FIRE / Moustaches). Then you live somewhere cheap, make sound investments, and live off of $25k / yr. In the right places, less than 1/4 of that will go towards rent.

If our primary concern as a society was escaping work, we'd be better at it. Most of our modern economy goes towards making things better, not cheaper (phones, transportation, entertainment, etc.).

We're already at a point where as a society we have the tech to live off of 10 hour work weeks. But we'd have to focus our economy on making a low standard of living cheap, instead of focusing it on raising the standard of living.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#185

Post by Evgeny »

misiti3780 wrote: post #46

I just finished a book by Nick Lane where he discussed how he believes aging is cause by mitochondrial free-radical leakage. His hypothesis (and he is a smart guy) is that science will allow people to live longer, but probably not much longer than 125. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20021368

His hypothesis (and he is a smart guy) is that science will allow people to live longer, but probably not much longer than 125.

Not exactly! I just finished the same book and the exact quote is: I doubt we will ever find a way of living much beyond 120 by merely fine-tuning our physiology.

So he's a smart guy indeed! He says that there still may be ways to extend lifespan, but they have to be more radical compared to just fine-tuning physiology.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#187

Post by eagsalazar2 »

Humans should not be immortal like gods until they attain godlike control of their impulse to consume and reproduce. If we get total liberation from nature's constraints (already 90% there), without evolving a corresponding ability to plan and resource long term, it will make the ecological disaster we're already witnessing 1000X worse and we'll likely destroy ourselves anyway.

I'm not saying death doesn't suck or that I wouldn't like to save my loved ones from the suffering that comes with old age, of course as an individual I would. Still extending life is a terrible idea from an ecologist point of view. How about while we're at it we extend the life of and provide unlimited food and protection from predation to elk? That would go real well right? Right now we are no different than Elk in our ability to manage our own consumption.

To people who say "oh we'll figure it out" I say yeah maybe but we're already wrecking this earth as it is, why add fuel to the fire? And everyone will have to die someday anyway and it will still suck.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#188

Post by BjoernKW »

xixixao wrote: post #93
BjoernKW wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough time? Perhaps, but forever is a long time. Quite possibly it's exactly our limited time that has us achieve great things. If you have all the time in the world why bother starting that business or learning that new skill today? Might as well start tomorrow ... I also find it at least a bit disturbing that WoW is so high on that list. Then again, if you have all the time in the world ...

Also, no one is trying for immortality. You will still die, just not from standard health decline. Hack, why not at least try and see what happens, going back to normal dying will be easy (depending on the cure, but most likely).

> going back to normal dying will be easy

Depending on the solution, normal dying might indeed be impossible. I remember a piece of dystopian fiction (I think it was an Outer Limits episode) where characters couldn't even kill themselves anymore because nanobots would instantly repair any damage.

Not that this scenario is extremely likely but there might be ramifications we can't think about yet. Immortality after all isn't a particularly well-trodden path.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#189

Post by ancient_kaiser »

ryuker16 wrote: post #182
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully death comes along and sorts through the wants from the willing. It has a nice way of making space for a newer generation of thinkers. Old prejudices die, new thinkers arrive. There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else. I guess this is the rub I get from most people that extol the Silicon Valley dream of extending the…

I'd imagine a society with 200 yr old people would be much wiser and sanely run.

Yes, that would be lovely, Kaiser Wilhem I would still sit on the throne of Prussia and Rutherford B Hayes would be seeking re-election.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#190

Post by BjoernKW »

nickpinkston wrote: post #85
BjoernKW wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough time? Perhaps, but forever is a long time. Quite possibly it's exactly our limited time that has us achieve great things. If you have all the time in the world why bother starting that business or learning that new skill today? Might as well start tomorrow ... I also find it at least a bit disturbing that WoW is so high on that list. Then again, if you have all the time in the world ...

I'm unsure if anyone who thinks "there's just not enough time" is the kind of person who would sit around because of their immortality.

There's the rub. The feeling of "There's just not enough time." precisely stems from the fact that our time is limited. If that's no longer given that feeling might disappear from humanity entirely, which in turn could lead to stagnation and ultimately - and ironically - to mankind dying out.
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