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NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

blog.newlimit.com

111–120 of 141 posts

Re: NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

#111
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no better legacy than “stopped death and disease from tearing down your grandchildren’s generation and every generation after it.”

I agree with Elon Musk that immortality is actually not great, and would instead lead to a static dystopia. New generations need a chance to put their own stamp on the world.

The new generations would be (and are!) quicker to adapt to and create new norms. It used to be that just a few generations ago the middle and elder generations were the carriers of experience and wisdom vital to thriving in the world. This is still true to a certain extent but new societal norms created in large part thanks to the steady (or exponential) march of technological progress are more easily adapted to by the younger generations.

In addition, term lengths could be placed on more than government roles to prevent excessive solidification of rules and procedures.

Re: NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

#112
> What differentiates SpaceX from NASA, or SpaceX from Blue Origin, is people and culture. We are not trying to build an institute or academic minded organization where papers are more important than products. Our goal is to build an ambitious, well run, for-profit company that will deliver revenue generating products on the way toward accomplishing its much bigger objective.

It is debatable whether they truely understand the financials of biotech. The grind of basic research will never go away. Many successful biotech company essentially acquihire researchers and work that is already 80% complete, the role of the company is to bring it to production. That itself will make up the bulk of the company's workload. Similarly, SpaceX had the benefit of leveraging an existing pool of talent and resources; you cannot build a heavy launch company in Zimbabwe. If they want to do both active basic research and at the same time trial therapies, then they would need an enormous amount of funding (on the software unicorn level). You will need scale on the same magnitude as Pharma giants like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson and Johnson to be able to acquire companies, run trials, and discard ideas that do not work. In the current bull market, this is the perfect company to build with Coinbase's founder as the chief fundraiser.

Re: NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me this statement is a logical conclusion to the thought experiment ”imagine if everyone lived forever”. But I realize maybe for some it isn’t, so lets categorize this as an opinion.

Well there's probably no version of everyone living forever. Societies will still fail. Natural disasters will still happen, not to mention wars and terrorism. Functionally there'll still be an end-date for most "human" lives. But there's plenty of meaning to be found in 10,000 or 100,000 years of life, without disease and death lurking around the corner every day.

> death lurking around the corner every day.

It will still be lurking around the corner and it will change your risk calculus completely. Today, if you go out and get hit by a bus, at worst, you lost 70 years of your life. In the future, you're risking 10-100k years of your life. What's worse is having to accept this risk for your loved ones.

A better question to consider would be, what would people do if they had only 1/5/10 years to live.

Re: NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, longevity is just a bridge to get us to live long enough to transfer our consciousness to small robots. I'd rather live 1000 years as an solar-powered ion rocket roaming around the nearby stars than as a fragile protein meatpack

I personally think it would just be fun to re-program myself. What would life be like if I could make myself less argumentative? If I could turn myself Christian? If I could make myself enjoy OOP? Also, imagine all the various hardware updates I could get - how cool would it be to see UV/IR?

"I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more."

https://youtu.be/mPnx3zO3SDc

Context at 1:14, quote at 2:08

Re: NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

#116
post #103

We know how to make people live longer – provide them with good healthcare from cradle on, reduce pollution, help them out of poverty etc. Biggest problem with people living longer is the costs of supporting them increase dramatically, and who's going to pay these costs? Increasing longevity places a burden on our children, and their children

You're confusing (deliberately?) a few different things. (1) better healthcare, reducing poverty etc. lift the floor of longevity but not the ceiling (2) "cost of old age" is exactly what longevity research attempts to reduce - noone is interested in living longer as a vegetable; instead, the goal is to increase healthspan - living healthier for longer

Better healthcare, reducing poverty etc., lift the ceiling.

In many parts of the worth we are living longer due to these things (or were before Covid)

Longevity research may also be interested in lifting this further but are all these people who now live cor even longer going to want to carry on working?

If not what are they going to live on, how are their pensions going to be paid for, how are we going to mitigate the extra demand placed on earth etc.?

I'm going to die one day and I'm fine with that

Re: NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

#117
post #3

There is something dystopian, childish, naive, desperate, arrogant, sad and tragic about billionaires founding and funding longevity companies and projects. They think that they've got it all, but deep down there's still this gaping hole of meaninglessness. They can control evertything. Everything but death. If only they can find a way to live longer, maybe even a way to never die of natural causes, everything will b…

Increase in human lifespan (and longevity of "youth") is the most obvious sign of the success of modern civilization. We have doubled the average life expectancy in just about a century, so by your reasoning, past humans would likely call us "arrogant" when on average we live better, more fuller lives than they ever did. There will be unintended consequences of humans living longer, of course but those are problems w…

We've doubled life expectancy by lowering the rates of early deaths.

Even in antiquity, healthy people lived to their 60s.

That might be the 70s or 80s now, but the quality of life at those ages isn't great - take a stroll to your local elderly home.

Re: NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increase in human lifespan (and longevity of "youth") is the most obvious sign of the success of modern civilization. We have doubled the average life expectancy in just about a century, so by your reasoning, past humans would likely call us "arrogant" when on average we live better, more fuller lives than they ever did. There will be unintended consequences of humans living longer, of course but those are problems w…

>We have doubled the average life expectancy The only reason the average value shifted so much is drastically reduced infant mortality rate. If you managed to live to the age of twenty two centuries ago, chances were you'd die as an old man

Or twenty two centuries ago.

Even in Roman times healthy individuals lived to 60

Re: NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

#120
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I wouldn't even mind if somebody spent billions on finding an 'Upload' like solution where you can just put your consciousness in a computer and live forever like that instead. People generally have a knee jerk hate for such things but I welcome that with open arms too.

I wouldn't push the upload button unless it is a last resort. It's a philosophy problem about consciousness and continuity more than anything else. Call it the star trek teleporter problem.

It really depends on how the hypothetical upload process works.

Scan and replicate? Heck no. That's just death, with the creation of a new consciousness that behaves exactly like the original, while not being the original.

It would require mature nanotechnology, but it might be possible to transition a whole brain neuron-by-neuron into a simulated space, while proxying existing connectivity between the original not-yet-transferred neurons and newly transferred simulated neurons.

Our brains already experience continuous physical drift while maintaining a continued sense of self. So the gradual, online, ship of Theseus approach might work for uploading as well.

Ultimately I don't think it will be provable as to what is actually required for a non-destructive transfer of consciousness, as a copied consciousness will still perceive itself to be the original.

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