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Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

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21–30 of 87 posts

Re: Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

#21

He's found the best way to live an extended life - be rich. He has access to health care and doctors most people can't afford & preventative tests that typical insurance doesn't cover. Of course, just because you have access to that type of health care, doesn't mean you take advantage of it - Warren Buffett famously put off his colorectal exams forever, nearly costing him dearly. The other aspect of this article that…

Your data doesn't support your claim unless you mean that you can extend life into your 80's.

As for working out, consider the workout guru Jack LaLanne who managed to live to 96.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_LaLanne

Of course, his brother Norman lived to be 97.

Re: Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

#22
I don't want to sound mean but he's still Then, being mean, what I see here is a narcissistic guy who's saying: "I'm so cool and I bet that with exercise I will survive until 130years. Everyone should worship to my phallus idol"

To which I would like to reply: lucky you in being fit and strong and cool and rich and yada yada yada. I hope the best for you, but still this will have a ludicrous scientific relevance.

And finally, to connect with the tabou article of before, there's some one else that think that maybe living longer is a problem and not a solution?

Re: Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

#24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryonics?

Cryonics is similar to religion, it just seemingly costs more. You invest in a promise that may or may not be reality, with religion it's 'follow these rules for ever lasting life after you die', whereas cryonics is 'pay us to cryogenically preserve your body so you may have ever lasting life after death'.

> You invest in a promise that may or may not be reality

I don't think cryonics organisations promise that you will eventually be revived. They promise to try, and they probably think there's a higher chance of it happening than most people do. (But perhaps not higher than most people who pay for cryonics.)

With that in mind, the structure you describe is "pay someone to try to do something that might not work", which also describes investing in startups and any number of other things.

Your objection here is that you don't think cryonics will work. That's a reasonable objection, but the way you're framing it is uncharitable.

Re: Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

#25
post #20

Anecdotally the elderly people I've known who've lived the longest, have been the ones who've been active as long as possible, not just with exercise but also trying to continue either working in some regard or continue travelling and exploring. I'd imagine there's likely studies on it, but as our population ages it'll become more significant.

There's an excellent article about this in the NYT: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-whe...

Thanks, that was really interesting.

Re: Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

#26
post #22

I don't want to sound mean but he's still Then, being mean, what I see here is a narcissistic guy who's saying: "I'm so cool and I bet that with exercise I will survive until 130years. Everyone should worship to my phallus idol" To which I would like to reply: lucky you in being fit and strong and cool and rich and yada yada yada. I hope the best for you, but still this will have a ludicrous scientific relevance. And…

Yup. I know plenty of 80 year olds into ultra marathon running in high country NZ (extremely tough to run) and yet, I'm pretty sure they're not going to "beat death". No matter how fit and healthy they are.

This article is definitely just silly.

Re: Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

#27

Anecdotally the elderly people I've known who've lived the longest, have been the ones who've been active as long as possible, not just with exercise but also trying to continue either working in some regard or continue travelling and exploring. I'd imagine there's likely studies on it, but as our population ages it'll become more significant.

The second president of the United States was an avid walker (3-4 miles a day) and he lived to be 89. John Adams was not a ripped guy.

http://www.presidenstory.com/stat_tal.php

Almost two centuries later and it doesn't seem like we've made much progress on aging.

Re: Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

#28
post #18

Awhile ago there was a wonderful little post about the probability distributions of human lifespan. The distributions fall off super-exponentially with age. What this means is that chances of someone living past 130 without major medical intervention is astronomically small. Even with medical intervention, it seems unlikely someone will live much past the 130 year barrier. Link: http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/…

Looking at your graph, which tells us what we all already really know (we will probably die somewhere between 60 and 80) makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

I think of my grandfather, who is about 80 now. He seems pretty healthy, but I know he probably has a couple more years. I should make the best of every time I see him. Should try to see him more.

Re: Brazilian Billionaire Creates Plan to Beat Death

#29
His plan is only a plan to live healthily. In that he is like David Murdoch [1], who has the fortunate coincidence of living longer, being very wealthy, and having long had good health practices. But once you get past your 70s and 80s, the odds of living longer start to have much more to do with your genes than your past health practices. 75% of everyone with the best diets and healthiest lifestyles die before reaching 90 [2]. 99% die before reaching 100, and your progress in that territory is strongly dependent on genetics. This fellow has about a 50/50 chance of making it through the next 10 years, and only very low odds of making to 100, and there is actually very little he can do to make those odds better that is not also available to the rest of us.

We live in an age in which access to specific types of medicine is very flat. If you have $30,000 and medical insurance, there is nothing that a billionaire can conveniently buy that you cannot also go out and get if you do the legwork and phone calls yourself. Medical tourism, clinical trials, etc, etc. The billionaire can buy a fleet of doctors but he cannot buy a form of medical technology that isn't yet available to other people.

He can of course, create new medical technologies by funding their development, but then it is still available to everyone at the end of the day.

Remaining life span for the old is strongly dependent on progress in medical science, however: the transition of the next few decades from medicine that is only a matter of crudely patching over the symptoms of aging to medicine that addresses the causes of aging. An example of the former is alteration of gene expression through drugs, or introduction of reprogrammed stems to enact repair. In neither case does that address the reasons why gene expression changed, or why native stem cells are not doing their jobs. An example of the latter is breaking down the build up of metabolic waste products like lipofuscin constituents [3] that harm cellular operations and housekeeping machinery, and are increasing prevalent with age.

The future of medicine must be something that evolves from the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) [4], a way to repair the underlying cellular and molecular causes of aging to reverse its course. Everything else that fails to deal with underlying causes is just patching over holes in the dam, or trying to keep an old engine running without replacing any parts: the whole thing fails catastrophically no matter how much expense you go to, and the expense keeps mounting regardless. That is present day end of life medicine in a nutshell, and it must change to preventation and repair of known causes.

Even with far more funding than is presently the case, SENS implementation in laboratory animals is 10 to 20 years away.

If you are in late life then your only practical option for anything other than death and oblivion is cryonics [5], the low-temperature vitrification of the fine structure of the brain in which the mind is stored, done against the possibility that future medicine can restore a vitrified brain to life. (Or, depending on your viewpoint, that it can be scanned and run in software, but that doesn't seem like a very helpful end result to me. A copy of you isn't you).

So as I said at the top, this fellow has a health hobby, but he really isn't doing anything material other than having a good time, and perhaps deluding himself as to how well he is impacting his life span. The only material things worth a damn are (a) 80/20 good health practices like regular moderate exercise and calorie restriction, (b) funding the right rejuvenation-focused medical research, things like SENS that may pay off greatly in the next few decades, and (c) cryonics. Everything else is wishful thinking.

1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/06/07/90-year-ol...

2: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/npp/national-population-projec...

3: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/intra...

4: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

5: http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open-letter-...

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