461–470 of 535 posts
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Maybe, but I feel like most would eventually reach same conclusion as the (majority of) protagonists in the good place…
That's just terror management of death.[1] That's why we say things like "death gives life meaning". Utter bollocks. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DF54G8F9/
For reference: the movie "Soylent Green" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/
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Seems more like billionaires spending money on trying to live forever has an edgy image in non-billionaire cycles. Sure, maybe Gates and Buffet really aren't that interested in living forever, but the likes of Thiel and Musk aren't exactly noted for techno-pessimism or caring whether the average normie thinks they and some of their investments are creepy, and they absolutely have the dealflow and the connections to e…
Thiel put a couple of million in some edgy stuff with little to show for. It is nothing compared to the order of magnitude that Gates invested in malaria.
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What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal. We also know germ line cells can give rise to new organisms which can give rise to germ line cells in an unbroken chain effectively forever. This is quite far from making a human immortal but it shows that there appears to be nothing in physical law or intrinsic to biology that prohibits it. Therefore it is possible. Star travel and terraformin…
Not in any sense that's applicable to humans.
The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3].
In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc.
Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals.
Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are?
In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body?
I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay.
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76371-0
1: # Greenland shark metabolism over entire lifespan
sh -c "units '((30mg/oxygen)*(mol/g))/hour/(1000/1000^0.84*kg) * (434kJ/mol) * 200year' MJ/kg"
2: # Greenland shark lifespan metabolism, alternate estimation
sh -c "units '192kcal/day*200year/126kg' MJ/kg"
3: # Human metabolism over 1 decade
sh -c "units '150W/100kg*10years' MJ/kg"
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesisEarlier quoted context omitted.
Yes very illogical to hope that life will get better when my analysis proves the opposite. Bazinga!
Why do you believe that extending human life will make “life better”?
"So long as men die, liberty shall never perish."
Genetics required. Natural evolution has zero interest in old people, so there has been no evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan. Possibly even the opposite. We could apply that pressure, either through selective breeding over generations, or through direct genetic modification. Maybe we aren't quite there yet, but it won't be long. Experiments on insects with selective breeding have easily tripled lifespans. How…
In modern society there is little evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan, but that's a very recent phenomenon. If my parents watch my kids and do the cooking so I have more time to hunt or work the field that improves the survival chances of my children, and my children share 25% of their DNA with their grandparents. The grandparents living a long productive life is good for the survival of their grandchildren, and…
The life-span extension experiments I have read about specifically only allowed older adult insects to reproduce, pushing that age later and later. Adults that died early did not reproduce. Massive evolutionary pressure.
Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence. If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity. The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no l…
Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact. While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence. - Possible in our lifetime. - Affordable to the faithful. You remove these two, and the faithful lose their…
I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
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The study takes all the advancements you mention into account, and says that even with that rate of progression, the specified life extension target (100y) is unlikely. Just like perpetual motion or time travel. On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.
"takes all the advancements you mention into account" And I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. There is no way you can extrapolate from basic experiments like Katcher's to the year 2080.
Well, the study is literal science from a scientific institution, compared to an internet comment so... It wins here.
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The same magic that keeps some people on quasi-life support for sometimes decades already. You could imagine entirely curing cancer, heart disease, frailty and infection but not brain degeneration, for example. Curing everything else except frailty also seems invidious, though with sufficiently good brain-machine interfaces perhaps that would be less of a problem: you can just float in anti-impact gel from 100 and 20…
Weird that you say that because these life support systems are exactly what I had in mind as evidence to the contrary. Without such an external life support system attached keeping you alive, there's not going to be some drug that holds your body together in a zombified form. Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body, as would what…
I'm not sure that's a foregone conclusion. Loads of interventions put extra pressure on other body systems (often, but not always, the liver and kidneys). Sometimes to the extent that even if you may "manage" the original complaint, it comes at a substantial cost to overall health. And heart muscle is pretty special anyway, so it's quite possible it's a separate treatment to skeletal muscle problems.
And pretty much any system failing can kill you so if long term life extension comes from targeted treatments per problem, you need to hit bones and cartilage, muscles, skin, nerves, brain, GI tract, kidneys, liver, immune system, endocrine system, lungs, etc etc, but also not overstress any one with the treatments of the others and also handle almost-inevitable cancers.
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Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition? or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan (let's say 400 years for the sake of argument here).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark