Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

lafollette.wisc.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 535 posts

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#481

Post by Intralexical »

oceanplexian wrote: post #467
nabla9 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It has also become popular with billionaires to invest huge sums of money into life extension, or at least cosmetic surgeries to appear younger (Hair transplants, etc). 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.

Some would say that if they were able to find meaning in life or cope with mortality, then they wouldn't have hoarded so much money and tech in the first place.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#482

Post by [deleted] »

nradov wrote: post #425
ACCount37 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for them to decide, not you. I don't have enough cruelty in me to demand that someone should stay in Sudan and try to "fix" what's happening there.

Would you have said the same about the USA's founding fathers in 1776 who stayed to fix what was happening there?

[deleted]

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#483

Post by [deleted] »

Levitz wrote: post #357
ACCount37 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for them to decide, not you. I don't have enough cruelty in me to demand that someone should stay in Sudan and try to "fix" what's happening there.

Do you have enough cruelty to promote immigration, grabbing the best people a country has to offer, leaving it in the gutter?

[deleted]

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#484

Post by ACCount37 »

sdeframond wrote: post #442
ACCount37 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kind of solution that scales as "O(n) effect with the number of people involved", but isn't broadly implemented? It's usually at least O(n log n) on the effort required to actually involve those people. This vital input is the source of piss poor scaling in practice. Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does…

Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they can be sold . A healthy lifestyle must be earned. It is a constant struggle against the fastfood industry. Soon you'll see Coca-cola or Nestlé [0] selling both very unhealthy quasi-addictive food and drinks to kids and magic pills that cure obesity. Sounds scalable enough ? [0] https://www.nestle.com/brands/healthcare-nutrition/medical-n...

Miss me with that "must be earned" bullshit.

If you think that being healthy should be a reward for a lifestyle of virtue, that's your problem, not mine. I'd rather have an actual solution than a blanket "those people don't struggle hard enough", pointed at the majority of US population that's overweight.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#485

Post by [deleted] »

pembrook wrote: post #449
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we really have to read again and again the same fantasies the far right spew out continuously here in France on Hacker News? It’s so easy to factually disprove, it’s kind of boring. I will keep it short because I value my time but here some things you might want to ponder: - America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no…

I find it very ironic your username is 'StopDisinfo.' First, the idea there is no American integration is just funny, given millions of your countrymen moved to the US just 2-3 generations ago and yet French identity is essentially non-existent in the US. In fact, there's more ethnically french people in America than in Canada, and yet Canada has very strong french cultural identity by comparison. Second, I wasn't ar…

[deleted]

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#486

Post by EasyMark »

adastra22 wrote: post #4

There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature.

I'm not saying this isn't possible, as some simple lifeforms seem to be basically immortal but our systems are much more complex and consist of many more moving parts and we are just meat machines. Machines wear out and you have to replace the parts. We're no where near being able to replace all of our parts. So there is a pretty good reason why at least the people currently alive aren't going to see what you're saying come to fruition. Entropy is a bitch.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#487

Post by EasyMark »

elitan wrote: post #16
meindnoch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this feeling he's going to die way earlier than he would have if he just lived a normal life.

I have the opposite feeling.

I don't, he's using he body like a lab. One of those experiments is likely to go terribly wrong rather than just eating optimally and exercising and crossing your fingers and hoping that you won the genetic lottery.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#488

Post by sherburt3 »

Intralexical wrote: post #465
pyth0 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe that extending human life will make “life better”?

Wouldn't it be great if every figure we learned about in history class was still alive and kicking today? Wouldn't that just make everything so much better? "So long as men die, liberty shall never perish."

Have you heard of term limits?

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#489

Post by mcswell »

inglor_cz wrote: post #283
ggm wrote: post #191

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…

I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future. An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost…

I read an article somewhere around 1960 that predicted we'd achieve travel at the speed of light in 25 years (I forget the real number, but within the lifetime of many people living then), and exceed the speed of light shortly thereafter. He based his prediction on the increases in speed of travel over decreasing spans of time, starting with people running, then tens of millennia later horseback, then a couple millennia later steam ships and trains, then a century later airplanes, then sixty years later orbital space travel.
Post reply on HN