10 ms·

NewLimit: a company built to extend human healthspan

sschueller 5y ago
SpaceX is titering on bankruptcy so I don't know if your really want to be the "SpaceX of living for ever". Also asking your employees to work over the holidays (SpaceX Company email) because of your management failures is not a good company culture.
- extheat 5y ago
  Those “management failures” seem to be working pretty well then, as the US gov and private industry don’t seem to see the fuss. Where’s your competition? That said, it is definitely foolish the comparison here.
- varjag 5y ago
  If SpaceX goes public it'll be drowned in capital the day of IPO.
vgchh 5y ago
Frankly, this is what America has always been about - A combination of science, technology and capitalism. We need a lot more of these moonshots attempted at a massive scale. So what if it may not work out? People can not stop for the fear of failure. If founders have money and resources, by all mean I for one welcome these with open arms.
- ghoomketu 5y ago
  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.
  - kiba 5y ago
    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.
    - xvector 5y ago
      Gradual replacement uploads would retain continuity of consciousness
    - czynskee 5y ago
      Permutation City is a great exploration of this idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
    - mrshadowgoose 5y ago
      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.
youngtaff 5y ago
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
- zemvpferreira 5y ago
  That's the logic of mass homicide. How many children would you kill now, today, to spare the generation after the burden of taking care of them? Why haven't you killed yourself to spare (y)our children the pollution your existance causes? Humans are a burden to humans, but we're also humans' best shot at prosperity. Let's not be so quick to deny the upside of living longer, healthier. (That said I agree with you that up to age 80 or so the recipe for general healthspan is very simple and up to personal responsibility)
- tomp 5y ago
  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
  - youngtaff 5y ago
    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
dav_Oz 5y ago
If I look around me - and I'm more at the bottom, at grassheight relative to billionaires and UHNWI in general on skyscrapers - I see a host of other immediate "longevity issues". For one there is a substantial amount of people just trying get by and being like 50/50 on the choice of rather being dead already or trying to get through somehow 'till the next day, ad infinitum: from depressives who are stuck in a loop of ever growing void of meaningless in "wealthy" countries to factory workers serving as means to an end kept away from "jumping to termination" by saftey nets. And of course those infamous 10% in absolute poverty which nowadays is more like a definition game by statisticians sponsored by the World Bank showing steady progress since the 1800s. From a psychological point of view it becomes exponentially difficult to not have an inflated ego with more and more wealth. If I would win the lottery today my ordinary psyche would not be able to process it adequately, I would inevitably grossly overestimate my contribution to it, we are simply not finetuned to handle gigantic orders of probabilites. So it comes off as a childish thing for most of us mere mortals trying to overcome your "lifetime" limitations without taking into account your environment the "soil of decaying and growing matter" in a biosphere going around an unimaginable ball of pure "fuel" in its dimension and age seperated by a vastness of nothingness in between. At some point in the "success-intoxicated" linear chase of an ever increasing personal "lifetime" I would speculate that one would reach a critical point, a no point of return in which the sense of the self would ultimatley shatter, your (biographical) memories become obliterated beyond "recognition", so just another death-life cycle we are seeing and studying already in all life around us. So, I would appreciate the more sober tone of just improving life in general like addressing immediate, mundane and unspectcular things like e.g. the wealth gap instead of playing on the reptilians chords of our brains by searching the "cure of aging" which kind of gives off a vibe of an coke head.
- xvector 5y ago
  While people working on longevity might sound like "coke heads" to you, generations from now your descendants will scarcely be able to imagine a world where death was not a willful choice, and they will look back on today as "that horrific time when people just dropped dead." They will find it barbaric and terrifying that people could not live life out to contentment, but rather, were forced to die, and people merely accepted it rather than doing anything to fight it. Finally, addressing the wealth gap is not mutually exclusive from solving much more important problems like death.
LNSY 5y ago
I'll take any opportunity to post this William S. Burroughs essay: https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2015/03/immortality-by-william-s-burroughs.html https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2015/03/immortality-by-wi... Only Burroughs could truly capture the ghastly consequences.
pixelgeek 5y ago
Well this certainly makes sense in a country where people can't afford healthcare at all and some even do their own dentistry.
morpheos137 5y ago
Can somebody explain to me why do people fear death?
- mrshadowgoose 5y ago
  I don't fear it. I simply don't want to unwillingly die. Life is incredible, and I'd like to continue enjoying it on my schedule. "Conscious entity doesn't want to die" should be justification enough for not wanting to die. However, it seems that just because we've lived with a naturally imposed expiry date for so long, we are expected to accept death after an arbitrarily imposed time limit. I live in an artificial structure because I do not accept the natural outdoor conditions that my ancestors lived in. I communicate with people around the world, using horrendously artificial means, because I refuse to accept the silly natural limitations of local auditory communication. I choose to accept antibiotics for infections that would otherwise naturally kill or maim me. And if I can, I will choose to opt-out of death, the greatest disease that afflicts all of us. As an aside, I do fear the tragedy of the aging process, for both myself and other people, but although that's presently a tightly-coupled problem, I'm assuming we're strictly discussing death and not aging.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  have you tried it?
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    Pretty much every night when I go to sleep.
    - xvector 5y ago
      You would not sleep tonight if you knew with complete certainty that you would not wake up.
- samwillis 5y ago
  I fear not being there to provide for my kids and seeing them grow up. The opportunity to help them grow into better people than myself and watch what they do with their lives. I think that’s a legitimate fear, and nothing to do with what happens next to me.
shafyy 5y ago
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 be better. I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging such as dementia and various cancers. But when I read this announcement I feel an air of arrogance that fucking annoys me.
- bobcostas55 5y ago
  This is just deathist brainrot. If we lived for 10k years "naturally", would you support killing people off after 70-80 years? Of course living longer would make things better.
  - swader999 5y ago
    Living that much longer through disease and natural degeneration elimination with the possibility of still dying from trauma might be quite horrible. Aversion to risk would logically skyrocket. Would skiing or even driving make sense?
    - dudeman13 5y ago
      You'd make the same argument if your life expectancy was 40 years and people proposed medicine could let you live to 80. You'd also make the same argument if your life expectancy was 200 years and medicine advancements could let you live to 300.
    - kiba 5y ago
      I suspect almost no human beings actually carry out such a rational calculation of risk.
  - redwood 5y ago
    Better?
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
On the one hand, try to live forever with this. On the other hand, accelerate the burning of the planet by giving more people access to an energy-wasting ponzi scheme. Your 2 goals are incompatible with each other, Brian and Blake.
- inkblotuniverse 5y ago
  Clearly, they don't think so.
supercon 5y ago
Mixed feelings. On one hand I can imagine situations where longetivity and its development might really be useful, for example when (if ever) we enter the human space travel era, where the human lifespan will eventually start to factor in. On the other, its hard to not consider the deeper meaning of such pursuits. After all, death is what gives life meaning and pushing it further raises lots of possible negatives e.g. 1) less sense of urgency 2) traumatic death will be even more traumautic, especially in the early years of life… I do wish I can live healthily to the end of my days, but its really a sort of miracle in todays world if the reaper doesn’t collect you before aging runs it course.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > death is what gives life meaning citation needed
  - supercon 5y ago
    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.
    - newsbinator 5y ago
      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.
      - supercon 5y ago
        Sure. I’m not saying death is the sole provider of meaning, but still a major one, no matter how far we push it. As long as an inevitable end exists, we will adjust our life and actions with it.
      - 5y ago
newsbinator 5y ago
This makes perfect sense to me. If I were a billionaire, I'd very quickly drop down to millionaire because I'd be putting 99% of my funds into solving the "our bodies and brains are ridiculously failure-prone" problem. And I'd be begging every other billionaire to do the same.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  Most billionaires I know would rather leave behind a legacy in the form of charitable foundations, their work, and their families. Squandering their fortune in a vain attempt to extend their own lives is not a widely accepted choice. Most rich folks would rather preserve their fortune for their offspring or try to make the world a better place. Eventually many people, rich or not, notice that the younger generations are better equipped to run the world. Not to mention we'd be better off extending human life by preventing and curing diseases and ailments like cancer and heart disease.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    There’s no better legacy than “stopped death and disease from tearing down your grandchildren’s generation and every generation after it.”
    - jcrben 5y ago
      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.
      - datameta 5y ago
        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.
galfarragem 5y ago
Imagine you are "filthy rich", what would be your main worry? Having money without having time is meaningless. Consider also that "crypto millionaires" are often sophisticated "lottery winners", they didn't get their money like Bezos or Musk. The bright side is that society as a whole will profit from this also.
RichardHeart 5y ago
I raised $27M for longevity research (SENS.org). Summary of pro death arguments: Fairness Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.) Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) Bad for society Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent) Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) Stop having kids Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136) Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age) Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.) Old people suck. (death is an inferior cure to robustness.) Bad for individual You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related) You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?) You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.) Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.) People will force you to live forever (they aren't able to do this now, why would they begin to be?) Do you think less people make progress faster? What's your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years? More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then. Man up, save your family, save yourself. P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  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
ampdepolymerase 5y ago
> 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.
danielrpa 5y ago
I'm not criticizing the effort nor being sarcastic: was there any measurable progress by any of the companies working on increasing longevity? I'm talking about actual increase of lifespan, not promising ideas.

SpaceX is titering on bankruptcy so I don't know if your really want to be the "SpaceX of living for ever". Also asking your employees to work over the holidays (SpaceX Company email) because of your management failures is not a good company culture.

extheat 5y ago
Those “management failures” seem to be working pretty well then, as the US gov and private industry don’t seem to see the fuss. Where’s your competition? That said, it is definitely foolish the comparison here.
varjag 5y ago
If SpaceX goes public it'll be drowned in capital the day of IPO.

vgchh 5y ago

Frankly, this is what America has always been about - A combination of science, technology and capitalism. We need a lot more of these moonshots attempted at a massive scale. So what if it may not work out? People can not stop for the fear of failure. If founders have money and resources, by all mean I for one welcome these with open arms.

ghoomketu 5y ago
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.
- kiba 5y ago
  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.
  - xvector 5y ago
    Gradual replacement uploads would retain continuity of consciousness
  - czynskee 5y ago
    Permutation City is a great exploration of this idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
  - mrshadowgoose 5y ago
    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.

youngtaff 5y ago

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

zemvpferreira 5y ago
That's the logic of mass homicide. How many children would you kill now, today, to spare the generation after the burden of taking care of them? Why haven't you killed yourself to spare (y)our children the pollution your existance causes? Humans are a burden to humans, but we're also humans' best shot at prosperity. Let's not be so quick to deny the upside of living longer, healthier. (That said I agree with you that up to age 80 or so the recipe for general healthspan is very simple and up to personal responsibility)
tomp 5y ago
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
- youngtaff 5y ago
  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

dav_Oz 5y ago

If I look around me - and I'm more at the bottom, at grassheight relative to billionaires and UHNWI in general on skyscrapers - I see a host of other immediate "longevity issues". For one there is a substantial amount of people just trying get by and being like 50/50 on the choice of rather being dead already or trying to get through somehow 'till the next day, ad infinitum: from depressives who are stuck in a loop of ever growing void of meaningless in "wealthy" countries to factory workers serving as means to an end kept away from "jumping to termination" by saftey nets. And of course those infamous 10% in absolute poverty which nowadays is more like a definition game by statisticians sponsored by the World Bank showing steady progress since the 1800s. From a psychological point of view it becomes exponentially difficult to not have an inflated ego with more and more wealth. If I would win the lottery today my ordinary psyche would not be able to process it adequately, I would inevitably grossly overestimate my contribution to it, we are simply not finetuned to handle gigantic orders of probabilites. So it comes off as a childish thing for most of us mere mortals trying to overcome your "lifetime" limitations without taking into account your environment the "soil of decaying and growing matter" in a biosphere going around an unimaginable ball of pure "fuel" in its dimension and age seperated by a vastness of nothingness in between. At some point in the "success-intoxicated" linear chase of an ever increasing personal "lifetime" I would speculate that one would reach a critical point, a no point of return in which the sense of the self would ultimatley shatter, your (biographical) memories become obliterated beyond "recognition", so just another death-life cycle we are seeing and studying already in all life around us. So, I would appreciate the more sober tone of just improving life in general like addressing immediate, mundane and unspectcular things like e.g. the wealth gap instead of playing on the reptilians chords of our brains by searching the "cure of aging" which kind of gives off a vibe of an coke head.

xvector 5y ago
While people working on longevity might sound like "coke heads" to you, generations from now your descendants will scarcely be able to imagine a world where death was not a willful choice, and they will look back on today as "that horrific time when people just dropped dead." They will find it barbaric and terrifying that people could not live life out to contentment, but rather, were forced to die, and people merely accepted it rather than doing anything to fight it. Finally, addressing the wealth gap is not mutually exclusive from solving much more important problems like death.

LNSY 5y ago

I'll take any opportunity to post this William S. Burroughs essay: https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2015/03/immortality-by-william-s-burroughs.html https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2015/03/immortality-by-wi... Only Burroughs could truly capture the ghastly consequences.

pixelgeek 5y ago

Well this certainly makes sense in a country where people can't afford healthcare at all and some even do their own dentistry.

morpheos137 5y ago

Can somebody explain to me why do people fear death?

mrshadowgoose 5y ago
I don't fear it. I simply don't want to unwillingly die. Life is incredible, and I'd like to continue enjoying it on my schedule. "Conscious entity doesn't want to die" should be justification enough for not wanting to die. However, it seems that just because we've lived with a naturally imposed expiry date for so long, we are expected to accept death after an arbitrarily imposed time limit. I live in an artificial structure because I do not accept the natural outdoor conditions that my ancestors lived in. I communicate with people around the world, using horrendously artificial means, because I refuse to accept the silly natural limitations of local auditory communication. I choose to accept antibiotics for infections that would otherwise naturally kill or maim me. And if I can, I will choose to opt-out of death, the greatest disease that afflicts all of us. As an aside, I do fear the tragedy of the aging process, for both myself and other people, but although that's presently a tightly-coupled problem, I'm assuming we're strictly discussing death and not aging.
cblconfederate 5y ago
have you tried it?
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Pretty much every night when I go to sleep.
  - xvector 5y ago
    You would not sleep tonight if you knew with complete certainty that you would not wake up.
samwillis 5y ago
I fear not being there to provide for my kids and seeing them grow up. The opportunity to help them grow into better people than myself and watch what they do with their lives. I think that’s a legitimate fear, and nothing to do with what happens next to me.

shafyy 5y ago

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 be better. I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging such as dementia and various cancers. But when I read this announcement I feel an air of arrogance that fucking annoys me.

bobcostas55 5y ago
This is just deathist brainrot. If we lived for 10k years "naturally", would you support killing people off after 70-80 years? Of course living longer would make things better.
- swader999 5y ago
  Living that much longer through disease and natural degeneration elimination with the possibility of still dying from trauma might be quite horrible. Aversion to risk would logically skyrocket. Would skiing or even driving make sense?
  - dudeman13 5y ago
    You'd make the same argument if your life expectancy was 40 years and people proposed medicine could let you live to 80. You'd also make the same argument if your life expectancy was 200 years and medicine advancements could let you live to 300.
  - kiba 5y ago
    I suspect almost no human beings actually carry out such a rational calculation of risk.
- redwood 5y ago
  Better?

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

On the one hand, try to live forever with this. On the other hand, accelerate the burning of the planet by giving more people access to an energy-wasting ponzi scheme. Your 2 goals are incompatible with each other, Brian and Blake.

inkblotuniverse 5y ago
Clearly, they don't think so.

supercon 5y ago

Mixed feelings. On one hand I can imagine situations where longetivity and its development might really be useful, for example when (if ever) we enter the human space travel era, where the human lifespan will eventually start to factor in. On the other, its hard to not consider the deeper meaning of such pursuits. After all, death is what gives life meaning and pushing it further raises lots of possible negatives e.g. 1) less sense of urgency 2) traumatic death will be even more traumautic, especially in the early years of life… I do wish I can live healthily to the end of my days, but its really a sort of miracle in todays world if the reaper doesn’t collect you before aging runs it course.

newsbinator 5y ago
> death is what gives life meaning citation needed
- supercon 5y ago
  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.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    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.
    - supercon 5y ago
      Sure. I’m not saying death is the sole provider of meaning, but still a major one, no matter how far we push it. As long as an inevitable end exists, we will adjust our life and actions with it.
    - 5y ago

newsbinator 5y ago

This makes perfect sense to me. If I were a billionaire, I'd very quickly drop down to millionaire because I'd be putting 99% of my funds into solving the "our bodies and brains are ridiculously failure-prone" problem. And I'd be begging every other billionaire to do the same.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
Most billionaires I know would rather leave behind a legacy in the form of charitable foundations, their work, and their families. Squandering their fortune in a vain attempt to extend their own lives is not a widely accepted choice. Most rich folks would rather preserve their fortune for their offspring or try to make the world a better place. Eventually many people, rich or not, notice that the younger generations are better equipped to run the world. Not to mention we'd be better off extending human life by preventing and curing diseases and ailments like cancer and heart disease.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  There’s no better legacy than “stopped death and disease from tearing down your grandchildren’s generation and every generation after it.”
  - jcrben 5y ago
    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.
    - datameta 5y ago
      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.

galfarragem 5y ago

Imagine you are "filthy rich", what would be your main worry? Having money without having time is meaningless. Consider also that "crypto millionaires" are often sophisticated "lottery winners", they didn't get their money like Bezos or Musk. The bright side is that society as a whole will profit from this also.

RichardHeart 5y ago

I raised $27M for longevity research (SENS.org). Summary of pro death arguments: Fairness Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.) Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) Bad for society Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent) Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) Stop having kids Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136) Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age) Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.) Old people suck. (death is an inferior cure to robustness.) Bad for individual You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related) You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?) You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.) Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.) People will force you to live forever (they aren't able to do this now, why would they begin to be?) Do you think less people make progress faster? What's your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years? More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then. Man up, save your family, save yourself. P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.

cblconfederate 5y ago
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

ampdepolymerase 5y ago

> 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.

danielrpa 5y ago

I'm not criticizing the effort nor being sarcastic: was there any measurable progress by any of the companies working on increasing longevity? I'm talking about actual increase of lifespan, not promising ideas.