Lol people donāt get it. The longevity treatments are the medical care. āToo oldā.
People still imagine you biologically age at the same rate, become decrepit at 60-70 and then just get older for 1000 years.
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A_User
#3
Anyone would accumulate so much wealth simply by investing in index funds that no one would eventually need to work and everything would be automated. Itās the power of compounding and time.
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The comments on that article are unreal man. The pro-aging trance is much worse than I thought. But itās simply that theyāve not thought it through.
People utilize all kinds of interventions currently available to meaningfully improve their quality of life and alleviate their suffering, yet somehow the idea of new things being invented to add on top of those is this taboo subject.
Theyāre ready for the divine creator to pluck them from this mortal realm when they are spiritually chosen to leave. Oh whoops they have a slight headache better pop something for that slight discomfort, anywhere where was I oh yes Iāll keep it natural thank you!
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The great irony here is once these treatments come out people are going to be aggressively entitled about getting them. They are going to go nuts over it.
Think about the hype around Ozempic, but x1000000. Unironically.
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Sounds good. But until itās available, Iāll stick with my exercise, good nutrition, aggressive screening for disease and some meds / supplements (Rapamycin, Acarbose, Taurine, Lithium etc).
As a thought experiment āWhat would I attempt if I had 1,000 yearsā is kinda fun. You could quite literally move mountains in that time!
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Difference being, practically every fat person HATES being fat and would take anything in order to get rid of all their fat. It is thin people who dislike ozempic because it creates competition.
Good thing about aging is everyone ages and no one likes it. They might cope otherwise but if they had the simple ability to undo metabolic damage of aging they would simply just do it.
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I have been properly obese. I donāt see it that simplistically
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It is that simple though: No one likes being fat. Of course there are obese people who have internalized societal shaming to the point where they believe that obesity is a sign of being a gluttonous, greedy and evil person and that using GLP1 is cheating. But the rest of us dgaf about being a good/virtuous person or not and simply wants to use the best tool available to us.
Three strategies for not dying ā depending on how you define you:
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Pearsonās Upload: Mind becomes software. No body, just a backup running on silicon.
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Kurzweilās Merge: By 2029 AI catches up, by 2045 we merge ā a gradual slide into cyborghood.
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de Greyās Repair: Stick with biology, fix what breaks, and push the organic lifespan to 1,000+.
I believe all three will happen. The first two are what I call āgoing into the machine.ā (ire in machinam) Maybe that counts as life, idk.
Me? Iām with the third camp ā staying in the body as long as I can pull my weight on the bar. Literally.
In the year 2100, folks like me might look like the Amish ā still driving a buggy while others float in the clouds or stalk the earth as chrome-plated cyborgs.
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One advantage of getting old is that youāve seen it all before and so are less likely to be taken in by hype. All this mind to silicon body to machine on some ridiculous timeframe is just laughable nonsense. None of that is going to happen within the lifetime of anyone alive today. The best most realistic chance we have is some superheavy duty genetic engineering to give us a whale-shark-tortoise 200-300 year lifespanā¦ maybe, wildly optimistically it could happen in the next 50 years, but the chances are very, very low.
Itās been over 20 years since rapa was shown as life prolonging in most animals - not even in humans - and nothing since. What does that tell you? Progress is extremely, extremely, extremely slow. Currently, there are NO life extending interventions that provably slow aging to affect max ifespan. None. Zero. Zilch. Not even by one second. And no, AI will not rescue us - itās another hyped up technology that is long on dreams and short on delivery.
Iād love to be wrong - believe me; how could I not be? My life is on the line too! Iād love nothing more than for all the wild eyed projections to be true. Alas, reality is what it is.
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Totally fair on the hype fatigue. Weāve seen plenty: Google Glass flopped, but AR lives on in quieter forms. Segway didnāt change cities, but now weāve got sleek electric unicycles. The big promise often doesnāt land ā but something related usually does.
Thatās how I see mind upload and digital souls. I think theyāll technically happen ā the hardware will get there. But like Segway, I donāt trust the experience to match the pitch. Thereās something thereā¦ just not what theyāre selling.
Thatās why I lean bio. Stem cells, tissue repair, cloning ā we already have the parts. Now itās just a matter of figuring out how to smooch them into place and the body will integrate them. To me, thatās not science fiction ā it just an engineering problem.
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Neo
#14
Can you unpack what you mean by this one?
I totally agree with this. Iām not into the uploading my mind into machine idea. Thatās just data, itās not me. Cyborg isnāt something that attractive to me. Maybe mechanical things can replace organs that are failing hard but Iād prefer biological solutions.
Maybe something like nanobots that just go throughout the body clearing up every problem could be good.
Limited (non-brain) body part replacements with mechanical devices is OK in my book - example IOL for the eyes. Iām going to get IOL in both eyes when the time comes and the technology has evolved sufficiently. YMMV.
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I agree. In the real world, the number of centenarians (age 100+) is rising rapidly, but the number of supercentenarians (110+) is not. Only a handful of people ever make it to 115, and the record for human lifespan (122) hasnāt been broken since the last century. Furthermore, we still donāt have a solid scientific grasp of what aging is, let alone how to stop or reverse it. These facts donāt justify moving the bar to 1,000 years, or hyping the solution is just around the corner.
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There is probably a me somewhere else in a multiverse experiencing eternal bliss forever. Does this help me somehow?
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Kurzweilās Merge: By 2029 AI catches up, by 2045 we merge ā a gradual slide into cyborghood.
You donāt need AI to become a cyborg.
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Eh, progress happens in waves. There are times when nothing of importance happens for decades, centuries or even billions of years and then bƤm, sudden explosive developments.
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Sure Neo ā Iām not a specialist, but hereās what I mean:
Weāve already shown we can clone mammals (Dolly the sheep was 1996), and we know how to reprogram adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) ā basically turning skin or blood cells back into stem cells that can become almost anything.
We can grow organ-specific tissues in the lab ā kidney organoids, liver buds, even heart patches. And with CRISPR and other gene-editing tools, weāve got a way to tweak the DNA blueprint itself ā which we already have mapped out in ridiculous detail. Every cell in your body carries a copy. Itās not magic ā itās replication and logistics.
So when I say āwe have the parts,ā I mean:
- We know how to generate the raw biological material
- We have the instructions (DNA)
- And weāre learning how to direct it to build or repair what we need
The hard part isnāt the concept ā itās the precision delivery. Thatās why I think of it like a transportation, integration and logistics problem. Not easy, but not unknowable either.
Now, if someone could build a functional human genome from clay and beach sand?
Thatād be a feat worthy of myth ā or at least a Nobel and a lightning bolt.
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