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How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years
HughPickens.com writes Bloomberg News reports that venture capitalist and paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has a plan to reach 120 years of age. His secret — taking human growth hormone (HGH) every day, a special Paleo diet, and a cure for cancer within ten years. "[HGH] helps maintain muscle mass, so you're much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis," says Thiel. "There's always a worry that it increases your cancer risk but — I'm hopeful that we'll get cancer cured in the next decade." Human growth hormone also known as somatotropin or somatropin, is a peptide hormone that stimulates growth, cell reproduction and regeneration in humans and other animals. Thiel says he also follows a Paleo diet, doesn't eat sugar, drinks red wine and runs regularly. The Paleolithic diet, also popularly referred to as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is a modern nutritional diet designed to emulate, insofar as possible using modern foods, the diet of wild plants and animals eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era. Thiel's Founders Fund is also investing in a number of biotechnology companies to extend human lifespans, including Stem CentRx Inc., which uses stem cell technology for cancer therapy. With the 70 plus years remaining him and inspired by "Atlas Shrugged," Thiel also plans to launch a floating sovereign nation in international waters, freeing him and like-minded thinkers to live by libertarian ideals with no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.
30 years was about right for the paleolithic. Neolithic though, our best guess is around 20.
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The paleo diet might end up being silly, but just once I'd like to see this discussion without the kneejerk "20-30 year life expectancy".
If you made it to 15 years of age or so in a hunter-gatherer society, you might reasonably expect to survive to 60. As an infant, you are highly likely to fall prey to disease or poor care, pushing the life expectancy at birth way down on average even though those deaths usually had nothing to do with the diet of a mature adult in the community. Adults didn't usually drop dead at 30 from poor nutrition.
Another childless, rich, white male plans to live(practically) forever - STOP THE PRESSES!
Dude, have a kid. It's cheaper, more reliable and far more fun.
Not at all. But civilization doesn't have to always be the bureaucratic mess it is today, as perpetuated by the established "liberal" and "conservative" (that is, entirely anti-freedom and advancement of society on both sides) incumbents.
Socialism in particular fails because the only motivation inherent in the system is to improve the lives of others. The cool thing about making a society more democratic and less restrictive (that is, moving toward the libertarian sense of what a government should be) is that it makes it really obvious how you can benefit from the self-improvements of others, and how they can benefit from your own self-improvement at no cost to yourself.
Why does everyone always think that a libertarian ideal is completely geared around making money? It doesn't have to be. My ideal would be as much humanist as libertarian, and I expect that's more of what is being talked about with the "seasteading" project as well, since it seems to come from the Randian vision of how to define a model person.
Yeah, I think people underestimate the difficulty of extending life.
This.
Of course, you could put evolution back on the proper track of life extension by only allowing females who had family histories showing all second-gen forebearers living past 90 to bear children, and then only by being inseminated by the sperm of men similarly sired and then only collected past the age of 75 or so to make sure their "stupid genes" didn't weed them out. Wash, rinse, repeat with cutoff ages increasing. The rest is simply culling of the herd - it might take a few hundred generations, but I'm pretty sure there'd be a few tricks left in the old genome that would let us get to be 120.
That is all.
The interesting thing is when researchers did plots of estimated ages of paleolithic skeletons, the population showed exponential decay from the age of maturity. For modern populations in advanced societies the # deaths vs. age of death curve is relatively flat until you start getting into the 60s and 70s.
What this tells you is that paleolithic people didn't die from age related causes. They got picked off by accident, mishap, violence or infections that cut down people in their prime, so it made no difference whether you were 16 or 30, your chances for surviving another year were the same.
So this kind of makes sense; he's looking to move into a population which does not die from age. It's the kind of thing that makes intuitive sense, but often doesn't pan out. What *might* make sense is a counter-intuitive move: fasting, or intermittent fasting where you fast on alternate days. This reproduces the way paleolithic people consumed calories: not three meals a day on the clock, but feasting after a kill and making
Taking HGH is just proof that having money doesn't make you smart or well-informed. He is going to need that cancer cure soon if he keeps that up. His plan is like pouring oil on a smoldering fire and hoping they develop really good fire extinguishers soon. It also seems very un-paleo to me. Paleolithic people went through periods where they had plenty of HGH (feasting) and periods with low HGH levels (fasting). Some researchers believe the fasting period confers many aging related health benefits.
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