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Silicon Valley's Quest To Extend Life 'Well Beyond 120'
HughPickens.com writes: The Guardian has an interesting article on the current quest sweeping Silicon Valley to disrupt death, and the $1 million prize challenging scientists to push human lifespan past its apparent maximum of about 120 years. Hedge Fund Manager Joon Yun's Palo Alto Longevity Prize, which 15 scientific teams have so far entered, will be awarded in the first instance for restoring vitality and extending lifespan in mice by 50%.
"Billionaires and companies are bullish about what they can achieve. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company. Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." ... In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal, and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people.
Why might tech zillionaires choose to fund life extension research? Three reasons reckons Patrick McCray, a historian of modern technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. First, if you had that much money wouldn't you want to live longer to enjoy it? Then there is money to be made in them there hills. But last, and what he thinks is the heart of the matter, is ideology. If your business and social world is oriented around the premise of "disruptive technologies", what could be more disruptive than slowing down or "defeating" aging?
"Billionaires and companies are bullish about what they can achieve. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company. Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." ... In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal, and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people.
Why might tech zillionaires choose to fund life extension research? Three reasons reckons Patrick McCray, a historian of modern technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. First, if you had that much money wouldn't you want to live longer to enjoy it? Then there is money to be made in them there hills. But last, and what he thinks is the heart of the matter, is ideology. If your business and social world is oriented around the premise of "disruptive technologies", what could be more disruptive than slowing down or "defeating" aging?
So many billionaires in Silly Valley, and none of them is willing to invest more than $1 million in extending their lifetime to forever?
Clearly they don't expect much to come out of this research.
Its true that cancer is an almost inevitable consequence of simply living, and the longer you live the more likely you'll have it -- but many cancers are treatable, depending on the particulars of the strain. You think these people aren't prepared to pay top dollar for the best treatments when/if the time comes that their longevity has a consequence?
I don't know about you..
but one of the greatest things about the modern age is the considerable technlogically amplified pleasure(entertainment, learning, naked pics) that are available to everyone even if you're a slob working for 5 bucks a day in Asia.
A fair comment, I agree completely, and to be clear, I don't expect 100% leisure time or an age of work-less abundance. I'd just like to see everyone (myself included) continue to have a right to continue to earn a living. However the greed of the top percentage of our society will ensure this childish, fanciful and ridiculous dream of mine is unsustainable for the myself and most of our society. Western civilisation as we know it is returning on its unstoppable orbit, ultimately terminating in the embrace of serfdom. The Black Death was the only thing that allowed us to escape last time and then only at enormous cost.
Remember, as a '1-percenter' it's less about ensuring one wins, as that's already well-assured dear boy. More important is that everyone else loses! That's where the joy and the true victory lies!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Silicon Valley's Quest To Extend Life 'Well Beyond 120
followed by the government's quest to extend the pension age well beyond 115
And why do you feel that defeating cancer isn't already part of the research into helping us live longer?
You can make the same argument about all of it, the longer you live the more likely you are to catch any deadly disease. The longer you live the more likely your heart is to give in. The longer you live the more likely you are to suffer a stroke. The longer you live the more likely you are to go deaf and lose your vision.
Cancer is no different, increasing age increases the chance of suffering all these things. Part of living older is defeating or delaying each and every one of these possible threats. What makes you think that cancer is somehow a distinctly different problem on the way to the same goal as the rest of it that means that it should be singled out and held up as a possible problem of increasing age more than anything else?
Yes, take a look at that page and consider what Blackburn got a Nobel for then get back to me. It's not a reset button.
I'm 40 and I'm ready to check out. DNR, etc.
I've seen it all and can't build up much of an excitement for anything. I can't imagine that my Dad is 90 and my Mom 86 and they're both not showing signs of going anytime soon.
Just my luck to be stuck with depression *and* longevity. I keep telling people that I'm 25 years away from my best years in the past, but I don't think I can last another 25 just to live through the decay of everything I used to enjoy.
These idiots better work on getting rid of aging, not just clocking in more years.
Mostly random stuff.
Some (most?) billionaires deserve 120 years of continuous radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Imagine if Genghis Khan's life had been extended, or Stalin's.
So we have to kill a few tens of billions of people in order to kill off the Khans and Stalins? To damn the entirety of humanity for however long it exists to short, painful, ignorant lives? To create suffering on a scale orders of magnitude greater than anything these guys ever did or were capable of? If you were to actually do that, you would be even worse than those old terrors were.
Seem to be panicking upon realizing that aging and mortality are the great equalizers.
I see such things as the greatest form of selfishness, it wasn't enough they hoarded resources from people in their own generation. They want to continue to do so to their children.
So cancerous mutations represent a measurable delta-S that normal cellular processes do not? Do please, tell me more!
It's funny all of the things people try to credit to the second law of thermodynamics that aren't even talking about thermodynamics, as if you can user-define "disorder" any way you wish ("cancer sounds disordrous... so let's say that the second law of thermodynamics means cancer will occur!"). No, the only thing in that regard that's an inescapable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that at least some day all humans will be dead, as the universe will have died of heat death.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Khan's empire still would have collapsed, as would Stalin's. And likely faster. Not only that, but the lessons of history would have stayed learned, rather than us having to repeat them over and over. Khan would be able to tell us today that just printing money feels great for a few decades, but it inevitably leads to destruction, while Stalin could tell us that Communism simply doesn't work. Not only that, but the people who lived under them would have learned how much power they had after going through some number of revolutions, and would never again allow people to have arbitrary authority over them.
Stop trying to justify things just because you think they are inevitable.
All these nerds turning 40+ and thinking about their mortality.
The "anybody who wants to prevent/stave off death is just 'scared shitless' " meme is one I've seen before from a wide range of sources, and I can't for the life of me understand how so many people can be so stupid. Fighting death is the logical thing to do, the *obvious* thing to do, whether you're rich or poor. Fighting death has given us life expectancies better than any other point in history. It has given us medical advances that seemed impossible just a few decades ago. It has improved quality of life across all ages. It has vastly reduced infant and childhood mortality.
It doesn't even seem to make sense as a religious objection. Biblical characters had vastly longer lifespans than we do - the concept of "Methuselah" as relating to longevity is fairly common, yet Methuselah's lifespan was merely the longest, rather than being exceptionally long compared to others of the same generation and lineage - and while some people are focused on ending death entirely (via things like brain uploading or cryopreservation with later revival), that doesn't apply to this project. It's not exclusive to the rich; rejuvenation and clinical immortality memes have been widespread in science fiction for decades, and most SF authors aren't exactly Scrooge McDuck. It is most common in the developed world (in many third-world nations, the fact that life expectancy can be higher is completely obvious, as their developed neighbors demonstrate) but certainly isn't exclusive to California.
The "found something you can't buy?" meme is also a stupid one. The vast majority of things people can imagine today - never mind things we'll be able to imagine in the future - are things you can't buy. People work constantly to bring new things to market. Prior to Tesla Motors, you couldn't buy a pure-electric car with a multi-hundred-mile range. Prior to Iridium, you couldn't buy a telephone usable anywhere in the world. Prior to the medical development of penicillin, you couldn't buy a cure for most bacterial infections. Prior to... you get the idea. Technology marches on. Today, you can't buy a life expectancy of 100, but that's no reason to avoid working on it!
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...