The headline is confusing. This is not about a company that's becoming older. It's about a building a biotech company that treats the symptoms and causes of aging.
Anti-aging would be an attempt at reversing it, rather than still going "yep, this happens" but making it a nicer ride before you're forced to get off.
Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve.
As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea.
For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.
Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to fiat wealth, engaged in vain wank.
Aging exists because the human body is optimized to survive and reproduce in a resource constrained environment with many threats. Our predecessors eked out just enough calories to survive to the age of 15, when we could begin reproducing. Any traits that made it more likely for us to survive until that point, even if those traits resulted in damage that would eventually accumulate and wear us down after our reproductive window, was selected for. We are all basically running the biological equivalent of overclocked CPUs without investing in proper cooling.
We no longer exist in a resource constrained environment and have access to massive amounts of energy from the sun which makes entropy a negligible concern. There is no good reason to not at least try to prevent or reverse senescence.
I don't think "live to 15, have kids, and die" makes sense as a model for humans, even if you're modeling them solely as child generating machines.
Humans are a pretty damn care-dependent species. They're not going to defend or feed themselves without years of support, so if they aren't surviving en masse into their 30s and 40s, the next generation is probably going to have a severe die-out.
Beyond that there's probably ongoing marginal benefits to species fitness with longer lifespans. If you can keep a few generations in circulation at once, you probably have greater resilience to things like disease outbreaks (the 50-year-old cohort might have some past related immunity to a disease that rampages the 20-year-olds).
This also completely ignores any value of intelligence and ability to pass down knowledge, which is definitely a fitness factor just for being able to prevent future generations from poisoning themselves as easily.
Having kids takes a long time, especially when many of them die of infection or malnutrition. So yes, you're absolutely right that evolution "cares" about human beings up until they hit ~40. At that point, human beings enter the selection shadow, when improvements to survivability have a negligible impact on selection. I was eliding this point for clarity but I don't think it really alters my broader argument.
This is all pretty obvious when you look at one of the main diseases of aging, cardiovascular disease. There are natural genetic variations that result in very low free LDL blood levels, which basically prevents artherosclerosis from every developing and which inspired the development of the PCSK-9 inhibitors. However, there's no evolutionary benefit to not dying of cardiac arrest when you're 60, but there are marginal benefits to the liver binding to fewer LDL particles when people are in a starvation environment, so these variations never became widespread.
The grandparent hypothesis is certainly compelling and might explain some marginal improvements in human lifespan relative to e.g. chimps (who live about 10-20 years less than us even in captivity). But if anything, that reinforces my broader point, which is that aging did not develop as some kind of culling agent by evolution and that we should be looking for ways to extend human longevity now that we have the resources to.
Death is a natural sweeper that allows progress, evolution, rapid change and adjustment to new situations. The opposite brings, well, the opposite.
The life well lived is a life thats easy to let go, regardless of your beliefs. The more people messed up the more they desperately cling to it (I know its vastly more complex, but this is the core of what I see around).
I am not claiming we shouldn't be trying to make lives better, or longer. But immortality will be humanity's doom - there is endless row of puttin' and trumps and hitlers and stalins and maos in every single generation, and the only real working solution is inevitable death, none of them went or will let go power on their own from the bottom of their good hearts. That is unavoidable since it comes from base character of humans, whether we like it or not.
I'd say we should shoot on sight all researchers and VCs pouring time and money into directly immortality, that's much safer bet than some immortality bringing long term prosperity for mankind.
That's a nice theory but I don't want to bet future of mankind on some feel-good logic. In my view, a-holes remain a-holes, self-centered narcissists double so.
Feel like trump for example got wiser and saner and more rational the second term? Because literally whole world believes otherwise. He has his whole clan to think of due to consequences of his actions, if he cared. puttin' is same, just sour keg of bad beer that should be poured down the river (or some better ecological disposal of garbage).
Why do you think 70-80 year old "middle aged" politicians would get a chance when 150 year old "boomers" with wealth and powerful networks might be able to call the the shots?
What interest I have in anti-aging is less about living forever than alleviating suffering on the way out. Living to 80, 90 or 100 seems like plenty of time on earth but making that last half of our lives less achey, infirmed and delirious is a noble goal.
By that logic, why not just execute everyone over 35? They're just slowing down human progress.
Aging doesn't exist because it benefits us, we did not choose 70-80 to be the ideal lifespan, and my back doesn't continuously ache to give new ideas a chance to spring forth.
> For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.
Sure but that's because the US voting demographic is old. It's the tyranny of the majority [1]; as the largest generation the baby boomers can vote and do vote for things that advance their interest. I'm not sure this phenomenon works if people live out to 150 years as the generational bubbles would be relatively smaller.
Strange because in a way we've already had these for a long time for the visual signs of aging, moisturizers , wrinkle creams etc.
And we've been trying to treat all the symptoms of aging for a long time too. Alzheimers, heart disease , arthritis etc. They just haven't been explicitly "anti-aging"
This app has been great. I've used it a lot to identify the birds that inhabit my back yard.
I tried using it in New Zealand last year, and it wasn't as effective as in the US: I think it hasn't been trained as well on the native New Zealand birds, many of which aren't found anywhere else.
Amusingly, it identified turkeys when we were in New Zealand, which I was irritated with because there clearly weren't any turkeys in New Zealand. It turned out I was wrong when we came across a flock of them in the Waikato area running around in a sheep field. A local told me that they were brought there around a hundred years ago and are mostly left alone because nobody eats turkey in New Zealand.
Agreed. As a citizen, most interactions with border control are unpleasant. The only positive experience I've ever had was at a quiet border crossing in Maine where I met what was probably the country's only friendly CBP agent.
I had a Brother Multi-Function color scanner/printer that lasted almost 15 years. In the end, the scanner started to malfunction, doing blurry scans, but the printer portion still worked great. Toward the end, it started complaining about low black toner, and I looked up when I last bought black toner: it had been 7 years earlier.
I ended up buying a new Brother scanner/printer that can do full-duplex scanning and printing. The thing is amazing, and I'll likely have it for another 15 years. It's solid and reliable, and the toner lasts a really long time.
We discovered that many towns in Iceland have municipal pool/sport complexes, and those were great to visit. They were quite affordable for single visits, the pools were great (with various pool temperatures to choose from), and many of them had extras like pool toys and waterslides, which were a hit with the kids.
This is very nice. I didn't know Pluto's orbit was more inclined than many of the others.
It also gives me strong "The Expanse" vibes. Probably because there are so many orbital bodies shown that were mentioned in those books. I also learned that Pallas is an actual asteroid.
Appreciate the comment! The Expanse and Paul McAuley's Quiet War series both get a lot of inspiration credit for this project. I tried to include every body that has some "brand recognition", whether from fiction or from real spacecraft missions. There are actually quite a few asteroids and comets that have been visited in real life — NASA, ESA, and JAXA have been doing amazing things in the Asteroid Belt over the past few decades.
Seconded, the whole design seems like something straight out of the books. And it also feels like it's just waiting for other solar systems to be included there…
About a month ago started reading the first book of the Murderbot Diaries (All Systems Red) after seeing it recommended multiple times. I have to admit that it didn't sound all that interesting, but I'm glad I gave it a try.
It's really good, and I've since read the next two books. They are all more of a novella length, so I've been finishing them much faster than the average novel.
I wanted to call that one out if anyone is looking for a good read.
Also, Mistborn has been memorable since I first read it about 8 years ago. That's a very good story. I'm considering reading it again, which I rarely do with books I've read within the past decade.
As a Californian living in the central valley, where we never get snow, I had never heard of snow tires until I lived in Germany, where seemingly everyone had them in winter. Nobody around here has them or even sells them.
When we go up into the mountains in winter, either the roads are cleared and we can drive on them with normal tires, or it's snowing heavily and we put snow chains on the tires and drive slowly. I've only had to use snow chains a couple times in my life because I generally only go into the mountains when it's not currently snowing, which is most of the time.
Climate change has made the climate drier here, the mountains get a lot less snow than they used to. It also helps that real winter with snow storms only lasts about 3 months.
It's the same for Canada if you choose to drive any of the mountain highways passes. The cops will fine you if they catch you without a "mountain-snowflake" graded tire.
I also discovered Storyteller among the Netflix games and loved it: truly a gem. However, just like you said, when I finished it, I didn't have any reason to come back to it.
"Into the Breach", on the other hand, kept me coming back for a long time. It's definitely an iOS game though: completely unsuitable for most devices that use Netflix.
That was one thing that the article didn't explain that I was curious about. What does days mean in this context and how does the court determine the number of them? Why days combined with a variable fee vs just a variable fee?
