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Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

I just have to shake my head at this. The only adequate word for this is arrogance. The arrogance to believe that we know enough about the processes of life to extend them indefinitely.

We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now.

We do not know or understand the over-arching cause of cancer, nor the cause of its radical increase. Similarly with heart disease: after a generation of assurances that the cause is a high-fat diet, the premise itself is being rejected. I could go down the list of major congenital diseases, and tell the same story. Even the most basic assumptions which we have about disease are being overturned. And whatever replaces them will likely be overturned yet again.

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> We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now.

Aubrey's point is that we don't need to understand metabolism to repair the damage of aging, just like you can maintain and repair a house or a car without understanding in detail all of the mechanisms that cause damage and failure. You just clean up some of the damage and change some parts periodically so that it never reaches a threshold at which failure is possible.

Our bodies already do this quite well for the first 20-30 years of our lives, but after that, we're in an evolutionary blind spot and long-lived molecules accumulate and eventually make maintenance and repair mechanisms stop working for long enough to lead to pathologies. If we clean up these long-lived molecules, that'll be a very good start.

I disagree with your perspective. Scientists don't need to understand everything about life to make meaningful contributions to our lifespan. This stuff isn't magic - there are sound, repeatable principles at the bottom of everything you mention, and the principles are possibly within our grasp. The technology needed for making these discoveries only gets better with time, never worse.

Look at it this way: crude principles applied at the macro level have extended our lifespan by decades. As scientists get better and better at piecing together the building blocks from the bottom, they'll likely find principles at the micro level that improves our lifespan as well

From TFA: "And each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined."

Totally agreed-- it's insane to think that because you can do some stuff in isolated cases, the combination is a trivial extension.

Hubris is the hallmark of entrepreneurial endeavors. I don't know how many sympathetic ears you'll have here if you're concerned about the "arrogance" of scientists.

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