Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood into an Elixir of Youth
wired.com
wired.com
I mean, the blood is harvested today, but someday it's gonna be synthetically produced, probably. you gotta start somewhere!
Anyone who has kids... or parents, for that matter.
It seems there are like 3 or 4 things you can’t innovate on without being vilified as some out of touch, Mr Burns-style caricature.
Food is one. Blood of those younger than you seems to be another. Suggesting that jurisdiction shopping to avoid all possible compulsory-military-funding is a good thing is another.
I’m probably missing a few more. What else is a tradition that tampering with freaks people out on an irrational level? Probably something to do with daily routine like showering or sleeping or pooping or health maintenance.
Are we talking about soylent? hasn't took off yet has it?
...and solve overpopulation and unemployment by using young people as its raw resource in the process?
Once the minimum quality of life is at a point where a young someone from SV wouldn't mind living it (and, incidentally, knocking off 4 of the top ten causes of death), we focus our time, money, and intelligence into extending lifespans.
Of course, that won't happen. It's easier to throw money at re-selling plasma or stem cells than it is to actually improve people's lives.
Is this taking blood from donations from people with more genuine needs?
The massive concentration of wealth in a few people is going to fuck up the world. This is just the latest sign.
And yet I have to wonder, would future generations see it that way? Was organ transplant considered deeply disturbing 2 centuries ago?
[0] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-04-18/desperately-poor-filip...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/01/05/...
Sometimes we need to have morals that go beyond what a period thinks.
Whatever way future generations see some things, they would still be bad.
It might not be easy (or possible) to go against one own's era morals, but moral relativity in this sense shouldn't be an argument for the present era ("yeah, we think it's bad now, but in 2500 they might consider it ok, it's all relative").
That's too absolute for a concept so relative. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
Imagine equal right for all people, a concept past generations would have discarded and lunacy. Someone 200 or 2000 years ago might have said "whatever any future generation might say about equality it will still be bad".
Well, the only way your example works is if you ascribe to what I said. Because you imply that those persons were wrong -- and thus that "equal rights for all people" is the correct choice. Not just for now, but for then too -- they just didn't know it.
That's kind of what I'm saying too.
I can't guarantee that anybody's morals are valid. Or that they will be considered valid in the future.
I just say that we shouldn't relativistically lax our morals just because "the future might think differently on this matter". That's the future's problem. Except if its some trivial matter. Some stuff we should consider bad for the ages, even if the ages disagree with us.
To answer the dead comment below: "Homosexuality was considered bad 2 generations ago, are [y]ou saying it should have been fought tooth and nail then?"
No, I'm not saying this or that particular moral is wrong or that this or that period got it right.
Just that it can't be trivially dismissed because it might change or have changed in the past.
Obviously one could just as easily reverse the question: "are you saying it was correct for them to consider homosexuality bad 2 generations ago just because those were the morals of their day?".
If you say "no, it was bad then too", then you got to my point. Morality might be changing over time, but we should not merely "adapt to the times" but go with what we really think is the best moral option for all ages.
But opening the door to such morally or ethically questionable endeavors usually has to be done when they are still considered as such, questionable. So what I'm saying is that this might be deeply disturbing today but maybe that's how it should be so something good can come out of it in the future.
I know, it's purely philosophical.
People already donate blood to cure other people, and old age is the deadliest disease possible since it kills in 100% of cases.
Curing the disease of the unlucky few is quite different from allowing the rich to live longer and accumulate more wealth, from a societal standpoint.
Accepting this line of reasoning means accepting that there are situations where society is allowed to kill some people for some greater good, which is deeply wrong.
The argument also depends on several assumptions about the way this technology will work, which are likely to be wrong (e.g. that price of extending life will never be reduced enough to be available to poorer people, that having more time to learn, won't help poor people to become richer, that reduction of the fraction of resources spent on reproduction won't help society to become more stable and more wealthier).
But even the worst case scenario, when everything on earth belongs to old people, is actually good, because it means there is more incentive for other people to go explore other planets and stars!
I think you’re being overly optimistic. First of all, we already have a society where the rich have access to life extending services. The life expectancy gap between the rich and poor is 20 years[0] in the United States. While in theory we absolutely could provide this to the poor and they would probably accumulate wealth and reproduce more slowly, politically and socially I see zero evidence that this would happen.
Second, the price for a life extending treatment will be arbitrary. How much do you think a company that can tack 30 years onto your lifespan will charge? Again we could force them to sell cheap, but we can’t prevent ERs for charging $200 for aspirin, the political will just isn’t there.
> Accepting this line of reasoning means accepting that there are situations where society is allowed to kill some people for some greater good, which is deeply wrong.
A good point. However I’m a utilitarian at heart, if trading the rich only having 80 years keeps us from going into revolution or neufeudalism, I am will to accept that trade, even if I’m in the group who could probably afford said treatments.
> But even the worst case scenario, when everything on earth belongs to old people, is actually good, because it means there is more incentive for other people to go explore other planets and stars!
Or wealth could concentrate into few hands, and people could start binding themselves to richer patrons to guarantee access to life saving food and medicine, and the world descends into neufeudal torpor. Humanity has killed off massive amounts of itself for dumber reasons, don’t assume that a new tech will lead to your desired outcome just because it’s futuristic.
0. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/inequality/...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/06/us-healthcar....
Even if you stick with the article I linked above, living in a poor part of the US takes 20 years off your life expectancy, which is still my point. The US can and does restrict the poor from access to resources that will add decades to their lives.
If other countries have better stats in this regard it's because they've less opportunity for functional people to pull themselves out of the bottom 1%.
“The poor do it to themselves” is an argument that you can take back to the Victorian era where it belongs.
We already do have healthcare programs for the bottom 1%, like Medicaid.
A better analysis would be to compare the overall population variance in life span, between different countries or years. This gives a direct measurement of how unequal life outcomes are, instead of being affected by the way the economy sorts people into wealth brackets.
But I think I can mention some facts without pointing at any conclusion:
- Not allowing people to live longer than is otherwise natural is not the same as killing.
- Societies today are allowed to kill some people for some greater good via the death penalty. A vast majority of people on the planet live in such societies: US, China, India, Pakistan (most of Asia), most (all?) of the Middle East, most of North-Eastern and Central Africa, etc.
- Having to leave your planet because you're being "pushed out" is not what I'd call an incentive or good (for who?). At least not more than the bank taking away your house is an incentive to explore living in an underpass. It's rather just a disincentive to stay.
The problem with this argument is that it is not clear what is a "natural way". By that logic one can argue that letting half of the children to die before reaching 5 years, and not spending money on accessibility infrastructure is good, because the natural way is for all these people to die.
The only logical solution is to accept, that not allowing life extension, because one wants to get specific distribution of people in society, or because a corporation wants to get money for copyrighted drug, is murder.
> - Societies today are allowed to kill some people for some greater good via the death penalty.
In more civilised parts of world (e.g. Europe, Russia, Mexico, some states in USA:) death penalty is not allowed. And in general the fact that something is allowed in many places is not a good argument for it being ok, since from history we know many widely accepted things that are considered abhorrent now.
> - Having to leave your planet because you're being "pushed out" is not what I'd call an incentive or good
Having to leave your planet (and explore underworld) because there is a law that forbids you to get resources required to sustain your life, is way worse than young people looking for better place to leave going somewhere else. It's actually the most natural things for all living beings as most of the young always have to leave their place of birth, and find a better place to live.
I agree that there is a lot of subjectivity in topics like this, but it mainly comes from not knowing the tradeoffs a technology like this will introduce. But if life extension doesn't make people less smart, societies that disallow life extension will lose, because people simply will run from there to societies that allow life extension.
There's no logic in the conclusions you're reaching or the arguments you're using. It's very clear what "natural" means: the limits of what nature can achieve without artificial help. And while you could argue that an all natural human would live to be 70 not 80 years old I'm finding it hard to believe you can find a natural way for a human not to die or even to live to 150. Hence "natural". Is it clearer now? I think I only defined it for you 3 times so...
How many examples of individuals in nature that never die can you mention? You're giving me examples of "societies" and "spending money" to contradict my "natural" argument? Try to grasp the concept: all life on Earth has a natural cycle to maintain a balance between life created and life ended. All your examples are completely besides the point. They are NOT natural, they are human constructs. If you put bacteria in a Petri dish they will multiply and die (natural), they will not spend money on infrastructure (unnatural).
While we're doing unnatural things like saving a kid from dying at 5, we don't really change that balance in a significant way. It simply means a person doesn't have to try 10-15 times to get one successor. Queen Anne had at least 17-18 pregnancies [0]. Take a gander on how many survived infancy? One (1). Do you honestly think she would have had 18 children with modern medicine being able to save the first 2 or 3? Helping an individual get past infancy is not that unnatural. Kids and animals do it all the time. Now you tell me how many immortal people you know?
> In more civilised parts of world [...] death penalty is not allowed
And yet most of today's population lives in societies that allow it. And you still somehow believe that being banned from using artificial methods of prolonging your life past any human in history is like killing you. Do you also feel that anyone refusing to give up an organ for transplant is basically killing a patient? Is wearing a condom like killing a kid? This is the "logic" you used.
The "incentive" to explore the planets is the same as getting kicked out of your house by squatters is an incentive to find a better house. As long as not all people can use the life elixir and only the unfortunate get "incentivised" to go explore living in a cave on Mars I guess that argument flops.
The subjectivity here comes from the fact that you seem to make up arguments on the fly. You expect to get some magic explanation on a forum instead of reading a book. And you're willing to skew the definition of "logic" to death so you can claim "natural cycle of life" and "paying money for infrastructure" are in some unimaginable way in the same category of "natural things".
Offering humans immortality is a guarantee that you will create a few Gods (people that simply manage to accumulate so much power they are Gods) and a whole world of shadows.
[0] http://royalcentral.co.uk/blogs/stories-of-the-stuarts-queen...
Pushing that back could have some devastating results on society in the long term. There are plenty of movies on this topic so no need to go into details :).
Death being "perfectly natural" is not a good argument, having slaves, eating people, not allowing women to vote, all have been considered perfectly natural at various points in time, and some time soon accepting aging will be considered equally backwards, as these other things.
> There are plenty of movies on this topic so no need to go into details
I am asking because i have not seen a single pro-aging argument that had made any sense to me, in the best case they are about some people killing other people to get their stuff, which is not directly related to aging, in the worst they are "fox and the grapes" kind of rationalizations saying that the thing people want but can't get is probably not worth it.
On the other hand i have seen many compelling arguments that curing aging is the _most important_ thing that we can do now. For instance: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C25qzDhGLx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoJsr4IwCm4
I think we're talking about different kinds of natural. What I meant (an clearly mentioned) is that almost all life on Earth since the beginning of life followed a natural cycle: it was "born" (a cell, an individual), lived a certain relatively predetermined period, then it died. Your examples are about an individual, a species, a society. I'm talking about all life.
> i have not seen a single pro-aging argument
I'm not sure what you're saying, you have not seen any good argument that supports the idea that we should age and die? With uncontrollable rise in population you have everything that accompanies it coming from the lack of resources and limited space. What happens to people who want to live on this planet but no longer fit, or have food? An "incentive" to buzz off the planet, right? Where? What if there is no planet able to support you?
What happens if you are ever unhappy with something and want to change it but the person you're fighting has 200 years of experience, power, and wealth under his belt. They are for all intents and purposes Gods walking on Earth.
If you haven't seen any "good" reasons against eternal life than I think you weren't really looking. ;)
Peter Thiel will have founded another company called Blód which he manages from his real life reconstruction of Orthanc. There he uses data crunching to source the healthiest and most vulnerable blood donors.
This is already the case.
Just let the indebted young sell their blood for pennies and they'll jump at the idea.
My understanding is that it in the US, it is common to be paid for blood plasma, but highly uncommon (I've never heard of it happening) to be paid for blood.
This is a plot hole. Healthiest and most vulnerable are directly at odds. Extreme vulnerability (and poverty) does bad things to one's health. Good health is a good antidote to vulnerability.
This is one of those cases where evil is its own solution or antidote because this fundamentally doesn't work, a la "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
The vulnerable needn’t be poor. They only need be situated where the exercise of your power could put them into a position to sell.
Feel free to decide if you think that makes my opinion an informed opinion or if it means my bias is showing. :)