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Comment by Jeff_Brown | Hacker News Reader

Longevity research is likely to improve quality of life too. Diseases that have been tackled separately since forever -- cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes -- are starting to be seen as manifestations of a single underlying process, which is what we aim to stop.

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> are starting to be seen as manifestations of a single underlying process

Eating and breathing pollutants ?

No that isn't it. Else all animals would have at least similar life spans. A dog doesn't die at 8 from cancer because of eating and breathing pollutants. And neither does a human at 80. The only thing most pollutants do is make it worse.

The underlying cause is our body not being able to maintain itself over even short timescales, with or without pollutants.

All animals have different responses to toxins, pollutants, cancer growth, etc. We're kind of actually at a "sweet spot" for cancer rates, big enough to get a lot of cancer, not so big that we need extraordinary cancer resistance like whales.

Historically, the population of the world was exposed to much higher doses of common pollutants than today in much of the world. One example, see link below. If what your second line describes were so directly the case, then, for example, the people of late medieval Europe or the time of the early industrial revolution would have been saturated with diseases like cancer, alzheimers, diabetes etc. Maybe they were, since medical records from those times are barely above non-existent, never mind being clinically accurate, but the evidence either way definitely shows how much higher accumulations of common toxins were in people's bones, hair, blood etc prior to modern times.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00204-012-0866-7

One mayor thing which changed definitely and is underrepresented is the exposure to various frequencies.

frequencies in what sense? The entire spectrum of communications frequencies used by our comms technologies, including 5G, are well inside the non-ionizing side of the EM spectrum. There's no evidence of them causing cellular harm, much less the kinds of shitty, long-term crippling or deadly effects that we clinically know are caused by the chemicals and elements humans have spent centuries casually contaminating themselves with.

I'm not an expert in any of this, but from reading this stuff a long time it almost always goes back to inflammation.

Inflammation is still a symptom- body reacting to something that it doesn’t like so it’s like saying that almost every smoke goes back to fire. Not wrong, not horribly useful.

I doubt it. In the book Outlive, they show the overall rates of mortality after subtracting for the 8 leading infectious diseases, and the death rate is mostly flat over the last 70 or so years. His conclusion was that neither environmental factors nor medical research has made much progress on things like cancer, etc.

That doesn't make sense, if pollution was literally slowly killing us, and the planet, surely we would take some action to decrease pollution, and yet for my entire lifetime we've exuberantly increased it, recently going so far as to build bitcoin, a popular competition to pollute as much as possible in exchange for prizes.

Weirdly, if I do any amount of research, it does seem like there's strong correlations between pollution and most kinds of cancer, what a wild coincidence.

But the pollution in regard to bitcoin is CO2 from energy use. So this is an incredibly broad statement where you leap from cancer to climate change. "Killing us, and the planet"? Human activity in general causes trouble, that's your insight. We should take some action to curtail action?

There already are pollution controls. Stronger pollution controls might be beneficial, sure, but is that the key to longevity? Or is the connection here that you regard longevity as similar to pollution?

Something like 45 % of BTC energy consumption comes from coal, a rather impressive carcinogen.

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