Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aeroi | Hacker News Reader

I raced with him on his boat. During a gybe once, he was swept overboard and the mainsheet wrapped around his torso. He was dragged through the water, but somehow held onto the rail until I was able to pull him back aboard by the loop on his foullies.

He was an interesting guy. He had been a medic during the Vietnam War, and his old boat, Sorcerer II, became a platform for his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from 2003 to 2010, which discovered millions of new marine microbial genes.

He collected a lot of friends, and definitely a few enemies, and, in his own strange and remarkable way, seemed to have lived a complete human experience here on Earth.

View on HN

Only 79… far from a complete human experience. It’s incredibly sad how little time we get here, especially the best of us.

> Only 79… far from a complete human experience

It seems you’re judging his life solely on the age when he died rather than all the things he did.

Imagine what a guy like that could do with 79 more years... or 10x of that.

It's not that outlandish: sharks, turtles, etc get far more years than we do.

It's shocking all billionaires aren't devoting all their resources to solving this cosmic crime against humanity.

A complete human experience is to have relatively little time, no point in doing anything if you have 500 years to do it IMO.

Edit: Maybe there wouldn't be nilihism, but I don't think you could get more fulfilled with the extra time. I feel like an insect that lives 24 hours and a shark that lives several hundred have an equal feeling of accomplishment.

500 years is as arbitrary a number as 79 is.

A Craig Venter that lives (a healthy life) to 158 is quite likely to accomplish at least 1 more great thing than one who lives to 79.

More likely that he would live most of those years with compounding mental and physical health issues, quality of life degrading to the point where most would wish for death instead.

What an un-hacker ethos: the idea is to continuously fix problems so that, if anything, quality of life improves from year to year.

"un-hacker ethos". I'll put that on the shelf next to "it's only an engineering problem" and "assume a spherical cow".

This is a common misconception. Namely, that increasing lifespan just means extending the part where your health degrades continuously. That's actually a very unrealistic outcome for life extension technology. In general, the things that cause your health to degrade as you age are interlinked with the things that cause you to die. If you find a way to increase lifespan, chances are you've also found a way to increase healthspan. In fact, all of the best methods we currently have to live longer do exactly that (e.g. exercise, eat healthily, avoid smoking, etc.).

You seem to be implying that at after a certain number of years (e.g. 79) you wake up one day and say "I'm fulfilled and have nothing left I'd like to achieve".

As someone who occasionally works with terminal patients, I've never seen that in practice. In reality most people desperately wish that they could carry on living, and have plenty of unfinished business that they'd like to see through. The only exception I've seen is when someone is in so much pain that they just want to end the suffering.

If we turn your argument on its head, a person who dies at 20 is just as fulfilled as a person who dies at 79. So why should anyone bother trying to live a long and healthy life?

I recognize and appreciate that you likely believe your contribution is one of optimism, but respectfully, I feel ill reading things like this.

Ever heard of Chesterton's fence? I don't believe we are more clever than our mother, the computational machinery of the universe. If we remove death, there will be great consequence.

Heck, it's arguable that the slow decline and death spiral we're in on this planet (empathatically NOT just human well-being metrics here), that this is already due to pushing death back, and systematically allowing power/opportunity to accumulate ever more deeply at scale of the selfish individual...

Why didn't anybody warn Alexander Fleming about Chesterton's fence?

I know it's cliche, but if he knew he (any of us) knew we might live to 790, would we live life so fully?

I kind of think that's what is behind some people versus others—those that have an intrinsic, constant sense of the brevity of life are the ones that try to experience life to the fullest.

Yes. A lot of people would live life so fully if they knew they had 790 years: in fact more so.

Right now the most ambitious projects people start barely scratch a decade or two.

They might be less willing to get on a sail boat where they could be swept off and nearly drown.

Thiel might be, but Thiel is also someone who gets infinitely mocked

With that having been said a lot of the health industry is fraud

I think he’s really just trying to spur your imagination into imagining if someone like that had lived longer.

Anyway, this conversation has been had repeatedly. Many people seem to be unable to imagine that positive benefit of much longer lives.

Suppose that’s why “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

This is just a tragic way to view the world, on so may levels: 79 is a great run for anybody. And more importantly, Craig Venter did more in 79 years than most people could do in two or three lifetimes. Lastly, of course, life is literally the longest thing you will ever experience, regardless of how long it lasts.

I learned a lot about Craig Venter after reading My Life Decoded in college. Truly an amazing person.

>79 is a great run for anybody

Average life expectancy for males in the US is 76.5 years. During the pandemic it dipped below 74. So he was definitely already on the lucky side of the distribution. He also famously once said: "If you want immortality, do something meaningful with your life."

Looking at his life. This is as complete human experience as we can hope to get.

I'd MUCH rather consider the completeness of my experience based on what I was able to experience, rather than how long I'd lived for.

Sorry for the tangent, but this is a pet peeve of mine. From my perspective, it seems like our modern quest for safety in all things has the effect of wrapping the whole world, and ourselves, in bubble wrap. The goal seems to be to extend that number as far as possible, without regard to how the life that we experience during that period is diminished by all the safeguards.

It bothers me that we've made it a mantra, telling each other "have a safe trip", or "be safe", and so on. I can't remember anyone saying "have the richest experience you can manage".

The longer your lifespan, the more chances you have to waste chunks of it in a rut of zero experience, but have time to work your way out of it.

At just 60 ~ 90 years, a rut of a single decade can take up > 15% of your lifespan.

What is sad is having a world view where the value of a human life is duration, not accomplishment.

If you value accomplishment, then adding more years to accomplish more things is a no-brainer

There is absolutely zero proof that more years would mean more accomplishments. Bad assumptions are bad assumptions even in fantasy land. No-brainer indeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com