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Comment by darsham | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a pretty big deal, but the article gives off the impression that mithocondrial aging is the only reason that we age. In fact there are many other aging factors that have not been linked to mithocondrial aging (and have, agruably, no relationship).

Some other factors I recall studying are

- gradual DNA damage, which is quite inevitable

- collagen degradation, which affects the eyes and all cartilaginous tissues.

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Yes, it is confusing, since there is no wider context given in the article at all. The conventional story I hear about ageing is that telomeres in replicating cells become shorter until the DNA no longer replicates and the cell either dies or seriously malfunctions. As a significant proportion of the cells in your body move into this state you "age".

So I'm struggling to relate this phenomena to the mitochondrial story described in the article - it's not clear to me whether these are independent aspects of ageing or somehow related?

Independent. There are, oh, I think I once saw a lost of about fifteen major known causes of ageing.

Some are worse than others; this is one of the really serious ones, but not #1. Others of note are... - Intracellular debris - Intercellular debris - Gradual macroscopic degeneration from incomplete healing/scarring - Progressive DNA damage, with any number of consequences (e.g. cancer) - Asymptotic loss of some brain functions (e.g. learning)

I could go on. For evolutionary reasons all of these hit at roughly the same time, which means uploading remains the most promising approach for completely eliminating ageing.

Well, almost completely. Upload someone, and you eliminate degeneration below the firmware/software layer, but you still need to cope with a brain that didn't evolve to last for centuries.

uploading remains the most promising approach for completely eliminating ageing

If so, in the future the equivalent of CryptoLocker will be a terrorist weapon that takes hostages.

I also see a strong future for bitcoin in this scenario. Virtual minds are going to have a hard time paying for things with cash. They'll probably want some form of currency to pay for their Amazon EC2 instances to offload various components of their sentience, essentially slowing down their perception of the passage of time so they can get more accomplished faster.

Right.

Because there's no way, today, to pay for an EC2 instance without involving physical cash.

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