
Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood into an Elixir of Youth - rafaelc
https://www.wired.com/story/startups-flock-to-turn-young-blood-into-an-elixir-of-youth/
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ctack
Slightly horrific and as other comments have suggested - quite dystopian, but
the idea that they will surpass the need for actual blood - which they'd need
to at scale and for many people ethically - that sounds pretty good.

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amarant
am I the only one who thinks this is pretty great? that ambrosia company seems
pretty dodgy, but the field overall - who wouldn't wanna cure old age?
surprised at all the negativity in this thread...

I mean, the blood is harvested today, but someday it's gonna be synthetically
produced, probably. you gotta start somewhere!

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sneak
Remember that time someone made a healthier and cheaper food but made it a
liquid and bottled it and they attacked him?

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.

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lawlessone
>Remember that time someone made a healthier and cheaper food

Are we talking about soylent? hasn't took off yet has it?

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nakedrobot2
Another prescient episode from Silicon Valley already covered this horribly
distopian idea.

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lawlessone
>Anyone over 35 with the necessary cash was eligible to receive two liters of
plasma donated by young adults, which Ambrosia purchases from blood banks.

Is this taking blood from donations from people with more genuine needs?

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pvarangot
Yes, I mean I don't see how it couldn't be since everyone says blood donor
supply is always lower than what's needed in almost any big city I've asked
about.

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marcusKral
This path seems fundamentally regressive.

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sesm
In Yharnam, they produce more blood than alcohol, as the former is the more
intoxicating

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taneq
Wow, it didn't even take exposing the Howard Families.

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Hoasi
This has all the ingredients for an upcoming debacle...

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Gatsky
Bloodtech. This is... dispiriting.

The massive concentration of wealth in a few people is going to fuck up the
world. This is just the latest sign.

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DoreenMichele
Bad Blood 2: The sequel to the Theranos debacle.

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close04
It's only a Theranos sequel if it's a fraud. But even if this is "for real"
it's still deeply disturbing. Today...

And yet I have to wonder, would future generations see it that way? Was organ
transplant considered deeply disturbing 2 centuries ago?

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chr1
Why is this disturbing at all if it is "for real" (which i agree seems
unlikely)?

People already donate blood to cure other people, and old age is the deadliest
disease possible since it kills in 100% of cases.

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village-idiot
The fear isn’t that it’s unatural, it’s that the long term consequences to
society will be bad.

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.

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chr1
> 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!

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close04
The problem with such a topic is that you cannot discuss it without walking
through a galaxy sized minefield where you're guaranteed that every step will
land on a mine. It's deeply subjective and tied to values that are different
between the societies each of us might belong to.

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.

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chr1
\- Not allowing people to live longer than is otherwise natural is not the
same as killing.

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.

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close04
> By that logic

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...](http://royalcentral.co.uk/blogs/stories-of-the-stuarts-queen-
annes-18-pregnancies-47524)

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mothsonasloth
Imagine a dystopian future where there is vampires. The vampires being super
wealthy individuals who have resorted to feeding on the young and vulnerable.
Sending out blood hunters to grab people and then drain them. Others prefer
the convenience of an ontap blood donor, living in their houses and being well
looked after.

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.

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nannal
Why would there be blood hunters?

Just let the indebted young sell their blood for pennies and they'll jump at
the idea.

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taway_1212
Am I not mistaken that in the US it's already common to get paid for blood
donations? (Here, in Poland, you only got a couple bars of chocolate for it).
So, people in the US are already ok with selling their flesh (at least the
part that does it for money, and not to help others).

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nordsieck
> Am I not mistaken that in the US it's already common to get paid for blood
> donations?

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.

