
Google Ventures' Bill Maris Investing in Idea of Living to 500 - antr
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/google-ventures-bill-maris-investing-in-idea-of-living-to-500?
======
guylhem
Some other poster is talking about "hubris", "neopotism", or "tales from the
aristocracy."

Are we so focused the 99% / 1% difference that we are too blind to see we're
all in the same team, team Humanity?

Nothing is sadder that a live going away, knowledge, experience, etc all going
to waste. Sentient creatures have a moral duty to live.

Extending our lifespan is also a necessary first step for serious large scale
projects. I don't think we are ready with a 70 years lifespan to care about
the consequences of our present days actions in 500 years, or to tackle
serious projects such as building a Dyson sphere.

To all those who talk about how some people won't have access to that
technology - yes, just like how they don't have access to antibiotics,
cellphones or the internet in Africa.

~~~
littletimmy
We're not all on the same team. No way.

When a certain portion of the 1% seems intent on seeing the populace as cannon
fodder (Kissinger's ideology), or as idiots to be manipulated into submission
(Bernays's ideology), or as any of the other indsidious descriptions that the
1% use for the rest (welfare queens, leeches, etc.), we are certainly not all
on team humanity.

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chatmasta
This piece may as well be called "tales from the aristocracy." Every name
mentioned in there except for Brin got to where they are through some
combination of nepotism and positive stereotyping.

I bring this up because I find it especially amusing to watch these aging
billionaires chasing after immortality. I imagine some ancient philosophers
would have some zingers for these guys. The hubris is incredible.

(That said, the research into aging is fascinating and promising in many ways.
I'm disappointed the article spend so little time exploring the substance of
the research.)

~~~
defen
If you think income inequality is bad now - imagine how much
power/money/prestige/knowledge a 400 year old Sergey Brin would have. The rich
getting exponentially richer.

~~~
josephschmoe
We have a pretty strong reliance on the estate tax for situations like these.
I imagine if longevity were discovered, that would change to another kind of
wealth tax within 10 years.

~~~
Brakenshire
Does the estate tax actually work in the US? Our equivalent in Britain appears
to be a joke - anyone with a reasonable amount of money can just hire
accountants to find some trivial way around it.

I think it's probably the most important tax, in terms of social equity - if
you can easily pass down all your wealth from one generation to another, there
are no wealth taxes, and capital reliably grows faster than the general
economy, that is an obvious formula for the creation of an aristocracy - but I
don't know whether it's compatible with the global financial system. Or
perhaps it's just British politicians are particularly lackluster on cracking
down on obvious avoidance schemes.

~~~
nostromo
Estate tax in the US only hits the upper-middle class. The rich avoid it
entirely.

What makes my blood boil is that politicians that support raising the estate
tax use trusts to avoid paying it. People like the Clintons:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-17/wealthy-
cl...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-17/wealthy-clintons-use-
trusts-to-limit-estate-tax-they-back)

They're not alone... The Kennedys, the Pelosis, even Noam Chomsky is set up to
avoid paying the estate tax!

[http://www.hoover.org/research/noam-chomsky-closet-
capitalis...](http://www.hoover.org/research/noam-chomsky-closet-capitalist)

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aetherson
> “The analogy I use is this,” he says, holding up his iPhone 6. “Even five
> years ago, this would have been unimaginable."

That's... a strange thing to say. In 2010, the iPhone6 was "unimaginable"? At
the time of the iPhone 4, the iPhone6 was unimaginable? Really?

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callmeed
It's hard not to think of Ricky Bobby:

 _" No one lives forever, no one. But with advances in modern science and my
high level income, it's not crazy to think I can live to be 245, maybe 300.
Heck, I just read in the newspaper that they put a pig heart in some guy from
Russia. Do you know what that means?"_

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marianov
That leaves you with 450 years of unenployment for many engineers.

~~~
chatmasta
Or 450x new projects and job openings, depending how you look at it.

Of course, a 22 year old engineer won't stand a chance of getting hired over a
222 year old engineer. :) at that point they may as well be called wizards.

~~~
ttty
>Of course, a 22 year old engineer won't stand a chance of getting hired over
a 222 year old engineer.

Now that made me stop and think... what I could be in 200 years from now?!

~~~
Devthrowaway80
Topsoil.

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cryoshon
It's good that big names with big money are investing in fighting aging, but
it's not so great that the end result could be an entrenched eternal
aristocracy. I'm not so sure we have to worry about that just yet, though. I'm
a big proponent of research on aging and cures thereof.

As far as the article itself, the SV-standard corpulent optimism seems to run
strong in Maris, and when it comes to biomedical stuff, it's an indication of
ignorance. I read that Maris worked in a lab before he got the gig at Google;
that's great, but it means he should know better than to casually bullshit
around about living to be 500 years old being a realistic goal because Google
is weighing in. Maybe it will be ultimately proven to be a realistic goal, but
for the people alive now, reliably getting to 100 or 115 using anti-aging
technologies is far more likely than living to be 500.

Biomedical research and development is messy, fault-filled, slow, and never
truly finished. I guarantee that "disrupting" organic degeneration as a result
of accumulated damage is several orders of magnitude more difficult than
making a dominant search engine. Gaining a rudimentary knowledge of aging
systems beyond what we already have is going to take years, not to mention
several paradigm shifts in how aging is considered. That said, I think that
science is up to the task-- in particular, private R&D is going to be carrying
a ton of weight when it comes to aging research because of how lucrative any
product would be.

I'm pretty sure that research on aging will have a lot of unintended positive
side discoveries, likely relating to cancer and immunology. Hopefully the hype
from Google causes more people to pile on their support, getting us there
faster. It's going to be a really interesting 20 years-- there's a good chance
anti-aging technology could remake society.

~~~
dkarapetyan
In this case piling on more support will not help. Like most things that
require fundamental research for progress quality trumps quantity. By support
I'm assuming throwing more people at the problem.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think it could be useful. It's true that for that kind of problem, you want
to throw more money at the best people, no strings attached, and let them keep
playing around until they solve it - but all other research you can get will
act as a support team. The field of biology is so big and messy, that you'll
likely need tons of researchers and algorithms running experiments, sorting
through data and writing down the findings, so that the best of the best can
have all results they need available to devise a working solutions.

TL;DR: make the support T-shaped.

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bdcravens
If you think real estate in SF and the valley is bad now ...

~~~
bcheung
Seasteading FTW!

------
hereonbusiness
I think we are going in the wrong direction once again, this won't solve the
problem of death at all, instead it would merely prolong life, but all studies
show that the leading cause of death is in fact life.

Trillions of dollars are already being spent worldwide each year with the
supposed goal of eradicating life, but I think it's all just a conspiracy
involving the military industrial complex.

I'm sure that if we really wanted to we could end all life and thus death once
and for all _today_ using the means we already have at our disposal and have
had for over 5 decades now.

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therzathegza
[http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html](http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html)

This was an interesting read about humanity's perception of mortality.

------
blahblah3
if a cure for aging was discovered, how would we deal with the population
getting too large?

perhaps mandating that people who take the drug can't have children?

------
charlescharles
Bill Maris looks like a white Tyler the Creator.

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jgalt212
Maris is a buffoon.

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dkarapetyan
It doesn't matter. Cancer will get them anyway:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/sunday-review/why-
everyone...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/sunday-review/why-everyone-
seems-to-have-cancer.html). Unless they figure out a way to digitize
themselves in which case maybe something else will get them.

Mutation is the engine of evolution so in essence the folks looking to live
for 500 years are trying to get rid of "the engine of evolution". Lofty goal
when put that way.

~~~
Brakenshire
The whole of modern civilization is a way to power down the engine of
evolution - for instance, short-sighted people or someone who catches a nasty
infection surviving to have children. If you take moral cues from natural
selection, you're going to face the creation of a very bleak world.

~~~
dkarapetyan
It's not about morality. It is the fundamental nature of the cell to mutate.
The fact that multicellular organisms have managed to get this far is quite
amazing but you'd be foolish to think those cells are anything more than
selfish self-replicating mutation engines. So really at the end of the day all
life extending research is about changing the fundamental nature of the cell
which is an impossible goal.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Why impossible? A cell is but a complex nanoscale machine. There's nothing
fundamental about it that says it's The Right Way. But if you mean the
fundamental nature of evolution process, its _mathematics_ , then well - we
don't have to change it, we just need to harness it. Just like we didn't
change the explosive nature of gasoline, we harnessed it for our purposes.

We're no longer in the domain of gene-based evolution anyway - our minds are
smarter than it, and thanks to our ability to write things down, we advanced
into cultural-level evolution, which works _orders of magnitude_ faster than
the biological kind. There is no law of nature that says we can't just decide
we like living and then enforce our will on nature.

