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Sorry for your loss. Losing so many people in such a short time is devastating. People talk about to going to Mars or other planets as a stupendous achievement

Sorry for your loss. Losing so many people in such a short time is devastating. People talk about to going to Mars or other planets as a stupendous achievement. And it is. But I believe what would be the greatest human achievement would be fully conquering these leading causes of death: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease..and finally the biggest cause of death and the final frontier: dying of old age. Even an extension of human lifespan by a several decades in good health could transform civilisation. Yet, it seems that medical science has progressed only a few feet while industry/tech has sprinted miles. Life expectancy has plateaued and even declined across the world.

lelanthran 5y ago
TLDR - Before you cure cancer, you need to "cure" aging. > But I believe what would be the greatest human achievement would be fully conquering these leading causes of death: cancer, I dunno about the others, but with cancer I don't think it is possible to "cure" it. It's the result of a bad mutation when a cell reproduces (AIUI, it's to do with telomere lengths and statistically certain low-frequency events). Each cell that reproduces will do so imperfectly, and normally those random mutations aren't too bad. Statistically, one of those mutations will eventually be a mutation that causes the cell to reproduce without limits (normal cells don't reproduce very fast). Hence, the longer you live, the greater the chance of a bad mutation, i.e. cancer. The only way to "cure" cancer, then, will be to have cells reproduce perfectly, in which case you have effective immortality as long as no other disease or event kills you.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  And yet there are species of animals that can live well over 500 years without aging much. If it just comes down to errors, perhaps we should focus on finding better error repair mechanisms. If half the money that went into building the ad platforms was put into senescence repair mechanisms, who knows where we would be. One sad thing about pointless high paying tech jobs is they often take brilliant minds and set them to work building a better bean counter in exchange for money. A good portion of work done every day by Silicon Valley will have no lasting benefit and will be completely thrown out. Humans are smart enough to understand this but not smart enough to break the meaningless cycle and work on goals that will benefit society over the next 1000 years.

lelanthran 5y ago

TLDR - Before you cure cancer, you need to "cure" aging. > But I believe what would be the greatest human achievement would be fully conquering these leading causes of death: cancer, I dunno about the others, but with cancer I don't think it is possible to "cure" it. It's the result of a bad mutation when a cell reproduces (AIUI, it's to do with telomere lengths and statistically certain low-frequency events). Each cell that reproduces will do so imperfectly, and normally those random mutations aren't too bad. Statistically, one of those mutations will eventually be a mutation that causes the cell to reproduce without limits (normal cells don't reproduce very fast). Hence, the longer you live, the greater the chance of a bad mutation, i.e. cancer. The only way to "cure" cancer, then, will be to have cells reproduce perfectly, in which case you have effective immortality as long as no other disease or event kills you.

suifbwish 5y ago
And yet there are species of animals that can live well over 500 years without aging much. If it just comes down to errors, perhaps we should focus on finding better error repair mechanisms. If half the money that went into building the ad platforms was put into senescence repair mechanisms, who knows where we would be. One sad thing about pointless high paying tech jobs is they often take brilliant minds and set them to work building a better bean counter in exchange for money. A good portion of work done every day by Silicon Valley will have no lasting benefit and will be completely thrown out. Humans are smart enough to understand this but not smart enough to break the meaningless cycle and work on goals that will benefit society over the next 1000 years.