Gravity and Levity

I think the issue is that there are two conflicting populations on Hacker News: hackers/geeks/nerds in the traditional sense (who are here to talk about cool technology and such, and because the place is called "Hacker News") and entrepreneurs (who are here to talk about economics and politics and such, and because the place is run by a company that funds entrepreneurs).

Being part of the first group, it's a bit strange to me to see this sort of article on a site that's called "Hacker News", and I agree with the parent commenter that the article feels out-of-place here. Perhaps if it had some nifty technical details on flash bangs and their effects on humans (more concrete references to PTSD diagnoses, descriptions of temperatures attained by flashbangs and the physical effects of those temperatures on humans, even some possible elaboration on potential blindness caused by flashbangs) - in other words, things that hook into scientific basis (which makes nerds squee) rather than emotion/"ethics" (which doesn't make nerds squee) - would improve this.

On the other hand, I realize that my demographic is not the only one worth considering (regardless of whether I want it to be the only one worth considering). It's disappointing that articles with a dearth of technical description seem to be becoming the norm even here, but at the same time I realize that it's not disappointing to all of HN's users, so the best I can do is move on to a hopefully-better article (or stop using…

I don't know anything about global warming research to comment about the conclusion of the text, but I can say something about what is certainly a religious belief infecting those who respect science, and are then led to respect "science": nutrition. The truth is that we know very little about human nutrition, especially in healthy individuals. When John Ioannidis demonstrated that most published medical research is false (wholly or partially), he singled out nutrition and gene-association as two especially problematic fields. Yet, the reason many believe that reading some papers and changing their diets to include more or less protein -- or more or less fiber, or more or less fat -- has an effect on their health is pure religion and magical thinking. This magical thinking stems from a possibly innate (and certainly ingrained) belief that "our body is a temple", or that "we are what we eat", which is a particular manifestation of the more general psychological desire in what Jonathan Haidt calls "purity". This psychological need is combined with the false[1] seemingly-scientific belief that our bodies accumulate damage over time.

The scientific truth is that (other than obviously pathological cases of eating poison, or living on just fries for a year) we simply don't know what food is good for us, and certainly not in what quantity. It's actually worse: we don't even know if diet (again, non pathological) has any effect on health. It is absolutely possible (and even…

> IMHO living for centuries with the body of a 90 year old wouldn't be so bad. (Supposedly there's a point where the body stops getting any more frail.) And as long as you can keep mortality risk to a low enough level for long enough, it's just a matter of time before youthfulness-restoring tech comes along.

I'm sure you've seen http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/ already, so you know you can't live for centuries with the body of a 90 year old because the decay and mortality is just too bad, fancy exosuits or no.

So this leads to the kind of odd thought experiment which runs more accurately like 'imagine you have the organs and general health of a 12 year old, but are weak and debilitated and functioning at a low level (though not getting any worse); would you still find life worth living today?'

I'd say the answer is yes. Elderly suicide is more frequent than among the middle-aged or younger, so life isn't as good (not a surprising claim), but suicide is still rare, so life is still somewhat good.

Two points:

(1) I haven't seen this article mentioned here:

https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/

I am not sure if the article addressed this model in particular, but I found it compelling.

(2) It occurred to me that most of us don't fear death as much as becoming increasingly useless as we become older due to ill health and physical weakness.

It would be not much fun living to be 200 if the last 120 years were spent in a bed or wheelchair.

So what we want is not to increase the lifespan but to prolong the amount of time we can spend in relatively physically prime condition. I am sure this is not an original thought, but something worth mentioning.

We've gotten good interventions for a lot of things that will kill you that aren't old age. But if you've already managed to live to 90, your further life expectancy might not be much better today than it would have been in Ancient Greece. See http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/ for how bad things get when you age.

Some kind of medical intervention that targeted the actual senescence mechanism instead of just the other problems it causes would be an actual game-changer, and I don't see how we could get living past 100 to be very probable without coming up with one.

> If you were standing at arm's length from someone and each of you had one percent more electrons than protons[[0]]

The latent energy of electromagnetic repulsion between the two of you (never mind between the parts of each of your bodies) would be a bit more than ((1%*80kg/2amu*electroncharge)^2 coulombconst / meter), or on the order of a megaton. Not megaton tnt, a megaton of just energy (comparable to a million tons of antimatter).

0: https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/what-if-i-were-1-charged/