Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research
Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc.<p>I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good.<p>But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least.<p>I’ve thought for a while now that every philosophy problem is in some sense, just a health problem waiting to be solved.<p>Occasionally I think about the Bible too and the way Christ (regardless of your religious beliefs) upended this tradition of rationalizing death as good. There’s a line in the Bible that’s the shortest verse in the English version: “Jesus wept.” And he was weeping for Lazarus, a man who died (who he could bring back to life effortlessly); in some sense a true condemnation of death as evil. Something even a god would weep over.<p>I think about the future often too; the way immortality will finally be achieved. There’s so many complications when it comes to aging, and so much we don’t know about the human body, I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand.<p>I think it’ll happen someday. But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now.<p>I certainly hope it’s soon. Some days I feel like I’m at the edge of an eternal history.