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by pdimitar 2570 days ago
At this point I almost expect an article titled "All oxygen-breathing organisms are a fatally flawed design and are doomed to never live healthy no matter what".

:(

4 comments

https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/doctors-medical-parano...

The SENS people say, if you live long enough, you will eventually have cancer.

I was under the impression that everyone has cancer all the time at about the same rate the body can fight it before it becomes an actual, detectable problem.
Yup. So shoukd we should worry about our ability to fight it, rather than what 'causes' it, outside agressive carcenogens?
Is there a SENS newsletter like hacker news?
On the upside, oxygenation led to the explosive diversity of complex, high-energy organisms that led to us[0]!

Without living on the edge, you don't get complex, powerful organisms (like mighty trilobites).

Plus, there's no telling how much reprogramming for stronger oxidization-repair mechanisms can provide. Mammalian mitochondria are inferior to bird mitochondria (and birds have them in their blood cells unlike us which may help[1]), allowing birds to live longer even with higher metabolisms than mammals. Evolution hasn't exhausted the possible. There's hope!

Just not for us. :) Which is fine; everything's fine.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#Increase_in...

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3686644/

Well, that's basically true, isn't it? Oxygen is extremely reactive and was poisonous to early life: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/the-great-oxygenation-e...
It still is. If you live at sea level, your chances of getting lung cancer are much higher that of you live at higher elevations.
Interesting; could that be caused by most cities being near sea level and most people living near cities, and thus pollution rather than oxygen might be the root cause?
I don't have a link to the study, but the researchers of the study I read were very meticulous and did discard all other obvious explanations before concluding that altitude was the best explanation.
Huh. I didn't know that. What's the altitude at which cancer risk starts increasing again due to radiation exposure?
That's exactly the problem with cancer. You know - vaccination causes cancer! Allows you to live long enough to die of cancer. :-)