Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "Joe Scott" channel.

  1. Thank you for this most excellent video! This is a subject I know a little about, so I'm impressed by how balanced and informative your video is. It's an excellent introduction to the subject. Like any scientific field there's a lot more detail under the surface, including researchers that disagree with Dr. Sinclair. Though I (an ordinary layman) find his ideas quite compelling, there's still quite a bit of debate over the causes of aging among the scientists. One of the things I find really interesting is the relationship between mTOR, bodybuilding and longevity. Basically bodybuilders want to activate mTOR to build muscle, which is the opposite of what people want to do for longevity. It seems like there's some sort of balance required between building and keeping muscle (particularly in later years when muscle wasting can become a serious problem) and inhibiting mTOR. As to your last question, I absolutely agree that a long-lived society would be a more moral one, precisely because people would be forced to confront the consequences of their actions. The aging process perverts human nature, and is a contributing factor to many of our worst tendencies.
    23
  2. Thanks for this video! There's a whole sub-genre of science fiction devoted to exploring what might have happened if NASA had kept going after Apollo. "The Tranquility Alternative" by Allen Steele is a great example of this kind of alternate history. Although he goes even further, and imagines a timeline where the first manned spaceflight happens during WWII in 1944. I'm not certain they could have landed on Mars by 1981, because the technical challenges of building self-sustaining enclosed biospheres that can support human life for 6-12 months at a time are considerable. It's something we're still working on now, despite all those years of living on the ISS. When there's absolutely no resupply coming, just living in space becomes a very difficult challenge. Still, they had the right approach, starting with space stations and using the same components in later space ships. Each step teaches you how to make the next one.
    20
  3. I think some of the ideas behind Neom are very intriguing, and worth exploring...someday. When we eventually have space colonies we'll probably be building linear cities like this. Take a city inside a giant rotating wheel and stretch it out, you'll get a line. The water desalination dome is also a really interesting idea, with more immediate uses. But I have zero confidence that Saudia Arabia or Softbank or whomever else can build a livable linear city, today, in some of the harshest terrain in the world. Especially not when they build it from the top down with the expectation of controlling everything like a mathematical equation. Real cities are messy. They grow and change in response to the needs of their inhabitants, and if the inhabitants of this city are all rich they'll just pick up and leave if they find it too restrictive.
    18
  4. Back in the 80's I used to be obsessed with Fortean phenomena, and I remember reading about the surprisingly long history of unusual things that occasionally drop from the sky. The star jelly you mentioned is the most famous one, with a documented history going back hundreds of years. But in the 20th century there were reports of all sorts of things raining down on people like fish, frogs, jellies and eggs. The egg fall is particularly memorable because the book I read had a photo of the aftermath. It was a picture taken outside a British school, with a bunch of children holding up eggs for the camera (they didn't all break) beside a sign that said Egg, Eggburton, Eggtown or something like that. The school was named egg-something, and it had been pelted by a rain of eggs from the blue. It's almost too coincidental to believe, but why would a bunch of 1970's children and teachers make up a story like that? The Oakville blob falls in your video are even stranger because they happened more than once. I've never heard of a sky fall phenomena that repeated before.
    15
  5. It makes sense. Keep your life and your home in order. Be good to the people you personally know. If you can do that, then any crisis will only be temporary.
    9
  6. I understand your Mom is just trying to reassure people that their pets aren't ill and don't need unnecessary treatments, but there is an actual scientific study looking at ways to help dogs live longer lives. YouTube doesn't like it when I post links in comments, but it can be found by Googling "dog aging project"
    9
  7. It sounds like you're a legend as well, if you've been to two of these places!
    3
  8. A great deal of pushback to the idea of living longer or curing aging also comes from the liberal arts and literature, and I'm not really sure why. My best guess is that literature absorbed many ideas and themes (like the idea that life has "seasons") from religion and retains them to this day, even if the modern authors aren't religious themselves.
    2
  9.  @StarlitSeafoam  That's very true, but I think the most important consequences we face as a species are limited to a time horizon of centuries at most. Only things like nuclear radiation will last for thousands of years. You are right, though. There's no guarantee that immortality will make people more responsible. But I think it's an evolutionary leap our species needs to make to face up with the magnitude and effects of our own technology. Right now our short lives mean we never learn enough to deal with it properly.
    2
  10. You can still do your video! I'd love to watch it as well.
    1
  11.  @jay-em  Or maybe a square, so they don't have to build curved tunnels and track.
    1
  12. Thank you for this video! It's one of my favorite subjects, particularly what you call "intensive rotational grazing" and agroforestry. The plain truth is that modern agriculture is simply not sustainable. Even if we didn't need to feed more and more people with a shrinking amount of land, the current system - through the overuse of fertilizers, herbicides and especially pesticides - is destroying the biological systems that keep the biosphere going. We're causing a massive wave of extinctions, with consequences that are completely unknown. Agriculture has to change to a more sustainable model if we want humanity to survive long term, just as we need to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy to fight climate change. It's the cost of maintaining a global civilization of billions on a single planet, where own needs and waste products now constitute a significant part of the biosphere. But what agriculture has to change into is still not clear, because we don't want to look at the problem. Thank you for making a video that does.
    1
  13. The thing is, there's a huge disincentive to change the existing system. In my country the current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to change, or look into changing (it's confusing) our first-past-the-post electoral system and investigate alternatives like proportional representation. It's seven years later now, and he did nothing of the kind. From his perspective the current system already gives him what he wants, so why rock the boat?
    1
  14. The intro to this video is hilarious. It's really well done. As for ASMR... Sadly, I don't feel it. I'm as open to psychonautics as anyone else, and I've experienced all sorts of weird sensations over the years, but not that one. Alas. With misophonia, oh yeah. When I was younger someone making a wet smacking sound when they talked (usually interspersed randomly between words, or sometimes after each sentence) would instantly put me in fight mode. For some reason I interpreted it as an aggressive challenge, even though that made no logical sense. But over the years the reaction faded away.
    1
  15.  @feline.equation  I don't mean to imply that genetics are of no importance. It makes sense that the dogs with greater genetic diversity would be healthier overall (once they got to live with you and not on the streets), and hence live longer.
    1
  16. But the Smithsonian's collection will still exist hundreds of years from now, and the data it represents will become ever more valuable as future researchers find new ways to tap the information contained within it. Like for example, sampling the DNA from all those thousands of pinned butterflies. So I'd say the permanence of the collection has something to do with the definition as well. If your collection of wood scraps and hardware pieces is still around hundreds of years from now, scientists might find it immensely valuable because it could tell them what kinds of trees we were harvesting for commercial uses.
    1
  17. I'm Gen X, but this topic makes me feel like an old Boomer hippy nostalgic for the Summer of Love. My Internet, back around 2001, was a place where you could type something and it might be read by anyone in the world. You could say anything you wanted and it never resulted in consequences in the "real" world - but you had to back up your opinions with facts because there was always someone out there who could take you down. I've very little interest in replicating the virtual reality Metaverse from Snow Crash, but if doing so somehow resulted in a Web 3.0 where people weren't siloed off from each other in little bubbles of self interest, it would be worth doing.
    1
  18.  @SixOThree  You're right, it'll be a series of hubs connected by a single underground rail line. If Neom actually succeeded in attracting residents, presumably they'd build more hubs over time, until the entire line is filled out.
    1