Filched from NatGeo:
To uncover the secrets of longevity, Chris Hemsworth put his body on the line
In his new Nat Geo series, ‘Limitless,’ the actor dangles from a rope high above a canyon and surfs frigid waters—all to test extreme strategies for living longer.
In his new National Geographic series, Limitless With Chris Hemsworth, the actor completes a test of the body’s reactions to fear: He climbed up a hundred-foot-long rope suspended from a cable car, high above a canyon floor in Australia’s Blue Mountains.
Chris Hemsworth plunged into Arctic waters, dangled a thousand feet over a canyon while climbing a rope, fasted for four days, and prepared for his own eventual death—all in the pursuit of living longer.
In Limitless With Chris Hemsworth, a six-part National Geographic documentary streaming on Disney+, the actor doesn’t just rely on a physique honed during a decade of playing Thor in movies. He challenges mind as well as body in a quest to develop habits that might extend life. His, and ours.
Experts guide him. Some of their tips sound familiar—eat less, exercise more—but others, less so: Accept reality. Harness stress. (What wild baboons can teach us about aging)
Hemsworth explores the different ways humans can live better for longer by taking on physical challenges such as diving in ice or climbing skyscrapers.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Before this project, Hemsworth had “always trained specifically for a movie,” where the goal might have been “to have abs this summer or whatever. And it was more superficial. I always felt better, but doing a deep dive into the science-backed evidence of why I felt better was a completely new experience,” the actor tells me, from his Byron Bay, Australia, home.
Limitless—which took more than two years to complete, given pandemic shutdowns and breaks for Hemsworth’s movies—stemmed from a 2006 film that producers Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel had written: The Fountain, about a man searching for everlasting youth. Handel recalls a line that resonates today: “Death is a disease, it’s like any other. And there’s a cure. A cure—and I will find it.”
Nearly two decades ago, they worried the idea was implausible for audiences. Now, with an aging population and high-tech companies “trying to beat death and reaching for immortality in a lot of different ways,” Aronofsky says, it doesn’t seem as far-fetched.
Hemsworth puts his surfing skills to use in the Norwegian Arctic. “It was physically painful beyond measure from anything I’ve ever felt,” he said of swimming sans wet suit in the freezing waters. His skin turned red, as his brothers stood on the shore, bundled against the cold.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CRAIG PARRY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC FOR DISNEY+
With production company Nutopia, the team set out to craft a series about longevity that was informative yet entertaining. Hemsworth undertakes complicated stunts, but there are takeaways for viewers at home. Nutopia executive producer Jane Root says it’s less a sci-fi vision of extending life and more about improving chances for a long “life that is fulfilled and happy and active.”
How active? In Norway, to study extreme temperature’s effects on the body, Limitless had Hemsworth swim and surf in a fjord’s 36-degree water. Aronofsky—who managed a numbing dip himself—said it was “an amazing experience to … see Chris really pushing himself to the edge.”
To push that hard takes exceptional drive, says Ross Edgley, who coached Hemsworth’s fjord swim. A sports scientist and the only person to swim around Great Britain (some 1,790 miles), Edgley also helped him train for the movie Thor: Love and Thunder. “People know Chris as the actor, but not a lot of people know him as the athlete,” he says. Hemsworth had been a hurdler in his school days and still surfs. (Athletes are going faster, higher, and farther—thanks to technology and smarts)
While fasting, Hemsworth plays underwater hockey—another extreme activity filmed for the Limitless series.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CRAIG PARRY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC FOR DISNEY+
In Limitless, Hemsworth plays underwater hockey during a four-day fast, part of a test to measure fasting’s potential benefits. The actor tends to keep the mood light, joking about being hungry. But there’s a dark moment when Peter Attia, a preventative care physician, tells Hemsworth, then 37, that blood tests reveal he has 10 times the average risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease because of genetic traits. Daily exercise, good sleep, and stress reduction might help lower that vulnerability, Attia adds.
“It was initially pretty scary,” Hemsworth says. “But now, because of this information, there’s an opportunity to live an even better life.”
Hemsworth’s extreme feats in the series include walking on a two-foot-wide construction beam 900 feet above Sydney Harbor. And yet it’s simple scenes in the finale—an episode about accepting reality and death—that crystallize why we yearn to live longer.
Wearing an MIT-designed suit that replicates aging by limiting movement and dulling the senses, Hemsworth spent three days in a retirement community. Listening to people whose deaths were imminent, he said, was a lesson “in many ways of health and wellness but, most importantly, in how to live a beautiful life.”
Wearing an MIT-designed suit that replicates aging by limiting movement and dulling the senses, Hemsworth spent three days in a retirement community. Listening to people whose deaths were imminent, he said, was a lesson “in many ways of health and wellness b…Show more
For a few moments at a time, Hemsworth experiences aspects of old age. He wears an MIT-designed suit that adds weight and restricts movement, hearing, and vision, mimicking how he might feel in his late 80s. He listens to people who are close to death and reflects on what matters. He’s then led toward an apparently older woman, sitting with her back to him—and the second he touches her shoulder he recognizes his wife, Elsa Pataky, under extensive aging makeup. She turns to him, and they embrace.
The show team hadn’t warned Hemsworth about this encounter; they wanted his purely natural reaction. Suddenly, he’s trying to reckon with being near the end of his days, and it’s evident why he’ll sweat, freeze, and starve. Does it all come down to love?
“Absolutely,” Hemsworth says, a smile creasing his face. “One of the first questions I had from Peter Attia was, What does your life look like in 20 years … in 30? What does your death look like?”
Hemsworth pauses. Then he says, “A good death for me would be having lived a good life.”
The kids ARE alright… In my own friend’s group, I know at least one trans and one enby kiddo now (both young adults, slightly older than my own daughter).
This could also be cross-posted to the kids are alright thread!
I have a kid in the Regional Arts Program high school. Want to guess how that place shakes out? 
That said, another friend in the above groups is at our neighbourhood school, where disrespect is also not tolerated.
I do think it’s thanks in part to fairly broad sanctions on hate speech in 
. Things are obviously not perfect, but it’s “officially better”, which around here tends to slowly drag “actually better” with it, and at least gives any complaints about discrimination force of law and a growing body of precedent.
An interview with the author of this book
Bill and Melinda Gates… are now [2021] the biggest owners of farmland in the US, a new report revealed.
The tech billionaire has quietly bought up 242,000 acres of farmland in 18 states - and 268,984 of multi-use land in 19 states in total, making him the biggest agricultural landowner in the US, though far short of the biggest overall landowner in the country
What’s he BUILDING out there?
We have a right to know!
No . . . really? So, they aren’t actually libertarians, they’re just “rights for me, but not for thee”-tarians.
New study finds libertarians tend to support reproductive autonomy for men but not for women
New research provides evidence that libertarians in the United States tend to prioritize men’s reproductive autonomy at the expense of women’s. The study, published in Political Psychology, found that libertarianism was associated with both opposition to women’s right to an abortion and support for men’s right to withdraw financial support for a child when women refuse to terminate the pregnancy.
Shockednotthatshocked.gif
My paper-making projects done in grade school using window screens and grass clippings really pale in comparison to this! 
It’s also making me reconsider my plans to digitize and destroy old paper records. Decades ago, experts predicted a CD or DVD would last between 25 to 100 years. Now my relatives are complaining that they can’t find a player to view records converted 20 years ago. We can’t agree on ways to convert the data on them to something else, either. 
It’s not a good idea to put all of your eggs in one basket - or rely on a single technology.
I think this is the thing that people didn’t account for when making those predictions - that capitalism would drive the players into scarcity as new technologies proved profitable.
Frustrating… I’m wondering if there will be gaps in our historical records due to this problem.
Possibly, but I hope not. You would think they learned from past losses due to fire and flood, but tech seems to be seductively simple. I’m wondering what will happen if all the old tech I hang onto to help family members fails beyond the point of repair one day. 
It’s tough being the family librarian/tech support. Most of the genealogy records we use come from digitized versions of originals, too. Just the thought of printing all that out makes me…
well it helps if the paper is non-acidic. I assume that this Korean paper is.
For sure. When I was doing a lot of research in the US National Archives I talked with some of their preservation folks. They were trying to convert 18th and 19th century records that had been microfilmed over to digital, and having a lot of trouble because of how badly the microfilm had deteriorated. The microfilming had been done in the 1930s through the early 1950s. The originals? Once they were microfilmed they were thrown in a landfill. So once the microfilm is gone, that’s it. I’m guessing we’ll see the same with digitized records.
So about 420 square miles. A square ~20miles on each side. You can grow enough vegetables on one square mile to feed 40,000 people (intensive farming, ideal conditions). Gates could feed ~6.5 million on his land.
(Rough rule for estimating is usually 100 people per acre but I said what the heck)
It seems like a new protocol needs to be taken up at NARA (which will hopefully trickle down to other archives) where each time a new format arrives, there are steps taken to make versions in those new formats, and to preserve the technology to read it to the best of the ability of current technology… rinse and repeat.
But honestly, the thing that has been most durable is (weirdly) paper. It’s strange how all those monks across Europe seemed to have the right idea in the middle ages… copy, copy, copy!
I know it’s a real issue, but the phrasing made me think of “Mr. President we must not allow a mineshaft gap!”
