421–430 of 599 posts
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Why not die at 30 then in the spirit of societal progress? This argument is philosophical i.e. worthless. We will actually have to win with death to answer the question if it's good or not. It's not something you can figure out without doing it.
Raising children (and later, grandchildren) is the obvious answer.
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I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging. (Note that for those who discuss this semi-regularly, that's understood to be very different than seeking a cure for any particular age related disease, which usually we attempt to address when it's too late.). There are groups like https://www.levf.org/ doing some early work like Robust Mouse Rejuvenation (in mid-lif…
One shouldn't put money into "curing death by aging" without fixing society first; while birth rates exceed death rates, the world fills up and drains natural resources etc etc. There's a ton of problems that need resolving if living longer is to be a thing.
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What lower hanging fruit are governments currently spending on? Giant militaries? Healthcare for those last few months of life?
> What lower hanging fruit are governments currently spending on? I meant what lower hanging fruits governments ought to spend on. However, since you asked, here are some of the things governments are currently spending on, but could bear improvement: eradicating preventable diseases, ensuring kids get good nutrition, better tracking, and hopefully prevention of e. coli/salmonella outbreaks, funding basic research in…
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In case it's insightful, I've correspondingly never understood the common contentment with death. The world is an incredible place, and there's so much to experience and do. If I had the time there's hundreds of careers I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery. I think I could live a thousand lives with the people I care about and not be done. I've had to choose one life, and it's a nice one, but if…
For a counter thought: while I absolutely agree with you in terms of richness of life, I don’t think pursuing endless life is a sound idea. As parent poster wrote, we like nostalgia, because we clutch to our experiences. We compare them instead of collecting it. On the other side the more we experience something the more we stall or get bored. Even with other people - with increase of lifespan we also increased numbe…
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You can think whatever you want. But in almost all cases you are wrong. And you can only choose what makes you feel better in matters that don't matter. In all others you are almost always better off choosing what is actually correct. You can choose a narrative that pi equals 3 because it makes you feel better but you won't be doing world or yourself any favors if you choose to make real world decisions based on that…
If you want to be correct, there's hardly any "you" to begin with. Given basic physics, cultural and physical context (whether that's atmosphere and biosphere or 21st century and technolgy), dropping cartesian theatre you will have a hard time finding "you". It's mostly a language construct. If you want analogy - we are looking on the river and we see a vortex, then it disappears. Parent comment is like - oh, the wat…
So there is "you" as there is a "vortex". It's not just a language construct. It's a language construct that describes impactful but sadly transient phenomenon.
Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.
In case it's insightful, I've correspondingly never understood the common contentment with death. The world is an incredible place, and there's so much to experience and do. If I had the time there's hundreds of careers I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery. I think I could live a thousand lives with the people I care about and not be done. I've had to choose one life, and it's a nice one, but if…
My guess is that we’ll inevitably begin to forget the older, less important stuff even with a completely healthy brain simply due to size constrain.
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What lower hanging fruit are governments currently spending on? Giant militaries? Healthcare for those last few months of life?
> What lower hanging fruit are governments currently spending on? I meant what lower hanging fruits governments ought to spend on. However, since you asked, here are some of the things governments are currently spending on, but could bear improvement: eradicating preventable diseases, ensuring kids get good nutrition, better tracking, and hopefully prevention of e. coli/salmonella outbreaks, funding basic research in…
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I've lived a modern day life of comfort, opportunities and experiences unimaginable compared to even my grandparents (all deceased now). I've been to places and had opportunities to try things which they never did. Compared to my grandma who cooked during food rationing and had to save sugar rations to make a cake, who lived a frugal life of 'make do and mend', I have the spare money and first world surroundings to i…
> Brute forcing through everything-there-is-to-experience is not an enticing vision for the future at all, it's a grind. Speak for yourself, but please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective. (I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to.)
Whom do you think I am speaking for?
> "please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective."
"I want everything" is a youthful perspective that adults grow out of by gaining things and realising that drowning in endless things isn't happiness, it's a hoarding disorder. People with a PetaByte storage array of media aren't the happiest film watchers on the planet, people with a garage full of Lamborghinis aren't the best drivers or the happiest people, Billionaires aren't satisfied with 'enough' money. Indeed, the opposite as one anecdote in this thread commented - a child with nothing who gets an orange is happy; a child with 9 consoles who gets a 10th console and wants an 11th, isn't happy. Saying "I want 1000000 consoles" seems more cringeworthy than convincing. "I want a career" "I want ten careers!" "I want a pony" "I want a hundred lifetimes of pony ownership!". "I want to master an instrument" "I want to master infinity instruments!". Ok mr oneupper. But it makes no difference whether "you" lived all those lives you can't remember, or someone else did. No difference at all. In fact, you may as well assume that other people are you, and their lives are ones you lived and can no longer remember. Everything becomes much simpler and it makes just as much sense.
> "I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to."
I suspect they are against suicide; why would someone who promotes longevity so much also be pro-dying-early? I also suspect one of the reasons our societies are against suicide is because workers can't be allowed an easy escape from their suffering. The kind of people who are in favour of working infinity lifetimes of careers are probably in the upper/white collar classes if they see that as a good thing; to a huge amount of the world, retirement is the carrot dangled ahead of them and dozens of lifetimes of work would be a pretty bad thing.
Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.
In case it's insightful, I've correspondingly never understood the common contentment with death. The world is an incredible place, and there's so much to experience and do. If I had the time there's hundreds of careers I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery. I think I could live a thousand lives with the people I care about and not be done. I've had to choose one life, and it's a nice one, but if…
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The state of the art in this field is removing a rabbit's kidney, vitrifying it, waiting a month or so, thawing it and implanting it. I haven't read this article but the abstract seems to confirm what I read a while ago.[0] Apparently the bottleneck is in thawing organs past a certain size, current thawing methods lead to uneven thawing in larger organs, however I read they were experimenting with using directed radi…
Sure, you can freeze and unfreeze an organ. But that doesn’t work with the brain the electricity and the connections between the neurons are you. Cryogenic freezing will never work, until the structure of the brain can be preserved. All current methods kill the brain. It’s expensive snake oil.
Source? How do you know it's not just the neurons?