Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness soon resulting in accidental death. Finally, for all we know there is a long tail of obscure disease processes that only kick in after lifespans no one has as yet ever reached-and even though that too might eventually be solved, if it takes you a thousand years to find the first case of such a disease, how many will die from it before you find a cure?
We Need to Die
101–110 of 190 posts
Re: We Need to Die
#102Eh I’ll take my 78, someone else can have the rest.
Re: We Need to Die
#103If you have an evening to burn, 17776 by Jon Bois[0] is a surprisingly captivating multimedia story/project about this topic. It speculates about a future Earth where people have been immortal for thousands of years and explores what happens through the lens of absurd football games. Previously discussed on HN in 2017[1].
Re: We Need to Die
#104> they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway.
How is that a bad thing? Are you the same person you were when you were 15? Of course not. Is it the case for when you were 20 or 30? No. The whole point of living is to learn, gather new experiences and grow. Would you stop doing that because you are immortal? No.
I think author is caught too much in his work whatever it is. Me, personnally would love to meet my grandkids and their kids. Learn and try do new things for dozens of years.
Would this be bad to see the wolrd or even other worlds if we could be able to visit other planets?
I think the main problem is that people are getting old and unhealthy. My grandpa was living for 92 years and I saw that he is miserable. He was fine mentally but his body was failing him. Imagine getting up in the morning and everything hurts. You try to go to the bathroom but your hand are shaking. That is the problem.
At some point you just do not want to live anymore. Because it is just suffering.
Re: We Need to Die
#105Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes. I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a de…
As I said in another comment, I'm against immortality because old people need to make way for new generations. But this comment is cute. I like the idea that we'd be there and we're able to see how people are doing, but we're not influencing the world anymore. Though I could also imagine at some point it could become depressing in bad times when there's nothing you can do, or boring after tens of thousands of years o…
I'm not sure why people have it in their heads that this "making way" requires one to be cast into the formless void instead of, like, a gated community.
Re: We Need to Die
#106> they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway. How is that a bad thing? Are you the same person you were when you were 15? Of course not. Is it the case for when you were 20 or 30? No. The whole point of living is to learn, gather new experiences and grow. Would you stop doing that because you are immortal? No. I think author is caught too much in his work whatever it is. Me, personnally w…
> for dozens of years
Yeah, that's not eternity. And if you read the article at all you'd know the argument is not against life extension, it's about having constraints, horizons, and deadlines to give meaning and urgency to things.
Re: We Need to Die
#107the 1973 essay can’t be found on that link, maybe provide an alternative :-/
_nobody_ needs to die, even assuming quality of living is maintained with age, and that one can live 1000s of years, that decision belongs to the self /jk
srsly, how is this an issue if everything in the Universe eventually dies, why wouldn’t we?
Re: We Need to Die
#108Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness s…
Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this. For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease kicked in
Re: We Need to Die
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I said in another comment, I'm against immortality because old people need to make way for new generations. But this comment is cute. I like the idea that we'd be there and we're able to see how people are doing, but we're not influencing the world anymore. Though I could also imagine at some point it could become depressing in bad times when there's nothing you can do, or boring after tens of thousands of years o…
I'm not sure why people have it in their heads that this "making way" requires one to be cast into the formless void instead of, like, a gated community.
I do think we're significant more likely to solve immortality than the problem of getting old rich powerful people to relinquish their grip on wealth and power
Re: We Need to Die
#110There have been many, many stories over the millenia that try to empart the wisdom that mortality is necessary. Some present it as being a gift. I don't think any one source made it click for me, but I think some combination of watching The Good Place , Sandman , and a lot of Black Mirror got me really stretching my imagination of what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that felt like my horizons…
I'm with you. The idea of being immortal is terrifying to me. Will I still care about nature after seeing millions of extinctions? Will I still care about life when I see trillions of humans doing human things? Will I even still feel part of the universe as the only permanently unchanging thing? Hard pass. Besides, if we were immortal, we wouldn't have my favorite quote, which feels a bit relevant here. As the great…
>Will I still care about nature
A society that has the ability to provide infinite life, will for sure have the ability to inject this caring feeling back.