161–170 of 190 posts
Never dying ever is definitely a weird thing to consider, but that's not possible even theoretically. Eventually all the energy in the Universe will reach maximum entropy and nothing will be alive.
But I am very suspicious of anyone who is sure that 75 years is the optimal meaning-to-lifespan ratio.
Bah, 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…
Your idea obviously doesn't work. You're basically advocating for something like Chronic lymphocyte leukemia at the society level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_lymphocytic_leukemia).
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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
> the problem of getting old rich powerful people to relinquish their grip on wealth and power This is a solved problem, guillotines worked wonders for this back in the day.
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You won't have immortality, but Jeff Bezos & friends might. How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?
Agreed. If immortality was discovered tomorrow (or at least some sort of anti-aging treatment), there’s no way it would become available to a regular person. All of us would still age and die, but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.
We all know what the ruled do when they get really pissed. The prospective ghouls know it very well too.
(surprising that the text doesn't mention it)
Bah, 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…
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 s…
To even consider "immortal" as possible suggests someone hasn't had a lot of formal math training. Infinity is rather large. In an infinite amount of time, any possible conjunction of circumstances that could cause an immortality system to fail will happen. Talking in thousands, millions or even billions of years doesn't even need to be rounded to be basically zero when compared to eternity. Death is a certainty. No…
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Life extension to make people live several times longer? Seems plausible we’ll get there eventually, simply by extrapolating current trends in science and biotechnology, and observing what is possible in other species. Mind uploading? That’s a whole other level of sci-fi. It isn’t extrapolating what we already have, it is waving your hand and declaring “as far as we know it isn’t physically impossible so why wouldn’t…
What trends are those? So far there has been zero progress on increasing maximum human lifespan.
We can already change the maximum lifespan of some other species. Why shouldn’t we expect to gradually be able to do it for more species? And then what makes humans special that we couldn’t eventually do the same for humans?
Derren Brown's book "Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine" (which is much better than the title might lead you to believe) does a very good job exploring the philosophy behind this. The choices we make have meaningful and value in large part because we sacrifice a fraction of our finite time and attention in order to do them. But once you have infinite time, then the value of everything you do becomes zero.
by that logic things done during shorter lives are more valuable, so you should kill everyone as soon as possible to make their lives more meaningful lotta people in this thread with anti-life beliefs
Spending half your life writing a book makes that book more meaningful than spending a tenth of your life doing it. But you can only write two of the former versus ten of the latter.
Either way, this is a simple and dumb mathematical model, not a literal equation for calculating the actual value of a life's work.
> 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.
Like the only thing keeping people all around the world going would be though that they are going to die and they need to do as much as they can before that. This is just radicoulous.
If people would be immortal they would just lie down and die because there is no point in leaving! People die on their retirement because they have nothing to work on! And author need the deadline to actually do some work! Those arguments sounds like rants of workaholic with procrastination problems. By the gods! If I would live forever I would live for 200 hundred years in one place and build water mile and garden. The move to some beach and learn surfing. And then maybe I would built a boat and move to another continent. Learn climbing. And then fencing. And then maybe I would join university and become math proffesor. Or join rock band. Or just knit some socks for grandkids. Possibilities are endless.