71–80 of 180 posts
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It's not most, but it's still remarkable that about 5% of humans who have ever lived haven't died.
To Whom It May Concern, By reading this, you have confirmed your membership in the Five Percenters Club. Welcome.
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Jesus claimed to offer everlasting life to those who believe in him (see Gospel of John). Worth looking into?
So did Muhammad (see Quran). Worth looking into?
Worth looking into?
Makes me wonder how many more billions will have to die before we bother to put some actual effort into ending death, but I know that's a very obscure opinion. https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
We do put huge amounts of effort into ending it, which so far has only served to delay it by decades. It's part of life that it ends, it seems. No way of getting around that no matter how many sci-fi solutions Bostrom proposes as realistic.
The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed.
We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0.
Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like.
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrs...
Makes me wonder how many more billions will have to die before we bother to put some actual effort into ending death, but I know that's a very obscure opinion. https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
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Why would you want to end death?
Because I love life and there’s nothing after this?
You'd most likely have been born into society as something between a serf and a slave, with your life strictly by controlled to ensure you never might imperil the perpetuation of those who would almost certainly come to see themselves as Gods. And no, you wouldn't be immortal. That'd be too risky for the Gods. It'd be the absolute worst of humanity, frozen in time, due to the lack of death.
And oh boy, imagine the punishments they could contrive for anybody who might indeed imperil (or even deny) their utter supremacy. How about a million years of torture, if for no other reason than to use you (and the millions of others granted similar accommodation) as warnings to the rest of society? I can say, with at least as much confidence as you express about there being nothing after this life, that this life will end. But the thing I can add to this, is that that's also a very good thing for all of humanity to come.
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I like Randall Munroe's summary of the argument ( https://what-if.xkcd.com/65/ ): > Almost everyone who hears this argument immediately sees something wrong with it. The problem is, everyone thinks it's wrong for a different reason. And the more they study it, the more they tend to change their minds about what that reason is.
I guess I'm one of those people because I read Wikipedia and this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me: > The Copernican principle suggests that any one human is equally likely (along with the other N-1 humans) to find themselves in any position n of the total population N. I feel like I must be misunderstanding the argument because it just doesn't make sense to me. First, why should I even assume N is finite? Se…
Our current understanding of physics dictates that the (observable) universe has a finite size and a finite lifespan, from which it logically follows that there can't be an infinite amount of humans.
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Because I love life and there’s nothing after this?
You don't know that.
You dont treat any other piece of knowledge with the same demand as you do the (lack of) afterlife.