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The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

nytimes.com

81–90 of 139 posts

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just reading about the French revolution. Not sure we should be hoping for anything like that.

I don't think OP is pointing to what he "hopes" is happening. He's pointing to what he thinks the rich and powerful are steering society towards.

I suspect that OP may have advanced knowledge of their fate thanks to the copy of a certain encyclopaedia which fell through a rift in the space-time continuum from 1,000 years in the future.

Share and Enjoy.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#82
post #3

> What If They Could? Then they'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

I was just reading about the French revolution. Not sure we should be hoping for anything like that.

You might belong to the group that is benefitting from the status quo.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#83
post #75
post #47

Living forever sounds awful. For one, I am extremely curious what happens when I die. Without death, life becomes a hollow shell, or at least I imagine it would, as you would lack urgency.

You have already been dead. It feels exactly like it felt before you were born.

This is conjecture. No one knows.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#84
Living systems - hell, complex systems - don't do "forever" real well. You end up adding a compounding amount of energy over time, a "negentropic tax", as the universe tries to untie that complexity into radiation.

After a while the compounding energy input of the negentropic tax overwhelms the control mechanisms that feed it into the "preserved" system, and it blows up.

It's a common feature across disciplines: content management, biology, programming, maintainability engineering, neural networks, chemical engineering . . I imagine the list is pretty close to boundless. Ha, turns out human knowledge is also a complex natural system.

So I guess what I'm saying is only dead things live forever. Which should say a lot about the internal life of the standard tech/finbro. "I want to be just like I am right this second for all time!"

Speaking personally, I'm always amused by the Eternal Life pitch whether I hear it in church or on the internet. Everyone gets eternal life. We're surrounded by it, we eat it, we poop it out every day. Our grandfathers are in our lungs, old friends in the leaves of trees, giant parts of your brain die every morning as you wake. Eternal Life is not for the selfish. Something that the Bible thumpers could read for themselves, if they bothered to read the thing.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#85
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think OP is pointing to what he "hopes" is happening. He's pointing to what he thinks the rich and powerful are steering society towards.

I suspect that OP may have advanced knowledge of their fate thanks to the copy of a certain encyclopaedia which fell through a rift in the space-time continuum from 1,000 years in the future. Share and Enjoy.

To know our future, sometimes it helps to look at our past. And then extrapolate.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think blaming America's problems on gerontocracy is correlation-causation confusion. The reason we have a gerontocracy is that ordinary rank-and-file voters are too cynical and individualistic to participate in politics.

In many wealthy countries the old are literally outnumbering the young so it wouldn't matter if everyone under the age of 40 turned up to vote. Nations haven't tried to implement mass immigration because they are woke- it's a last desperate gamble.

A gamble which they managed so poorly that the planned wins got buried under collateral losses. And I still don't see much talk about solutions, just destructive radicalization.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#87
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have already been dead. It feels exactly like it felt before you were born.

This is conjecture. No one knows.

It is the simplest explanation. It is the conjeture that it feels any different that needs a proof.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very few wouldn't, unless very much driven by their religion to fetish death. I feel sad that you seemingly have met more people who lack compassion and empathy than ones who have it. Personally, I don't know (or "hang out" rather maybe) many people who'd sacrifice anyone's life just to live a day longer, and I don't think that's a useful default view to have of people, most people I've met don't want to hurt other…

Though many would sacrifice an intelligent animals like a pig or dolphin and they’d do this optionally

In the West, most will happily slaughter a cow but never a dog (and by slaughter, I mean allow someone else to slaughter it for you, but never be OK with doing it yourself). In many Indian states, cow slaughter is a crime. Many places in China traditionally ate dog meat. People all over the world make more-or-less arbitrary decisions about which animals are OK to kill, and that's before even talking about their fellow humans.

I'm not a nihilist and I do eat meat. I think we should minimize suffering to others. But I can see how anybody could be conditioned to think otherwise. It's not some inherent human instinct to want to preserve others' lives. We've had to develop that instinct culturally.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#89
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re the only ones who would be able to afford it.

This is an argument against all technological progress.

Nope. Just technological progress in the context of a neo-feudal system.

Re: The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

#90
To play devils advocate here: could it be a good thing?

That way they would be incentivized to think about the long term actions of their actions, like not dying before getting affected by global warming etc.

And once aging is understood and solved, maybe it’s possible to iterate on the approach and make it cheaper and more accessible. That would greatly help the aging populations of the west.

If you’re around forever I’d imagine you would care more about what people think of you, too. If not your number of enemies would just rise forever.

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