I am a tremendous Beatles fan and I often depress myself by looking back at their 1960’s Beatlemania concerts and think that most of those screaming teenagers are probably dead by now. Happy Friday.
I hate articles like these. We all know we're going to die and that life moves too fast. In a practical sense it adds absolutely nothing of any positive value to remind people of this fact. Nobody is going to change the way they live their lives because of an article like this, all it does is make the reader's day a little more depressing.
I once read a similar article about a guy who visited his parents once a year. He then calculated he realistically has 10 more visits with them based on their age and decided to visit more often. That hit home for me, and I've made an effort to visit more and be more patient. These articles can be a gentle prompt. The last line of this particular article made an impact too.
Exactly. Another one is to calculate how many weekends you have left, fill a jar with that many marbles, and throw away a marble every week.
This will make you be more deliberate with what you do with each weekend, even a lazy do-nothing-couch-potato weekend will be a decision and you will feel great about it.
I disagree. I've found it's valuable to be reminded how short life really is; it makes you think hard about how you want to spend your finite time. This idea has really changed how I live my life, from small decisions (is scrolling twitter really worth it?) to big ones (do I really want to spend my precious life in this miserable job?).
I read an article where they visualized each week of your life as a diamond. If you live to be 90 years old, all those weeks would barely be a handful of diamonds. Each week you are "giving away" that diamond to the things you do, whether it's working, hobbies, time with friends, etc. You have to consider "does this activity really deserve a diamond? is this really how I want to spend my most precious resource?".
We will all die some day. Ignoring this fact won't make it go away, but embracing it will let you take control of it.
Not so sure about that. Ernest Becker wrote a book on the subject titled The Denial of Death (though some take issue with psychoanalysis, whether post-Freudian or not).
Even when we tacitly admit to the seeming fact, we still hedge in that our family, religion, culture, species, knowledge, or stories will continue into an infinity that (so far as we know) doesn't exist (this ignores, of course, notions of an afterlife, which can be seen as fulfilling the same need under different constraints). The universe (again, so far as we now) is hurtling towards heat death, and ultimately, producing a billion more generations and having one big humanity party this weekend capped off with Kool-Aid all amounts to the same.
Even then, infinity isn't really such a good anti-depressive. It's just that, unlike other animals (again, so far as we know) we have to craft such psychological defenses against our own analytic mental processes in order to fulfill the more fundamental drive of biological reproduction.
There is a popular definition of "nihilism" which is "the belief that life has no meaning" but for Nietzsche, and most existentialists that followed, there was a much more insidious nihilism that this comment embodies.
For Nietzsche and thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir it is a fact that "life has no meaning and we all die", the real question is "what do you do with this?". For both of these thinkers real nihilism is "pretending this isn't happening".
Nietzsche is often partially quoted saying "God is dead" as though it's some sort of atheistic battle cry, but it's not that at all. The full quote is:
> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Nietzsche is pointing out that the old way we used to deal with existential despair was religion. This is how meaning was created. But like it or not that system of meaning is largely gone and cannot be trivially replaced. Nietzsche's entire life's work is about confronting this existential horror and coming up with new ways to live.
de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, goes on to catalog all the strategies we have for dealing with this problem. Pointing out that nihilism ultimately leads to the rise of Nazism. Likewise far right extremism in the US can be viewed as a natural reaction to the failure of systems of meaning across the US.
The point being is that when you see articles like this, your response doesn't have to be and should not be merely to dismiss it until you feel better.
For a great overview of this perspective of nihilism I highly recommend Nolan Gertz's Nihilism from the MIT Press
If the article were really as useless as you say, I suspect it would not bother you as much as it seems to. Might be worth it to ruminate on a little longer.
I disagree. If anything, most of us NEED reminding that our time is limited and precious, and that our circumstances can change in an instant.
The practical value of me after reading this (YMMV) is that I'll be a bit more present, do more meaningful things, heck even just appreciate that hug or phone call a bit more, today and probably tomorrow too.
Do you have kids? I find thinking about this stuff particularly valuable in a way I probably couldn't grasp before them. Spending 30 minutes playing blocks with a 2-year-old can be a mundane, frustrating experience. Or -- if you realize that this 30 minutes is probably one of the last dozens or so times you will EVER play blocks with this little wonder child, in all of time -- you relish it, like you would relish seeing a great movie for the first time, or (better comparison) your first kiss with someone. It's rare and precious.
> In a practical sense it adds absolutely nothing of any positive value to remind people of this fact... all it does is make the reader's day a little more depressing.
Have you considered that other people may have different takeaways than you? I know that I'm going to die someday but this piece still added to my perspective on life and old age. And I'm glad it was posted. :)
I had my kids young. I’m an empty nester at 45, and I happen to be dipping my toe into the dating pool for the first time in a very long time. Looking through online dating profiles, I’m genuinely surprised how many folks want to have children into their late 40s.
Ignoring the medical risks, this throws the timing of everything off. A former coworker is paying off his kids’ student loans in retirement.
My grandmother was 47 when she had my mother. I saw my mother struggle to care for her aging mother while at the same time raising children.
It's not surprising, it's an economic consequence. At 25 I couldn't even afford to properly care for myself, much less a kid. At 30 it would have been difficult with lots of corner cutting. At 35 its viable-ish, but now I'm getting up there...
All else equal, having child related expenses later in life rather than earlier will only leave you richer due to time value of money. Assuming you plan ahead and save.
I can't imagine having biological kids that late in life, however becoming a foster/adoption parent is always possible and there's always a need for more of them.
Also, it limits your ability to enjoy your grandkids. My oldest will be out of the house by the time we’re 44/45, and the kids have been informed they have until 27 before I call the Bangladeshi matchmaker. God willing if I life to the normal life expectancy I’ll see my great grands.
This is a topic that completely changed how I think about my life. Many people think it's morbid, but I've found that contemplating my death frequently allows me to make much better decisions about how I'm spending my finite time.
This inspired me to make an android wallpaper that displays the percentage of my life that's already elapsed, so every time I look at my phone I'm reminded to think "is this really what I want to be doing right now?".
Same. My favorite topic (not easily brought up at parties though). Powerful meditation... Some suggested readings would be Ernest Becker and Sheldon Solomon.
There's a reason why the classic "midlife crisis" comes between 40-50. A lot of people reach this point halfway through their lives, often at the peak of their careers, and think "my time is limited… is this all there is?"
As someone in this age range, I don't find it depressing, I find it clarifying. There are so many things I could say "yes" to, so many branches in my career I could chase. Reminding myself that my time is limited helps me to say "no" and maintain focus on the things that truly matter.
I have to say I like this somewhat poetic way of writing, especially the sentences with which the author ends paragraphs. Very rich.
On a different note, no. Let's fight death. Fuck aging. We can fight it. We don't have to suffer like cattle under it. We can beat it.
There are plenty of longevity focused startups and academic research groups, and yet we're not spending nearly enough effort and money on this problem. It affects every human on earth, and the immense benefits of adding even one year of healthy lifespan to 7 billion people make it a moral imperative to act upon.
Fighting death should be a multi-national effort that we focus on with all our might, _right now_. You shouldn't have to die.
Because interstellar travel is probably much harder than extend people's lifespan to unreasonable extents. Your children will need room to thrive.
Of course, you could argue it's others who have to die. But that seems a morally difficult position.
I love the positive sum framing in your response. Yes earths resources are technical finite, though I’m not sure that’s true in a meaningful sense.
Humans are already well past the natural carrying capacity of the planet for our species. But we’ve figured it out an have been (mostly) successful. I don’t see why that would change between now and when we get access to off planet resources. Especially if humans live forever - priorities are able to shift quite a bit when you can think longer term (what’s 100 years of effort to solve this problem compared to infinity?).
I still wouldn't call death desirable outcome but having kids did start putting many things into perspective. Admittedly there's a certain comfort I take in knowing that a part of me will continue to exist here. Even if the generations that come afterwards have no memory of me as a person.
Why? Life is long enough when well lived. My intuition is decisively against the idea of stretching longevity. How about we try to make more meaningful the time we are given rather than having more capacity for idleness and dread?
Yes, you should. Either that, or no one can have children. It's finite planet, and it's already over-flowing with people and their detritus.
Not only that, but if people don't die, then the first generation that doesn't die will end up ruling forever over everyone who has the misfortune of being born later. In a world where no one dies, someone like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un can and will rule quite literally forever. The U.S. Supreme Court will have no turnover.
You’re assuming the status quo will continue. How will a small group in the Supreme Court maintain power if there’s enough of a willing population to oust them?
Your example of King Jong Un doesn’t work either, because it’s still a dictatorship, and father and grandfather were both dictators, and they both died, so why does it matter?
The world is overflowing with detritus because the incentive structures are not there. If people lived much longer they might be more willing to spend the time to clean up.
> How will a small group in the Supreme Court maintain power if there’s enough of a willing population to oust them?
Supreme court justices serve for life. The only way to "oust" a supreme court justice (in the U.S.) is through impeachment. In the entire history of the U.S. no supreme court justice has ever been removed against their will. The assumption of mortality is deeply embedded into the U.S. Constitution. (Yes, you could amend the Constitution. Good luck with that.)
> so why does it matter?
Because there is at least a possibility that the next generation Kim might be better. Or that a Kim might die childless.
> If people lived much longer they might be more willing to spend the time to clean up.
Yes, that's possible, but much more likely those in power would continue to do what they do now: build enclaves for themselves that keep out the riff-raff.
If we eventually become a post-scarcity, multi-plantary species then significant life extension or immortality might work. But in the near future it would be a environmental and social calamity.
Warren Buffett is probably working hard to buy more time. Sad reality, we just don’t know the outcome after death. If we knew the outcome, it will be okay to accept it.
Even after too much psychedelics. It still doesn’t help anyone accept the deep void of not knowing.
The way I look at it: the year after I die will be just as difficult as the year before I was born. IOW not a care in the world.
I understand being afraid of death because self-preservation is built into us, but unless there really is some hellfire that some of us will be thrown into for all eternity (unlikely but boy would that suck), then logic dictates that it will bother us just as much as our non-existence bothered us for the billions (trillions?) of years before our births.
Yes, but if nothing is infinite, then when did the universe begin and how? I always struggle with this. Presumably something must have always been, and it is that always that throws a wrench in my secular vision of the universe.
Most cattle don't suffer from aging. Beef cattle are usually killed in their first year or two. Dairy cows live longer, but tend to be killed after their milk output drops enough (which I guess you could call aging, but they could live for many more years after that).
If you're proposing fighting aging, but against a backdrop of euthenization, ala Logan's Run, I'm in, but we'll need to rebuild the Dallas mall everyone lives in. But if it's trying to get the general population to have a life expectency of 100+, I'm not sure that's a grand plan.
My grandfather on my father’s side was born in 1906. He was 35 when my father was born in 1941.
My father was 38 when I entered this world in 1979.
I was 41 in 2020 when my son was born. Fortunately we were able to have some semblance of an 80th birthday for his grandfather last year in the midst of this pandemic.
If my son has a child as late in life as I have, there’s no telling if I’ll get to meet them, simply because of life expectancy.
Ah yes, life advice and perspective form an overly priveleged nobody. It is easy to do these kind of lazy life pholosophy takes when you have your life sorted. Unfortunately, for the most of "this" generation, this life was screwed by your fathers generation beyond measure. Out of control global warming, house prices that require life long mortgage that you cannot even commit to because of student loans. Consider yourself lucky if you are perfectly healthy (for now). So yeah, shut up about living "now".
>Ah yes, life advice and perspective form an overly priveleged nobody. It is easy to do these kind of lazy life pholosophy takes when you have your life sorted.
You will die too. Are you going to be satisfied on your deathbed that you spent your life being angry at everything?
I am unsure why you have made a conclusion about my state of affairs? I am happy with my life, but I am not churning out advice for someone who has it much worse than I.
There's a lot of assumptions here. The "our parents screwed us over" is almost exclusively American phenomenon - in a lot of places around the world, current generation is unimaginably more wealthy than their parents ever were. My own parents were living in a house without a washing machine and a fridge when they were my age, and owning a car was a very rare luxury. What we have now was once reserved for the elites, or maybe for people from other, richer countries.
This is a beautiful article, but I feel that it should be read as a chronicle of the author's life experience rather than an analysis on when to have your children.
The age at which couples are having their children is Indeed increasing; this isn't necessarily a bad thing. As the author pointed out, parents are more likely to have time to spend with their children if they've already established a career/source of income. They'll automatically also have better resources to care for them (babysitter/schooling/literally everything else). On top of all that, they'll have more life experience, which should help in the education of their offspring.
Besides, what are the alternatives ? Having your children at a young age has the only major benefit of being young. And if your remain healthy throughout your life, I believe the benefit of being young remains irrelevant.
Why shouldn't raising children be considered a worthy career? Why does society pretty much mandate dual income families? That’s what seems bleak to me. Having kids older is riskier for both women and the children. It’s not healthy. Society, if it wanted to prioritize the health of women, should be figuring out how to support the idea and reality that homemaking (whether father or mother who primarily engages in it) is a worthy career.
I think we’re approaching a point in human evolution where we should all be obsessed with death. Like, spending R&R time on biology.
100 years ago, it would be unhealthy - it was certainly an unavoidable outcome. I had this view going through high school and college - biology/anatomy classes never interested me. They were fairly hocus pocus in my eyes - like we were scratching the surface of a world we barely understood and wouldn’t master for dozens of generations. As if a Neanderthal discovered a computer and attempted to understand how it worked - they’d get there, but the original Neanderthal would be long dead before any real answers surfaced.
This changed recently. The hockey stick of progress is clearly forming in biology. With technology like CRISPR, we are starting to get the tools to reverse engineer and bend life to our will. Death doesn’t seem inevitable for my children anymore; our generation might actually be able to partially solve it - at least enough to buy the next generation enough time to fully solve it.
I don't think death is a thing that can be "solved" ( as in, it's not a problem per se and "solving" it will only cause a lot of problems). There's only a finite amount of resources on the planet after all, so we can't have everybody live for as long as they want while also making children.
It’s only technically true that there are a finite number of resources on the planet. But I don’t think that’s true in any meaningful sense. This isn’t zero sum - humans are able to expand the available resources and have already demonstrated they are capable of that.
We are well past earths natural carrying capacity for our species - and we have been for quite a long time. But humans have solved those problems. Yes we’ve created problems in the process, but we are solving those too. So far nothing indicates to me that humans can’t continue solving the growing pains on earth long enough to get access to the (nearly) limitless supply of resources available in the cosmos.
>> This isn’t zero sum - humans are able to expand the available resources and have already demonstrated they are capable of that.
Nonsense. People are getting better at accessing resources that were hard to get at. But doing so is just a symptom of the low hanging fruit running out.
We’re not going to use up all the sunlight and the US uses less water than it did in the 60s (and emits less CO2 per year than it did in the 2000s). That includes offshoring it too.
Degrowth has no good evidence for it because it’s false. It’s just another version of baby boomers deciding their own children aren’t allowed to inherit their wealth.
Living longer lives will definitely increase space travel. More people would be ready to sacrifice a few decades of their lives if that means space exploration. We would eventually colonize the solar system.
I feel if we could literally halt death a lot of hedonism would stop. That YOLO feeling that plagues most of humanity would mostly go away. We would suddenly be a species with a clear aim. To know more about the universe and ourselves. We would find meaning in our lives and hopefully wisen up a little.
I'd say avoiding death is about as likely as overtaking the speed of light. It seems like science fiction to me. No matter how much progress we make, we might be trying to do something that's literally impossible.
That doesn't mean we can't research it, and certainly we can discover things that are useful. But there's really no reason to believe immortality is achievable. And honestly there are lots of works of fiction on why it's actually bad for humanity.
I don't want true immortality, but it would be momentous if we could significantly extend people's active lifespan. Imagine if 100 was the new 50, and 200 was the new 100.
Counterpoint: imagine if we got 50 extra years of extremely low quality life at great financial cost, and the courts decided that withholding the longevity treatment from anyone was a crime.
The result would be lots of misery and a wealth transfer from regular people to the medical and pharma industry.
I think this misses the point of the essay completely. Hoping for life extension like that is simply a form of procrastination. What is it you hope to do better if only you could have more time? The hourglass has already been turn over, what are you going to do before the sand runs out? Go!
In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova? ...
I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...
I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!”
There are many issues that can be solved with extra time. But should we all be living 200 or 300 years, society would probably be restructured in a way to squeeze that extra time out of you. Want financial stability and a good work/life balance? A house? Just grind for 200 years and you'll be set...
For every person who would benefit from that, there would be someone harmed by that. We should instead focus on ways to alter our very perception of time - paying attention to the actual passage of time will usually slow it down for you. Time is very fluid for us, most of us just don’t realize it.
Avoiding death is impossible like you say. In many, many, many years the universe will be nothing but black holes without any way to harvest any energy. It will be impossible for a human to live then. But conquering aging? There is not a doubt in my mind that this is possible.
> Avoiding death is impossible like you say. In many, many, many years the universe will be nothing but black holes without any way to harvest any energy. It will be impossible for a human to live then
That is just the conclusion reached by the best and brightest chimps among the 8 billions chimps that dominate all the other species on the planet.
Even Einstein and Hawking might be victims of the Dunning Kruger effect, only there is nobody smarter than them who are currently around to mock them or feel pity towards them.
All the physics and science that we do should come with a huge asterisk disclaiming that it's only the conclusion reached by the brightest and most specialized chimps.
FTL is physically impossible as far as we know. Immortality, like practical immortality, as in life spans in the thousands or millions of years, does not appear physically impossible. Just very complicated.
> I'd say avoiding death is about as likely as overtaking the speed of light.
I don't think the two are comparable. Overtaking the speed of light is impossible according to our current understanding of physics.
Death on the other hand seems to be due to defects in our bodies (and most living organisms) - nature just hasn't "planned" for them to function for so long and pretty much cut corners. Those defects might be hard to fix with our current technology and/or understanding of medicine, but they're not proven to be impossible. In fact unlike the speed of light, "death" isn't even a single specific event where someone's brain just quits for good but is due to a variety of factors, some of which we can already control and resolve (it used to be that cardiac arrest is guaranteed death, nowadays it's no longer a certainty).
In addition, there are many different ways of "solving death". Even if we assume that any living body must die because of some unbreakable law of physics, if we could move someone's consciousness to a new body (or a "virtual machine" in a computer) we've effectively solved the problem anyway.
Death can't be "solved" because it's not a problem, it's a solution. If we defeat death (and we may) then a host of terrifying problems will arise from that, starting from the sharing of resources, who gets to enjoy that technology, etc.
Defeating death is a great plot idea for a dystopian novel, but in reality it's the ultimate selfish pursuit.
I very much doubt that most people will actually live forever even if it becomes possible.
At some point you are just done, and if you accept that, you’ll die. It may be at 50, 100, 150, maybe 200. But I don’t think humans are mentally made for spans of time much larger than that.
Greg Egan's novel "Incandescence" has a short story prequel/teaser named "Riding the Crocodile" which sets the backdrop for the novel in the form of a post-human couple's last big journey, they set out to do something and at the end of the story they decide that even though their success opens up many exciting new possibilities they are not the ones to pursue those possibilities and so they just slip away and die.
And any other technology is not the ultimate selfish pursuit? The reason we have nice electricity, cities, running water is purely so we can live in more comfort. This is just as, if not more, selfish as wanting a longer healthy lifespan.
How nice that nature has chosen the correct solution for your host of terrifying problems. If we were immortal and truly wise, I'm sure we also would have decided it was reasonable to kill literally everyone in order to share resources better.
> how would natural selection work in a world where individuals live forever?
So it would likely be pretty unchanged from our current levels. Just about everyone survives to produce children these days (with some people i wonder how).
Also i don't think when people say conquer death they mean true immortality, they mean Negligible senescence i.e. we are no more likely to die due to aging, people would still die (accidents, violence, natural disaster etc).
Defeating death would ironically cause us to die out. Death is essential to avoid stratification. Our minds are not compatible with living forever. In a way we are illusions, we don't exist without each other, so there is no reason keeping a person alive forever. The human race, our communities are what's important. They are the key to the future, not any person. The person is just a cell. The cell is not important, the structures we form are.
Luckily death is really hard to defeat. Dying is always on the menu.
On the contrary, world leaders who can live 1000 years will be much further-sighted than those we have now. And we may actually be able to solve hard problems like safe and sustainable nuclear energy, how to build a modern soceity that encourages mindfulness and collective enlightenment (instead of driven by mindless comsumerism and stress-coping mechanisms), etc.
Also, there is something about compassion and love that we do not understand that are physiologically benefit to the person. I do believe we live in a world where niceness eventually prevails, and if someone is able to live a healthy long age, they likely have embraced death wholeheartedly, and are good and kind, (esp as they age and learn from their mistakes instead of getting stuck in behavioural patterns).
Maybe it's not about you avoiding death. You don't avoid death. It has always been about death avoiding you, if you allow some mythicism in this thing called existence. So this has always been a journey about learning to accept and embrace death with compassion and love for the world. Maybe that's what life is.
And so long existential time comes and goes at the whim of itself. Technology is never the cause, but merely an enabler.
> "On the contrary, world leaders who can live 1000 years will be much further-sighted than those we have now."
More like a recipe for an omnipresent gerontocracy, locked into the culture and values of a millennium ago, but wielding immense wealth and power ruling over everything. Sounds like a conservative's wet dream.
> More like a recipe for an omnipresent gerontocracy
Sounds like the thinking of a Tier 0 civilization in regards to the ruling class of a Tier 2 civilization (if one day we can prove that such civilizations exist
Given the great success of trickle down economics, benevolent dictators etc. throughout history, I call this out as the bad rhetorical technique of "no, but this time it is different".
The very framing of dividing "civilizations" into "tiers" where one is clearly superior to the other shows some implicit assumptions that not everyone might share, as well as the idea that there will be or should be a "ruling class".
If people reject this, we do not get to thinly veil "just accept your technological superior you luddite" like some 1920s robber baron. That's been done, and they got pushed back, and we have no obligation to enable the fabulous wealth and power of some elite to last forever without provable commitments that this will benefit all of us
> ...the idea that there will be or should be a "ruling class".
There will always be a "ruling class" the same way that there will always be dependency hierarchy in the cost structure of things (eg from compiler design to the way a solar system works).
> ... and we have no obligation to enable the fabulous wealth and power of some elite ...
Indeed. But let's be pragmatic for a second. What can an individual (or a collective of people) do to not enable (ie disable) existing wealth and power (ie the status quo)? Unfortunately the answer is by gaining wealth and power themselves. (eg in the cultural-economic form or socio-politically or militarily, etc). To change the dynamics of the system. Anything else is just ignoring reality and encouraging hypernormalization [1]. The world is in a huge mess now because many highly capable people chose not to make the hard decisions. (eg with the current RU & China situations)
... and the world will only become a better place (eg in the sense of reducing suffering, and for the pursuit of universal human & animal rights, etc) when hard decisions are made and executed to bring forth a paradigm shift (that which can be measured game-theoretically e.g. compare modern day France to 18th century France)
> ... without provable commitments that this will benefit all of us
Proof is useful but it is not enough in the same way the map is useful but it is not the territory.
In some sense I've just elaborated your points above but from the angle that the world is going to collapse soon if we don't reach Tier 1 as a cilivisation fast enough.
First I would like to thank you for actually engaging in a non-defensive way.
Second, I would like to point out some flaws I see in your argumentations:
On ruling class/"dependency hierarchy":no, there does not always need to be one. For a semantic example, it is perfectly possible to have no "dependency" in software systems (except the one to the underlying system, but this is not a power relationship). Closer to the subject, it is possible to structure systems such that there is no power concentration, "soft power" is effectively diffused and true consent (not necessarily concensus, just consent) is required to get anything done. Such systems still enable decision making to be delegated, but when push comes to shove, power is distributed and recalled easily. We see it in associations, we see it in anarchist social experiments, we see it in well designed teams and companies where employees have real leverage - such systems are often not as scalable yet, but they do generally perform better in terms of welfare and resilient - see the german company-union relationships which tend to be more resilient to economic downturns for example and generally treat their employees much better.
To blindly reassert "there is no other way" is to adopt as an axiom that is at best uncertain and at worst empirically wrong.
3rd, on pragmatism and the french, sure, pragmatically we can play that game while it exists, but the glory of the french revolution was not in it's pragmatic achieval of its goals (they failed after all, napoleon the post-metternich era reinstuted defacto monarchy) and but that it completely and radically did away with pragmatism and destroyed the old social order. So I'm surprised you would use it as an argument in a discussion about the inevitably of hierachy, if anything I would use it as an argument for the great good that can come from taking away power from old decision making structures.
4th, on game theory, I do my best to study game theory nowadays, and you can only prove what your assumptions allow you, so in this discussion it's out of bounds without a formal specification (I'm happy for references though if you can recommend good formalisations and studies of current political and economic systems).
5th, on the world collapsing, it is collapsing because our elite has so far not cared to save it despite the scientists warning them for decades, and its the populace and idealists (extinction rebellion et al) who are pushing for the radical solutions to save them - so again, I don't see why we should buy the argument of "oh no, actually, the elites need to be more powerful so they can save us".
Scaling and Growth at all costs without distributed power to alleviate the distributed ills has brought us here. So why should we not ask for solid proof before we give more power to a centralised few? Why should we assume a ruling class will survive the coming shifts? Why should we assume having a ruling class is inevitable when previous generations were told only the kings and royals had the divine grace to rule, that the plebs could never handle reading, women could never handle equality, colored would never be able to vote rationally?
As we march towards extending life - you are still welcome to choose death. You can even start a cult where you recruit followers to your doctrine of death. I’m sure you’ll find many souls willing to part with this world.
But you’re going to have a hard time convincing every soul to drink the kool-aid.
The reason it's such a great plot idea for a dystopian novel is that the young people, who already resent the old for living this long, will eat them alive if there's no more hope of them ever dying from natural causes.
People seem pretty willing to drive cars, drink soda, get suntans and other things that’d mean eventual certain death even if you cured old age. People will keep dying if you just make it sound cool!
For me, defeating death doesn’t mean I get to live 400 years. It means I get to live 100 years free from the fear of dying because of silly accidents, diseases, etc.
We need a maturity revolution across the entire globe for any technological immortality to be created that is not as a maximum profit seeking corporate nightmare. I suspect we're at a point technologically we can finally see the horizon, but like a mirage it is further away than it appears.
I reached the same conclusion as you when I became a biology student and started to learn about morphogenesis, epigenetic reprogramming, DNA repair enzymes, etc.
I wouldn’t have said that a few years ago and would have accepted my fate. However, now my perspective has changed because we’re on the verge of a revolution in biotech (we’ll, one could argue we are in the middle) where we understand enough of the aging process - not all of it - to reverse it or at least slow it down.
However, I’m really disappointed with some of the people in the field such as David Sinclair who have become snake oil salesman and almost charlatans, pushing inconclusive science as facts (e.g. resveratrol, sirtuins, etc) and I think it hurts the field more than anything else.
Interesting years ahead, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t mind living a few more decades as long as I’m healthy and active.
> I think we’re approaching a point in human evolution where we should all be obsessed with death. Like, spending R&R time on biology.
I believe we are going in that direction in general. Then one day some crazy person wakes up and decides to wage a war and kill thousands for some fantasy, threatening the rest of the world with nukes.
So at the end of the day biology itself is not enough, preventing climate change is not enough. Similar to what we have in IT security, we need to have a way for coordinated global action that would correspond to new threats. As a humanity, we more or less started to learn how to deal with a global pandemic, what are the gravest mistakes, how the governments must not communicate with the public and so on. We are constantly learning and evolving.
In certain phase of life IMO probably most of us think about death, but until we are able to became "pure intellects" who can switch from an artificial-biological body to another witch means live forever from the single human being point of view we will keep dying no matter how we try to change.
One thing too many forget is that being alive is not the single target. Being alive but for instance in a wheelchair might not be that desirable, and that the most stupid example. So we add new category of research to push for instance old age effects in the future, and since we can't do that much we just mock them up like "hey menopause can be nice with 'treatments'" or "hey thanks to analgesics we can ignore back pain, articular pain etc" masking them under the carpet and often if we mask too much shortening our active life.
The most important fact IMVHO is living to live, enjoying their life, and that's the issue: balancing the today/short term pleasure to the longer term ones. I have no recipe for that, probably an entire life is needed to find the right balance and once found that will not apply much for a younger self so the game began again.
We are still absolutely on the Neanderthal discovered the computer level.
Even with CRISPR, how are you going to replace existing structures that doesn’t naturally grow continuously, like our very brains? They accumulate all sorts of waste materials and you have absolutely no way to replace that specific axon with a new one in its place. That would also require complete control on creating new proteins, where we are absolutely at the beginning, and not even that may be enough.
We are basically made with single-use components, not everything is just a constantly dividing bunch of cells.
Former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone had a child (his first son) at 90.
As a guy I am not that interested in having babies, we have reached a point where we are not facing underpopulation anymore and will not face it any time soon.
But for Ecclestone having a baby at 90...that's his POE (Proof of Erection), I tip my hat to that.
In any event sex in the 80s and 90s is common for people who arrive at that age healthy enough. It's a known phenomenon in retirement homes.
Ecclestone just improved his odds of arriving at that age healthy enough due to his wealth and also the odds of having a young woman to have sex with as opposed to other octagenarians.
with a bit of luck (or bad luck according to each person POV) the end result is a baby.
For me at least, articles like this make it much easier to have that flash of sonder when thinking about the millions of people moving in and out of life as you move your frame of reference around in time. It can be truly disorienting.
This is a good point to reflect on the value of life. Not just human, either. The world definitely abounds in examples of life not being respected or valued. Just this morning we’re seeing satellite photos of mass graves outside Mariupol, Ukraine, for instance. Todays also earth day.
So yes, life’s end aka death is certain. I think that’s reason enough for life to be valued, cherished, and protected more than it is. And all those things which deteriorate life’s habitat should be mitigated and sought to be reversed. The cold unfeeling universe doesn’t have to win sooner than later.
I had first kids in my 20s. Now 59 and in another marriage and my younger kids are almost 6 and almost 2. I live them to bits and every day I look at what I do and think how will they remember me if I die tonight. Morbid maybe but helps with choices. More emails or cuddling the 2yo and reading a book. Learning something esoteric about operating systems or doing the day’s wordle with 6yo.
Momento Mori the Stoics way to remember we all die so make best use of time. The Hagakure tells us to always depart from others as we wish to be remembered.
FTR I run a lot now knowing that it improves quality of life and stats show time running is returned in more time alive. I value those extra hours with those whom I love.
I don’t care if I have to work until the day I die to support my kids but I do care that I have as many seconds with them that I can manage. And leave them knowing their dad ‘lived for them’.
One of my favourite quotes (no idea who made it) is that in all of human history, the death rate is exactly 100%. Outside of people's religious beliefs (Jesus, Lazarus, etc) and fiction (vampires, sci-fi, etc), we'd all agree that no-one has escaped death.
The death rate is 100%, no-one gets out alive. So we should get as much out of this life as we can. What that means for you can differ from others, but to me that's a central question as we enter middle-age.
> The death rate is 100%, no-one gets out alive. So we should get as much out of this life as we can.
I don't think one flows from the other. It could be argued that since the death rate is 100%, nothing really matters. Once dead, we are not going to miss the life not lived. Growing old is a sure way to have regrets.
It is worth investigating the historical reliability of Jesus's resurrection. If he really did defeat death as he claimed he would, what are the consequences? What does that mean for the rest of Jesus's claims? I think it's the consequences of the bible being true that people most want to avoid.
I've attached some resources for those who want to dig deeper, including arguments from both sides of the debate.
We had our first and only at 40. (My wife is two days younger than me.) I retired a year ago, and our daughter is approaching a quarter of a century old. That was a miracle in itself as she almost didn't make it past hour one.
I loved this essay, saved it even. It's how I've lived my life for all of the days since our daughter's birth. I'm reluctant to say it's how I lived all of the years before that, as I wasn't as aware of time and of my mortality. That said, I had a sense my average life would be 75 years, and privately celebrated my 37.5 year birthday.
For me, I consider my life as a book. There's a chapter where I would read the Wizard of Oz books to our daughter most nights. We went through the set of 15 books three times, and then it stopped. There's a chapter where I was doing fashion photography as a hobby for eight years. Me?! Yes! I even had two fashion shoots in Manhattan. There are many chapters of me working as a mathemagician, working on air traffic control R&D projects, one where I had to simulate stratospheric balloon trajectories and balloon control and navigation logic. I also had to learn a lot about stratospheric weather, which our in-house meteorologists had almost no experience.
I take essays like this and the two PG essays, and realize I have the chance to live a little more. This afternoon I'll be at the library while our daughter is working from home. I'll be continuing the writing of a story, may work on the migration from Freemind to Freeplane so that I can return to my personal work on the Traveling Salesman Problem. I'll grill dinner tonight for the family, will attend an in-person luncheon on Saturday, have an on-line chat with some folks in Berkeley Sunday night (I'm outside DC.)
The clock is ticking, the sand is flowing through the sandglass (I love that from Tom Scocca's essay!). The meaning of life is what we produce and what we create in the limited time we have. It's our mortality that establishes the context for meaning; it's what we do that is the actual meaning.
Yes, you have finite time and it's just simply so easy to squander them, playing games, social media, clicking around on youtube, etc. I'm sure many of us do it more than we would like and taking back that control is hard because "wasting" time is just so easy.
For me, visualising this has helped me put things in context and made me make better decisions but that's not to say I don't fall down the whole now and again. I wrote https://www.thismuchlonger.com/ many years ago and have it as a pinned tab in my browser.
I don’t really like this view of the world. I think they are correct about the lack of certainty and doing things while you can, but often big goals, like having a child, professional success, monetary success, etc. can cause us to miss life, too. Everything is a trade off. There’s always opportunity cost and you can always look back and see what you may have sacrificed to get where you are.
It’s needlessly depressing to wallow in this mindset. I personally value being a good person and my connections with people. Sure I could focus this energy on one human I bring into the world, but that’s not objectively better than anyone else I affect positively.
And I know having a child is a transformative experience. I’m lucky enough to have lots of little cousins and Have volunteered with programs for kids for years. Kids are amazing and bring magic to the world as you grow older. I just think that wrapping all of your identity and self worth up in a single goal is asking for disappointment. It’s not fair to you or the child.
Try to appreciate your real impact on the world. Did you improve someone’s day today? Did you restore someone’s faith in humanity? Is someone comforted right now by their trust in you? That’s the good stuff. Make that happen any way you can.
If you do want a child, go for it. Time IS ticking, but if you can’t or didn’t or are considering bring one into a bad situation or relationship to quell an existential fear, don’t worry. It’s fine. You can still find meaning and have an impact through your connections with others.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadCame into the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay...
Well-written article but extremely heavy on the existential dread and questioning whether I am spending my time wisely.
This will make you be more deliberate with what you do with each weekend, even a lazy do-nothing-couch-potato weekend will be a decision and you will feel great about it.
I read an article where they visualized each week of your life as a diamond. If you live to be 90 years old, all those weeks would barely be a handful of diamonds. Each week you are "giving away" that diamond to the things you do, whether it's working, hobbies, time with friends, etc. You have to consider "does this activity really deserve a diamond? is this really how I want to spend my most precious resource?".
We will all die some day. Ignoring this fact won't make it go away, but embracing it will let you take control of it.
Not so sure about that. Ernest Becker wrote a book on the subject titled The Denial of Death (though some take issue with psychoanalysis, whether post-Freudian or not).
Even when we tacitly admit to the seeming fact, we still hedge in that our family, religion, culture, species, knowledge, or stories will continue into an infinity that (so far as we know) doesn't exist (this ignores, of course, notions of an afterlife, which can be seen as fulfilling the same need under different constraints). The universe (again, so far as we now) is hurtling towards heat death, and ultimately, producing a billion more generations and having one big humanity party this weekend capped off with Kool-Aid all amounts to the same.
Even then, infinity isn't really such a good anti-depressive. It's just that, unlike other animals (again, so far as we know) we have to craft such psychological defenses against our own analytic mental processes in order to fulfill the more fundamental drive of biological reproduction.
For Nietzsche and thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir it is a fact that "life has no meaning and we all die", the real question is "what do you do with this?". For both of these thinkers real nihilism is "pretending this isn't happening".
Nietzsche is often partially quoted saying "God is dead" as though it's some sort of atheistic battle cry, but it's not that at all. The full quote is:
> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Nietzsche is pointing out that the old way we used to deal with existential despair was religion. This is how meaning was created. But like it or not that system of meaning is largely gone and cannot be trivially replaced. Nietzsche's entire life's work is about confronting this existential horror and coming up with new ways to live.
de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, goes on to catalog all the strategies we have for dealing with this problem. Pointing out that nihilism ultimately leads to the rise of Nazism. Likewise far right extremism in the US can be viewed as a natural reaction to the failure of systems of meaning across the US.
The point being is that when you see articles like this, your response doesn't have to be and should not be merely to dismiss it until you feel better.
For a great overview of this perspective of nihilism I highly recommend Nolan Gertz's Nihilism from the MIT Press
The practical value of me after reading this (YMMV) is that I'll be a bit more present, do more meaningful things, heck even just appreciate that hug or phone call a bit more, today and probably tomorrow too.
Do you have kids? I find thinking about this stuff particularly valuable in a way I probably couldn't grasp before them. Spending 30 minutes playing blocks with a 2-year-old can be a mundane, frustrating experience. Or -- if you realize that this 30 minutes is probably one of the last dozens or so times you will EVER play blocks with this little wonder child, in all of time -- you relish it, like you would relish seeing a great movie for the first time, or (better comparison) your first kiss with someone. It's rare and precious.
Have you considered that other people may have different takeaways than you? I know that I'm going to die someday but this piece still added to my perspective on life and old age. And I'm glad it was posted. :)
Happy Friday!
I'm always thankful for the reminders. Especially this one as its actually about children. I will be sure to spend extra time with them today.
Ignoring the medical risks, this throws the timing of everything off. A former coworker is paying off his kids’ student loans in retirement.
My grandmother was 47 when she had my mother. I saw my mother struggle to care for her aging mother while at the same time raising children.
This inspired me to make an android wallpaper that displays the percentage of my life that's already elapsed, so every time I look at my phone I'm reminded to think "is this really what I want to be doing right now?".
App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.machineryc...
Source code: https://github.com/ethanmdavidson/DeathProgress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
Maraṇasati (mindfulness of death, death awareness) is a Buddhist meditation practice of remembering that death can strike at anytime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati
As someone in this age range, I don't find it depressing, I find it clarifying. There are so many things I could say "yes" to, so many branches in my career I could chase. Reminding myself that my time is limited helps me to say "no" and maintain focus on the things that truly matter.
On a different note, no. Let's fight death. Fuck aging. We can fight it. We don't have to suffer like cattle under it. We can beat it.
There are plenty of longevity focused startups and academic research groups, and yet we're not spending nearly enough effort and money on this problem. It affects every human on earth, and the immense benefits of adding even one year of healthy lifespan to 7 billion people make it a moral imperative to act upon.
Fighting death should be a multi-national effort that we focus on with all our might, _right now_. You shouldn't have to die.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=cZYNADOHhVY
Humans are already well past the natural carrying capacity of the planet for our species. But we’ve figured it out an have been (mostly) successful. I don’t see why that would change between now and when we get access to off planet resources. Especially if humans live forever - priorities are able to shift quite a bit when you can think longer term (what’s 100 years of effort to solve this problem compared to infinity?).
[citation needed]
Yes, you should. Either that, or no one can have children. It's finite planet, and it's already over-flowing with people and their detritus.
Not only that, but if people don't die, then the first generation that doesn't die will end up ruling forever over everyone who has the misfortune of being born later. In a world where no one dies, someone like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un can and will rule quite literally forever. The U.S. Supreme Court will have no turnover.
Your example of King Jong Un doesn’t work either, because it’s still a dictatorship, and father and grandfather were both dictators, and they both died, so why does it matter?
The world is overflowing with detritus because the incentive structures are not there. If people lived much longer they might be more willing to spend the time to clean up.
Supreme court justices serve for life. The only way to "oust" a supreme court justice (in the U.S.) is through impeachment. In the entire history of the U.S. no supreme court justice has ever been removed against their will. The assumption of mortality is deeply embedded into the U.S. Constitution. (Yes, you could amend the Constitution. Good luck with that.)
> so why does it matter?
Because there is at least a possibility that the next generation Kim might be better. Or that a Kim might die childless.
> If people lived much longer they might be more willing to spend the time to clean up.
Yes, that's possible, but much more likely those in power would continue to do what they do now: build enclaves for themselves that keep out the riff-raff.
If we eventually become a post-scarcity, multi-plantary species then significant life extension or immortality might work. But in the near future it would be a environmental and social calamity.
Even after too much psychedelics. It still doesn’t help anyone accept the deep void of not knowing.
I understand being afraid of death because self-preservation is built into us, but unless there really is some hellfire that some of us will be thrown into for all eternity (unlikely but boy would that suck), then logic dictates that it will bother us just as much as our non-existence bothered us for the billions (trillions?) of years before our births.
Most cattle don't suffer from aging. Beef cattle are usually killed in their first year or two. Dairy cows live longer, but tend to be killed after their milk output drops enough (which I guess you could call aging, but they could live for many more years after that).
If you're proposing fighting aging, but against a backdrop of euthenization, ala Logan's Run, I'm in, but we'll need to rebuild the Dallas mall everyone lives in. But if it's trying to get the general population to have a life expectency of 100+, I'm not sure that's a grand plan.
My grandfather on my father’s side was born in 1906. He was 35 when my father was born in 1941.
My father was 38 when I entered this world in 1979.
I was 41 in 2020 when my son was born. Fortunately we were able to have some semblance of an 80th birthday for his grandfather last year in the midst of this pandemic.
If my son has a child as late in life as I have, there’s no telling if I’ll get to meet them, simply because of life expectancy.
You will die too. Are you going to be satisfied on your deathbed that you spent your life being angry at everything?
While an older person gains more years of life experience, their experience of youth becomes more and more outdated.
I may know all about how to troubleshoot broken sound in DOS computer games, but I've never sent or received a 'nude selfie' in my life.
Time to fix that.
100 years ago, it would be unhealthy - it was certainly an unavoidable outcome. I had this view going through high school and college - biology/anatomy classes never interested me. They were fairly hocus pocus in my eyes - like we were scratching the surface of a world we barely understood and wouldn’t master for dozens of generations. As if a Neanderthal discovered a computer and attempted to understand how it worked - they’d get there, but the original Neanderthal would be long dead before any real answers surfaced.
This changed recently. The hockey stick of progress is clearly forming in biology. With technology like CRISPR, we are starting to get the tools to reverse engineer and bend life to our will. Death doesn’t seem inevitable for my children anymore; our generation might actually be able to partially solve it - at least enough to buy the next generation enough time to fully solve it.
We are well past earths natural carrying capacity for our species - and we have been for quite a long time. But humans have solved those problems. Yes we’ve created problems in the process, but we are solving those too. So far nothing indicates to me that humans can’t continue solving the growing pains on earth long enough to get access to the (nearly) limitless supply of resources available in the cosmos.
Nonsense. People are getting better at accessing resources that were hard to get at. But doing so is just a symptom of the low hanging fruit running out.
Degrowth has no good evidence for it because it’s false. It’s just another version of baby boomers deciding their own children aren’t allowed to inherit their wealth.
I feel if we could literally halt death a lot of hedonism would stop. That YOLO feeling that plagues most of humanity would mostly go away. We would suddenly be a species with a clear aim. To know more about the universe and ourselves. We would find meaning in our lives and hopefully wisen up a little.
That doesn't mean we can't research it, and certainly we can discover things that are useful. But there's really no reason to believe immortality is achievable. And honestly there are lots of works of fiction on why it's actually bad for humanity.
The result would be lots of misery and a wealth transfer from regular people to the medical and pharma industry.
It's basically this: https://9gag.com/gag/a815W1d and it's been noted time and time again ...
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL3AgkwbYgo
I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...
I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!”
That is just the conclusion reached by the best and brightest chimps among the 8 billions chimps that dominate all the other species on the planet.
Even Einstein and Hawking might be victims of the Dunning Kruger effect, only there is nobody smarter than them who are currently around to mock them or feel pity towards them.
All the physics and science that we do should come with a huge asterisk disclaiming that it's only the conclusion reached by the brightest and most specialized chimps.
I don't think the two are comparable. Overtaking the speed of light is impossible according to our current understanding of physics.
Death on the other hand seems to be due to defects in our bodies (and most living organisms) - nature just hasn't "planned" for them to function for so long and pretty much cut corners. Those defects might be hard to fix with our current technology and/or understanding of medicine, but they're not proven to be impossible. In fact unlike the speed of light, "death" isn't even a single specific event where someone's brain just quits for good but is due to a variety of factors, some of which we can already control and resolve (it used to be that cardiac arrest is guaranteed death, nowadays it's no longer a certainty).
In addition, there are many different ways of "solving death". Even if we assume that any living body must die because of some unbreakable law of physics, if we could move someone's consciousness to a new body (or a "virtual machine" in a computer) we've effectively solved the problem anyway.
Defeating death is a great plot idea for a dystopian novel, but in reality it's the ultimate selfish pursuit.
At some point you are just done, and if you accept that, you’ll die. It may be at 50, 100, 150, maybe 200. But I don’t think humans are mentally made for spans of time much larger than that.
https://www.gregegan.net/INCANDESCENCE/00/Crocodile.html
But public goods like that are shared with other people; it’s not like you keep all the water in your single-family house. That house though…
And if you don't think natural selection is what powers nature, then the question becomes, why did God choose to kill his creatures?
So it would likely be pretty unchanged from our current levels. Just about everyone survives to produce children these days (with some people i wonder how).
Also i don't think when people say conquer death they mean true immortality, they mean Negligible senescence i.e. we are no more likely to die due to aging, people would still die (accidents, violence, natural disaster etc).
Luckily death is really hard to defeat. Dying is always on the menu.
Also, there is something about compassion and love that we do not understand that are physiologically benefit to the person. I do believe we live in a world where niceness eventually prevails, and if someone is able to live a healthy long age, they likely have embraced death wholeheartedly, and are good and kind, (esp as they age and learn from their mistakes instead of getting stuck in behavioural patterns).
And so long existential time comes and goes at the whim of itself. Technology is never the cause, but merely an enabler.
More like a recipe for an omnipresent gerontocracy, locked into the culture and values of a millennium ago, but wielding immense wealth and power ruling over everything. Sounds like a conservative's wet dream.
Sounds like the thinking of a Tier 0 civilization in regards to the ruling class of a Tier 2 civilization (if one day we can prove that such civilizations exist
The very framing of dividing "civilizations" into "tiers" where one is clearly superior to the other shows some implicit assumptions that not everyone might share, as well as the idea that there will be or should be a "ruling class". If people reject this, we do not get to thinly veil "just accept your technological superior you luddite" like some 1920s robber baron. That's been done, and they got pushed back, and we have no obligation to enable the fabulous wealth and power of some elite to last forever without provable commitments that this will benefit all of us
A lot of things are going to be different if longevity tech is successful.
There will always be a "ruling class" the same way that there will always be dependency hierarchy in the cost structure of things (eg from compiler design to the way a solar system works).
> ... and we have no obligation to enable the fabulous wealth and power of some elite ...
Indeed. But let's be pragmatic for a second. What can an individual (or a collective of people) do to not enable (ie disable) existing wealth and power (ie the status quo)? Unfortunately the answer is by gaining wealth and power themselves. (eg in the cultural-economic form or socio-politically or militarily, etc). To change the dynamics of the system. Anything else is just ignoring reality and encouraging hypernormalization [1]. The world is in a huge mess now because many highly capable people chose not to make the hard decisions. (eg with the current RU & China situations)
... and the world will only become a better place (eg in the sense of reducing suffering, and for the pursuit of universal human & animal rights, etc) when hard decisions are made and executed to bring forth a paradigm shift (that which can be measured game-theoretically e.g. compare modern day France to 18th century France)
> ... without provable commitments that this will benefit all of us
Proof is useful but it is not enough in the same way the map is useful but it is not the territory.
In some sense I've just elaborated your points above but from the angle that the world is going to collapse soon if we don't reach Tier 1 as a cilivisation fast enough.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
Second, I would like to point out some flaws I see in your argumentations:
On ruling class/"dependency hierarchy":no, there does not always need to be one. For a semantic example, it is perfectly possible to have no "dependency" in software systems (except the one to the underlying system, but this is not a power relationship). Closer to the subject, it is possible to structure systems such that there is no power concentration, "soft power" is effectively diffused and true consent (not necessarily concensus, just consent) is required to get anything done. Such systems still enable decision making to be delegated, but when push comes to shove, power is distributed and recalled easily. We see it in associations, we see it in anarchist social experiments, we see it in well designed teams and companies where employees have real leverage - such systems are often not as scalable yet, but they do generally perform better in terms of welfare and resilient - see the german company-union relationships which tend to be more resilient to economic downturns for example and generally treat their employees much better.
To blindly reassert "there is no other way" is to adopt as an axiom that is at best uncertain and at worst empirically wrong.
3rd, on pragmatism and the french, sure, pragmatically we can play that game while it exists, but the glory of the french revolution was not in it's pragmatic achieval of its goals (they failed after all, napoleon the post-metternich era reinstuted defacto monarchy) and but that it completely and radically did away with pragmatism and destroyed the old social order. So I'm surprised you would use it as an argument in a discussion about the inevitably of hierachy, if anything I would use it as an argument for the great good that can come from taking away power from old decision making structures.
4th, on game theory, I do my best to study game theory nowadays, and you can only prove what your assumptions allow you, so in this discussion it's out of bounds without a formal specification (I'm happy for references though if you can recommend good formalisations and studies of current political and economic systems).
5th, on the world collapsing, it is collapsing because our elite has so far not cared to save it despite the scientists warning them for decades, and its the populace and idealists (extinction rebellion et al) who are pushing for the radical solutions to save them - so again, I don't see why we should buy the argument of "oh no, actually, the elites need to be more powerful so they can save us".
Scaling and Growth at all costs without distributed power to alleviate the distributed ills has brought us here. So why should we not ask for solid proof before we give more power to a centralised few? Why should we assume a ruling class will survive the coming shifts? Why should we assume having a ruling class is inevitable when previous generations were told only the kings and royals had the divine grace to rule, that the plebs could never handle reading, women could never handle equality, colored would never be able to vote rationally?
But you’re going to have a hard time convincing every soul to drink the kool-aid.
I wouldn’t have said that a few years ago and would have accepted my fate. However, now my perspective has changed because we’re on the verge of a revolution in biotech (we’ll, one could argue we are in the middle) where we understand enough of the aging process - not all of it - to reverse it or at least slow it down.
However, I’m really disappointed with some of the people in the field such as David Sinclair who have become snake oil salesman and almost charlatans, pushing inconclusive science as facts (e.g. resveratrol, sirtuins, etc) and I think it hurts the field more than anything else.
Interesting years ahead, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t mind living a few more decades as long as I’m healthy and active.
I believe we are going in that direction in general. Then one day some crazy person wakes up and decides to wage a war and kill thousands for some fantasy, threatening the rest of the world with nukes.
So at the end of the day biology itself is not enough, preventing climate change is not enough. Similar to what we have in IT security, we need to have a way for coordinated global action that would correspond to new threats. As a humanity, we more or less started to learn how to deal with a global pandemic, what are the gravest mistakes, how the governments must not communicate with the public and so on. We are constantly learning and evolving.
One thing too many forget is that being alive is not the single target. Being alive but for instance in a wheelchair might not be that desirable, and that the most stupid example. So we add new category of research to push for instance old age effects in the future, and since we can't do that much we just mock them up like "hey menopause can be nice with 'treatments'" or "hey thanks to analgesics we can ignore back pain, articular pain etc" masking them under the carpet and often if we mask too much shortening our active life.
The most important fact IMVHO is living to live, enjoying their life, and that's the issue: balancing the today/short term pleasure to the longer term ones. I have no recipe for that, probably an entire life is needed to find the right balance and once found that will not apply much for a younger self so the game began again.
Even with CRISPR, how are you going to replace existing structures that doesn’t naturally grow continuously, like our very brains? They accumulate all sorts of waste materials and you have absolutely no way to replace that specific axon with a new one in its place. That would also require complete control on creating new proteins, where we are absolutely at the beginning, and not even that may be enough.
We are basically made with single-use components, not everything is just a constantly dividing bunch of cells.
As a guy I am not that interested in having babies, we have reached a point where we are not facing underpopulation anymore and will not face it any time soon.
But for Ecclestone having a baby at 90...that's his POE (Proof of Erection), I tip my hat to that.
In any event sex in the 80s and 90s is common for people who arrive at that age healthy enough. It's a known phenomenon in retirement homes.
Ecclestone just improved his odds of arriving at that age healthy enough due to his wealth and also the odds of having a young woman to have sex with as opposed to other octagenarians.
with a bit of luck (or bad luck according to each person POV) the end result is a baby.
So yes, life’s end aka death is certain. I think that’s reason enough for life to be valued, cherished, and protected more than it is. And all those things which deteriorate life’s habitat should be mitigated and sought to be reversed. The cold unfeeling universe doesn’t have to win sooner than later.
Momento Mori the Stoics way to remember we all die so make best use of time. The Hagakure tells us to always depart from others as we wish to be remembered.
FTR I run a lot now knowing that it improves quality of life and stats show time running is returned in more time alive. I value those extra hours with those whom I love.
I don’t care if I have to work until the day I die to support my kids but I do care that I have as many seconds with them that I can manage. And leave them knowing their dad ‘lived for them’.
The death rate is 100%, no-one gets out alive. So we should get as much out of this life as we can. What that means for you can differ from others, but to me that's a central question as we enter middle-age.
I don't think one flows from the other. It could be argued that since the death rate is 100%, nothing really matters. Once dead, we are not going to miss the life not lived. Growing old is a sure way to have regrets.
I've attached some resources for those who want to dig deeper, including arguments from both sides of the debate.
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-there-histo...
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/...
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/historical-evidence-for...
I loved this essay, saved it even. It's how I've lived my life for all of the days since our daughter's birth. I'm reluctant to say it's how I lived all of the years before that, as I wasn't as aware of time and of my mortality. That said, I had a sense my average life would be 75 years, and privately celebrated my 37.5 year birthday.
Paul Graham has at least two essays related to this: http://paulgraham.com/vb.html http://paulgraham.com/kids.html
For me, I consider my life as a book. There's a chapter where I would read the Wizard of Oz books to our daughter most nights. We went through the set of 15 books three times, and then it stopped. There's a chapter where I was doing fashion photography as a hobby for eight years. Me?! Yes! I even had two fashion shoots in Manhattan. There are many chapters of me working as a mathemagician, working on air traffic control R&D projects, one where I had to simulate stratospheric balloon trajectories and balloon control and navigation logic. I also had to learn a lot about stratospheric weather, which our in-house meteorologists had almost no experience.
I take essays like this and the two PG essays, and realize I have the chance to live a little more. This afternoon I'll be at the library while our daughter is working from home. I'll be continuing the writing of a story, may work on the migration from Freemind to Freeplane so that I can return to my personal work on the Traveling Salesman Problem. I'll grill dinner tonight for the family, will attend an in-person luncheon on Saturday, have an on-line chat with some folks in Berkeley Sunday night (I'm outside DC.)
The clock is ticking, the sand is flowing through the sandglass (I love that from Tom Scocca's essay!). The meaning of life is what we produce and what we create in the limited time we have. It's our mortality that establishes the context for meaning; it's what we do that is the actual meaning.
For me, visualising this has helped me put things in context and made me make better decisions but that's not to say I don't fall down the whole now and again. I wrote https://www.thismuchlonger.com/ many years ago and have it as a pinned tab in my browser.
It’s needlessly depressing to wallow in this mindset. I personally value being a good person and my connections with people. Sure I could focus this energy on one human I bring into the world, but that’s not objectively better than anyone else I affect positively.
And I know having a child is a transformative experience. I’m lucky enough to have lots of little cousins and Have volunteered with programs for kids for years. Kids are amazing and bring magic to the world as you grow older. I just think that wrapping all of your identity and self worth up in a single goal is asking for disappointment. It’s not fair to you or the child.
Try to appreciate your real impact on the world. Did you improve someone’s day today? Did you restore someone’s faith in humanity? Is someone comforted right now by their trust in you? That’s the good stuff. Make that happen any way you can.
If you do want a child, go for it. Time IS ticking, but if you can’t or didn’t or are considering bring one into a bad situation or relationship to quell an existential fear, don’t worry. It’s fine. You can still find meaning and have an impact through your connections with others.