I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death.
I have decided that soon I will quit my job ($1M+ TC at FAANG), and I will dedicate the entirety of my remaining life (I am ~30) to helping humanity solve death, even if I never benefit from it.
This is a difficult decision for me because I am giving up a life of guaranteed luxury and comfort for a moonshot that almost certainly will not pan out. But I can think of no greater and more meaningful pursuit. This is my Zero Dawn. Moving the needle here is the only thing that will let me - ironically - die happy.
I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense potential to be leveraged here if we come together.
Nearly all of humanities pursuits is giving the middle finger to entropy. Yes, we're accelerating it's eventual win, but in the short term we're comfortable.
Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Living beings are open systems because they constantly exchange energy and matter with their surroundings. Earth is also an open system because it receives energy from the sun (and, to a much lesser degree, from other stars), and sometimes things from outer space fall here.
Entropy applies across the universe. We know the minimum entropy it started with, where we are now, and the maximum entropy possible. We are about halfway there.
It's not possible to escape death, and all timelines will feel short when it comes to their end. Reducing the suffering of life, whether mental or physical, seems a more achievable pursuit. To die without cancer, dementia, chronic pain or the so many other ailments would be amazing.
They go hand in hand. Any reasonable path to eliminating mortality will entail eliminating aging and degenerative conditions.
Often, when people first imagine living much much longer, they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of age that also end up killing you.
If the pathway to where you're looking to go runs mostly through a fight against age-related degeneration, why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept?
Who's out there handwringing against fighting, just to pick a random example, dementia?
> why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept?
There are both drawbacks and benefits to the controversy of "ending death".
You have mentioned the drawbacks, but the benefits are that it attracts the interest of the individuals that care about the most important problem in the world, which is specifically this problem of ending death.
That's the idea behind marketing campaigns like "healthspan". It's a trade-off. It's very easy to get dragged into a pivot that focuses on one specific condition rather than mortality and age-related degeneration in general.
If we told someone 200 years ago that I'd be typing this on a pane of glass that talks to satellites in low earth orbit at the speed of light, accessing the entire repository of human knowledge while hurtling through the air at 600 MPH in a man made bird, they'd call it impossible (and probably burn us at the stake.)
If we told the same person that we have managed to create a crude facsimile of intelligence and expect to have full intelligence in our lifetimes, running on lightning trapped in purified sand, their mind would simply break.
I am confident that humanity will solve death on all relevant timescales, out to the heat-death of the universe itself.
I am optimistic that today will be looked back on as "that era when people died, isn't that sad?"
It is not an issue to me if <bad human> lives longer, if I get to enjoy more time with my loved ones, watch humanity build Dyson spheres, explore the galaxy, etc.
Bad humans then become social issues - and those, we can solve.
You live in society, not alone on far side of the moon. In any society including worst communism terror Earth has seen, the worst and most potent humans bubble up to the top, always, without exception.
No mechamism to wipe this clean means absolute dictatorship with no end in sight, you always see it even in democracies, strong persons tend to bend rules as they like and the only stopping power is re-election force, or you end up eith some form of forever putin.
Death brings correction, even if individually of course it sucks pretty badly. Even for just avoiding endless dictatures its necessary.
> Death brings correction, even if individually of course it sucks pretty badly.
There is no real correction though.
Because for every person who you think that you helped, you should know that those people are going to eventually die anyway, meaning that it was all for naught.
I think you are mixing up concepts. Curing mortality doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be killed.
Authoritarian regimes don’t end because the dictator gets old and dies, they end because the people rise up against the oppressive government. If mortality was the liberator you imagine it to be then North Korea would already be rid of their nightmare.
We haven't. Even simple ones like poverty, hunger, homelessness that are just a matter of admin and money. We've been captured by self-perpetuating and effectively immortal institutions (NGO's and arguably governments) that will not let us solve them because that would mean their own death.
I agree with the spirit of your argument but maybe not the villains you've chosen. Given legislative capture is absolutely a thing I think your criticism is more effectively pointed at the individuals and organizations responsible for funding reelection campaigns for the politicians that aren't obviously servicing the needs of their notional constituency.
Comprehensive, as in extensively but not necessarily totally? And why as a species rather than as countries, given we don't have a single world government?
Equality issues still exist, but compared to 1924?
Is literacy is a social issue or not? 31% to 87%.
Is extreme poverty? 54% of about 2 billion, now 10% of about 8 billion, reduced in absolute numbers and not just as a percentage.
Consider this, those that command most resources will be able to get this tech, not you. This isn't everyone gets an iPhone. It's the richest get the best health insurance.
If it was invented in isolation of all other tech, it would still be in the interests of the rich that everyone else got to use it.
More users, more awareness of limitations and side effects and how to treat them.
Longer working lives for the labour force, less need for expensive pensions and expensive old age care.
But this isn't in isolation, the changes to AI and robotics, even without AGI/ASI or von Neumann replication, will make us unfathomably better off by 2050 (and with, no more labour). What does "rich" even mean when anti-aging stops being a choice between "snake oil" and "in mice"?
> It would still be in the interests of the rich that everyone else got to use it.
Why though? More users? Economy is already moving to a free-to-pay model. You earn more catering to rich people than the middle class/poor. Look at hardware nVidia is earning more extracting money from the richest people buying 4090 and 4080 than from rest, and that's dwarfed by their AI offerings.
The way I see it, basically you earn money from whales, rich people and you toss breadcrumbs to the rest.
> First, it's easier to do test on undocumented, homeless and rights deprived people than regular citizens.
Not if you want to do long term analysis, and rule out confounding variables like the impact of sleeping rough.
Though even if you did, that would still be a demonstration that it won't just be for the rich. Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
> Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor will be automatized, who's going to rebel? The automatons?
It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one, followed by log_2(population)*replication_period, before everyone has them. The former is 33, so even if they take a year starting from bashing rocks with pickaxes, this would still be less than half the current human life expectancy.
> Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.
> It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one
Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation. Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.
> Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.
We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically. (Not that this means nobody will do them, the Tuskegee study happened, but it was also low-value in addition to being unethical).
> Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation.
It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation, as full automation requires anything that a human can do, and we can already do "build robot".
If machines cannot make robots, people will be paid to make robots, and then it won't be fully automated.
> Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.
Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.
Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last. And it's only "probably" because there's a reasonable chance Earth gets ejected from the solar system over that time scale.
And before you say it PV is also a thing that we can do and thus a thing that must be fully automatable in any economy deserving of the description "fully automated".
But it doesn't need to last that long; if such a thing takes a year to make a copy of itself, then even limited to the surface of the Earth it would be able to make the last doubling, 4 billion units, if the construction had an energy budget of 247.7 GWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%286000km%29%5E2*pi*...
28.276 megawatts on average for a year is considerably more than we use to reach adulthood, even in countries with high per-capita usage. Biologically speaking, it's about 15700 times the energy consumption we need to reach adulthood (and the disparity is even more severe for, say, a dog which reproduces significantly younger than a human), and we get that energy and those materials by eating plants or animals that ate plants, which is also a clearly sufficient source of both materials and energy that this planet can provide without violating entropy or being magic.
> We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically.
Yeah, and there is a gulf between works in mice and works in humans, as anyone reading science journals will tell you. Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real deal.
> It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation.
Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
It's a very theoretical solution to a problem that can be solved in a much messier but available way. E.g. Warp drive vs Nuclear power generation ships.
> Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last.
You mean the sun? Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".
> Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.
Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.
> Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real deal.
Only if you don't shoot yourself in the foot in the process.
> Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's piecemeal or sudden.
> Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".
The sun is more stable than Earth's orbit and we're using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms ("life") have been running on it for billions of years before we came along.
> Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.
I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my fingers as I type this, because all life meets the criteria of a VN machine.
> Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's piecemeal or sudden.
You don't have to do it all from scratch. First variation can be built by humans, then the rest can be maintained by machines long term. It's like bootstrapping a compiler versus having compiler write/build itself and hardware.
> I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my fingers as I type this, because all life meets the criteria of a VN machine.
You aren't a Von Neumann replicator. Or at least not a useful one. No human can construct hammer, chairs and PCs given sequence of DNA. Unless you have to learn it yourself, which defeats the purpose, or you have to raise a new one from scratch for 18 years.
Previous statement indicated that they are necessary for full automation, implying they are useful when it comes to generating artifacts useful for humans.
> The sun is more stable than Earth's orbit and we're using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms ("life") have been running on it for billions of years before we came along.
Sun is stable? Could have fooled me. How are the solar flares?
> So, kill off all of humanity to make sure you get rid of the worst ones?
No one said to kill off all of humanity. Certainly 'bad' people have died in the long (short) history of humanity without the remainder of the species disappearing.
Life doesn't occur without death. Death is a necessary component. Life _comes from_ death.
I think you misinterpreted the response. They said "humanity" but probably meant "every single human".
You said: "It’s extremely important that we [die] — if not just for getting rid of some of humanity’s worst humans"
Their retort is that this is a very blunt instrument. You are advocating killing literally billions of humans (not all at once), just to make sure you get the bad ones. That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
I'm ambivalent on the question of improving healthspan and longevity, but I agree with the other person that this is a bad argument against it.
> You are advocating killing literally billions of humans (not all at once), just to make sure you get the bad ones. That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
I think you misinterpreted my comment. I was not advocating for killing. Killing is an unnatural process.
> accessing the entire repository of human knowledge
I know this is a common trope, but just think about how far it is from the truth. And not just because of business secrets, classified information, privacy rules and so on—think of the signal to noise ratio, the vast quantities of "fake news", propaganda, misconceptions, not to mention how hard it is to find reliable and detailed information about niche stuff. Information is vastly more accessible than ever before, but we still have a very long way to go.
Many not-even-that-obscure topics hit “you’ll need to go get a university press book that’s not online to continue” surprisingly fast. Any decent used book store is full of information that’s not online.
Library Genesis is the only reason this is even kind-of close to true.
As someone who grew up alongside the growth of the Internet (and remembers a time before it), I gotta say it hasn’t lived up to the hype.
> I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense potential to be leveraged here if we come together.
Amen. I want to build dyson spheres myself. Gathering the money right now for it. Of course I know it won't happen in my lifetime but you got to start.
I will never understand people who say that mortality is what gives life a meaning.
It is exactly opposite. If I can't observe effects of my actions (and most likely "I" would not be able to do so after death), then it does not matter for me what I do during life, since outcome is all the same.
There should be no death. For whatever reason, it is incredibly hard to find people thinking the same, despite, paradoxially no one wants to die.
You are confusing You-level and mankind-level, it was never about You. Meaning is there, but its not kind to people who think themselves as center of universe and mandatory part of it (we all are of our own version of reality but thats not what I mean).
Life well lived is a life thats easier to let go, believing in afterlife or not. Now what does that mean is highly individual but for most its around friends, family and children, mostly children. Most prople with kids have no problem seeing that meaning in mortality, plus there are even more logical and potent arguments (resources, selfishness, not ending up with immortal dictator forever etc but thats for longer)
> I will never understand people who say that mortality is what gives life a meaning.
Same here. I wonder why they don't give even more meaning to their life by killing themselves right now.
Oh wait, it doesn't work that way. Death gives a meaning only when it is in a distant future... or some other excuse like that. But for some people, that future is now, or very soon. They would probably also prefer to have a "meaningful" death later rather than now.
> I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death.
A world without death is also necessarily a world without birth once the whole biosphere has been converted to immortals. I'm not sure living amongst a bunch of old people is something to be envied.
I also don't think that people who think that immortality is enviable have really come to grips with how long forever actually is.
You think those numbers are enough to keep the population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers? Consider the global population is increasing now and we're talking about removing a big chunk of all-cause mortality from the field. So unless there's a plan to replace natural causes with artificial causes (which moots functional immortality entirely) some form of population control is an absolute requirement.
>You think those numbers are enough to keep the population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers?
If we keep reproducing at today's rates, of course not. However, birthrates are in free-fall worldwide due to many factors, with the biggest ones probably being education, women's rights, and access to reliable contraception. As the high birthrate countries improve in these areas, their birthrates fall; we've seen this universally in countries across the world. Of course, there's other factors too, like high costs of living, gender divides in some cultures, etc. The latter ones might be solved eventually, but I truly hope we don't regress on the former ones.
With life-extension research, I think it's highly unlikely someone is going to find the Holy Grail anytime soon that suddenly makes humans biologically immortal. Instead, it'll probably be a slow process of incremental improvements. So while those improvements chip away at the death rate, cultural changes will continue to decrease the birthrate: people will continue to choose to have fewer children, people will wait longer to have children, etc.
Not many, no. Not enough to matter. Natural disasters just don't kill that many people [1].
But now that you mention it I do think that anyone living in a world without death will be constantly looking over their shoulder and sleeping with one eye open.
Old people who will likely still look like they are in their mid-20s — few people are going to want to develop something that only extends old age, even though people (not sure if "some" or "many") will still prefer that over death.
Being old is not limited to how you look. It’s also how your world views change, how your personality evolves, etc.
Also you didn’t address my almost-no-children point. That one I think is the stronger point. Looking at my children grow older day after day is the thing that bring me the most joy and sens of meaning in my life.
This is really important. Being young is cool not just because your body works better but because you still have a lot to discover. Discovery is fun. Experiencing something for the first time is fun. But the problem is that you can only experience something for the first time once. The second time it might still be fun, or the third time, but by the time you do something 100 times or 1000 times or 10,000 times it becomes less fun. This is one of the major differences between doing something as a hobby and doing it as a job. When it's a hobby, when it stops being fun, you can just quit. And sooner or later, everything stops being fun if you do it often enough.
The problem is not that we don't live long enough, the problem is that most people don't have the freedom to do the things they want to do in the time they have. That is a much more tractable problem, and it is the one we should be working on, not extending life spans. If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
> The problem is not that we don't live long enough, the problem is that most people don't have the freedom to do the things they want to do in the time they have. That is a much more tractable problem, and it is the one we should be working on, not extending life spans.
We as a species can do both without either slowing down the other — biotech researchers aren't the same skillset as politicians.
> If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
Disagree, that requires a personality which gets bored quickly. Expertise comes from having the passion stay for long enough to get really good — despite the meme this isn't exactly 10k hours, but it's still long enough that you can fail to grow sick of living after properly mastering just fifteen things in a century.
But even if you did, being ageless doesn't take away the opportunity to cease to be. If it's really all that dull, people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.
That may sound like a punch line, but it is actually a serious point: our existence has externalities that need to be taken into account. If you're going to argue for the value of potential experiences that will never be had by old people because they die, then I think you also need to consider the value of potential experiences that will never be had by young people because they are never born since all available resources are being used in perpetuity by the lucky generation that came along just as the longevity technology matured.
Arguing for the potential future of young people who won't be born, is a thing that some do.
Not me, I think there's a hyperbolic discount to unwritten futures¹, and that we should live in the present with a view to the foreseeable future — a future which is, IMO, currently "about 5 years"², because there's too many things changing to see further than that anyway.
Perhaps one day things will calm down, and we can be confident of what our experiences will be a millennium into the future; or perhaps that future, being filled by other humans just like ourselves who are themselves all making predictions of what will come, will be inherently chaotic beyond our own ability to forecast.
And a millennium is what you want for starters if you are to explore the stars, as space dust becomes dangerous well before relativity makes a huge difference.
> I think there's a hyperbolic discount to unwritten futures.
And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing people.
BTW, it's not just about the actual unborn, it's all the existing people who want the experience of having and raising children who won't be able to. Personally, I am happily childless by choice, but I am given to understand that some people find it a very fulfilling experience.
> And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing people
I can personally experience aging: Every change to my body after the mid 20s sucks. A life of the same length without aging is still an improvement. Unwinding the last 15 years of aging on my body would still be an improvement, even if aging continued normally and lifespan wasn't increased as a side effect.
I have no problem working towards improved quality of life, but I think we should start with the low-lying fruit of improving the quality of life of poor young people rather than old rich people. But either way that's very different from working to extend longevity.
> If it's really all that dull, people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.
That, or... I know that'll sound crazy but... not everything has to be an adrenalin rush. Just let go, stop taking your keep-me-alive-forever medication, have a peaceful death during your sleep, contemplating the fact that you'll make room for new humans to have the chance to discover all the things you also had the chance to discover during the last 231 years?
> Being old is not limited to how you look. It’s also how your world views change, how your personality evolves, etc.
It's also your muscles, which won't be old, and the on-going feeling of a ticking biological clock driving people to say "kids, now, before it is too late".
It's also how much sleep you need, how much energy you have.
It's also your metabolism, your ability to recover from light injuries, to exercise, to excel at sport.
It's also neuro-plasticity.
We don't have good examples to even guess if world-views (or fashion choices) lock in place because of brain age, or because we've seen too much and become bored.
But personality, that we can already change with chemistry; it's not a reason by itself for anything.
> Looking at my children grow older day after day is the thing that bring me the most joy and sens of meaning in my life.
Good for you :)
But for me, I wish I'd had kids already, but I have many other joys until I find someone who can help me with that (most of my friends are deliberately child-free). If I became ageless, it wouldn't be a worry to wait.
What is it you suggest we can change with chemistry?
Is it boredom? Are you suggesting we can keep enjoying the things we are bored with thanks to LSD or something?
So, a childless world with centuries-old people drowning there boredom in drugs?
Is this sarcasm? Functional immortality without a complete redesign of the economic system guarantees the least ethical among us would come to own and control everything with no failsafes. Beware what you wish for.
Email me (address in profile). I’ve already made this step. I am presently launching a molecular nanotechnology startup, under the not unreasonable assumption that better tools are required to fully solve the problem.
Edit: not saying we should join forces or that you should work on nanotechnology, but we are clearly value aligned and should connect.
I think the part of "even if I never benefit from it" is a key point in living a meaningful life and transcending the fear of death, though hopefully you have carefully considered your decision from a financial perspective since material aspects are obviously also a part of being able to carry out your plans in this life.
I don't think there is anything wrong in seeking the longest healthiest possible life, but suspect that in many cases that the motivation for it comes more from fear of personal death than the love of what life is. It's great to be an agent in this incredible adventure but my take on it is that when the means (a specific localized self consciousness) become the end ("being me is the most important thing and it should be great forever") then that is where you get stuck in a local maximum and some sort of suffering is bound to follow.
Another aspect is that of how much more time do you think will be enough? 1000 years? 10,000 years? As someone has already stated, you will not be able to avoid death forever and even in the most optimistic case (at least from this myopic view of immortality) you won't win against entropy. No matter how long of a good life you are granted, it will never seem enough because from the subjective point of view it will seem to be over soon at which point personal death will again become very real and very alarming.
It seems the only way out of this is to be able to transcend the personal sense of self and see that your real immortality lies in realizing that in a very real sense you are also something much greater than just a localized version of it.
I'm not some Zen master and am probably afraid of my own personal mortality as much as the next person, but after a long time of thinking deeply about it, this seems to be the most probable conclusion.
If you're making 1m +, just work for like 1 or two more years and you have retire to work on this passion project and have your life if comfort. With so much money idk how you couldn't have both?
You are not alone. I can't retire yet to start working on this, but I'm looking forward to when that day comes. In the meantime, I'm working my day job and writing at night speculative fiction on the intersection of this topic and our current value systems. A big chunk of the problem is that most people are extremely conservative when it comes to death... and perhaps for good reason. But the time has come when more of humanity should leave the shelter of resignation and faith and go into that battlefield.
This seems approximately as likely as people not having the courage to enact injustices (since their victims will have unlimited time to plot a perfect revenge and gather all the resources that would require).
Real life accounts always say otherwise. Death is a limited liability card that people can use to commit anything.
People who commit injustices, even today, are often confident enough that they will be in a position to kill themselves before suffering at hands of others.
That doesn't contradict my point: universal mortality means the potential losses of an oppressor are bounded, and the bound is acceptably low to many people. Immortality removes that bound.
Life in itself is worthless. The only reason why life is valuable is because it is a canvas, a vessel through which you can find happiness, meaning and so on.
This means that if you have a life that isn't worth living, you are not at risk of losing anything of value, and so the potential loss is still bounded. Sure, there is the potential that life can change in the future, but whether you have 10, 100 or 1000 years left of potential life, you don't really care much about that if your life is an agonizing living hell.
Sure, lots of philosophers talk about lives barely worth living, and what constitutes the line. Lots of public health researchers work on metrics for quality-adjusted life years, and increasing longevity is useful only insofar as it increases QALY's.
But I really do expect most measures which increase population longevity to increase population QALY's. The conflict between hypothetical immortal tyrants and immortal coup-conspiracies would only be a small part of this; material conditions and overall societal wealth would weigh much heavier on the scale.
For now it looks like death can't be "solved" at all.
You may be able to prolong individual human life, even by a lot.
But how to solve entropy and the end of an empty, cold universe?
There is even speculation that life is from a certain angle only an effect to accelerate entropy under the umbrella of the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (but I do not remember the source).
So from the standpoint of current knowledge of how nature works this seems to look dire.
I also personally disagree. I do not think that the beautiful chaos of life is strictly preferable to the requiem eternam of death. I'll go when I have to, without hesitation and regrets. It's not the things that terrify us, but our opinion of the things.
AGI singularity is science fiction and, while interesting, none of that research comes close to biological immortality in humans. Don't deceive yourself.
> I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death.
There will never be a world without death. Not, unless you have a way to reverse the laws of thermodynamics, on a universe scale. Only world where people die later.
Also, keep in mind, your most disliked people will probably remain in power for longer. Next, Putin or Xi will remain in power for centuries.
What's the pathway you're thinking in this effort? I had a similar plan I envisioned in my early 20s, which led me to become an engineer. I'll be ready to go down the same path pretty soon, would love to chat with more people in a similar mindset. Email in the profile if anyone wants to talk more about this.
"Solving death" won’t help humanity. Isn’t that obvious to you??
For a starter, birth rates and death rates should be about the same otherwise it’s not sustainable. If you "solve death", birth rates will need to drop a lot.
Do you want to live in a world with almost no children? Just very old people all over the place. Sounds like a nightmare to me.
You need to let go, accept your mortality and leave some room for new humans to live. At some point you’ll have had your time, death is part of life.
> birth rates and death rates should be about the same otherwise it’s not sustainable
In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted famine due to overpopulation, because he didn't predict the discovery of nitrogen fixation, which allowed scaling food production.
There are likely many technological leaps we've yet to make which will change your definition of sustainable.
Do you know about exponential growth? If birth and death rates are not about the same, it means the population will double every X years. You’ll need a major breakthrough in food production every X years. For ever.
Even if we achieve that, at some point there just won’t be enough square meters on earth. But I guess it’s okay to you since we’ll have solved space travel and we’ll just send billions of people to Mars? Then other planetary systems? Then other galaxies?
In any case, as I don’t buy we’ll ever be able to send billions of people to other planets, let alone make them habitable, this is exponential growth with finite ressources. Doesn’t sound sustainable to me.
In my personal opinion: Life is an incredible adventure. I do not feel that the value of it is increased by death. I also do not feel that I misunderstand life.
you've painted yourself into a corner, how exactly are you going to define meaning? As far as we know the universe is infinite, and as such all actions fit your description anyway, so why not be infinite along with it?
> Meaningless for whom or for what? There is no meaning separate from a subject
The philosophical argument for a truly-immortal being being indifferent is that they would, over an infinite timeline, experience every possible experience an infinite number of times. In that frame, preference loses meaning. A being that has no preference is indifferent to what happens around or to them. That, one could argue, is an existence without meaning.
That's so splendidly separate from biological immortality as to be a straw man. (The argument also suffers from failing to appreciate that there are many types of infinity.)
Far from it being a straw man I think it's already a reality that affects us. In very affluent, safe countries we are so far removed from death or meaning that most people's lives consist of picking a different flavor of craft beer or game from their Steam library. This isn't just the concern of some theoretical immortal being, people have a crisis of meaning already, there's a bestseller with that title probably being published every week because in a way the illusion of immortality we have has already rendered most of what we do exchangeable and banal.
Mind you it's no accident that the one meaningful thing most people still have, which is having kids, is precisely given meaning by our own mortality, it's the one transcendent thing that only exists because our lives are finite.
> people have a crisis of meaning already, there's a bestseller with that title probably being published every week
People have always been complaining about this, I think Socrates and Cicero griped about it in their times.
The problem isn’t distance from death but monotony. The philosophised immortal being has monotony forced upon them. Many people today and in the past self-impose it.
How does this cause individual events to lose meaning? Have events that happened to the human race as a whole thousands of years ago lost their meaning?
You're not going to run out of atmospheric oxygen, no matter how much you breathe. There is, for your purposes, an unlimited amount of it.
That may make all your breaths meaningless. But when I'm meditating, or bicycling up a hill, or face-to-face with my lover, or watching the sunrise on a cold morning, my breath has plenty of meaning to me. Limiting the amount of oxygen I was allowed to use would not lend those more meaning; scarcity is not the same as meaning.
Respectfully: You do. You must. Or if you don't, then life misunderstands itself. For life has adopted this pattern of death in essentially every conceivable domain, every ecological niche. Further, any hypothesised lifeform that has discovered death as unnecessary, they curiously have not arrived here for us to interrogate. The significance of that seems vaguely familiar, but perhaps just Fermi ;)
You don't know me, but I usually air toward speaking humbly about things I suspect I know. Readers are free to decide which perspective is true hubris: my hubris that aligns with all known living systems and their failed aspirations of immortality, or the other hubris that stands alone with cancers and brainless jellies, where death is a failure of all historical life to discover otherwise... that the cleverness of life we laud so much praise on -- the same life which has invented every enchanted bit of protein machinery that runs this whole beautiful mess -- that it has somehow had a blind spot all these millennia, that we humans have seen clear-eyed.
Death is hegemonic for a reason. It's the Chesterton's fence around the whole damn bustling city, that we've never seen what comes from the other side of, if we finally remove it.
Much love here. I don't mean to be dismissive, this is just something I care about deeply and wish to speak firmly on.
> life has adopted this pattern of death in essentially every conceivable domain, every ecological niche
Biological immortality exists [1].
More pointedly, life hasn't "adopted" death, it's a consequence of thermodynamics. Where it can escape it, however, it has tried. From a "Selfish Gene" perspective, our genes aim--to the degree they have aims--to be immortal. Our multicellular bodies are simply easier to replace than repair.
I hope not to seem combative, but I'll weigh against your view.
Life hasn't "adopted" anything. It's like when people say evolution "chose" an advantageous trait, when in reality it's just a consequence of dead stuff not passing on traits and specimens with those traits having more success at living, and neutral traits surviving just by not immediately killing or ahem rooster-blocking.
Old-age death is merely a mechanical limitation of biological processes (and possibly matter in general if you subscribe to the heat death of the universe.) It enabled rapid evolution, which allowed MUCH more complex life to come about after billions of years, but the fact that life retains death is merely a consequence of how it came about. Probably life that never died would only evolve in response to environmental disasters or predation, slowing changes significantly.
Don't take this to mean there aren't problems with humanity's search for extending life well past our natural biology. There are. But all those problems revolve around society needing death to not stagnate to hell due to evolutionary circumstances shaping our mentality, not the universe demanding it for some grand philosophical reason.
If you see death as something the universe "wants", great! I merely see death as a limitation and a mechanical process for exacting change.
To posit another philosophical quandry: if life can reproduce, can it ever really "die" of old age? We're one branch on a massive chain of reproduction stretching over literally billions of years, so are we really a "different" life-form from the first one? One enormous organism, split up into quintillions of different parts. If you have a child, where do you stop and they begin? Where do your parents stop and you begin? They/you literally came in part from their/your own cells!
Some of us need a do-over. (In my case, I had a disabling disease that robbed my youth and a treatment only became available when I started nearing old age)
It’s not so much that I don’t want to be immortal - although I do think it’s a huge positivist assumption that your current human existence is the “peak state”, the best possible thing to continue being forever. It may turn out that this life is just an unpleasant dream of a superior consciousness. Maybe it’s not, and this life is all you get. But we don’t know that and it seems extremely self-absorbed and myopic (a common trait throughout human history) to consider this existence as the only real thing.
My concern is more that the world required to keep people immortal is almost certainly one removed of all risk, danger, adventure, and dynamism. I don’t want to live in a world where people hide inside staring at screens, because they’re afraid of physical accidents ending their otherwise immortal lives.
I remember reading an analysis that if people only died by accident then the average life span would between 900 and 2000 years. That assumes no more conservative living than today. Surely things like cars and guns would be much less prevalent.
You’d still end up with any slightly dangerous activity being banned or discouraged. No bicycling, no skiing, no martial arts, etc. The risk would be considered not worth it.
And that’s not mentioning inherently dangerous things like exploring the cosmos.
It would be a very small, sad, scared little world, in my opinion.
If people only died by accident, it implies the absence of murder, which implies either a state of enlightenment or non-humanness. I doubt we can meaningfully conjecture on such a world.
Or perhaps, lives being so long, there wouldn’t be any perceived difference between dying at a hundred and a thousand years old.
Today, a twenty-something dying in a car crash after drinking alcohol is as stupid and preventable as deaths gets. And we known that people drive more safely later in their lives. And yet, we let twenty-somethings get a driving license and drive a car around.
I don’t think you could discount the Foucault power dynamics either. The people running society would all be hundreds of years old, so it would have an effect on culture.
I don’t agree that preventing twenty somethings from dying in drunk crashes is easy or preventable at all. You’d need to redo the entire transportation and city planning infrastructure of almost the entire United States to do that.
Young drunks also ride electric mopeds in European capitals, usually renting them through apps. Sometimes without even a driving license.
So while public transports might be a part of the issue, I doubt they are the root cause.
But that wasn’t my point. My point was that, although it is stupidly dangerous, since they statistically have significantly more accidents than older drivers, young people are still allowed to get a driving license and drive.
Even though they are those that stand the most to lose in terms of life expectancy.
What makes you think everyone would adopt that attitude? Plenty of people today risk losing decades of their lives doing those things in addition to more risky ones like rock climbing. Why would centuries instead of decades change that?
Living for centuries or longer would be an entirely different thing. If the baseline assumption is that you’re going to live forever unless you have a dumb accident, I think society will ultimately orient itself around avoiding that possibility.
Of course you still might be a counter cultural movement against it, but if the powers running society are all centuries-old people, I don’t think that counter culture will have much institutional support.
> You’d still end up with any slightly dangerous activity being banned or discouraged. No bicycling, no skiing, no martial arts, etc.
I'm unconvinced. Humans' maximum age has barely budged over the millenia. What drove our increasing concern for safety was external to that. We also don't see evidence of increased risk taking as one's risk-adjusted remaining years decline.
> If the only way you could die was by physical accident, you don’t think people would do less physically risky things?
On average, sure. But look at how the wealthy spend their time today. Rationally, they should be more conservative. In reality, the infinity of experience calls out.
Similarly, having biological immortality doesn't mean your time preference goes to zero [1]. And if that number is positive then value of a statistical life is finite [2]. We're thus shifting our place on a scale, not throwing the scale out. Hence why the examples are relevant: we've shifted on this scale before.
I still don’t think this is a relevant example at all. Rich people are still going to die. If they’re careful, which they tend to be relative to the population, they live a decade or two longer than average people.
Biological immortality still means you'll die, somewhow, somewhere. Or at least, I believe enough will believe that to continue to have fun. There will be folks who lock themselves in a room to keep the world away, but we have those today as well.
My feeling is that longevity will have an s-curve effect. Every disease and malady we solve today only extends life until some other problem kills you. However, the further we push things, the more problems we are capable of resolving, the fewer things that will pop up and kill you - until, probably surprisingly, people are living significantly longer lifespans than ever before.
The most generalised effects of aging will probably be the most problematic (muscle loss and the like), but there are plenty of stories of people in their 90s who are plenty spry until they are brought low by a heart attack, stroke, cancer and so on.
Just to make a small note: most martial arts are not in any way dangerous. I think crossfit has more chances to mess someone up than practicing a martial art.
> Surely things like cars and guns would be much less prevalent.
Why “surely”? I don’t see why people would try to stop killing each other if everyone were immortal. There would still be fighting for resources, power, land…
One of the most constant lessons of literature and mythology is that people who dedicate themselves to becoming immortal inevitably spend their life harming others.
I'm guessing advanced alien civilizations have figured out how to live a much longer time. Immortality isn't a physically achievable goal, but death from natural causes doesn't have to be necessary with a deep enough understanding of biology.
It’s a pretty big assumption that alien civilizations would even have a concept of the personal self that is interested in personal immortality. Even human beings had less of an interest in personal immortality prior to roughly ~2,000 years ago - before that, your group identity and memory tended to be more important, or your soul was something very different from a continuation of your earthly self.
It’s just as likely that an alien civilization is a biological system akin to insects or trees, where the individual existence of one entity is not relevant at all.
I wonder if that's more a matter of incapability than anything else, though.
Currently, we have more ability to move the needle on lifespan and illness than we've ever had before, and we learn more about it at increasingly accelerated rates. Doing the same 200 years ago (or earlier) was not really feasible. Today, we more or less have a decent grasp of the majority of diseases that end life.
I think you meant to reply to someone else? Or are you saying that the concept of a personal self is tied to the increased ability to reduce illness and lengthen lifespan? Which is an interesting idea and probably defendable.
The Hebrew scriptures and Buddha were plenty troubled by death prior to Christianity. I don't see why the equivalent of an intelligent ant civilization wouldn't remove aging from individuals once they were advanced enough. Jellyfish don't age, and one of The Expanse aliens (to mention a scifi example) were jellyfish-like, and had made themselves immune to biological forms of death.
There is that saying Amateurs talk strategy, Professionals talk logistics.
I think it is a case of the strategy is fine (wanting immortality), but the logistics are just not there. So as much as it may pain us, focusing on not dying would mean you could spend your life not living in try to achieve said additional life.
I can think of a thousand futures on what I could do in a certain position but odds are that none of these situations will ever come up. So to have a clear mind, don't cling to things that might not happen.
I am glad that many are trying to achieve immortality, I will not stand in the way of them, but I also won't be holding my breath on it happening in my lifetime.
My friends and I argue about "eternity is hell" all the time - how even a christian heaven would actually be hell since it's never ending. However for me, I could easily create a 20 or 30 year cycle of activities that would eternally satisfy me. It's a little silly but for example I'm starting to hanker for some old TV shows I watched 20 years ago. The argument typically goes that in eternity, you'd run out of things to do, but I just don't see how that's possible, I do things I've done before and enjoy it the second, third, fourth time around, so there's no such thing for me as "running out of things to do."
Somehow, all people suddenly do wish to be immortal when they realize their death is very close. At this point I'm convinced it's a very strong, socially normalized form of learned helplessness.
At five years old I cried because my parents made me ride space mountain at Disney and I thought roller coasters were scary, but since then ive learned to enjoy the big rides.
Some people see death from aging as eventually being curable. Obviously, something is going to kill you sooner or later. But why must it be old age? Assuming you survive long enough, who wants to spend their last years in body that's breaking down, with diminished cognitive and physical abilities?
While I get the desire of folks to live forever, IF it is possible I still think it is a VERY long way off. All I advocate for is quality of life. It feels like every time we make an advancement, we discover two new things to solve. Eventually we will get there but it might be a lot longer road than we anticipate. Sorry Aubrey De Gray, I don't think this is something that can be solved for a billion dollars like he has claimed.
Eat your fruit, veggies, nuts and whole grains, but don't over do it on the food! Move it or lose it. Build bridges, don't burn them! I don't say this so you can have smaller pants or live an extra decade, that would be a neat side effect, I say this so that you can live a happy fun life as much as possible.
If I reframe your question slightly, too many people think about aging as an inevitable, unstoppable, undelayable process. That is why we only have serious longevity research now, and that is why much of it is sponsored by billionaires or venture capitalists, because governmental agencies don't even comprehend the potential utility of it and relevant research must be reframed as anti-Alzheimer or whatever.
Once humanity gets rid of this prejudice, a venue towards much healthier and longer life is open.
Of course governments don't comprehend the utility of it - they are an immortal social structure made of coercion consisting entirely of replaceable and self-replenishing parts. It benefits from immortality no more than eusocial insects would from a longer lifespan. Ironically any governments that would pursue lifespan extension is thus inherently "corrupt" in that it is technically self-serving on the part of its administrators. Except for those with a clear voter mandate setting that goal of course.
Secession is already baked in just about every government system excepting deliberately unstable ones (favored by autocratic using the threat of chaos when they die as a shield). To governments that functionally makes it a "solved problem".
You can rant against it all you want, but we already live much longer than is justifiable from the evolutionary perspective. If it was up to the evolution alone, we wouldn’t live past 50. So try to make something of your life while it lasts. Or just enjoy the festivities, that’s perfectly valid, too.
We’re probably just using the “overengineering” that the evolution put into us to account for much harsher living conditions that existed previously. I have no other explanation, in any case. That’s also why a lot of us are fat.
There used to be more age difference between husbands and wives. Men who outsmarted and out gunned the competition to live longer got to reproduce a lot more… evolution does select for men who reproduce more later.
Since humans are very social creatures I think it's possible that variations of humans that live longer were selected for since the elderly can help care for the younger, teach things, etc.
I don't want to sound mystical or religious, but 'self' really is an illusion. It is a word that pops up in the LLM of our brain. It is a word that describes what we perceive as happening. What "we" really are are our thoughts and especially memories. And they can live on beyond our physical death. But does that make us happy? Of course everybody wants to go to Heaven, but no-one wants to die. But rationally thinking, 'self' is an illusion.
StarTrek taught us that you can transfer Kirk and Spock to a different place by re-assembling their atoms in a different place. But is it really the same Spock that pops up there? Or a copy? A copy obviously. Such a copy cam then live on practically forever because they could always re-assemble a younger Spock. But since it is aa copy would Spock really be happy that his copy lives on forever? Yes I believe if he thinks about it rationally. And Spock does.
A copy living on is meaningless to the original consciousness, since the subjective experience of the copy is decoupled from the original. There is no more connection than between you and me. You can dress this arbitrarily in grand words of leaving a dent and so on, but no matter the phrasing: once you’re gone, you’re gone. I don’t care if people remember me, if I cease to exist, I cease experience the world, and it’s all void.
I don't identify my "self" (or consciousness) with memories or anything the supposed LLM in my brain might babble about. If you took those things away, I'd still be here. Rationally speaking, self is the only thing that certainly isn't an illusion. Anything you perceive could be a hallucination, memories can change or disappear, and thoughts are mere dust in the wind, but you can't have any of those things without something to perceive them. It's the only thing you know is there, whatever it is.
The feeling off "self" is not an illusion, we all or most of us have it. But it is just a word and one whose meaning is not very well defined, it is like you say "whatever it is". Which kind of hints at that we don't really have a good definition for it.
I am "me" and the definition of "me" is what I am. Somewhat cyclical right?
If you lost all your thoughts and memories, what would be left? You can call that "self" but is it the same "self" as what you thought of yourself as before losing all thoughts and memories?
There are people suffering from schizophrenia who alternate between different "selves". At least to their experience those are totally different "selves" which need not be aware of the other selves at all. So would it mean there are multiple "selfs" within one brain?
I'm only talking about myself, since I'm talking about what I can't deny rationally, i.e. the fact of my own conscious experience. I can't speak for schizophrenics. I don't think you need a definition for your self in the sense that I'm talking about. Like you said, how would such a definition work? Definitions aside, I can't deny the fact of that self, even though I could by a slim margin doubt literally anything else.
I'm talking about the essential process of experiencing whatever comes to pass in my mind and senses. That process would surely continue if my memories disappeared. If all thoughts, memories and senses disappeared, well I can hardly say what would happen. All I can say for certain that my experience is happening right now, and it's not contingent on any particular thought, memory or sense.
I'm torn between the argument that the gift of life is such a precious one that eliminating death is one of the most virtuous endeavors at all – and the other argument where this is peak escapism and a fundamental not-getting-it-what-life-is-about.
At least one can be sure: Death is such a fundemantal part of life that every social norm we take for granted (thus not even noticing it exists) will be uprooted.
Technically that doesn't need to be a bad thing. It just makes it so much more likely that advocats of ending death are overlooking the bad parts.
Plus, I can't think of a scenario where, once this technology exists to extend life indefinetly, the state's monopoly on power won't turn into a dystopian monopoly on life.
> Plus, I can't think of a scenario where, once this technology exists to extend life indefinetly, the state's monopoly on power won't turn into a dystopian monopoly on life.
And the wealthy’s monopoly on wealth will only consolidate.
It reminds me of two quotes:
“Science progresses one funeral at a time” (paraphrasing Planck’s principle).
“[…] Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. […]”
That’s probably what worries me most, when it comes to extended or unending lives.
Also Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift. Good luck getting a new paradigm adopted when the decision makers at academic and scientific institutions never leave.
I wouldn't be so cynical. Many power structures rely on death to drive churn. But there are other mechanisms, e.g. sequential term limits and retirement. (Retirement doesn't mean you can't do anything anymore. Just not that thing.)
Moreover, while longer lifespans may drive calcification, they would also promote long-term thinking. How would we vote about the climate differently if we knew we'd be around for a couple hundred years?
> Moreover, while longer lifespans may drive calcification, they would also promote long-term thinking. How would we vote about the climate differently if we knew we'd be around for a couple hundred years?
Would we act more in favor of the general long-term good, or would we scramble even more to get ours now in order to secure our own future? I'm not so sure cooperation would win.
It is easy to see why an individual would choose life over death, if one has the means for a comfortable life. A second order question would then be: would the society value your life over their own? Even as we speak, many thousands are dying of preventable causes, including man made starvation. There is no way immortality will be accessible to all, and will only increase inequality.
I'll happily change my mind if we can fix world hunger and homelessness before conquering death.
“Science progresses one funeral at a time” (paraphrasing Planck’s principle).
I would be careful at citing that quote as evidence for how science work, especially when considering the historical uniqueness of the last two centuries or so.
This article said it's more complicated than that and more hopeful.[1]
>I'm torn between the argument that the gift of life is such a precious one that eliminating death is one of the most virtuous endeavors at all – and the other argument where this is peak escapism and a fundamental not-getting-it-what-life-is-about.
The problem with this line of thinking is that no one is ever going to eliminate death, ever. Even if you completely eliminate aging, people are still going to die at some point, whether it's from war, or natural disasters, or accidents, or murder. Making people ageless isn't going to keep them from dying when a piano falls on them.
So pontificating about humans living until the heat death of the universe is utterly pointless. Statistically, even without aging, humans aren't going to live beyond 1000 years most likely.
Suppose we hit the SETI gold medal, and meet and interact with intelligent aliens. We discover that these aliens are effectively immortal.
The aliens ask you for advice about how to live. Would you recommend that they all commit suicide at age 100, because it will be so good for them and their society?
Always flip the default and ask, will you switch back.
What if you could ask an octopus the same, and it suggested that dying after breeding is best for society to prevent the problems of overpopulation [1]? Unlike your hypothetical aliens, octopodes live in the same resource-constrained world we do.
The narrow mindedness of some of the comments on this thread is strange, especially on a site read by people with a supposedly open minded interest in the frontiers of interesting new technology.
It's absurd to think that one must be arguing for or desiring an infinite span of life just because they detest the shortness of the one we have as humans, and want to find a way around that natural limit. I or others might only want a few hundred or even a couple thousand extra years to enjoy ever more fascinating adventures, without ever seriously considering the idea of literally striving for eternity.
Yes, we have entropy, the current known limits of human biology and the laws of thermodynamics and so forth as superficial arguments against drastic life extension, but none of these at all firmly block the notion of humans developing ways to extend their lives by centuries or longer, even if not something like practical eternity.
Just in the natural world of today, there are animals like the giant tortoise, who live for over 200 years and spend much of that robust, sexually active and healthy, or the Greenland shark, which lives over 400 years and doesn't even reach adolescence until it's about 150.
Our current technology gives us no means of doing the same for our bodies, but the possible limits of technology and physics are nowhere near definitive enough for calling such a thing impossible. That alone and anything leading up to it would be an incredible improvement for so many lives that could be lived to a whole new degree of freedom and marvel for themselves and others.
And before anyone considers the very tiresome argument that multiple centuries of life would get boring, i'd suggest you internalize that yes, there are people who would have no trouble filling them with things that fascinate them to the very last minute of that extended existence.
Sadly, neither do I. I'm optimistic about the benefits of our current technology explosion (at least some parts of it, less so others) but I can't quite seriously imagine myself seeing aging reversal and life extension to beyond 120 years happening before my statistical natural lifespan ends by the middle part of the 21st century.
Evolution is what has made death mandatory. We'd be living much longer lives if it gave our species an evolutionary advantage.
For example, in many species, the male dies promptly after mating. Evolution has no further use for him, so his life is forfeit. In fact, survival of the progeny may be advanced by getting rid of the old folks.
The reason people live to be grandparents is grandparents turned out to be useful in ensuring the survival of the grandkids. Beyond that, off to the ice floe.
We all know about the heat death of the universe. It is irrelevant to this discussion, however. May I suggest taking a look at "The Red Queen". I'd be surprised if you were disappointed in it.
First of all, our cosmological models are constantly being updated. There are a ton of unknowns here and we cannot be certain in the heat death outcome.
Second, even if the canonical heat death model is right, the minimum required energy usage to sustain thought / simulation will go down as the CMB redshifts to zero temperature. It is unclear at this time which factor decays faster: available energy or cost per compute. Effective lifetime may be unbounded.
> Evolution has no further use for him, so his life is forfeit. In fact, survival of the progeny may be advanced by getting rid of the old folks.
I think this shows that in species where the male does not die promptly after mating, there is good reason to live longer.
> Beyond that, off to the ice floe.
Where does the certainty come that you cannot be useful in ensuring the survival of your great-grandkids, or great-great-grandkids?
After all, if you're arguing from what evolution mandates, the only thing to do is let everyone do whatever, and see where evolution goes next. You really can't think evolution had the current situation as its target all along, and now the only remaining thing is to not disturb it.
> You really can't think evolution had the current situation as its target all along
That's not the point. Evolution does not have a target. Evolution favors the propagation of genes. Anything that does a better job of that gets expressed into the next generation.
> Where does the certainty come that you cannot be useful in ensuring the survival of your great-grandkids, or great-great-grandkids?
I never said certainty.
The notion of diminishing returns comes to mind. Also, the percentage of great-great-grandkids genes that are yours would be about 8%, so not a lot of contribution.
Also, there's very likely big downsides to any adaptations for longer life, such as increased cancer rates, which might make it evolutionarily disadvantageous for humans to live that long.
Of course, evolution of humans was all done before humans invented technology and things like hospitals and bandages and antibiotics, so what yielded the best chances for propagating genes 100,000 years ago might not make too much sense to humans today.
This isn't about what any person wants, it's about what's more likely to increase odds for survival. Living too long, for a creature that doesn't have any medical technology, means probably a higher chance of cancer. Living too short means less chance to pass on its genes, or to help its children pass on their genes. So theoretically, we humans found a balance between the two where we live long enough to be grandparents but that's it, and that's what's encoded in our DNA.
However, now that we understand DNA better, and also what causes various cancers and how to treat them, we should be able to change our DNA to extend lifespans without causing us to die of cancer at young ages.
As "The Red Queen" points out, organisms tend to accumulate parasites and the parasites become adapted to living in the organism. The organism dying will then kill off its parasites, giving the offspring a better chance not be infected by the better adapted parasites.
The competition for food means the older organisms will be better at gathering food, leaving less for the young. Better for the older ones to die off so the young can get the food.
Nature is brutal. Civilization has been able to ameliorate some of the harshness, but it's still there, and we have no assurance that civilization won't kill us off anyway.
> I think this shows that in species where the male does not die promptly after mating, there is good reason to live longer
Yep. Parenthood. And for humans (and other social species like elephants, other primates, etc.) to be grandparents. Humans have a particularly long juvenile period, which they need care of parents and cannot reproduce.
The reason humans still die, of course, is so that resources aren't wasted on bodies that take more and more energy to keep alive and healthy, which ultimately comes back to entropy.
There is no reason behind evolution, attributing any outcome to an evolutionary benefit is complete folly. Literally the only answer to an evolutionary outcome is that a mutant nutted in a bunch of people. Everything after that is also happenstance. If we are to accept that societies with grandparents propagated some genes better, then we have to do the same about cancer, as if its not a complete random fuckup that we have short telomeres or whatever else. When a different explanation fits the model better: cancer tends to occur after reproductive years and therefore wasnt weeded out of the population by evolution, which would apply to people that live long enough to be grandparents too.
It's no different from water behind a dam that pushes against a weakness, and the trickle through it enlarges the hole and the water then tears the dam apart. There is no sentience or reason behind it, but that's what happens.
Life doesn't have a goal, but life that survives and propagates becomes the only life there is.
Life also evolves into local optimums that are dead-ends.
Sentience has helped humans propagate their genes, but mosquitoes are even more successful.
Those for whom these odds increase faster are at huge disadvantage whereas those for whom it increases slower are at huge advantage. As you can imagine it is variative.
Of course I should have said "those who can bear healthy children late in their lives".
I feel like this ascribes too much purpose to evolution. I don't know if I agree - for example, males might live longer even if it's not selected for, so long as their existence doesn't exert negative pressure. And they might anyway so long as propagation continues either way!
A few hundred years ago people would punish the sick and sometimes throw them into wells, making the rest of the village sick. I wondered if violence could be modeled as a plague. Once you're exposed, you're starting to catch it. Imagine that being violent to violent people spreads this disease.
That resonates with what you said - if we could absorb violence and not pass it on we can contain it. Unfortunately, the western world handles violence with more violence, which is the same as throwing a sick person into the village well.
Moments ago, I, too, used to think this way, but then I glanced around at the comments here, and I realize that even if immortal, we'd still have to suffer each other, and that simply just can't go on forever.
Heat death aside, with ‘infinite time’ and probably long before we arrive to affordable interplanetary travel of our squishy forms, we will have found a way to upload ourselves to silicon (or whatever substrate computes the best), where we can do whatever we want on our own little isolated wafers – if that’s what we wanted.
Maybe, but then we need to decide if an upload is you. What matters to me is the continuity of my perception of self. If I spawn a dozen versions of me, I still perceive them as other individuals.
It would involve a transitory step of a direct human computer interface. But tbf, there’s no continuity of perception when you go to sleep and wake up. We have no idea how consciousness works, or whether there really is something as multiple consciousness as opposed to, say, a single thread that traverses all streams consciousness in whatever order
Why are you alive then? I hope you continue to stay alive, by the way, I'd just like you to examine your reasons for not having allowed your own death yet.
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that your current lifespan is "natural" and an immortal lifespan is "unnatural". But what's the difference between being alive in 10,000 years, and being alive currently? A person 10,000 years old may believe themself to be immortal but there's fundamentally no difference between being "currently alive" at 10,000 and being "currently alive" at 40. Either way, it's an experience of the present. So what makes living to 10,000 wrong, if living to 40 is right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Men_Are_Mortal a great book on this. It shows how the immortal are withered away by time and futility of there attempts to change history and be a permanent influence.
Meanwhile, the mortal while shortlifed and with only one poker chip in the game, play and win/loose with all the passion they have and form a sort of river, that withers the immortals plans and dreams down to zero.
I'm not afraid of death, but I'm sad I cannot see how the world will be in 100, 200 or 500 years from today.
I wish people invented a reliable cryogenesis machine, so that I can go to sleep, come back after a century, live for 5-10years, and go back to sleep. Repeat the cycle.
I don't care about living a long life, it only burdens the body and mind. I want to see fast paced changes happening in front of my eyes. Evolution takes millions of years, technological advances takes century. Being awake for that long only makes you miserable, because of all the shit happening in life. Let's admit that life is for the most part a shitty deal, with some moments of excitement.
> I wish people invented a reliable cryogenesis machine, so that I can go to sleep, come back after a century, live for 5-10years, and go back to sleep. Repeat the cycle.
Some SF author here wanna pick up on this theme? This has potential, if the cryo is available equally to all comers in society, because I can't imagine how the world would look like — who'd "shape the time they're in" as some-specific-generation when people pop in and out of the progression of time liberally, century-hopping, taking a gander for a few years, then sleep through many more, then respawn once more.
Maybe one can leave specs for when to not thaw (wars, pestilence, famine, recession). No one's around for the bad times! Including whoever'd manage the cryo and thawings.
For the life of me I cannot remember where I saw it, but there is a comic that once explored the theme, a man wakes up from cryo 1000 years in the future to find that anyone who wanted to endeavor in any field figured they'd jump on the pod and wait for someone else to do some of more of the groundwork, that history and technological progress had basically stopped.
IIRC Orson Scott Card of all people did a riff on this, but the ability to freeze yourself was theoretically merit based. So then all the best and brightest thinkers spent most of their time frozen, with kind of a "break-glass-in-case-of-emergency" setup.
Iain Banks already wrote this for you, it's called Excession, and it is even better than you imagine.
I'm pretty sure the concept comes up in other Culture Novels but one of the main characters in Excession is the Sleeper Service, a ship which does precisely this.
>it's called Excession, and it is even better than you imagine.
I'd advise not startin with Excession but with Player of Games. Read from there. You'll get to Excession on time with plenty of background knowledge of how stuff works.
Reading Excession as book 1 will leave you ultra confused.
I think there was a sub-plot like this in "Children of Time", by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Only it was people on a generation ship that was forced to operate well beyond its limits. I don't want to give too much away but it definitely gave the concept a twist.
This happens in Liu Cixin's "Three Body Problem" books. Many of the characters experience life in eras starting from the near future, to a semi-utopian era a couple of centuries from now, to when humanity fights the aliens 400 years from now. They go into cold storage and are awakened when there is something for them to do.
I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually motivated by either the fear of death, or the desire to travel far and experience life in the future. But these are distinct motivations.
Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense. You are a product of your time. So if you end up 10000 years in the future, what is going to happen? It wouldn't be good if you were still you, a 2000 millennium person. So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity. So in effect it's like you died and were reborn multiple times over. "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.
I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and although they are alive, they are not part of the present. They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present, but mostly reminiscing the life they used to have in their childhood and early adulthood.
I do think our brain as a somehow fix structure / existential path that would struggle to make sense over multiple centuries[0]. Beside reminiscing times gone, there's also the absurdity of cycles and "forgettance", where stupid things come over and over[1], which is not pleasant.
[0] if you don't just go insane because your memory capacity is reached and you just can't organize new ideas without losing others or causing damage.
[1] that said this might be due to equal demographic waves, but in the case of immortal population, young ones would be less and less large % wise.
Depends on the type of immortality. If we can fight typical aging processes, then a big part of the problem you state would go away.
Old brains don't learn and think as fast as young ones do, this has purely to do with ageing and cell/dna defects over time.
Old people are not hyped by AI and new tech, because most of them don't understand them and i think this has much to do with the reason stated.
Not to say there is not a possible psychological problem for us when living forever, it just cannot be researched right now because, you know, we tend to die.
Let alone the implications.. insurance, prison sentences, housing, population and control of it...
You could also argue that old people are not hyped by AI and new tech because they have been through so many hype cycles, and seen so much in general, that they know that things come and go, and tech advances, but the really important things in life never change
So not lack of understanding, more that they see through the hype
I think most people who don't want to be extend life are actually motivated by extreme fear of death.
A fear so profound that they've reasoned themselves into a corner, that this way we live must be correct and cannot be questioned, because if we start to question whether death is necessary after a 'natural' lifespan, whether research into prolonging life might be possible and might not actually not be a ridiculous endeavour for a few madmen, then that deep dread they cannot speak of may return and consume them.
Beyond that your comment is full of odd assertions - yes, people grow and change, but no, that doesn't imply discontinuity or repeated death.
Your older relatives are living in ageing or aged bodies, including their brains. Their experience of life is not necessarily what we could expect if we were to be able to put off the effects of age indefinitely.
Edit - but I'll take your few centuries over what we have now, as a starting point :)
Not everyone is the same. Some people are more open to change and new experiences than others. And ultimately, I'd bet that if your relatives were facing death tomorrow, they'd take a pill today that would avoid it, notwithstanding that they prefer the past to the present. Just because a person doesn't like change doesn't mean they prefer death over change.
Ship of Theseus has many variations; one I like is from Terry Pratchett, regarding dwarfs and axes.
“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
I love this and Pratchett’s “Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness”. Imagine the cost to the poor if we discovered immortality before we eliminated poverty.
That’s a good point. Living forever before we eradicate poverty (and inequality) is a big issue that would, doubtlessly, create a lot of social upheaval.
Eradicating poverty could be done today, IF we could change everyone’s mindset. In my opinion that is harder to do than immortality. Heck, we could end war with a much smaller change in mindset and we can’t even do that.
> could be done today, IF we could change everyone’s mindset.
Oh yes! But capitalism extracts labor from wealth gradients, and extraction is more efficient the higher the gradient. Who’d clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the money to pay for food?
I think it's more extractive of wealth from information gradients than anything else. If two corporations do roughly the same thing, the staff switch to whichever pays more while the customers switch to whoever charges less or provides a superior product/service.
> Who’d clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the money to pay for food?
This is the sort of thing that sounds very truthy but I don't think that's actually very true. I don't think that this property is particularly unique to capitalism. As long as people have existed society as a system, whatever 'isim' it was labeled with (and even before) has extracted labor from power gradients. It's more simply stated that people tend toward forming more stable and longer lasting social systems (in which more gets done) in the presence of a strong hierarchy.
That’s true, but in capitalism wealth and power can’t be separated. Even in democracies, economic power gives the very rich political power that’s only achievable otherwise trough elections.
> It's more simply stated that people tend toward forming more stable and longer lasting social systems (in which more gets done) in the presence of a strong hierarchy.
Until the system collapses because of its rigidity.
Me? I already clean my own toilet. My partner sometimes makes me coffee, but I make my own too. I don't eat much beef, but I don't mind slaughtering my own chickens.
Honestly, if I had the time I'd be able to enjoy doing a lot more "menial" labor than I currently do. Living a simple life is nice, but because everything in modern society is tied to competition and the outcomes determine my standard of living, I am forced to constantly level up just to tread water.
Not quite today — I'm not even sure if it could be as early as by 2030 even if you eliminated all corruption and just had everyone working to build roads to and utilities in the remote towns and villages most in need of development.
We can certainly do more, don't get me wrong, but I don't think we could change so much for 750 million on a short timescale, even though that's just 10% of the world and we've clearly got the stuff in total.
China is, I think, doing a pretty decent job of getting itself out of poverty, but even they were "only" growing at 10%/year in this process.
Definitions such as food security? We don't have that. Housing for every person? Nope. How about the ability to ensure our health? Nope. Jobs? Nope. Help when you need it for your mental health? As if.
In terms of food security - what does that mean? I hear (unverified) there are places such as Venezuela where the population is starving, which is horrendous, but I haven't heard of this in the US.
The fear of insufficient calories to survive is all but eradicated. Obesity is the new marker of poverty.
Agreed on lack of housing, which is largely due to progressive local governments preventing the construction of new housing. Housing is far more plentiful and cheaper in red states.
Agreed on health. Replace the US system wholesale with one of the many more successful models in other countries. Ironically, our existing government run programs are already better in terms of cost and quality than private insurance.
Recent unemployment rates reflect essentially full employment.
> The fear of insufficient calories to survive is all but eradicated. Obesity is the new marker of poverty.
Tell that to the millions of families in the US who are food insecure TODAY. And calories alone are not enough.
"the USDA found that nearly 7 million households were so financially squeezed last year that they had to skip meals at times because there wasn't enough food to go around. Almost all of these households said they couldn't afford to eat balanced meals." ~NPR
As for employment, that 4.3% unemployment (per MSNBC on 8/3/24) still represents some 13 million people. I'd hesitate to call that "full employment" by any metric. And it doesn't count the other roughly 20% who are not counted in that statistic who are not working (intentionally or not).
It's a departure from what we previously worried about - people not having food to eat.
Look at the definition of "low food security" - the most extreme food insecurity the USDA measures.
Low food security — These food-insecure households obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake by using a variety of coping strategies, such as eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting food from community food pantries.
"obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake". So none of these people actually didn't have enough food to eat, they just had to change how they got their food.
I heard that it varies by cell type from at most 7 years, down to under-24-hours for a few types. But.. that's just my memory from some read many years ago. Curious what the latest official number is.
> They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present, but mostly reminiscing the life they used to have in their childhood and early adulthood.
You don't have to be 50+ to fit that description =)
>They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present
This is such a limited perspective. I’m in my 20s and don’t bother with any of that either. The continuity is of one’s conscious experience, not identity.
The older I get, the less I want to live forever. I mean, hell, my knees have hurt in some fashion or another since I was 10. It's not gotten better, it's gotten friends. ADHD... I can barely plan for today, let alone make sure I'm not destitute for the next billion years.
Now then, if they could solve (and reverse) all the other things that come with aging (honestly of those things death scares me the least), I would reconsider my stance. But even the thought of living for another 100 years at where I am right now sounds like a pretty miserable existence.
The amount of people here that seemingly don't care about quality of life is shocking to me. What's the point of drawing out negative experiences to potentially infinity?
One of the tricks that immortality plays to you, is that no matter how much you screw up, you still have an infinite lifespan remaining to fix everything, including the fuckups of an infinite lifespan (uncountable infinities/cantor's diagonal argument).
For example, let's say your eyesight deteriorates every 100 years and there is a cure that will take 2 years of your salary to fix. Add this up until you spend most of your life maintaining your immortal body.
The good news is that as far as I know, there is no plan to end death that doesn’t also involve ending aging. The bad news is that it might come too late for any of us talking here.
It's not just aging that's a problem. It's also issues we're born with (mental health, autoimmune disorders, and thousands of others), or issues inflicted upon us (back pain, cancer, etc).
All of these, practically speaking, need to be solved to extend life in a way that's worth experiencing.
Sure. And practically every one of these issues except for aging and death do have lots of people looking at them, and as someone with an autoimmune disorder that has multiplying available drugs, I can testify that things are getting better.
We have seen some improvements for some diseases. But so many others, especially any mental health issues, are not seeing much progress from the "drown the brain in these chemicals" method of treatment.
So yeah. I don't want to be a downer, but I'm not seeing what I would call enough movement. And it's slowing down even more (and those chemicals are becoming harder and harder to get sometimes) as pharma and hospitals focus on profit over health.
Even "solved" problems (really, problems which can/could be managed) are becoming issues again thanks to profit seeking. See insulin.
I have those relatives too and I know others in their 60s and 70s who are very much living in this moment. The difference is curiosity and motivation and the humility to recognize that what’s new and alien might just have something to offer you.
I’d bet those relatives you mention weren’t the most curious or open people when they were younger.
> I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually motivated by either the fear of death...
How are you not afraid of death? How is anyone not afraid of death? This baffles me. I mean, I don't spend my days agonizing over the fact that I will die someday, mainly because it has no use. Chronic anxiety won't help me as long as I take the necessary actions. But I'm sure as hell scared shitless of dying overall.
If I were 100 years old and every day was a struggle, sure, I'd want to just get it over with. But I have a really hard time understanding why people won't want to stay 30 years old forever. You, your conscience, the only thing that matters, will cease to exist. If that doesn't strike fear in a person, I don't know what will.
What is there to be afraid of about death, exactly? If you don't believe in any afterlife or continuation, then there will be no consciousness to perceive the other side of death.
If you do believe in an afterlife or continuation, you'll have spent your life preparing accordingly.
For me the problem is not death itself, but the steady decline that usually comes before it. Biologically immortal humans would still die eventually, but there wouldn’t be decades of old age before death.
I mean, there are plenty of things that are worse than death. I myself have an informal "anti-bucket list" -- things I want to make sure I die without doing / have happen to me. It's a LOOONG list.
Alzheimer's. Paralysis. Elder abuse. Bone cancer. Even identity death. I think anyone who is that terrified of death is doing so from an adolescent "bad things only happen to other people" mindset.
If I see any of those coming around the corner, I have intent to make like Ambrose Bierce: get my affairs in order and then go off into harm's way.
"If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs."
I think most people have that thought, but few act on it. And unfortunately, death is not the only harm that can come from harm's way. Stray bullets can find spines and genitals about as easily as they can find hearts.
Death is just the name we give to the moment when the condensed energy that is moving this system that calls itself a body breaks down into a temporarily simpler state.
At some point I'll get caught up in some whirlpool of energy and find myself crawling out of some uterus again as I have time and time again for all of eternity.
So you define yourself as energy? Not your conscience? Because your conscience and sense of self is what most people would describe as gone when you die, and that's where the fear comes from. Energy has no feelings, no conscience, no self...
It is not an idea that one needs to have given to them. It is the simple conclusion of known physics. However, the claim that "energy has consciousness" is a non-obvious idea, which can't be derived from the evidence and mathematics we use to describe the universe. It should be supported if you believe it. It would be an important learning about the universe. That, or you're redefining "energy" as "any system that contains energy," (including a human being, which very few would define as "pure energy").
Is there any meaning to this position you're taking? Does it support predictions about the world? Does it change how you think about the world?
The existence of a mind is a property of this mysterious universe that is obvious yet not described by any physical law.
We know so little what consciousness is at the age of the universe timescale (and possibly the infinite multiverse, which actually guarantees an infinite number of configurations of you), it’s hard to think that death is the obvious end of you-ness.
I didn't exist for billions of years before I gained consciousness as a child. I'm sure I won't mind not existing for billions of years after my system expires.
> I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually motivated by either the fear of death, or the desire to travel far and experience life in the future.
Good points. But I think another key motivation is the simple, banal Fear Of Missing Out. How dare human life on Planet Earth continue without me?
While (of course) I would like to live forever, it is not death I fear. Rather it is the process of dying that upsets me. I'm currently in a position where my mother and siblings seem to be in a race to the grave. My mum (age: 95) still has her mind, but her body has failed her badly over the past 10 years: every movement is an effort and a pain - she no longer leaves the house, though she absolutely refuses to become bed-bound. My brothers have fought, or are fighting, cancer. My sister had her second heart attack earlier this year; she still smokes - perhaps her understanding of things is better than ours? (FWIW, I have not yet discovered the means of my demise).
If extreme extended life includes endless pain and continual loss ... I don't think I'm as strong as my mother. My hope is one day I just forget to wake up, drift into oblivion dreamless. !Cogito, ergo !sum.
> Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense. You are a product of your time.
I wrote a novel[1] about a once-human entity that was born some 6-7,000 years ago, and now exists as a sort of eternal mind parasite. I had to do a lot of thinking about how such entities would think about life, time, and death. As the story developed it turned out that my main character quite enjoyed experiencing life, didn't much worry about time, but in particular was fascinated by how people die - which, as a mind parasite, he could experience almost-first-hand.
I find this comment incredibly difficult to read in a way that the book of scientology is, or a bottle of Dr Bronner's soap is. There are many assertions pretending that they logically support each other to build to a conclusion, but there's no logical connection between them at all. I'm going to try to break it down because maybe I'm just completely misreading it?
> You are a product of your time.
Sure. If I were born 600 years ago, I wouldn't be a software engineer. Perfect statement.
> So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity.
That doesn't follow. It veers wildly off course by making the assumption that I am a static thing, with a binary identity as "me" or "not me". But! I was actually born several decades ago. I was once a small child with no understanding of how software works. How is it that I'm a software engineer now? Growth, and change. Yet I retain my first-person memories of being that ignorant child. Did I steal those memories from another entity? I find that to be a useless definition of change-over-time, so I'd rather say I'm the same person. I feel like you'd agree I'm the same person, but only because the timescale is fewer than 1000 years, but that's a completely arbitrary cutoff. A person isn't defined by an instant in time, a person exists over time. Therefore there's no reason I would cease to be me in 8000 years even though I was still me in 4000 years, or 400 years, or 40 years. What possible mechanism could account for that total loss of identity after an arbitrary time? It may be in year 10024 I have no memory of the year 2024, but I might have memories of the year 9024, and in the year 9024 I might have memories of the year 8024.
> "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.
Why? How many 300-year-olds have you measured this against? How many 3000-year-olds? It seems you've just drawn a line where you feel like drawing one and started telling people the line was a natural feature of the land.
> I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and although they are alive, they are not part of the present.
Again this doesn't support your arguments at all. Those relatives are old. Their brains and bodies are weaker every year; we can't expect them to keep up. The idea of biological immortality is not that your body would just continuously age, or else yes you would just be a braindead corpse breathing on a slab for millions of years. Immortality means stopping the process of aging. So the challenges of current old people aren't really relevant to the experience of ageless 10,000-year-olds of the future.
You are just anthropomorhising a biology / technology problem that could be solvable (death). The fact that you cannot comput it doesn't mean at all that it doesn't compute in general.
> They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present
If that's actually how you define "partaking in the present" then I truly pity you. There is far more to life than obsessing over the latest silicon valley bullshit machine.
So many references to thermodynamics here, which is entirely irrelevant unless you choose "immortality" to mean surviving the death of the sun.
The world in which we live and die is very far from thermodynamic equilibrium. A reasonable definition of escaping mortality is being able to continue to live as long as the environment continues to support life, which involves it providing suitable energy gradients, which the sun will continue to do for a very, very long time relative to a normal human lifespan. The second law of thermodynamics does not preclude this.
The second law of thermodynamics is also not some quasi-mystical curse of doom, and it's not about "disorder" either, but that's a whole other discussion.
Ever since I read book about Scaling by Geoffrey West where human's average age is about 40 years I feel tons of problems of modern society are due to stretching human life far beyond 40. From population rising, declining, pension gap, bankrupting social security, care for old people, loneliness, old age diseases and so on and on.
Before life was nasty, brutish and short and now for large population on earth it is still nasty, brutish but long. And I am just not fan of long.
If they are <35, they are too young to realize how fast goes by; and if they are >40, they are selfish to still be alive while preaching for a shorter lifespan for others?
It's more that I can't see a philosophy in which people should die at around 40 surviving in a person that nears that age, because it's tantamount at that point to saying "My life isn't worth living, it provides neither myself nor society any value".
This is not something most people think of their own lives, and as a result would be more interesting than someone saying (in effect) "I think it would be better if other people died off".
In some forums, "post body" is used to rebuff arguments. The implication is that, when the user posts their physique, it will be lesser than your own, and your subsequent takedown of their ideas will include a photo of your own larger physique to reinforce the superiority of the responder.
In your question, there's even less of a fair shake: your own age has no part in it and the GP would simply look a fool for any answer under 40, due to the context. What's sad is that you think that appearance would be anything but an underhanded jab on your part, the immortality-conversation equivalent of "and yet you live in a society, hmm!"
Say GP was 20. So what? Have you dismantled any of their points about the inherent non-fit between the natural engineering of the human body and a society dominated by adults 40+? The GP at least brought one new idea to the thread, and it's rude of you to try to shuffle them off for immaturity. Maybe you're the type to say "it was just a question!", but its obvious to anyone who would read here that you were trying to subvert actual argumentation with a character attack.
I believe this comment violates HN's rules to assume the best intent on interlocutors.
> Say GP was 20. So what?
If the GP is 20 then their personal philosophy that humans should die around 40 may be informed by their feelings that 40 is a long way off and that people around 40 years old are 'other' to themselves and their peer group. Further, their philosophy has not at that point been tested while staring down the barrel, and has the luxury of being somewhat abstract.
And if it has been tested by staring down the barrel, then it becomes more interesting, and we may explore why they feel they don't have anything further to contribute to human society. I'm not pre-judging, I'm seeking to understand. Maybe this person would go willingly to carousel, but as that is entirely alien to me, I wanted to establish if that was the case. And if so I want to know more about it.
So regardless of your own extremely rude response, it is pertinent information required to understand the context of the original post and the thinking behind it.
Your expanded reply is a lot more generous than the single-line reply you gave, which I pattern-matched to countless prior discussions about age where the exact same verbiage was used to undercut youth. Hopefully you can forgive seeing my past experiences in a matching circumstance.
I still think that you do a disservice to the argument with the way you frame it. Not having stared down the barrel is a euphemism gesturing at naivety, when you could more kindly say that few people past the cutoff that GP gave would agree, and expand on that instead. I appreciate that you appear to mean this rebuttal in good faith, and I apologize for my own retort.
If I were to disagree with one element of the counterargument you gave, it's that people of a certain age cannot 'contribute to society'. We can see that people of almost all ages can contribute to society - least of all by political means, e.g. Thunberg, Biden. But the thrust of GP seems to me more that the original engineering of a human involves balancing shared resources directly and indirectly in different ways across lifespans, and as we stretch that long tail further out, it calls on more and different resources than the initial structures of socioculture were designed for. This isn't just about brain fog or palliative care costs, but also about how younger cohorts cope with the world around them.
Today, teenagers are told that their career peak will be in their 50s - the common response is, why work hard today when so much social momentum intends to hold you back? If our best and brightest live to 300, what will keep disenfranchised youth from decades of despair, given the economic revolutions (in the most fortunate outcome, rather than crises) these radical changes would entail? These are the questions I saw gestured at by the GP argument.
A follow-up thought, because this topic has haunted my mind today. A comment elsewhere in this post gestured to Malthusianism, referencing the failures of past societies to predict future advancements. That reminded me that the Repugnant Conclusion becomes all-too-real in a world of extended lifespan, and no amount of techno-optimism can solve for this problem. Bioavailability and the zero sum nature of resource management demands that we respect and solve the issues of population ethics as an integral step alongside lengthening lives. It's one thing to rebuild society with legible (!) cultures to fit the new world, but its wholly another to hand-wave uncounted suffering for the pipe-dream of living longer.
Nobody picks their birth. I can easily imagine ten people sorting toxic garbage their whole (short, brutish) lives to enable the decadence of each member of the future the centenarian ruling class. If we want to avoid such a scenario, we do so by acknowledging and integrating the studied solutions of population ethics, today.
Of course I want to live as long as possible! Because life is awesome! I want more of it!
The fear of death is of course real, but that's not the main reason for wanting to live longer. I want more experience, I want to see what happens in the future! I want to understand more, learn more and be able to do it at a more relaxed pace without the feeling that time will run out!
I think it's a bit similar to the deaf community hating on hearing aids or bald people hating on hair transplants. Psychologically, it's challenging to accept certain conditions, so our brains create rationalizations as a defense mechanism. Similarly, with death, we have no option but to accept it (at least for now), and so we develop rationalizations to convince ourselves that it's actually desirable.
The modern technological world has a certain approach to the individual Self and its experience of the world - it ought to be focused on almost to the exclusion of anything else. Nothing else ultimately matters, as long as your personal life experience continues - is what this philosophy ultimates boils down to.
Other people, in other places, value different things. Merely existing as long as possible is not their primary goal. And in fact, the lack of such ways to “use” one’s life and death in a meaningful way other than simply existing is one major cause of the modern malaise affecting many developed nations. To live and die for a purpose other than extending your own personal experience is something many people hunger for in current times.
I agree but I am responding mostly to the parent comment, which suggests that not trying to live as long as possible is some sort of disorder or disability.
That is not what they are suggesting though. They are simply making an analogy to a very real phenomenon in the deaf community. That they are deaf or are disabled is incidental, it could be any sort of community where they make rationalizations and then hate those who shatter their beliefs.
The desire for immortality goes back at least as far as the epic of Gilgamesh. Medieval alchemists tried to achieve it. In China, Daoists attempted to dramatically lengthen their lives by various esoteric means. Tibetan Buddhism also has practices along these lines.
Conversely, in today's world plenty of people would like to lengthen their lives, without that being their primary goal. Just because someone wants to live longer does not mean that it's the only thing they care about; it's even possible that some larger purpose is a major reason they want to live longer.
From a Buddhist perspective, "if you are a practitioner of the Dharma, someone who is putting the teachings into practice, there is great significance to doing long-life practice."
The primary reason the Deaf community "hates on hearing aids" is mostly because it comes at the expense of sign language.
If you're deaf and live in a Deaf community (i.e. with sign language), you will function normally in virtually every way. If you're deaf and live in a hearing community with hearing aids, you'll be forever impaired. With hearing aids and/or CI you will still be hard of hearing, you will still struggle with group conversations, at the beach or in a swimming pool, in noisy environments and so on.
Secondly, the Deaf community strongly objects to the notion that lack of hearing is a handicap and instead consider it a cultural difference. Somehow, when (we) hearing people think of the deaf we consider it a disability to e.g. have to use a vibrating wakeup alarm, but we don't consider our own inability to fall asleep in a noisy place a disability.
(For reference, deaf=impaired hearing, Deaf=sign language user)
My comparison was aimed at your second point. Deaf people not considering it as a disability is a coping mechanism. If there was a cure for deafness, nearly all deaf people would take it and conversely, almost no one intentionally seeks to become deaf (of course, there are exceptions).
It is not as simple as you're suggesting here. Deaf people have their own culture and language, and while it is built on a lack of something considered normal by others, that doesn't mean it's inherently just a disability that would / should be eliminated unquestionably.
Consider a similar example: if immigrant parents could instantly make their children forget their native languages and learn English fluently, many would choose to do so – as it would give the children more economic/social advantages. And yet I don't think we really want to say that not doing that, and instead retaining the native language and culture, would be a coping mechanism.
Culture and disability is a really complicated thing and deaf culture specifically should not be brushed away as just a coping mechanism.
(Side note: I am deaf in one ear and agree with the commenter above that it's actually a benefit for going to sleep, but of course this isn't considered a benefit by society at large.)
Thank you for this explanation. This is really interesting. I'm not deaf, so this is very difficult for me to understand, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
I'm trying to find something to compare to, but not sure if I'm getting this right.
I can't sense radio waves in the 87-110Mhz range, but let's imagine that most people can. This means that they can hear all the FM radios all the time.
Certainly, this would be very annoying, especially if you are not able to block it out. In this sense, I would be better off - one less annoying thing to deal with.
Of course, everyone else would be able to be up to date with all the news instantly, as they would always hear them from the radio. And, assuming you also had the ability to "tune the station" that you can hear, you would be able to listen to music or interesting shows all the time.
This would be good and fun.
Would I miss the ability that everyone else has? This is a very interesting question and I don't know the answer.
But, I would think that if someone gave me a wearable FM radio that I could turn on/off at will, I would think that I certainly would accept that.
Again, I'm sorry if this is not a good analogy and as all analogies this doesn't really capture all the nuances of course, but would this be similar at least in theory?
Yeah, it's complicated for sure. I think this is probably a good example, except that deaf people functionally get along fine in the world, for the most part. At least nowadays. Whereas in your example, it seems like the people without the radio ability are just inherently behind everyone else in terms of information access. And in your example world, the people without the radio ability would need to have their own unique subculture and language where they can communicate and relate to each other in ways inaccessible to the radio masses.
Personally, I do think the sense of hearing is important enough to be worth acquiring. But the underlying point, I think, is that deaf culture is not just a rationalization or coping mechanism. It's a fully-fledged culture. And while gaining the sense of hearing is probably "worth it" and a net gain, you're also losing something in the process.
To use myself as an example (although I'm not completely deaf) – while I wouldn't mind having my deaf ear fixed, being half-deaf has also shaped my personality and sense of self. So I wouldn't want to just label it as an unimportant coping mechanism, as it's much more fundamental than that – even if I ultimately did want to fix it. I imagine deaf people getting cochlear implants feel somewhat similar.
Evaluating it purely as a broken thing that is now fixed doesn't capture that aspect. And it's worth reflecting on how this idea that "useful = always better" is just a default assumption.
The language learning example I used is a good one in this instance: while it's nice that people can communicate more by learning English, it's also a process of destruction as local languages and cultures are eliminated and assimilated into a global English-language culture. The assumption that vocal communication + hearing is superior to sign language is a similar situation.
> I would think that if someone gave me a wearable FM radio that I could turn on/off at will, I would think that I certainly would accept that.
In this way it is an apt analogy, since many deaf get CI. The implant process removes any residual hearing, so the moment they turn it off everything is completely quiet. It's nowhere near a fully qualified hearing, however, so it's useful as a supplement to sign language, not as a replacement.
I don't know of a good analogy for it, but sign language obviously also carries with it some advantages and disadvantages that vocal communication does not. You need a flashlight to talk in darkness, but you can talk (sign) as much as you want in a library, through a soundprood window or in a noisy environment.
The conversation dynamics are also completely different. Often everyone will sit in a big circle with multiple conversations going on at once, and you can "opt in" to the one you want by watching whoever is speaking.
> Deaf people not considering it as a disability is a coping mechanism.
No, it's not, and this claim just shows your ignorance and prejudice.
> If there was a cure for deafness, nearly all deaf people would take it
This is pure conjecture, and I frankly think you are wrong.
> almost no one intentionally seeks to become deaf
Do you genuinely not understand that this has more to do with culture, language, habits and the familiar, not to mention ignorance of what it means to be deaf/Deaf, than an accurate judgment of the qualities of hearing vs. silence?
Dont forget blind people "hating" on bionic eyes and similar nonesense. And no, you haven't understood the underlying issue at all. All you can do is claim a minority group isn't quite in their right mind, thats pretty sad to read. Maybe you can read up on Ableism, but thats not the whole story. Tech based implants are very poor quality-wise. Bionic eyes have a few hundred pixels across, and hearing implants sound quite harsh and unnatural. What those minority groups are "hating" on (what a strange way to put it) is them being forced into this, without seeing a lot of gain. I am blind 45 years now. If someone would force me into a bionic eye, I would need the next 10 to 20 years at least to learn basic reading. I'd have to start at the very basics, and its likely too late for me to adapt to the visual world. My way of dealing with things, as a native blind man, is superior to every technology you undisabled people can give me. And if I decline, you say I am hating on technology. This is soooooooo fucked up, you have no idea.
You misunderstood my point. I was doing an analogy between three cases (deafness, baldness and death) where a real solution does not exist or if it exists, it is imperfect or not available to all. For example, hearing implants aren't a perfect solution and won't help much in cases of extreme hearing loss. I imagine they're also a bit inconvenient. Similarly for baldness, hair transplants aren't always an option due to cost or insufficient quantity of hair in the donor area.
So what happens is that those who aren't eligible for a solution often tell themselves that a hypothetical solution isn't even desirable at all, as a way to cope. This is where I was making the analogy with people praising death in these threads. My contention is that they're just rationalizing to deal with the fact that death is indeed inevitable, for now.
By "hate" what I really meant was that a subset of those who aren't eligible for a solution will "hate" those who are, because they are a reminder that their situation isn't actually desirable. I really should have wrote "deaf community hating on people with hearing aids or bald people hating on people with hair transplants."
In your case, it seems you acknowledge that an actual cure would be nice, but such a cure doesn't exist right now. I feel similarly towards death. I'm not about to do monthly "young blood transfusions" to gain a year or two of life but I acknowledge that a real cure would be nice.
PS: I absolutely meant no disrespect and understand that it's perfectly possible to live a good life as blind or deaf person.
Yeah, I agree with you. I want all those things and would try to attain them if possible. But I also think it's selfish and "not how it works".
I think people are not really made for adapting such a long time. I also think the generations after you would want to own a part of your ecological niche to live in themselves. You might be looking over your shoulder the whole time.
Well, if people live for really long time like 10000, it would become much easier to travel to other stars with technology that we already have, so there will be plenty of "ecological niche to live in".
Would it really be much easier? It's already possible, we just would have new generations on the ship when we arrive. We don't care enough about those future generations to take off for a new world today. Will we care more about our own 10000 year futures?
Passing down skills and ideas needed for the mission to survive and succeed over multiple generations is a very hard task.
A group of skilled and motivated people who spend a small percentage of their lives on a ship, is going to be very different from a group that is trapped in a small town for generations.
My estimate would be that the mission to succeed is going to need 10-100x more people on generational ship compared to a transport ship. (million vs tens of thousands.)
Yes, it is a bit selfish. But it is also okay to be a bit selfish from time to time. After all, it is your life. Of course, this needs to be carefully balanced. But doing things every now and then just because you want to, is okay.
However the "not how it works" comment ... well, you could make that pretty much throughout the time that humans have lived. We have been continuously changing the environment around us to suit our needs and wants. Early farmers burned down forests to get fertilized land. We domesticated crops and animals and bred them to grow the way we wanted them. We built things to make life safer, better and easier.
You could say "that's not how it works" about a tractor or wheat with multiple stems from a single seed.
But of course, there will be problems that need to be overcome if we ever do figure out ways of extending life. But again, there always have been problems with new inventions.
I firmly believe that humanity has the ability to overcome problems, develop, learn and improve. And that aligns well with wanting more life!
You have only considered the consequences of you living forever. It wouldn’t just be you, it’d be everyone. Well, more likely, it’d just be the rich, and you’d just have to hope you’re rich enough to afford it. And good luck with social mobility in a world where the ‘generational wealth’ doesn’t need the ‘generational’ part. You’ll find that an internship at a company with the potential to eventually give a high-paying job in a few decades needs 80 years of experience, three PhDs and a personal recommendation letter from at least one legendary figure just to make it to interview because you’re competing in a job market with immortals.
This feels similar to the people who advocate for dictatorships because they picture themselves as the dictators, and end up having their faces eaten by leopards. Statistically, you’re overwhelmingly likely to not end up in the elite in this new deathless world.
I'm certainly not part of the elite even in the current deathful world :)
And yes, of course there will be issues, difficult ones. But life is, was and will always be filled with difficulty, obstacles, struggles and failures. Mine certainly is.
However, I believe in progress and overcoming obstacles and I believe that if we ever manage to extend life, we will figure out ways to make it work.
There is a lot of talk how finding jobs is more difficult these days if you are young and do not have experience. That real-estate is so expensive that nobody is able to afford it.
And I'm sure it's true.
But I also see a lot of young people succeeding and thriving in ways that I could not even have thought of. Therefore, I think there is reason to believe that the next generation will be able to find a way to make it work. As has every generation before.
When I was younger I used to think that situations in the world are now radically different from what the previous generation had to deal with. And on the first level of abstraction, they are! Computers did not exist for the generation before me. So of course it was new.
However, that is just the first level of abstraction. Take the second level of abstraction and you can look back and identify things that are completely new for each new generation. I mean, how different was the concept of going to work in a factory with a loom from the previous generation where machines did not exist at all!
> Therefore, I think there is reason to believe that the next generation will be able to find a way to make it work. As has every generation before.
It’s worth remembering that many generations lost a significant percentage of their population to war, death, famine, etc. They didn’t always find a way to make it work without significant death and suffering. Many who died probably wouldn’t say “we made it work” for their own lives.
Yes I think most people here aren’t considering the fact that technology is rarely evenly distributed.
Rawls’ veil of ignorance is relevant here:
In the original position, you are asked to consider which principles you would select for the basic structure of society, but you must select as if you had no knowledge ahead of time what position you would end up having in that society.
Except in the short term, technology is one of the few things that almost always ends being distributed evenly. 2000 years ago, the only way to get running water was to be Ceaser and command a slave, “Go run and get me water.” Now one turns a tap. Similar arguments can be made to innovations ranging from household appliances to medical advances that were only available to the wealthy 50 years ago.
You also overestimate the power of entrenched interests and underestimate the political agency of those who live in a functioning democracy.
In broad strokes, you are correct, however in this case specifically I'm not so sure. Access to healthcare today is extremely unequal. I really doubt it'll become less unequal when immortality is on the line.
Unequal or not, the the bottom quarter today have better health care than the top quarter 75 years ago. Technology filters down to the masses. We can discuss timelines, but the basic fact is indisputable.
You have provided no evidence that the diffusion of technology will be different under an extended lifespan regime. You just make a bald statement.
I'm not sure how that is an argument against my initial comment. So the advancements will supposedly drift down to the lower classes over time. Society will still be unequal, and at that point the people with access to the best longevity tech will already be in power.
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to provide evidence of a future speculative event, but as I said, more life is about as strong as an incentive as is possible. There are plenty of examples of powerful technology that didn't become more accessible. Nuclear weapons as a prime example.
Now I don't think longevity tech, if such a thing is even possible (and I'm skeptical) will be as restricted as nuclear weapons. But to think that there won't be massive inequalities in access to it + strong power incentives to not distribute it seems naive to me.
Thanks for the comment. The Roman water system is indeed a marvel and did vastly facilitate access to water for the masses. Specifically though, I was referring to having easy access to tap water within one’s home. That, to my knowledge, was not common, whereas today nearly everyone in the first and second world has that [1].
[1] “It was very rare for a pipe to supply water directly to the home of a private citizen, since Romans would have to acquire an official authorization to validate the direct tap. Water mostly serviced the ground floor in buildings, rarely supplying the upper floors due to the difficulty this would provide in the gravity-powered system. Residents of apartment buildings who lived in the upper floors would have to carry water upstairs and store it in their rooms for sanitary uses” from https://engineeringrome.org/the-water-system-of-ancient-rome....
And yes, there is still many parts of the world still in poverty, but that is changing rapidly and doesn’t change the larger point that technology, by and large, democratizes and filters to the poor.
The idea we have of "Generational Wealth" depends on compouding returns and compounding returns require perpetual economic growth which is something that in a sufficiently long timeline is simply not possible.
Also, on capitalism, economic growth is also dependent at some level on population growth.
Eternal life would probably require some kind of socialism.
Elites are not the only ones who get cancer treatments. Since the diseases of aging are extremely expensive, it's even likely that national health insurance programs would pay for anti-aging treatments. Longer lifespans would also help counter lower fertility, which is an economic problem for most developed nations.
Long-term, sure, maybe we end up with a social mobility problem. But solving that seems less difficult than solving aging. Even if we didn't solve it, I'm not convinced it would be a bad trade.
Imagine we lived in world with an average lifespan of a thousand years but little social mobility. And some prominent person said "hey I know how to fix this, we'll just kill everyone on their 90th birthday." I doubt many people would consider that a viable solution, rather than a ridiculously bad one.
> This feels similar to the people who advocate for dictatorships because they picture themselves as the dictators, and end up having their faces eaten by leopards. Statistically, you’re overwhelmingly likely to not end up in the elite in this new deathless world.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone saying this.
Are those arguing for immortality assuming that aside from physical
decline we improve monotonically with age? That's not at all clear to
me. For example, the general consensus among linguists is that the
ability to acquire native fluency in a language is lost after a
certain age. Could there be other less obvious deficits in
neuroplasticity that people striving for immortality would need to
address? Sticking with the same example, how do we know it doesn't
confer some evolutionary advantage to repurpose the language
acquisition firmware (whatever that may be) to more age appropriate
ends later? Oddly enough, a couple of star trek episodes I'm too lazy
to look up got me thinking about all this. In one of them, captain
Picard gets a chance to relive a regrettable incident from his youth
and ends up ruining his life, and in the other, captain Janeway goes
back in time to help her younger self and finds out they both have
something to learn from each other. Relatedly, someone asked William
Shatner what he wished he knew when he was younger and he said a
better question would be about what he's glad he didn't know.
Disclaimer: I had an unexpected sudden cancer scare last week so maybe
you should discount my comment as a rationalization.
Materialistic people are so consumed by the fear of death that they yearn for immortality, craving endless time to create and acquire more distractions—little toys to appease their restless minds. It's ironic that in their quest to escape mortality, they lose touch with the essence of life itself. Humanity, as a collective, has driven us to this point, where the pursuit of material wealt overshadows the potential for deeper connections and meaningful experiences.
Our struggle against it reveals this deeper disconnection which is evident from the our so many attempts to "enhance" life - to extend it further all the way to infinity. We became so preoccupied with that task that we often fail to fully embrace the current truth: finite life. In this quest to conquer the inevitable, we miss the opportunity to find meaning and peace within the natural flow of our existence.
It's clear from many of these discussions that there is an unbridgeable discursive gap between the "why on earth would you ever want to die" and the "life would become an intolerable nightmare" groups. Realistically if we do find ways to extend life then people will take advantage of them and all kinds of weird consequences will follow, and the two groups will argue about just how long life should be while trying not to die. Cosmically speaking all that will happen is that human development will slow down: after all if it requires a generation of human scientists to die so that new ideas can be accepted then [1]...
My personal preference is pro-death. I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus. The fact that it's not under my control also makes me feel calmer - it's out of my hands.
If you're going to retire in N years, then that gives you an upper limit to how much you can benefit from learning (or even experimenting with) a new and potentially better approach, versus sticking with what currently works for you. As N gets smaller, the cost-benefit analysis increasingly favors the latter.
I like the concept that because we decline in liquid IQ as we age, so our static skill growth is always counterbalanced by our intellectual decline, we have never even seen a human being in the fullness of its power.
What is silly? Your statement can be true at the same time...
And just to be clear, I did not mean that it's the sole reason that people refute new ideas, I was just opening up the possibility that without mortality we might still have progress without relying on generation shifts.
I think neuroplasticity is well known to have a physical basis. We can probably extend the neuroplasticity of young adult and early middle age into longer and longer timespans, but all you have to do is watch a teenager or young adult for a few days to see that the extreme neuroplasticity of very young people definitely comes with some drawbacks.
I don't think I would want a future immortal billionaire with access to accumulated generations of power to enter a new adolescence with the brain reset that comes along with it.
We need young people to be stupid and brash and occasionally fearless and brilliant and unburdened by the lessons (or scars) of the past to keep society moving forward but those can't be the same people in charge of the world. There are roles for both.
If flexibility and plasticity of thinking are age-related, couldn't prevention of ageing maintain that?
I think it's inevitable that such a change would cause big social upheavals. I find it highly ironic that those people who call this out as a negative often also call out how people living longer are change averse.
> I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus.
Can I ask why, genuinely?
The fact that I will likely die sometime in the next 50 years doesn't make the evening out I have planned any better or worse. The band I'm going to see are getting older, but I'm going to see them because they're coming to my town and it'll be enjoyable. My eventual death has no bearing on it at all as far as I can tell.
On the one hand, we enjoy real flowering plants more than fake ones, and delight in anticipating their blossoming, though it is the fake plants that are ever blooming and ever lasting.
On the other hand, the only moment in which you have direct control and could actually affect is the current one.
When Pinocchio made his wish, was “agency” all he wanted, or was there something more?
> though it is the fake plants that are ever blooming and ever lasting.
I have recently been envious of a neighbours bushes - they flowered uninterrupted for many months, all spring, summer and autumn. Fantastic sprays of cream and crimson blooms. Both beautiful and long-lasting, I would love to plant those over more temporally limited ones that only flower for a few days per year.
It is not the permanence that is unappealing about fake blooms, nor the brevity that makes flowers beautiful. To me anyway. Silk wallpaper with floral prints that has survived for hundreds of years in old British castles and country homes is no less beautiful for its age.
I’m not sure I see the relevance of your other points. I guess we see things very differently.
> human development will slow down: after all if it requires a generation of human scientists to die so that new ideas can be accepted then
A worse problem is that whatever generation is in control when immortality is achieved will rule the world forever. Falling fertility makes this even more likely.
Falling fertility makes us extinct very soon. The idea that the youngest generation, raised by many generations to be dismissive or even outright hostile to fertility will, by some miracle, be the ones who say "no, I will have 2.1 children" is silly. And because it's falling fertility and not just "stable but below replacement fertility", demographic collapse comes quickly. and extinction within 200 years.
If you're worried about immortality, then the good news is we don't even have enough time to figure it out.
I could blame them, but about 3 months ago I saw a headline here on Hacker News telling us that the government of Canada plans on having a population of 100 million within the next few decades (currently at 30ish million). The 70 million difference isn't old people. Quite clearly, looks like government policy.
China deliberately lowered its fertility to a below replacement level. A few decades later, they decided they wanted to raise it back up higher.
They couldn't. They're not exactly wishy-washy, they happen to be one of the most authoritarian regimes on this planet, even if they understand the benefits of a velvet glove. If they couldn't raise it, why would you think anyone else can?
And we're already at sub-replacement. The same people who make the next generation of people (as small as it is), are the ones who also raise that generation and instill their values in them. What does having one child teach that child about their parents' values? It teaches them that, at most, they should have just one. Or maybe even that they should have none at all. Not only is this a self-reinforcing problem, it accelerates. You don't have a few decades to solve this.
Nor will "evolution" fix it as the other guy said. While some still have large families, it's not just the parents' own values that are instilled, but that of our society collectively. The many who have few or no children have far greater influence on the children of those families, than those families have on everyone else.
Population is counter-intuitive, and none of you understand it.
You're making all these assumptions about how the population grows and shrinks on a tiny subset of human history. People are not going to disappear as a species from social trends like having fewer children. Society will change to accommodate the new status quo and reach an equilibrium, like it has for the entire history of the species. Whatever wipes out humanity, it won't be that.
It’s worth noting that the they only put population control measures in place because their prior policy of encouraging massive population growth backfired horribly due to the strain it wrought on society’s carrying capacity.
The homo genus has survived huge variations over the last 200k years. The likely global warming scenarios are very bad but extinction would need a major screwup with AI and/or genetic engineering.
Evolutionary processes will prevent total extinction, even if "the next generation is raised" one way, new trends will emerge.
A population of few thousand is enough for humanity to come back. Even if population dropped 50% every 30 years, it's still 500 years to get down that low. And we haven't even started trending downward yet.
The good news is those more likely to reproduce are automatically selected by evolution… since they are the only ones having children in any significant numbers.
Things don't happen in a vacuum and trying to extrapolate current trends 100+ years into the future is a fool's errand. A couple decades ago everyone was worried about the opposite problem. Neither of us has any idea what the new worry will be in a few more decades.
The earth currently has billions more people than are necessary to keep humanity going; there's plenty of slack in the current system. Yes societies will have to evolve if birthrates stay low for a while, but they always have to evolve and if populations ever did drop precipitously low people already know how to make more babies.
Not only that, but the "cure for dying" will surely be priced such that only the already-wealthy elite of that generation will be able to afford it. It's not going to just be handed out to everyone.
Why not, actually? Why wouldn't it be at least somewhat related to the price of executing that life-prolonging procedure? The providers will surely want to sell it to the maximum number of customers in all countries.
Even if you argue that this would go against the interests of the highest class, what could they do? Technology is pretty unstoppable, and individual actors are usually pretty bad at conspiring together unless there's something in it for everyone involved. Not to mention that there's not even a way to define what specific dollar amount moves you from "wealthy commoner" to the "wealthy elite", especially if taking into account different countries.
> Why not, actually? Why wouldn't it be at least somewhat related to the price of executing that life-prolonging procedure?
Odds are we're talking about a suite of many procedures, some of which are intrinsically very expensive and that humanity doesn't have the resources to provide to everyone. But if it's really cheap...
> The providers will surely want to sell it to the maximum number of customers in all countries.
The maximum profit point isn't likely to be just above that really cheap price. People would be willing to give a significant fraction of their wealth for a magic bullet life extension, and most of the world's population has no wealth. Providers' ability to perform price discrimination isn't going to be perfect.
> Why not, actually? Why wouldn't it be at least somewhat related to the price of executing that life-prolonging procedure?
If it's anything like medical procedures that exist today, it sounds like at least in the US it will be impossible to afford without insurance, and therefore employment. "You can live forever, as long as you work forever" is exactly the amount of depressing I'd expect from real life.
There are so many great Haldeman books, particularly the ones where he sets out to kill a Heinlein book as did "The Forever War" (Starship Troopers) and "Worlds" (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.)
That book popped into my mind; it took two tries to find it with Copilot and I was pleasantly reminded of who the author was.
> The elite will finally meet the long term consequences of their past and present decisions.
It will be a spectacle: the true test of how useful wealth is against the Universe, compared to other things like knowledge or wisdom.
This is casting categories of people in very rigid and binary terms. Wisdom and knowledge is not more prevalent amongst the non-elite is it? Isn’t it distributed more evenly?
Thanks to their power, their decisions affect many. Those decisions are taken sometimes blindly, even if they could pay for good advice, sometimes knowing it's only for own benefit in short term at the expense of the rest. In the later case, they have knowledge, but decide to act anyway, as long term they will be dead. Any bad or good decision by a poor nobody will have a lot less impact.
Iain M. Banks probably said it best. "I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame?"
Yep and ossified control structures aren't exactly known for being flexible and well run in the long term. A permanent ruling class will almost certainly lead to a major collapse at some point, bringing down all of that fancy technology with it.
I think that what most pro-immortality people forget is that forever is not just a very long time, our finite thinking does not allow us to understand something that never start or never ends and that death is life just as light is darkness and heat is cold one cannot exist without the other.
Immortality isn't a thing, the heat death of the universe virtually guarantees that. But nobody seriously thinks they're going to live a Googleplex of years. They just don't want to be limited to a max 110 year lifespan, where there's a good chance you spend the last few years wasting away in some nursing home. Why not live a few centuries or even millenia until something inevitably kills you? There's way more to see and do than any one current lifespan.
Effective immortality is very much a thing for everyone at present. Given immortality means living forever, if you cannot access experience before your life, and you cannot access experience after your life, then for all purposes your life is forever as far as your experience goes, and your experience is all there is for you.
“Semantics” is simply “meaning”. If something has a different meaning, the equation no longer solves the same way.
If you feel defensive and want ways to put someone down, you can replace “semantics” with “sophism” or something like that.
> I'd rather live a few centuries than tell myself that.
But you can’t, can you? So might as well look into what life, death, and immortality might really be, beyond the naive and wrong intuitions we have picked up from fiction books about vampires.
Unless you believe in life after death (which I would not blame you for as many do, among scientists included), there is no span of time available to you in which you are not alive.
> There's way more to see and do than any one current lifespan.
Perhaps this a personal view but I had conversations with elder people and most will tell you the same, a very long life (even a healthy one) is quite boring and depressing, you start to see the same patterns again and again, everything and everyone you loved dissappear and the essence of humanity doesn’t change. Same play, different actors and costumes.
I'm sure some people feel that way, but I also know not everyone does. I have to wonder how much of that is a consequence of aging. Anyway, life extension can be a choice, once it's available.
Different people are different. For some people everything is so boooooooring already at high school. For other people, it's "vita brevis, ars longa".
> everything and everyone you loved disappear
Perhaps with immortality, there would be less of this?
Maybe I am just too young to understand the wisdom of the old people. I am almost 50, so in the optimistic case I might get the same amount of time again. That is definitely not enough to see all the things I want to see, try all the things I want to try, learn all the things I want to learn.
I imagine that when your health becomes shit, life sucks and you get tired of it. Good immortality should come with perfect (or at least average, from out current perspective) health. That includes mental health.
But if someone believes that he already understands everything and it's all just the same patterns over and over again... dude, where are all your Nobel prices? Maybe your life is boring because you don't try new things.
I’m in you age bracket and I wouldn’t say I find life “boring”, I find it recurrent, to me being able to communicate instantly from one end of the world to the other but being unable to understand our neighbor who thinks differently and losing the sense of “community” to become just individuals living closely in isolation to be able to travel in minutes what used to take months but at the expense of destroying our own environment and poisoning the future of our own descendants is no evolution. As Mahatma Gandhi said: “There’s more to life than increasing its speed”
> all that will happen is that human development will slow down: after all if it requires a generation of human scientists to die so that new ideas can be accepted then
It isn’t obvious to me that that is given. An alternative would be that the breadth of parallel ideas would expand, more competition. There could then also be more depth because individuals behind groundbreaking ideas can build on their cognitive foundations for longer.
One major change, which it thibk would be a positive is that we will be directed to thibk more long term. With extreme life extension, the cosmos also becomes smaller because we could travel and explore space and time more extensively.
Just my 2 cents - "why on earth would you ever want to die"
Because its the end of any worry, doubt, suffering, fear, uncertainty. Because its over. And youll be dead, so you wont be able to feel what youre missing out on.
The finality of death is a beautiful and comforting eventuality in my opinion.
I know a lot of people share similar sentiments but I doubt many feel that way when they’re on their deathbed.
Personally, I don’t want to die. There’s so much to do, see, and experience. One lifetime isn’t even close to enough, and that only got worse since I had children.
"There is no such thing as death at all for this body. The only death is the end of the illusion, the end of the fear, the end of the knowledge that we have about ourselves and the world around us."
"There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in flux."
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 593 ms ] threadI have decided that soon I will quit my job ($1M+ TC at FAANG), and I will dedicate the entirety of my remaining life (I am ~30) to helping humanity solve death, even if I never benefit from it.
This is a difficult decision for me because I am giving up a life of guaranteed luxury and comfort for a moonshot that almost certainly will not pan out. But I can think of no greater and more meaningful pursuit. This is my Zero Dawn. Moving the needle here is the only thing that will let me - ironically - die happy.
I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense potential to be leveraged here if we come together.
Often, when people first imagine living much much longer, they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of age that also end up killing you.
Who's out there handwringing against fighting, just to pick a random example, dementia?
There are both drawbacks and benefits to the controversy of "ending death".
You have mentioned the drawbacks, but the benefits are that it attracts the interest of the individuals that care about the most important problem in the world, which is specifically this problem of ending death.
If we told the same person that we have managed to create a crude facsimile of intelligence and expect to have full intelligence in our lifetimes, running on lightning trapped in purified sand, their mind would simply break.
I am confident that humanity will solve death on all relevant timescales, out to the heat-death of the universe itself.
I am optimistic that today will be looked back on as "that era when people died, isn't that sad?"
Bad humans then become social issues - and those, we can solve.
No mechamism to wipe this clean means absolute dictatorship with no end in sight, you always see it even in democracies, strong persons tend to bend rules as they like and the only stopping power is re-election force, or you end up eith some form of forever putin.
Death brings correction, even if individually of course it sucks pretty badly. Even for just avoiding endless dictatures its necessary.
There is no real correction though.
Because for every person who you think that you helped, you should know that those people are going to eventually die anyway, meaning that it was all for naught.
Authoritarian regimes don’t end because the dictator gets old and dies, they end because the people rise up against the oppressive government. If mortality was the liberator you imagine it to be then North Korea would already be rid of their nightmare.
Equality issues still exist, but compared to 1924?
Is literacy is a social issue or not? 31% to 87%.
Is extreme poverty? 54% of about 2 billion, now 10% of about 8 billion, reduced in absolute numbers and not just as a percentage.
So, kill off all of humanity to make sure you get rid of the worst ones? To me that seems... non-optimal.
More users, more awareness of limitations and side effects and how to treat them.
Longer working lives for the labour force, less need for expensive pensions and expensive old age care.
But this isn't in isolation, the changes to AI and robotics, even without AGI/ASI or von Neumann replication, will make us unfathomably better off by 2050 (and with, no more labour). What does "rich" even mean when anti-aging stops being a choice between "snake oil" and "in mice"?
Why though? More users? Economy is already moving to a free-to-pay model. You earn more catering to rich people than the middle class/poor. Look at hardware nVidia is earning more extracting money from the richest people buying 4090 and 4080 than from rest, and that's dwarfed by their AI offerings.
The way I see it, basically you earn money from whales, rich people and you toss breadcrumbs to the rest.
> More users, more awareness of limitations and side effects and how to treat them.
> Longer working lives for the labour force, less need for expensive pensions and expensive old age care
Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor will be automatized, who's going to rebel? The automatons?
Not if you want to do long term analysis, and rule out confounding variables like the impact of sleeping rough.
Though even if you did, that would still be a demonstration that it won't just be for the rich. Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
> Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor will be automatized, who's going to rebel? The automatons?
It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one, followed by log_2(population)*replication_period, before everyone has them. The former is 33, so even if they take a year starting from bashing rocks with pickaxes, this would still be less than half the current human life expectancy.
A better question is who would want to rebel?
Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.
> It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one
Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation. Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.
We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically. (Not that this means nobody will do them, the Tuskegee study happened, but it was also low-value in addition to being unethical).
> Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation.
It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation, as full automation requires anything that a human can do, and we can already do "build robot".
If machines cannot make robots, people will be paid to make robots, and then it won't be fully automated.
> Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.
Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.
Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last. And it's only "probably" because there's a reasonable chance Earth gets ejected from the solar system over that time scale.
And before you say it PV is also a thing that we can do and thus a thing that must be fully automatable in any economy deserving of the description "fully automated".
But it doesn't need to last that long; if such a thing takes a year to make a copy of itself, then even limited to the surface of the Earth it would be able to make the last doubling, 4 billion units, if the construction had an energy budget of 247.7 GWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%286000km%29%5E2*pi*...
28.276 megawatts on average for a year is considerably more than we use to reach adulthood, even in countries with high per-capita usage. Biologically speaking, it's about 15700 times the energy consumption we need to reach adulthood (and the disparity is even more severe for, say, a dog which reproduces significantly younger than a human), and we get that energy and those materials by eating plants or animals that ate plants, which is also a clearly sufficient source of both materials and energy that this planet can provide without violating entropy or being magic.
Yeah, and there is a gulf between works in mice and works in humans, as anyone reading science journals will tell you. Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real deal.
> It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation.
Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
It's a very theoretical solution to a problem that can be solved in a much messier but available way. E.g. Warp drive vs Nuclear power generation ships.
> Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last.
You mean the sun? Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".
> Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.
Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.
Only if you don't shoot yourself in the foot in the process.
> Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's piecemeal or sudden.
> Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".
The sun is more stable than Earth's orbit and we're using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms ("life") have been running on it for billions of years before we came along.
> Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.
I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my fingers as I type this, because all life meets the criteria of a VN machine.
You don't have to do it all from scratch. First variation can be built by humans, then the rest can be maintained by machines long term. It's like bootstrapping a compiler versus having compiler write/build itself and hardware.
> I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my fingers as I type this, because all life meets the criteria of a VN machine.
You aren't a Von Neumann replicator. Or at least not a useful one. No human can construct hammer, chairs and PCs given sequence of DNA. Unless you have to learn it yourself, which defeats the purpose, or you have to raise a new one from scratch for 18 years.
Previous statement indicated that they are necessary for full automation, implying they are useful when it comes to generating artifacts useful for humans.
> The sun is more stable than Earth's orbit and we're using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms ("life") have been running on it for billions of years before we came along.
Sun is stable? Could have fooled me. How are the solar flares?
No one said to kill off all of humanity. Certainly 'bad' people have died in the long (short) history of humanity without the remainder of the species disappearing.
Life doesn't occur without death. Death is a necessary component. Life _comes from_ death.
Walk into an old growth forest some time.
You said: "It’s extremely important that we [die] — if not just for getting rid of some of humanity’s worst humans"
Their retort is that this is a very blunt instrument. You are advocating killing literally billions of humans (not all at once), just to make sure you get the bad ones. That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
I'm ambivalent on the question of improving healthspan and longevity, but I agree with the other person that this is a bad argument against it.
I think you misinterpreted my comment. I was not advocating for killing. Killing is an unnatural process.
Look at this, from the 1700's:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passarola
I know this is a common trope, but just think about how far it is from the truth. And not just because of business secrets, classified information, privacy rules and so on—think of the signal to noise ratio, the vast quantities of "fake news", propaganda, misconceptions, not to mention how hard it is to find reliable and detailed information about niche stuff. Information is vastly more accessible than ever before, but we still have a very long way to go.
Library Genesis is the only reason this is even kind-of close to true.
As someone who grew up alongside the growth of the Internet (and remembers a time before it), I gotta say it hasn’t lived up to the hype.
Amen. I want to build dyson spheres myself. Gathering the money right now for it. Of course I know it won't happen in my lifetime but you got to start.
There should be no death. For whatever reason, it is incredibly hard to find people thinking the same, despite, paradoxially no one wants to die.
Can we chat? My e-mail is in the profile.
Life well lived is a life thats easier to let go, believing in afterlife or not. Now what does that mean is highly individual but for most its around friends, family and children, mostly children. Most prople with kids have no problem seeing that meaning in mortality, plus there are even more logical and potent arguments (resources, selfishness, not ending up with immortal dictator forever etc but thats for longer)
Same here. I wonder why they don't give even more meaning to their life by killing themselves right now.
Oh wait, it doesn't work that way. Death gives a meaning only when it is in a distant future... or some other excuse like that. But for some people, that future is now, or very soon. They would probably also prefer to have a "meaningful" death later rather than now.
A world without death is also necessarily a world without birth once the whole biosphere has been converted to immortals. I'm not sure living amongst a bunch of old people is something to be envied.
I also don't think that people who think that immortality is enviable have really come to grips with how long forever actually is.
You think no one is ever going to die from accidents or murder or natural disasters?
If we keep reproducing at today's rates, of course not. However, birthrates are in free-fall worldwide due to many factors, with the biggest ones probably being education, women's rights, and access to reliable contraception. As the high birthrate countries improve in these areas, their birthrates fall; we've seen this universally in countries across the world. Of course, there's other factors too, like high costs of living, gender divides in some cultures, etc. The latter ones might be solved eventually, but I truly hope we don't regress on the former ones.
With life-extension research, I think it's highly unlikely someone is going to find the Holy Grail anytime soon that suddenly makes humans biologically immortal. Instead, it'll probably be a slow process of incremental improvements. So while those improvements chip away at the death rate, cultural changes will continue to decrease the birthrate: people will continue to choose to have fewer children, people will wait longer to have children, etc.
But now that you mention it I do think that anyone living in a world without death will be constantly looking over their shoulder and sleeping with one eye open.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...
Also you didn’t address my almost-no-children point. That one I think is the stronger point. Looking at my children grow older day after day is the thing that bring me the most joy and sens of meaning in my life.
This is really important. Being young is cool not just because your body works better but because you still have a lot to discover. Discovery is fun. Experiencing something for the first time is fun. But the problem is that you can only experience something for the first time once. The second time it might still be fun, or the third time, but by the time you do something 100 times or 1000 times or 10,000 times it becomes less fun. This is one of the major differences between doing something as a hobby and doing it as a job. When it's a hobby, when it stops being fun, you can just quit. And sooner or later, everything stops being fun if you do it often enough.
The problem is not that we don't live long enough, the problem is that most people don't have the freedom to do the things they want to do in the time they have. That is a much more tractable problem, and it is the one we should be working on, not extending life spans. If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
We as a species can do both without either slowing down the other — biotech researchers aren't the same skillset as politicians.
> If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
Disagree, that requires a personality which gets bored quickly. Expertise comes from having the passion stay for long enough to get really good — despite the meme this isn't exactly 10k hours, but it's still long enough that you can fail to grow sick of living after properly mastering just fifteen things in a century.
But even if you did, being ageless doesn't take away the opportunity to cease to be. If it's really all that dull, people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.
That may sound like a punch line, but it is actually a serious point: our existence has externalities that need to be taken into account. If you're going to argue for the value of potential experiences that will never be had by old people because they die, then I think you also need to consider the value of potential experiences that will never be had by young people because they are never born since all available resources are being used in perpetuity by the lucky generation that came along just as the longevity technology matured.
Not me, I think there's a hyperbolic discount to unwritten futures¹, and that we should live in the present with a view to the foreseeable future — a future which is, IMO, currently "about 5 years"², because there's too many things changing to see further than that anyway.
Perhaps one day things will calm down, and we can be confident of what our experiences will be a millennium into the future; or perhaps that future, being filled by other humans just like ourselves who are themselves all making predictions of what will come, will be inherently chaotic beyond our own ability to forecast.
And a millennium is what you want for starters if you are to explore the stars, as space dust becomes dangerous well before relativity makes a huge difference.
¹ https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2020/01/08-21.46.38.html
² https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/03/23-17.24.34.html
And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing people.
BTW, it's not just about the actual unborn, it's all the existing people who want the experience of having and raising children who won't be able to. Personally, I am happily childless by choice, but I am given to understand that some people find it a very fulfilling experience.
I can personally experience aging: Every change to my body after the mid 20s sucks. A life of the same length without aging is still an improvement. Unwinding the last 15 years of aging on my body would still be an improvement, even if aging continued normally and lifespan wasn't increased as a side effect.
That, or... I know that'll sound crazy but... not everything has to be an adrenalin rush. Just let go, stop taking your keep-me-alive-forever medication, have a peaceful death during your sleep, contemplating the fact that you'll make room for new humans to have the chance to discover all the things you also had the chance to discover during the last 231 years?
It's also your muscles, which won't be old, and the on-going feeling of a ticking biological clock driving people to say "kids, now, before it is too late".
It's also how much sleep you need, how much energy you have.
It's also your metabolism, your ability to recover from light injuries, to exercise, to excel at sport.
It's also neuro-plasticity.
We don't have good examples to even guess if world-views (or fashion choices) lock in place because of brain age, or because we've seen too much and become bored.
But personality, that we can already change with chemistry; it's not a reason by itself for anything.
> Looking at my children grow older day after day is the thing that bring me the most joy and sens of meaning in my life.
Good for you :)
But for me, I wish I'd had kids already, but I have many other joys until I find someone who can help me with that (most of my friends are deliberately child-free). If I became ageless, it wouldn't be a worry to wait.
Please tell me that's not it.
Edit: not saying we should join forces or that you should work on nanotechnology, but we are clearly value aligned and should connect.
I don't think there is anything wrong in seeking the longest healthiest possible life, but suspect that in many cases that the motivation for it comes more from fear of personal death than the love of what life is. It's great to be an agent in this incredible adventure but my take on it is that when the means (a specific localized self consciousness) become the end ("being me is the most important thing and it should be great forever") then that is where you get stuck in a local maximum and some sort of suffering is bound to follow.
Another aspect is that of how much more time do you think will be enough? 1000 years? 10,000 years? As someone has already stated, you will not be able to avoid death forever and even in the most optimistic case (at least from this myopic view of immortality) you won't win against entropy. No matter how long of a good life you are granted, it will never seem enough because from the subjective point of view it will seem to be over soon at which point personal death will again become very real and very alarming.
It seems the only way out of this is to be able to transcend the personal sense of self and see that your real immortality lies in realizing that in a very real sense you are also something much greater than just a localized version of it.
I'm not some Zen master and am probably afraid of my own personal mortality as much as the next person, but after a long time of thinking deeply about it, this seems to be the most probable conclusion.
People who commit injustices, even today, are often confident enough that they will be in a position to kill themselves before suffering at hands of others.
This means that if you have a life that isn't worth living, you are not at risk of losing anything of value, and so the potential loss is still bounded. Sure, there is the potential that life can change in the future, but whether you have 10, 100 or 1000 years left of potential life, you don't really care much about that if your life is an agonizing living hell.
Don't ask me how I know.
But I really do expect most measures which increase population longevity to increase population QALY's. The conflict between hypothetical immortal tyrants and immortal coup-conspiracies would only be a small part of this; material conditions and overall societal wealth would weigh much heavier on the scale.
There is even speculation that life is from a certain angle only an effect to accelerate entropy under the umbrella of the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (but I do not remember the source).
So from the standpoint of current knowledge of how nature works this seems to look dire.
I also personally disagree. I do not think that the beautiful chaos of life is strictly preferable to the requiem eternam of death. I'll go when I have to, without hesitation and regrets. It's not the things that terrify us, but our opinion of the things.
-- Immunity to prion diseasy by epigenetically silencing the prion gene,
-- Cure (almost) all cancers
-- life long HIV AIDS immunity with 1 vaccination (based on a modified virus)
-- Extend life by a factor 2 (if I'm not mistaking)
-- Make them light up in the dark with a human ear growing on their back (this one is decades old already).
And all of the above is without considering the AGI singularity.
Human immunity is really not that far away. Depending on how AGI will respond to us we will soon either be wiped out or be immortal IMO.
Not fooling yourself is hard, because it goes both ways.
I am not argumenting against curing stuff and prolonging life.
I just think it is not immortality.
I don't think immortality is to have given our current knowledge.
It's like saying: "and then we build the perpetuum mobile. We're just short of it. One or two more breakthroughs".
I like ambition, I just don't think we even have a trace of a path
There will never be a world without death. Not, unless you have a way to reverse the laws of thermodynamics, on a universe scale. Only world where people die later.
Also, keep in mind, your most disliked people will probably remain in power for longer. Next, Putin or Xi will remain in power for centuries.
For a starter, birth rates and death rates should be about the same otherwise it’s not sustainable. If you "solve death", birth rates will need to drop a lot.
Do you want to live in a world with almost no children? Just very old people all over the place. Sounds like a nightmare to me.
You need to let go, accept your mortality and leave some room for new humans to live. At some point you’ll have had your time, death is part of life.
In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted famine due to overpopulation, because he didn't predict the discovery of nitrogen fixation, which allowed scaling food production.
There are likely many technological leaps we've yet to make which will change your definition of sustainable.
Even if we achieve that, at some point there just won’t be enough square meters on earth. But I guess it’s okay to you since we’ll have solved space travel and we’ll just send billions of people to Mars? Then other planetary systems? Then other galaxies?
In any case, as I don’t buy we’ll ever be able to send billions of people to other planets, let alone make them habitable, this is exponential growth with finite ressources. Doesn’t sound sustainable to me.
Alas, I wish you luck captain Ahab.
Not that I agree with the "infinite life destroys all meaning". Just nitpicking.
One, we don't get an eternity. It's thermodynamically impossible.
Two, we're mortal beings with mortal minds. Our trying to comprehend--let alone judge--what an immortal being would consider meaningful is hubris.
Three, how does this scale? Is a child's life more meaningfully if it ends early? Why is our present life and healthspan the sole optimum?
The philosophical argument for a truly-immortal being being indifferent is that they would, over an infinite timeline, experience every possible experience an infinite number of times. In that frame, preference loses meaning. A being that has no preference is indifferent to what happens around or to them. That, one could argue, is an existence without meaning.
That's so splendidly separate from biological immortality as to be a straw man. (The argument also suffers from failing to appreciate that there are many types of infinity.)
Mind you it's no accident that the one meaningful thing most people still have, which is having kids, is precisely given meaning by our own mortality, it's the one transcendent thing that only exists because our lives are finite.
People have always been complaining about this, I think Socrates and Cicero griped about it in their times.
The problem isn’t distance from death but monotony. The philosophised immortal being has monotony forced upon them. Many people today and in the past self-impose it.
A mere challenge to overcome.
That may make all your breaths meaningless. But when I'm meditating, or bicycling up a hill, or face-to-face with my lover, or watching the sunrise on a cold morning, my breath has plenty of meaning to me. Limiting the amount of oxygen I was allowed to use would not lend those more meaning; scarcity is not the same as meaning.
Respectfully: You do. You must. Or if you don't, then life misunderstands itself. For life has adopted this pattern of death in essentially every conceivable domain, every ecological niche. Further, any hypothesised lifeform that has discovered death as unnecessary, they curiously have not arrived here for us to interrogate. The significance of that seems vaguely familiar, but perhaps just Fermi ;)
You don't know me, but I usually air toward speaking humbly about things I suspect I know. Readers are free to decide which perspective is true hubris: my hubris that aligns with all known living systems and their failed aspirations of immortality, or the other hubris that stands alone with cancers and brainless jellies, where death is a failure of all historical life to discover otherwise... that the cleverness of life we laud so much praise on -- the same life which has invented every enchanted bit of protein machinery that runs this whole beautiful mess -- that it has somehow had a blind spot all these millennia, that we humans have seen clear-eyed.
Death is hegemonic for a reason. It's the Chesterton's fence around the whole damn bustling city, that we've never seen what comes from the other side of, if we finally remove it.
Much love here. I don't mean to be dismissive, this is just something I care about deeply and wish to speak firmly on.
Biological immortality exists [1].
More pointedly, life hasn't "adopted" death, it's a consequence of thermodynamics. Where it can escape it, however, it has tried. From a "Selfish Gene" perspective, our genes aim--to the degree they have aims--to be immortal. Our multicellular bodies are simply easier to replace than repair.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality
Life hasn't "adopted" anything. It's like when people say evolution "chose" an advantageous trait, when in reality it's just a consequence of dead stuff not passing on traits and specimens with those traits having more success at living, and neutral traits surviving just by not immediately killing or ahem rooster-blocking.
Old-age death is merely a mechanical limitation of biological processes (and possibly matter in general if you subscribe to the heat death of the universe.) It enabled rapid evolution, which allowed MUCH more complex life to come about after billions of years, but the fact that life retains death is merely a consequence of how it came about. Probably life that never died would only evolve in response to environmental disasters or predation, slowing changes significantly.
Don't take this to mean there aren't problems with humanity's search for extending life well past our natural biology. There are. But all those problems revolve around society needing death to not stagnate to hell due to evolutionary circumstances shaping our mentality, not the universe demanding it for some grand philosophical reason.
If you see death as something the universe "wants", great! I merely see death as a limitation and a mechanical process for exacting change.
To posit another philosophical quandry: if life can reproduce, can it ever really "die" of old age? We're one branch on a massive chain of reproduction stretching over literally billions of years, so are we really a "different" life-form from the first one? One enormous organism, split up into quintillions of different parts. If you have a child, where do you stop and they begin? Where do your parents stop and you begin? They/you literally came in part from their/your own cells!
At five years old I cried because I learned that I was going to die one day.
My concern is more that the world required to keep people immortal is almost certainly one removed of all risk, danger, adventure, and dynamism. I don’t want to live in a world where people hide inside staring at screens, because they’re afraid of physical accidents ending their otherwise immortal lives.
And that’s not mentioning inherently dangerous things like exploring the cosmos.
It would be a very small, sad, scared little world, in my opinion.
Today, a twenty-something dying in a car crash after drinking alcohol is as stupid and preventable as deaths gets. And we known that people drive more safely later in their lives. And yet, we let twenty-somethings get a driving license and drive a car around.
I don’t agree that preventing twenty somethings from dying in drunk crashes is easy or preventable at all. You’d need to redo the entire transportation and city planning infrastructure of almost the entire United States to do that.
Young drunks also ride electric mopeds in European capitals, usually renting them through apps. Sometimes without even a driving license.
So while public transports might be a part of the issue, I doubt they are the root cause.
But that wasn’t my point. My point was that, although it is stupidly dangerous, since they statistically have significantly more accidents than older drivers, young people are still allowed to get a driving license and drive.
Even though they are those that stand the most to lose in terms of life expectancy.
Of course you still might be a counter cultural movement against it, but if the powers running society are all centuries-old people, I don’t think that counter culture will have much institutional support.
I'm unconvinced. Humans' maximum age has barely budged over the millenia. What drove our increasing concern for safety was external to that. We also don't see evidence of increased risk taking as one's risk-adjusted remaining years decline.
Historical examples are not really relevant, as getting older is not equivalent to getting older then dying and living forever.
On average, sure. But look at how the wealthy spend their time today. Rationally, they should be more conservative. In reality, the infinity of experience calls out.
Similarly, having biological immortality doesn't mean your time preference goes to zero [1]. And if that number is positive then value of a statistical life is finite [2]. We're thus shifting our place on a scale, not throwing the scale out. Hence why the examples are relevant: we've shifted on this scale before.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference
[2] https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v...
That isn’t the same thing as immortality.
Biological immortality still means you'll die, somewhow, somewhere. Or at least, I believe enough will believe that to continue to have fun. There will be folks who lock themselves in a room to keep the world away, but we have those today as well.
The most generalised effects of aging will probably be the most problematic (muscle loss and the like), but there are plenty of stories of people in their 90s who are plenty spry until they are brought low by a heart attack, stroke, cancer and so on.
Why “surely”? I don’t see why people would try to stop killing each other if everyone were immortal. There would still be fighting for resources, power, land…
It’s just as likely that an alien civilization is a biological system akin to insects or trees, where the individual existence of one entity is not relevant at all.
Currently, we have more ability to move the needle on lifespan and illness than we've ever had before, and we learn more about it at increasingly accelerated rates. Doing the same 200 years ago (or earlier) was not really feasible. Today, we more or less have a decent grasp of the majority of diseases that end life.
Most people try in their own way to achieve immortality by being nice to others, staying active and healthy and trying to die as late as possible.
I think it is a case of the strategy is fine (wanting immortality), but the logistics are just not there. So as much as it may pain us, focusing on not dying would mean you could spend your life not living in try to achieve said additional life.
I can think of a thousand futures on what I could do in a certain position but odds are that none of these situations will ever come up. So to have a clear mind, don't cling to things that might not happen.
I am glad that many are trying to achieve immortality, I will not stand in the way of them, but I also won't be holding my breath on it happening in my lifetime.
Any source for this claim or are you just projecting your own thoughts on all humans?
And still I'm fine with it today.
Eat your fruit, veggies, nuts and whole grains, but don't over do it on the food! Move it or lose it. Build bridges, don't burn them! I don't say this so you can have smaller pants or live an extra decade, that would be a neat side effect, I say this so that you can live a happy fun life as much as possible.
It's material to the question of researching aging and longevity. A lot of people will come out singing death's praises.
Once humanity gets rid of this prejudice, a venue towards much healthier and longer life is open.
Secession is already baked in just about every government system excepting deliberately unstable ones (favored by autocratic using the threat of chaos when they die as a shield). To governments that functionally makes it a "solved problem".
What is the other factor pushing it up?
StarTrek taught us that you can transfer Kirk and Spock to a different place by re-assembling their atoms in a different place. But is it really the same Spock that pops up there? Or a copy? A copy obviously. Such a copy cam then live on practically forever because they could always re-assemble a younger Spock. But since it is aa copy would Spock really be happy that his copy lives on forever? Yes I believe if he thinks about it rationally. And Spock does.
I am "me" and the definition of "me" is what I am. Somewhat cyclical right?
If you lost all your thoughts and memories, what would be left? You can call that "self" but is it the same "self" as what you thought of yourself as before losing all thoughts and memories?
There are people suffering from schizophrenia who alternate between different "selves". At least to their experience those are totally different "selves" which need not be aware of the other selves at all. So would it mean there are multiple "selfs" within one brain?
I'm talking about the essential process of experiencing whatever comes to pass in my mind and senses. That process would surely continue if my memories disappeared. If all thoughts, memories and senses disappeared, well I can hardly say what would happen. All I can say for certain that my experience is happening right now, and it's not contingent on any particular thought, memory or sense.
At least one can be sure: Death is such a fundemantal part of life that every social norm we take for granted (thus not even noticing it exists) will be uprooted.
Technically that doesn't need to be a bad thing. It just makes it so much more likely that advocats of ending death are overlooking the bad parts.
Plus, I can't think of a scenario where, once this technology exists to extend life indefinetly, the state's monopoly on power won't turn into a dystopian monopoly on life.
And the wealthy’s monopoly on wealth will only consolidate.
It reminds me of two quotes:
“Science progresses one funeral at a time” (paraphrasing Planck’s principle).
“[…] Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. […]”
That’s probably what worries me most, when it comes to extended or unending lives.
Moreover, while longer lifespans may drive calcification, they would also promote long-term thinking. How would we vote about the climate differently if we knew we'd be around for a couple hundred years?
Would we act more in favor of the general long-term good, or would we scramble even more to get ours now in order to secure our own future? I'm not so sure cooperation would win.
It is easy to see why an individual would choose life over death, if one has the means for a comfortable life. A second order question would then be: would the society value your life over their own? Even as we speak, many thousands are dying of preventable causes, including man made starvation. There is no way immortality will be accessible to all, and will only increase inequality.
I'll happily change my mind if we can fix world hunger and homelessness before conquering death.
I would be careful at citing that quote as evidence for how science work, especially when considering the historical uniqueness of the last two centuries or so.
This article said it's more complicated than that and more hopeful.[1]
1. https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2019/11/07/does_sc...
Dystopian as in our status quo? (Also, monopoly on violence is essentially a monopoly on whether your life continues.)
The problem with this line of thinking is that no one is ever going to eliminate death, ever. Even if you completely eliminate aging, people are still going to die at some point, whether it's from war, or natural disasters, or accidents, or murder. Making people ageless isn't going to keep them from dying when a piano falls on them.
So pontificating about humans living until the heat death of the universe is utterly pointless. Statistically, even without aging, humans aren't going to live beyond 1000 years most likely.
The aliens ask you for advice about how to live. Would you recommend that they all commit suicide at age 100, because it will be so good for them and their society?
Always flip the default and ask, will you switch back.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Lifespan
It's absurd to think that one must be arguing for or desiring an infinite span of life just because they detest the shortness of the one we have as humans, and want to find a way around that natural limit. I or others might only want a few hundred or even a couple thousand extra years to enjoy ever more fascinating adventures, without ever seriously considering the idea of literally striving for eternity.
Yes, we have entropy, the current known limits of human biology and the laws of thermodynamics and so forth as superficial arguments against drastic life extension, but none of these at all firmly block the notion of humans developing ways to extend their lives by centuries or longer, even if not something like practical eternity.
Just in the natural world of today, there are animals like the giant tortoise, who live for over 200 years and spend much of that robust, sexually active and healthy, or the Greenland shark, which lives over 400 years and doesn't even reach adolescence until it's about 150.
Our current technology gives us no means of doing the same for our bodies, but the possible limits of technology and physics are nowhere near definitive enough for calling such a thing impossible. That alone and anything leading up to it would be an incredible improvement for so many lives that could be lived to a whole new degree of freedom and marvel for themselves and others.
And before anyone considers the very tiresome argument that multiple centuries of life would get boring, i'd suggest you internalize that yes, there are people who would have no trouble filling them with things that fascinate them to the very last minute of that extended existence.
For example, in many species, the male dies promptly after mating. Evolution has no further use for him, so his life is forfeit. In fact, survival of the progeny may be advanced by getting rid of the old folks.
The reason people live to be grandparents is grandparents turned out to be useful in ensuring the survival of the grandkids. Beyond that, off to the ice floe.
These ideas are not mine. See "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0... for the various strategies around sex and mortality that evolution has produced.
Nothing says, however, that we cannot tinker with our genes to produce what we want.
Thermodynamics makes death mandatory. Evolution set the timer to 100 to 120.
My point is there is a dial. We have to die. But we don't have to die when and in the manner that we do.
> May I suggest taking a look at "The Red Queen"
Ordered. Thank you!
I believe I made that point with: "Nothing says, however, that we cannot tinker with our genes to produce what we want."
> Thank you!
Welcs. It's a fun read, and makes you think differently about life.
First of all, our cosmological models are constantly being updated. There are a ton of unknowns here and we cannot be certain in the heat death outcome.
Second, even if the canonical heat death model is right, the minimum required energy usage to sustain thought / simulation will go down as the CMB redshifts to zero temperature. It is unclear at this time which factor decays faster: available energy or cost per compute. Effective lifetime may be unbounded.
I think this shows that in species where the male does not die promptly after mating, there is good reason to live longer.
> Beyond that, off to the ice floe.
Where does the certainty come that you cannot be useful in ensuring the survival of your great-grandkids, or great-great-grandkids?
After all, if you're arguing from what evolution mandates, the only thing to do is let everyone do whatever, and see where evolution goes next. You really can't think evolution had the current situation as its target all along, and now the only remaining thing is to not disturb it.
That's not the point. Evolution does not have a target. Evolution favors the propagation of genes. Anything that does a better job of that gets expressed into the next generation.
> Where does the certainty come that you cannot be useful in ensuring the survival of your great-grandkids, or great-great-grandkids?
I never said certainty.
The notion of diminishing returns comes to mind. Also, the percentage of great-great-grandkids genes that are yours would be about 8%, so not a lot of contribution.
Of course, evolution of humans was all done before humans invented technology and things like hospitals and bandages and antibiotics, so what yielded the best chances for propagating genes 100,000 years ago might not make too much sense to humans today.
However, now that we understand DNA better, and also what causes various cancers and how to treat them, we should be able to change our DNA to extend lifespans without causing us to die of cancer at young ages.
The competition for food means the older organisms will be better at gathering food, leaving less for the young. Better for the older ones to die off so the young can get the food.
Nature is brutal. Civilization has been able to ameliorate some of the harshness, but it's still there, and we have no assurance that civilization won't kill us off anyway.
Yep. Parenthood. And for humans (and other social species like elephants, other primates, etc.) to be grandparents. Humans have a particularly long juvenile period, which they need care of parents and cannot reproduce.
The reason humans still die, of course, is so that resources aren't wasted on bodies that take more and more energy to keep alive and healthy, which ultimately comes back to entropy.
Life doesn't have a goal, but life that survives and propagates becomes the only life there is.
Life also evolves into local optimums that are dead-ends.
Sentience has helped humans propagate their genes, but mosquitoes are even more successful.
That would surely manifest in a few generations, sans some big civilization collapse. Or artificial uterus, for sure.
Of course I should have said "those who can bear healthy children late in their lives".
A short story against mortality: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
The author clearly hasn't seen my ticket backlog.
If there is no death, there will only be more suffering, as suffering is in human nature. We experience pain, and want to return that pain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WDi4tAqPkM
I disagree. We absorb pain for our community/tribe or our own goals. Ideally, we don’t pass it on.
That resonates with what you said - if we could absorb violence and not pass it on we can contain it. Unfortunately, the western world handles violence with more violence, which is the same as throwing a sick person into the village well.
It kind of reminds me how Fox News selects its presenters. They’d definitely be the ones a sane society would try to punish.
Moments ago, I, too, used to think this way, but then I glanced around at the comments here, and I realize that even if immortal, we'd still have to suffer each other, and that simply just can't go on forever.
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that your current lifespan is "natural" and an immortal lifespan is "unnatural". But what's the difference between being alive in 10,000 years, and being alive currently? A person 10,000 years old may believe themself to be immortal but there's fundamentally no difference between being "currently alive" at 10,000 and being "currently alive" at 40. Either way, it's an experience of the present. So what makes living to 10,000 wrong, if living to 40 is right?
Meanwhile, the mortal while shortlifed and with only one poker chip in the game, play and win/loose with all the passion they have and form a sort of river, that withers the immortals plans and dreams down to zero.
I wish people invented a reliable cryogenesis machine, so that I can go to sleep, come back after a century, live for 5-10years, and go back to sleep. Repeat the cycle.
I don't care about living a long life, it only burdens the body and mind. I want to see fast paced changes happening in front of my eyes. Evolution takes millions of years, technological advances takes century. Being awake for that long only makes you miserable, because of all the shit happening in life. Let's admit that life is for the most part a shitty deal, with some moments of excitement.
Some SF author here wanna pick up on this theme? This has potential, if the cryo is available equally to all comers in society, because I can't imagine how the world would look like — who'd "shape the time they're in" as some-specific-generation when people pop in and out of the progression of time liberally, century-hopping, taking a gander for a few years, then sleep through many more, then respawn once more.
Maybe one can leave specs for when to not thaw (wars, pestilence, famine, recession). No one's around for the bad times! Including whoever'd manage the cryo and thawings.
Paradoxical, someone go write that SF!
Simpsons did it. Er, Vernor Vinge. Highly recommended, like all his works.
I'm pretty sure the concept comes up in other Culture Novels but one of the main characters in Excession is the Sleeper Service, a ship which does precisely this.
I'd advise not startin with Excession but with Player of Games. Read from there. You'll get to Excession on time with plenty of background knowledge of how stuff works.
Reading Excession as book 1 will leave you ultra confused.
Can't relate with this sentiment. Life is what you make of it and a lot of times we overcomplicate it and worry about meaningless things.
Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense. You are a product of your time. So if you end up 10000 years in the future, what is going to happen? It wouldn't be good if you were still you, a 2000 millennium person. So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity. So in effect it's like you died and were reborn multiple times over. "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.
I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and although they are alive, they are not part of the present. They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present, but mostly reminiscing the life they used to have in their childhood and early adulthood.
[0] if you don't just go insane because your memory capacity is reached and you just can't organize new ideas without losing others or causing damage.
[1] that said this might be due to equal demographic waves, but in the case of immortal population, young ones would be less and less large % wise.
Not to say there is not a possible psychological problem for us when living forever, it just cannot be researched right now because, you know, we tend to die. Let alone the implications.. insurance, prison sentences, housing, population and control of it...
So not lack of understanding, more that they see through the hype
Pretty cool if you ask me
A fear so profound that they've reasoned themselves into a corner, that this way we live must be correct and cannot be questioned, because if we start to question whether death is necessary after a 'natural' lifespan, whether research into prolonging life might be possible and might not actually not be a ridiculous endeavour for a few madmen, then that deep dread they cannot speak of may return and consume them.
Beyond that your comment is full of odd assertions - yes, people grow and change, but no, that doesn't imply discontinuity or repeated death.
Your older relatives are living in ageing or aged bodies, including their brains. Their experience of life is not necessarily what we could expect if we were to be able to put off the effects of age indefinitely.
Edit - but I'll take your few centuries over what we have now, as a starting point :)
It's also likely that in the future, this trait will be tunable with technology.
“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
Oh yes! But capitalism extracts labor from wealth gradients, and extraction is more efficient the higher the gradient. Who’d clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the money to pay for food?
> Who’d clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the money to pay for food?
If nobody needs money, then surely everyone has a personal service robot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryten
Or, at least, they clean their own toilets.
This is the sort of thing that sounds very truthy but I don't think that's actually very true. I don't think that this property is particularly unique to capitalism. As long as people have existed society as a system, whatever 'isim' it was labeled with (and even before) has extracted labor from power gradients. It's more simply stated that people tend toward forming more stable and longer lasting social systems (in which more gets done) in the presence of a strong hierarchy.
That’s true, but in capitalism wealth and power can’t be separated. Even in democracies, economic power gives the very rich political power that’s only achievable otherwise trough elections.
> It's more simply stated that people tend toward forming more stable and longer lasting social systems (in which more gets done) in the presence of a strong hierarchy.
Until the system collapses because of its rigidity.
Honestly, if I had the time I'd be able to enjoy doing a lot more "menial" labor than I currently do. Living a simple life is nice, but because everything in modern society is tied to competition and the outcomes determine my standard of living, I am forced to constantly level up just to tread water.
We can certainly do more, don't get me wrong, but I don't think we could change so much for 750 million on a short timescale, even though that's just 10% of the world and we've clearly got the stuff in total.
China is, I think, doing a pretty decent job of getting itself out of poverty, but even they were "only" growing at 10%/year in this process.
Definitions such as food security? We don't have that. Housing for every person? Nope. How about the ability to ensure our health? Nope. Jobs? Nope. Help when you need it for your mental health? As if.
Poverty is still a scourge on humanity.
And if you don't trust NPR, feel free to pick another one of dozens of sources under the google search "food insecurity us"
Agreed on lack of housing, which is largely due to progressive local governments preventing the construction of new housing. Housing is far more plentiful and cheaper in red states.
Agreed on health. Replace the US system wholesale with one of the many more successful models in other countries. Ironically, our existing government run programs are already better in terms of cost and quality than private insurance.
Recent unemployment rates reflect essentially full employment.
So a mixed bag.
Don't count so much on housing being so easy to fix, much of the rest of the world is also having a hard time with that. (Except China, I think?)
Tell that to the millions of families in the US who are food insecure TODAY. And calories alone are not enough.
"the USDA found that nearly 7 million households were so financially squeezed last year that they had to skip meals at times because there wasn't enough food to go around. Almost all of these households said they couldn't afford to eat balanced meals." ~NPR
As for employment, that 4.3% unemployment (per MSNBC on 8/3/24) still represents some 13 million people. I'd hesitate to call that "full employment" by any metric. And it doesn't count the other roughly 20% who are not counted in that statistic who are not working (intentionally or not).
How is this a drastic departure?
Also, some of the earliest research into food insecurity was done in 1798, and the phrasing came out of the aftermath of WWII. So, neither is it new.
https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/20864
Look at the definition of "low food security" - the most extreme food insecurity the USDA measures.
Low food security — These food-insecure households obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake by using a variety of coping strategies, such as eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting food from community food pantries.
"obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake". So none of these people actually didn't have enough food to eat, they just had to change how they got their food.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
You don't have to be 50+ to fit that description =)
This is such a limited perspective. I’m in my 20s and don’t bother with any of that either. The continuity is of one’s conscious experience, not identity.
Now then, if they could solve (and reverse) all the other things that come with aging (honestly of those things death scares me the least), I would reconsider my stance. But even the thought of living for another 100 years at where I am right now sounds like a pretty miserable existence.
One of the tricks that immortality plays to you, is that no matter how much you screw up, you still have an infinite lifespan remaining to fix everything, including the fuckups of an infinite lifespan (uncountable infinities/cantor's diagonal argument).
For example, let's say your eyesight deteriorates every 100 years and there is a cure that will take 2 years of your salary to fix. Add this up until you spend most of your life maintaining your immortal body.
I haven't seen this on here. Can you cite an example?
All of these, practically speaking, need to be solved to extend life in a way that's worth experiencing.
So yeah. I don't want to be a downer, but I'm not seeing what I would call enough movement. And it's slowing down even more (and those chemicals are becoming harder and harder to get sometimes) as pharma and hospitals focus on profit over health.
Even "solved" problems (really, problems which can/could be managed) are becoming issues again thanks to profit seeking. See insulin.
EDIT: So much for not wanting to be a downer.
There's continuity of consciousness which is the only thing that matters. Turn me into a mist, I don't care, as long as I can stay awake.
General anesthesia is the worst thing I've ever experienced.
Nobody wants to live forever in a decaying body. Just let me have my 23 year old body back, just for a few extra centuries. c'mon, universe.
I’d bet those relatives you mention weren’t the most curious or open people when they were younger.
How are you not afraid of death? How is anyone not afraid of death? This baffles me. I mean, I don't spend my days agonizing over the fact that I will die someday, mainly because it has no use. Chronic anxiety won't help me as long as I take the necessary actions. But I'm sure as hell scared shitless of dying overall.
If I were 100 years old and every day was a struggle, sure, I'd want to just get it over with. But I have a really hard time understanding why people won't want to stay 30 years old forever. You, your conscience, the only thing that matters, will cease to exist. If that doesn't strike fear in a person, I don't know what will.
If you do believe in an afterlife or continuation, you'll have spent your life preparing accordingly.
Sure, once I’m dead it won’t bother me, but I’m alive right now and it does.
Alzheimer's. Paralysis. Elder abuse. Bone cancer. Even identity death. I think anyone who is that terrified of death is doing so from an adolescent "bad things only happen to other people" mindset.
"If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs."
At some point I'll get caught up in some whirlpool of energy and find myself crawling out of some uterus again as I have time and time again for all of eternity.
Yippee.
No division.
> Energy has no feelings, no conscience, no self
Where did you get that idea?
> Where did you get that idea?
It is not an idea that one needs to have given to them. It is the simple conclusion of known physics. However, the claim that "energy has consciousness" is a non-obvious idea, which can't be derived from the evidence and mathematics we use to describe the universe. It should be supported if you believe it. It would be an important learning about the universe. That, or you're redefining "energy" as "any system that contains energy," (including a human being, which very few would define as "pure energy").
Is there any meaning to this position you're taking? Does it support predictions about the world? Does it change how you think about the world?
I'm the sea of energy from which all life and death springs from. We all live and die in it.
We know so little what consciousness is at the age of the universe timescale (and possibly the infinite multiverse, which actually guarantees an infinite number of configurations of you), it’s hard to think that death is the obvious end of you-ness.
Good points. But I think another key motivation is the simple, banal Fear Of Missing Out. How dare human life on Planet Earth continue without me?
While (of course) I would like to live forever, it is not death I fear. Rather it is the process of dying that upsets me. I'm currently in a position where my mother and siblings seem to be in a race to the grave. My mum (age: 95) still has her mind, but her body has failed her badly over the past 10 years: every movement is an effort and a pain - she no longer leaves the house, though she absolutely refuses to become bed-bound. My brothers have fought, or are fighting, cancer. My sister had her second heart attack earlier this year; she still smokes - perhaps her understanding of things is better than ours? (FWIW, I have not yet discovered the means of my demise).
If extreme extended life includes endless pain and continual loss ... I don't think I'm as strong as my mother. My hope is one day I just forget to wake up, drift into oblivion dreamless. !Cogito, ergo !sum.
> Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense. You are a product of your time.
I wrote a novel[1] about a once-human entity that was born some 6-7,000 years ago, and now exists as a sort of eternal mind parasite. I had to do a lot of thinking about how such entities would think about life, time, and death. As the story developed it turned out that my main character quite enjoyed experiencing life, didn't much worry about time, but in particular was fascinated by how people die - which, as a mind parasite, he could experience almost-first-hand.
[1] - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/book/spintrap-the-lonely-...
> You are a product of your time.
Sure. If I were born 600 years ago, I wouldn't be a software engineer. Perfect statement.
> So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity.
That doesn't follow. It veers wildly off course by making the assumption that I am a static thing, with a binary identity as "me" or "not me". But! I was actually born several decades ago. I was once a small child with no understanding of how software works. How is it that I'm a software engineer now? Growth, and change. Yet I retain my first-person memories of being that ignorant child. Did I steal those memories from another entity? I find that to be a useless definition of change-over-time, so I'd rather say I'm the same person. I feel like you'd agree I'm the same person, but only because the timescale is fewer than 1000 years, but that's a completely arbitrary cutoff. A person isn't defined by an instant in time, a person exists over time. Therefore there's no reason I would cease to be me in 8000 years even though I was still me in 4000 years, or 400 years, or 40 years. What possible mechanism could account for that total loss of identity after an arbitrary time? It may be in year 10024 I have no memory of the year 2024, but I might have memories of the year 9024, and in the year 9024 I might have memories of the year 8024.
> "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.
Why? How many 300-year-olds have you measured this against? How many 3000-year-olds? It seems you've just drawn a line where you feel like drawing one and started telling people the line was a natural feature of the land.
> I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and although they are alive, they are not part of the present.
Again this doesn't support your arguments at all. Those relatives are old. Their brains and bodies are weaker every year; we can't expect them to keep up. The idea of biological immortality is not that your body would just continuously age, or else yes you would just be a braindead corpse breathing on a slab for millions of years. Immortality means stopping the process of aging. So the challenges of current old people aren't really relevant to the experience of ageless 10,000-year-olds of the future.
Except for the ones on Facebook ranting about politics.
If that's actually how you define "partaking in the present" then I truly pity you. There is far more to life than obsessing over the latest silicon valley bullshit machine.
The world in which we live and die is very far from thermodynamic equilibrium. A reasonable definition of escaping mortality is being able to continue to live as long as the environment continues to support life, which involves it providing suitable energy gradients, which the sun will continue to do for a very, very long time relative to a normal human lifespan. The second law of thermodynamics does not preclude this.
The second law of thermodynamics is also not some quasi-mystical curse of doom, and it's not about "disorder" either, but that's a whole other discussion.
Before life was nasty, brutish and short and now for large population on earth it is still nasty, brutish but long. And I am just not fan of long.
This is not something most people think of their own lives, and as a result would be more interesting than someone saying (in effect) "I think it would be better if other people died off".
In your question, there's even less of a fair shake: your own age has no part in it and the GP would simply look a fool for any answer under 40, due to the context. What's sad is that you think that appearance would be anything but an underhanded jab on your part, the immortality-conversation equivalent of "and yet you live in a society, hmm!"
Say GP was 20. So what? Have you dismantled any of their points about the inherent non-fit between the natural engineering of the human body and a society dominated by adults 40+? The GP at least brought one new idea to the thread, and it's rude of you to try to shuffle them off for immaturity. Maybe you're the type to say "it was just a question!", but its obvious to anyone who would read here that you were trying to subvert actual argumentation with a character attack.
> Say GP was 20. So what?
If the GP is 20 then their personal philosophy that humans should die around 40 may be informed by their feelings that 40 is a long way off and that people around 40 years old are 'other' to themselves and their peer group. Further, their philosophy has not at that point been tested while staring down the barrel, and has the luxury of being somewhat abstract.
And if it has been tested by staring down the barrel, then it becomes more interesting, and we may explore why they feel they don't have anything further to contribute to human society. I'm not pre-judging, I'm seeking to understand. Maybe this person would go willingly to carousel, but as that is entirely alien to me, I wanted to establish if that was the case. And if so I want to know more about it.
So regardless of your own extremely rude response, it is pertinent information required to understand the context of the original post and the thinking behind it.
I still think that you do a disservice to the argument with the way you frame it. Not having stared down the barrel is a euphemism gesturing at naivety, when you could more kindly say that few people past the cutoff that GP gave would agree, and expand on that instead. I appreciate that you appear to mean this rebuttal in good faith, and I apologize for my own retort.
If I were to disagree with one element of the counterargument you gave, it's that people of a certain age cannot 'contribute to society'. We can see that people of almost all ages can contribute to society - least of all by political means, e.g. Thunberg, Biden. But the thrust of GP seems to me more that the original engineering of a human involves balancing shared resources directly and indirectly in different ways across lifespans, and as we stretch that long tail further out, it calls on more and different resources than the initial structures of socioculture were designed for. This isn't just about brain fog or palliative care costs, but also about how younger cohorts cope with the world around them.
Today, teenagers are told that their career peak will be in their 50s - the common response is, why work hard today when so much social momentum intends to hold you back? If our best and brightest live to 300, what will keep disenfranchised youth from decades of despair, given the economic revolutions (in the most fortunate outcome, rather than crises) these radical changes would entail? These are the questions I saw gestured at by the GP argument.
Nobody picks their birth. I can easily imagine ten people sorting toxic garbage their whole (short, brutish) lives to enable the decadence of each member of the future the centenarian ruling class. If we want to avoid such a scenario, we do so by acknowledging and integrating the studied solutions of population ethics, today.
Of course I want to live as long as possible! Because life is awesome! I want more of it!
The fear of death is of course real, but that's not the main reason for wanting to live longer. I want more experience, I want to see what happens in the future! I want to understand more, learn more and be able to do it at a more relaxed pace without the feeling that time will run out!
The modern technological world has a certain approach to the individual Self and its experience of the world - it ought to be focused on almost to the exclusion of anything else. Nothing else ultimately matters, as long as your personal life experience continues - is what this philosophy ultimates boils down to.
Other people, in other places, value different things. Merely existing as long as possible is not their primary goal. And in fact, the lack of such ways to “use” one’s life and death in a meaningful way other than simply existing is one major cause of the modern malaise affecting many developed nations. To live and die for a purpose other than extending your own personal experience is something many people hunger for in current times.
Conversely, in today's world plenty of people would like to lengthen their lives, without that being their primary goal. Just because someone wants to live longer does not mean that it's the only thing they care about; it's even possible that some larger purpose is a major reason they want to live longer.
From a Buddhist perspective, "if you are a practitioner of the Dharma, someone who is putting the teachings into practice, there is great significance to doing long-life practice."
https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Long_life_practice
If you're deaf and live in a Deaf community (i.e. with sign language), you will function normally in virtually every way. If you're deaf and live in a hearing community with hearing aids, you'll be forever impaired. With hearing aids and/or CI you will still be hard of hearing, you will still struggle with group conversations, at the beach or in a swimming pool, in noisy environments and so on.
Secondly, the Deaf community strongly objects to the notion that lack of hearing is a handicap and instead consider it a cultural difference. Somehow, when (we) hearing people think of the deaf we consider it a disability to e.g. have to use a vibrating wakeup alarm, but we don't consider our own inability to fall asleep in a noisy place a disability.
(For reference, deaf=impaired hearing, Deaf=sign language user)
Consider a similar example: if immigrant parents could instantly make their children forget their native languages and learn English fluently, many would choose to do so – as it would give the children more economic/social advantages. And yet I don't think we really want to say that not doing that, and instead retaining the native language and culture, would be a coping mechanism.
Culture and disability is a really complicated thing and deaf culture specifically should not be brushed away as just a coping mechanism.
(Side note: I am deaf in one ear and agree with the commenter above that it's actually a benefit for going to sleep, but of course this isn't considered a benefit by society at large.)
I'm trying to find something to compare to, but not sure if I'm getting this right.
I can't sense radio waves in the 87-110Mhz range, but let's imagine that most people can. This means that they can hear all the FM radios all the time.
Certainly, this would be very annoying, especially if you are not able to block it out. In this sense, I would be better off - one less annoying thing to deal with.
Of course, everyone else would be able to be up to date with all the news instantly, as they would always hear them from the radio. And, assuming you also had the ability to "tune the station" that you can hear, you would be able to listen to music or interesting shows all the time. This would be good and fun.
Would I miss the ability that everyone else has? This is a very interesting question and I don't know the answer.
But, I would think that if someone gave me a wearable FM radio that I could turn on/off at will, I would think that I certainly would accept that.
Again, I'm sorry if this is not a good analogy and as all analogies this doesn't really capture all the nuances of course, but would this be similar at least in theory?
Personally, I do think the sense of hearing is important enough to be worth acquiring. But the underlying point, I think, is that deaf culture is not just a rationalization or coping mechanism. It's a fully-fledged culture. And while gaining the sense of hearing is probably "worth it" and a net gain, you're also losing something in the process.
To use myself as an example (although I'm not completely deaf) – while I wouldn't mind having my deaf ear fixed, being half-deaf has also shaped my personality and sense of self. So I wouldn't want to just label it as an unimportant coping mechanism, as it's much more fundamental than that – even if I ultimately did want to fix it. I imagine deaf people getting cochlear implants feel somewhat similar.
Evaluating it purely as a broken thing that is now fixed doesn't capture that aspect. And it's worth reflecting on how this idea that "useful = always better" is just a default assumption.
The language learning example I used is a good one in this instance: while it's nice that people can communicate more by learning English, it's also a process of destruction as local languages and cultures are eliminated and assimilated into a global English-language culture. The assumption that vocal communication + hearing is superior to sign language is a similar situation.
In this way it is an apt analogy, since many deaf get CI. The implant process removes any residual hearing, so the moment they turn it off everything is completely quiet. It's nowhere near a fully qualified hearing, however, so it's useful as a supplement to sign language, not as a replacement.
I don't know of a good analogy for it, but sign language obviously also carries with it some advantages and disadvantages that vocal communication does not. You need a flashlight to talk in darkness, but you can talk (sign) as much as you want in a library, through a soundprood window or in a noisy environment.
The conversation dynamics are also completely different. Often everyone will sit in a big circle with multiple conversations going on at once, and you can "opt in" to the one you want by watching whoever is speaking.
No, it's not, and this claim just shows your ignorance and prejudice.
> If there was a cure for deafness, nearly all deaf people would take it
This is pure conjecture, and I frankly think you are wrong.
> almost no one intentionally seeks to become deaf
Do you genuinely not understand that this has more to do with culture, language, habits and the familiar, not to mention ignorance of what it means to be deaf/Deaf, than an accurate judgment of the qualities of hearing vs. silence?
[0] https://i.postimg.cc/13tjX46q/before-after-hair-transplant.p...
So what happens is that those who aren't eligible for a solution often tell themselves that a hypothetical solution isn't even desirable at all, as a way to cope. This is where I was making the analogy with people praising death in these threads. My contention is that they're just rationalizing to deal with the fact that death is indeed inevitable, for now.
By "hate" what I really meant was that a subset of those who aren't eligible for a solution will "hate" those who are, because they are a reminder that their situation isn't actually desirable. I really should have wrote "deaf community hating on people with hearing aids or bald people hating on people with hair transplants."
In your case, it seems you acknowledge that an actual cure would be nice, but such a cure doesn't exist right now. I feel similarly towards death. I'm not about to do monthly "young blood transfusions" to gain a year or two of life but I acknowledge that a real cure would be nice.
PS: I absolutely meant no disrespect and understand that it's perfectly possible to live a good life as blind or deaf person.
A group of skilled and motivated people who spend a small percentage of their lives on a ship, is going to be very different from a group that is trapped in a small town for generations.
My estimate would be that the mission to succeed is going to need 10-100x more people on generational ship compared to a transport ship. (million vs tens of thousands.)
However the "not how it works" comment ... well, you could make that pretty much throughout the time that humans have lived. We have been continuously changing the environment around us to suit our needs and wants. Early farmers burned down forests to get fertilized land. We domesticated crops and animals and bred them to grow the way we wanted them. We built things to make life safer, better and easier.
You could say "that's not how it works" about a tractor or wheat with multiple stems from a single seed.
But of course, there will be problems that need to be overcome if we ever do figure out ways of extending life. But again, there always have been problems with new inventions.
I firmly believe that humanity has the ability to overcome problems, develop, learn and improve. And that aligns well with wanting more life!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
This feels similar to the people who advocate for dictatorships because they picture themselves as the dictators, and end up having their faces eaten by leopards. Statistically, you’re overwhelmingly likely to not end up in the elite in this new deathless world.
And yes, of course there will be issues, difficult ones. But life is, was and will always be filled with difficulty, obstacles, struggles and failures. Mine certainly is.
However, I believe in progress and overcoming obstacles and I believe that if we ever manage to extend life, we will figure out ways to make it work.
There is a lot of talk how finding jobs is more difficult these days if you are young and do not have experience. That real-estate is so expensive that nobody is able to afford it.
And I'm sure it's true.
But I also see a lot of young people succeeding and thriving in ways that I could not even have thought of. Therefore, I think there is reason to believe that the next generation will be able to find a way to make it work. As has every generation before.
When I was younger I used to think that situations in the world are now radically different from what the previous generation had to deal with. And on the first level of abstraction, they are! Computers did not exist for the generation before me. So of course it was new.
However, that is just the first level of abstraction. Take the second level of abstraction and you can look back and identify things that are completely new for each new generation. I mean, how different was the concept of going to work in a factory with a loom from the previous generation where machines did not exist at all!
It’s worth remembering that many generations lost a significant percentage of their population to war, death, famine, etc. They didn’t always find a way to make it work without significant death and suffering. Many who died probably wouldn’t say “we made it work” for their own lives.
Rawls’ veil of ignorance is relevant here:
In the original position, you are asked to consider which principles you would select for the basic structure of society, but you must select as if you had no knowledge ahead of time what position you would end up having in that society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
You also overestimate the power of entrenched interests and underestimate the political agency of those who live in a functioning democracy.
You have provided no evidence that the diffusion of technology will be different under an extended lifespan regime. You just make a bald statement.
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to provide evidence of a future speculative event, but as I said, more life is about as strong as an incentive as is possible. There are plenty of examples of powerful technology that didn't become more accessible. Nuclear weapons as a prime example.
Now I don't think longevity tech, if such a thing is even possible (and I'm skeptical) will be as restricted as nuclear weapons. But to think that there won't be massive inequalities in access to it + strong power incentives to not distribute it seems naive to me.
> As of 2022, 2.2 billion people were without access to safely managed drinking water (SDG Target 6.1).
I don't think this invalidates your general point, but your specific example is wrong.
[1] “It was very rare for a pipe to supply water directly to the home of a private citizen, since Romans would have to acquire an official authorization to validate the direct tap. Water mostly serviced the ground floor in buildings, rarely supplying the upper floors due to the difficulty this would provide in the gravity-powered system. Residents of apartment buildings who lived in the upper floors would have to carry water upstairs and store it in their rooms for sanitary uses” from https://engineeringrome.org/the-water-system-of-ancient-rome....
And yes, there is still many parts of the world still in poverty, but that is changing rapidly and doesn’t change the larger point that technology, by and large, democratizes and filters to the poor.
Also, on capitalism, economic growth is also dependent at some level on population growth.
Eternal life would probably require some kind of socialism.
Long-term, sure, maybe we end up with a social mobility problem. But solving that seems less difficult than solving aging. Even if we didn't solve it, I'm not convinced it would be a bad trade.
Imagine we lived in world with an average lifespan of a thousand years but little social mobility. And some prominent person said "hey I know how to fix this, we'll just kill everyone on their 90th birthday." I doubt many people would consider that a viable solution, rather than a ridiculously bad one.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone saying this.
«I'm not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of dying pointlessly.»
(Don't remember the attribution.)
https://www.wecroak.com/
Isn’t that itself a sign of physical decline?
Our struggle against it reveals this deeper disconnection which is evident from the our so many attempts to "enhance" life - to extend it further all the way to infinity. We became so preoccupied with that task that we often fail to fully embrace the current truth: finite life. In this quest to conquer the inevitable, we miss the opportunity to find meaning and peace within the natural flow of our existence.
My personal preference is pro-death. I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus. The fact that it's not under my control also makes me feel calmer - it's out of my hands.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
Our five year old self is already dead.
I don't think I would want a future immortal billionaire with access to accumulated generations of power to enter a new adolescence with the brain reset that comes along with it.
We need young people to be stupid and brash and occasionally fearless and brilliant and unburdened by the lessons (or scars) of the past to keep society moving forward but those can't be the same people in charge of the world. There are roles for both.
I think it's inevitable that such a change would cause big social upheavals. I find it highly ironic that those people who call this out as a negative often also call out how people living longer are change averse.
> I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus.
Can I ask why, genuinely?
The fact that I will likely die sometime in the next 50 years doesn't make the evening out I have planned any better or worse. The band I'm going to see are getting older, but I'm going to see them because they're coming to my town and it'll be enjoyable. My eventual death has no bearing on it at all as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, the only moment in which you have direct control and could actually affect is the current one.
When Pinocchio made his wish, was “agency” all he wanted, or was there something more?
I have recently been envious of a neighbours bushes - they flowered uninterrupted for many months, all spring, summer and autumn. Fantastic sprays of cream and crimson blooms. Both beautiful and long-lasting, I would love to plant those over more temporally limited ones that only flower for a few days per year.
It is not the permanence that is unappealing about fake blooms, nor the brevity that makes flowers beautiful. To me anyway. Silk wallpaper with floral prints that has survived for hundreds of years in old British castles and country homes is no less beautiful for its age.
I’m not sure I see the relevance of your other points. I guess we see things very differently.
A worse problem is that whatever generation is in control when immortality is achieved will rule the world forever. Falling fertility makes this even more likely.
Falling fertility makes us extinct very soon. The idea that the youngest generation, raised by many generations to be dismissive or even outright hostile to fertility will, by some miracle, be the ones who say "no, I will have 2.1 children" is silly. And because it's falling fertility and not just "stable but below replacement fertility", demographic collapse comes quickly. and extinction within 200 years.
If you're worried about immortality, then the good news is we don't even have enough time to figure it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative
They couldn't. They're not exactly wishy-washy, they happen to be one of the most authoritarian regimes on this planet, even if they understand the benefits of a velvet glove. If they couldn't raise it, why would you think anyone else can?
And we're already at sub-replacement. The same people who make the next generation of people (as small as it is), are the ones who also raise that generation and instill their values in them. What does having one child teach that child about their parents' values? It teaches them that, at most, they should have just one. Or maybe even that they should have none at all. Not only is this a self-reinforcing problem, it accelerates. You don't have a few decades to solve this.
Nor will "evolution" fix it as the other guy said. While some still have large families, it's not just the parents' own values that are instilled, but that of our society collectively. The many who have few or no children have far greater influence on the children of those families, than those families have on everyone else.
Population is counter-intuitive, and none of you understand it.
For example, a war would kill lots of young healthy soldiers, leaving even fewer people in to care for the old, young, and infirm.
I’m guessing Ukrainian and Russian dependency ratios are getting worse and worse.
Evolutionary processes will prevent total extinction, even if "the next generation is raised" one way, new trends will emerge.
A population of few thousand is enough for humanity to come back. Even if population dropped 50% every 30 years, it's still 500 years to get down that low. And we haven't even started trending downward yet.
The earth currently has billions more people than are necessary to keep humanity going; there's plenty of slack in the current system. Yes societies will have to evolve if birthrates stay low for a while, but they always have to evolve and if populations ever did drop precipitously low people already know how to make more babies.
Even if you argue that this would go against the interests of the highest class, what could they do? Technology is pretty unstoppable, and individual actors are usually pretty bad at conspiring together unless there's something in it for everyone involved. Not to mention that there's not even a way to define what specific dollar amount moves you from "wealthy commoner" to the "wealthy elite", especially if taking into account different countries.
Odds are we're talking about a suite of many procedures, some of which are intrinsically very expensive and that humanity doesn't have the resources to provide to everyone. But if it's really cheap...
> The providers will surely want to sell it to the maximum number of customers in all countries.
The maximum profit point isn't likely to be just above that really cheap price. People would be willing to give a significant fraction of their wealth for a magic bullet life extension, and most of the world's population has no wealth. Providers' ability to perform price discrimination isn't going to be perfect.
If it's anything like medical procedures that exist today, it sounds like at least in the US it will be impossible to afford without insurance, and therefore employment. "You can live forever, as long as you work forever" is exactly the amount of depressing I'd expect from real life.
Recurring revenue is best revenue. Customer's LTV would be only limited by astronomical circumstances like the Sun turning into a red giant.
https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Time-Joe-Haldeman/dp/038070439...
There was a followup comic book series, which was decent.
That book popped into my mind; it took two tries to find it with Copilot and I was pleasantly reminded of who the author was.
>particularly the ones where he sets out to kill a Heinlein book
Interesting statement, I'm grabbing those books now.
It will be an spectacle: the true test of how useful wealth is against the Universe, compared to other things like knowledge or wisdom.
This is casting categories of people in very rigid and binary terms. Wisdom and knowledge is not more prevalent amongst the non-elite is it? Isn’t it distributed more evenly?
Iain M. Banks probably said it best. "I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame?"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the...
If by forever, you mean until they actually disappear from something they have failed to foresee or couldn’t avoid, then, yes maybe.
Nothing is forever. Prolongating human life would probably barely make a dent in the grand scheme of things.
“Semantics” is simply “meaning”. If something has a different meaning, the equation no longer solves the same way.
If you feel defensive and want ways to put someone down, you can replace “semantics” with “sophism” or something like that.
> I'd rather live a few centuries than tell myself that.
But you can’t, can you? So might as well look into what life, death, and immortality might really be, beyond the naive and wrong intuitions we have picked up from fiction books about vampires.
Unless you believe in life after death (which I would not blame you for as many do, among scientists included), there is no span of time available to you in which you are not alive.
Perhaps this a personal view but I had conversations with elder people and most will tell you the same, a very long life (even a healthy one) is quite boring and depressing, you start to see the same patterns again and again, everything and everyone you loved dissappear and the essence of humanity doesn’t change. Same play, different actors and costumes.
> everything and everyone you loved disappear
Perhaps with immortality, there would be less of this?
Maybe I am just too young to understand the wisdom of the old people. I am almost 50, so in the optimistic case I might get the same amount of time again. That is definitely not enough to see all the things I want to see, try all the things I want to try, learn all the things I want to learn.
I imagine that when your health becomes shit, life sucks and you get tired of it. Good immortality should come with perfect (or at least average, from out current perspective) health. That includes mental health.
But if someone believes that he already understands everything and it's all just the same patterns over and over again... dude, where are all your Nobel prices? Maybe your life is boring because you don't try new things.
It isn’t obvious to me that that is given. An alternative would be that the breadth of parallel ideas would expand, more competition. There could then also be more depth because individuals behind groundbreaking ideas can build on their cognitive foundations for longer.
One major change, which it thibk would be a positive is that we will be directed to thibk more long term. With extreme life extension, the cosmos also becomes smaller because we could travel and explore space and time more extensively.
Because its the end of any worry, doubt, suffering, fear, uncertainty. Because its over. And youll be dead, so you wont be able to feel what youre missing out on.
The finality of death is a beautiful and comforting eventuality in my opinion.
Personally, I don’t want to die. There’s so much to do, see, and experience. One lifetime isn’t even close to enough, and that only got worse since I had children.
"There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in flux."