You're right, of course. However, I am extremely selfish, and while I agree with you, I can't help but think "yes, but not me."
Society might need death, but I still want to live forever.
Society might need death, but I still want to live forever.
I also think death is treated too seriously by people believing they're just a bunch of atoms but still thinking of themselves as an entity meaningfully separate from the rest of the world.
I easily figure in the next 100 years we will accept cloning as a replacement for death. Simply duplicate the body, and transfer the brain, maybe throw in some extra gray matter to replenish what is lost through aging. Of course "throw in some extra gray matter" sells the complexity a bit short, but we are definitely on track to accomplish it.
I anticipate never having a 130 year old body. I would just replace mine with a genetically enhanced one at 60, and start over from ~15 (or honestly whatever the earliest age to insert a brain is). Almost anyone should be able to raise the money in ~30 years to pay to have another clone grown.
And from there you can iterate a few generations on first generation tech until we can manipulate the living brain into being able to learn like you are five again, hopefully without the negative side effects present in current brains of that capacity.
Not sure that we would be able to implement such a rationale solution, but at least it was pretty logical. The novel is essentially about the other grim decisions you have to take to have a constant population.
[0] This was in a book with multiple short stories from Paolo Bacigalupi. I believe this is Pump Six and Other Stories. Most of the novel are rather pessimistic, but at the same times sounds plausible enough to happen. I also recommend The Wind Up Girl from the same author.
If you have to raise your clone by yourself as another human being, who's to say which one of you deserves to keep living?
It all sounds so very nice in theory, but the reality might be that only the very rich and the elite will be able to afford to undergo such procedures, mainly because of the secrecy needed to essentially grow sacrificial human beings to maturity.
But don't worry. There are lots of other ethical concerns to focus on after you get rid of the conscious clone problem.
Arguably, if you're at that level of sophisticated biological manipulation, you're probably better-off simply growing the organs/replacement-parts/cells by themselves.
Read the Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton
Cloning isn't the same thing as "Simply duplicat[ing] the body."
Cloning creates an embryo which turns into a human infant. Then you have to wait 18 years for it to mature before you can transfer the brain.
There's an insurmountable moral barrier to raising a fully conscious child to adulthood and then killing it so you can have its body.
Some commenters down-thread have suggested removing the infant's brain and raising it, without consciousness, in a vat of some sort.
Aside from the obvious difficulty and huge expense of maintaining a fantastical life-supporting "vat" for 18 years, it just simply wouldn't work.
Human beings require social interaction, and consciousness, to survive. An infant deprived of social interaction and environmental stimulation, and the consciousness to experience it obviously, would die. Animals also require physical interaction; our bones and muscles and senses can't develop properly in a vat, so you'd end up with, at best, a pathetic excuse for a body, totally unable to function in any way you'd enjoy, if your clone survived at all (which it wouldn't).
In short, this idea is both morally appalling and biologically ridiculous.
There are also ways to maintain muscles without normal exercise. Direct electro-stimulation is an easy approach.
There is no physical reason you couldn't grow a body without a brain. It's an engineering challenge.
I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about whether a human infant missing most of its brain and deprived of all social interaction, environmental stimulation, and physical activity would thrive and mature normally. It would not.
(Also, just for the record, there are things which aren't possible to do, no matter how many awesome engineers you have.)
>(Also, just for the record, there are things which aren't possible to do, no matter how many awesome engineers you have.)
Yes, like break the laws of physics. Nothing proposed here does that.
This occurs in cell populations - the programmed self-death of cells (apoptosis) becomes corrupted and the individual cell acts selfishly (relative to the organism) and stays alive.
We have a word for this phenomenon and that word is "cancer".
Suspension of apoptosis is necessary, but not sufficient, for cancer. We have plenty of non-cancerous cells that rarely or never undergo apoptosis such as neurons or stem.
The implication that immortality = cancer does not follow.
Indeed, cellular immortality may be cancer when it gets against apoptosis and it's just a natural thing when not. Cancer as well comprises a wider range of anomalous cellular developments that most often does not turn off the apoptosis. The metaphor however was about selfishness, on individual organism and cell level.
I've never understood people who say they'd like to live forever. It just doesn't make any sense to me. The oddest thing is to listen to someone who talks about how it is - not probably or hopefully - going to happen in their lifetime. I once had an acquaintance who spoke of it so seriously that it was religious; he honestly believed (possibly still does) that he will not die.
You have the ones who are so absolutely terrified of death that they desperately grip onto the concept of immortality; a science fiction replacement for an afterlife or reincarnation they do not believe in. (Tangent: Why do so many people reject the idea of open casket funerals. Death is just too horrible to even observe, let alone having to reconcile that it will one day happen to them? "Think of the children" is a common argument, which is bullshit; perhaps such a large number of adults are so fearful exactly because they were never exposed to it.)
You have people who use the idea as a fantasy that someday they will do all the things they want to do, but don't have the time, money, or motivation to do today. This category is depressing, because I don't understand how someone can believe that an extended future would magically fix whatever is holding them back right now.
Then there are those who treat our species like a special little snowflake in the universe. That somehow being sentient with a consciousness is intrinsically deserving of cheating death - self-righteousness at the species level. That science can solve any problem, and not only will it be possible, but that it unequivocally should be done. "I think, therefore I am, and should forever be".
tldr; Death is, at least presently, inevitable. Get over it.
And yeah, I dream of the day I could do more far reaching stuff than what I do to pay the rent.
I see 2 pragmatic reasons for aging: enabling faster biological evolution, and escaping the lower performance/plasticity of older brain. We are at the brink of usefully being able to engineer human DNA and germ line. Once we get there (possibly not in my lifetime) - to the extent brain plasticity/performance can be kept up (and improved) - I see little reason for death through aging.
Anyone who is sufficiently math literate should know that they're very unlikely to live forever. If there's some finite chance you're going to die each year, as you consider longer theoretical lifespans, the probability you'll die gets so close to 1, it's basically a certainty. Anyone who is sufficiently science literate should know that thermodynamics and the heat death of the universe precludes anyone living forever.
All that said, if you offered me a life-span boost to 250, 1000, or a million years, I'd take it!
I think even if we engineer away death, you will still have the psychological structure from the "formative years" -- adolescence to early adulthood-- that sort of fundamentally make you personality-wise.
The songs and movies that gave you emotional experiences, the events that happened, etc. For me and my cohort it would be groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Beck, and movies like Reality Bites and Pulp Fiction. These were the things that spoke to us as we were becoming adults.
It's not that those groups or movies mean much to me nowadays, but I feel that, socially, I am a peer with someone who lived through those years at the same age I did. It's not simply that we share the same cultural references, nor is it just that we happen to be the same age. I think rather that we were formed by the same events at that age and time.
If I live to be 230, I might feel somewhat disconnected from a 200-year-old, even as the age difference becomes relatively smaller and smaller, because that offset of 30 years made for a completely different formative experience. I'd still want to be friends with people who _get_ me.
My grandpa lived into his 90s. It got to the point where the children of his peers were dying. His main thing to do was read the obits and note how he knew that person. He had lots of family and friends, but no one could relate to his stories of old sports games, WWII, etc. etc. He was in good health and will mentally alert, but after my grandma died, it was just a matter of time. He died of a blood infection, no illness or anything.
So even if we can undo aging and death, we still might need to address the developmental process-- tweak it in some direction. Either have eternal formation, or re-formations-- something.
It isn't a great leap to think that if we learn to alter our bodies at the nano/genetic level that we can handle our own evolution.
If we get to a point where large portions of our population are no longer oppressed or in poverty, where horrendous wars are largely a thing of the past, and we are already managing our population and environment in a healthy way -- then I'll be in your camp but right now we're doing exactly none of those things so, uh, no way getting rid of death is a good idea IMO.
What's your evidence that more attrition will create a greater society? If anything, greater longevity of people would allow for the accrual of more knowledge and wisdom. Living longer gives you a better long-term perspective. Give people a direct reason to care about what the environment will be like 150 years from now and maybe they'll care more about the CO2 they're putting out.
but right now
None of this is right now. We're right at the infancy of genetic manipulation. Even with the accelerating rate of technology growth, we won't understand our biology at a genetic level enough to be able to manipulate it in an everyday way for at least 50 to 150 years.