Death is terrible, and should be eradicated, but Alzheimer's is a few steps above that. There's nothing worse than seeing a loved one be slowly destroyed by that horrific disease, and I'm so glad there are people willing to work on it.
We are sensitive to death but it is the only mechanism I know that would control overconsumption of natural resources. If nobody dies, then we would deplete the resources in a few decades.
Imho it'd only work the other way around: For us to beat death, we first have to solve our sustainability/resource problems. What point is there to "endlessly living" if the reality of that boils down to being stuck in overcrowded and miserable living conditions? That sounds more like hell than utopia.
In combination, those should dramatically increase the carrying capacity of the world.
Ignoring all of that, though... Don't you think it's likely that people will start caring more about the future onceb they know they'll live to see it?
I don't think we'll see anything like increased exponential progress of the kind that has been (and has already slowed down) during the industrial age. All low hanging fruit have been gathered, and at this point there are diminishing returns.
We will have a few breakthroughs here and there but nothing to write home about the way the steam engine, electricity or the computer have been.
>Ignoring all of that, though... Don't you think it's likely that people will start caring more about the future once they know they'll live to see it?
Most people are terrible managing their own lives a few years ahead, much less decades ahead. So no reason to think they'll be any more apt when its something so vague as centuries ahead.
This conversation is going in circles. Has anyone brought up “death gives life meaning”?
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...
A platitude uttered by people who believe they have no way out, and are desperate to make themselves feel better about that. Not necessarily a bad thing, so long as there really is no way out, but catastrophic once that changes.
Destroying death will lose us something, most certainly; there are any number of great works of art and philosophy that would never have been created without the pressures and emotions it creates. But none of that, I think, can even remotely make up for the sheer awfulness of the downside.
There has to be a better solution than this creeping horror.
An AI was "let loose" with a variation of Asimovs laws of robotics, and interpreted the requirement not to let anyone come to harm through inaction as requiring it to literally end death.
The main character is a woman that feels it left her life without meaning, and who in response started gruesome competitions involving designing the most outrageous ways to die. Or rather, getting as close to the moment of death as Prime Intellect will let them before reviving them.
Imho it's way more desperate trying to find "a way out of death" by defining it as something that could be "destroyed" (how to destroy the unexisting?), instead of simply accepting that literally nothing lasts forever, most certainly not rather fragile biological life. There's nothing "creepy horrific" about it unless you make it so.
Our biological lifespans are in large parts responsible for forming our subjective views of the universe, making us ask for a purpose of that limited existence. If we'd ever reach a state where that doesn't matter anymore, then we've most likely left our biological shells behind and reached a level of consciousness which we couldn't even imagine right now.
I'm not sure if such a state would even still be perceived by us as "being alive" and not rather as simply "existing".
I changed only one parameter, while your assumption changes a whole lot of them in a very optimistic way. Which model do you think is more realistic?
> Don't you think it's likely that people will start caring more about the future onceb they know they'll live to see it?
Eh, imho people are too diverse for anything universal like that. Might as well pose the question if life actually still has meaning without death? If there's no end, how do we define the beginning and the different phases that used to be in-between?
Those kinds of questions would probably be way more relevant than "Let's all apply some foresight, now that we don't actually need it anymore due to being immortal!".
Also prices. New kinds of mining are invented to circumvent cost restrictions. Otherwise, certain kinds of metals and gasses would stay forever buried as unusable junk.
Also note that fish that are significantly easier to eat (not a lot of bones, easy to farm, etc.) are more utilized. "Trash fish" are usually just full of bones or too much work to prepare to eat in a tasty way.
The idea of those wanting that is to perpetuate themselves (and their current generation) in eternity, screw successors.
Nonetheless, physical bodies of any kind cannot seem to exist as they are for eternity. Even diamonds decay. Abstractions change as well-- ideas thought to be immortalized actually do change, actually do die. And they can be immortalized in time, in the past-- but towards the future, there has never been a concrete conception of such immortality, only in the frozen sense.
The worst solution we can come up with is to literally kill everyone. We can find a better way.
I strongly disagree with this statement. We learn through death, and yet we don't know what death is. We do not know the fundamentals of death, yet it occurs on all abstractions.
I think of this poetically, because I don't understand death. But all things being relative, life does not make sense without death.
Edit: On this topic I would also like to point out the eagerness of the immortal mindset. We are living 30 years+ in comparison to our ancestors, but it seems we approach an asymptote. With alzheimers and other neuro-degenerative diseases, we lose our mental faculties. We lose memories, emotions, we lose everything. Yes this is the topic at hand, but does that not indicate something fundamental as well? We have a reached a point where living implies the dissolution of what we used to be, of what we spent so long striving towards the future to do. And at that point of degeneration, we no longer exist in that sense. We can no longer orient ourselves towards the future, and decay while living.
If there is something after death-- if whatever composes our consciousness is actually tangible, autonomous, and not an emergent result of our brains (similarly, if emergence itself is autonomous), then after the alzheimers individual dies in body, he/she will not exist in consciousness either. After this point, his/her consciousness will have dissolved.
And these are rather philosophical points, but this is how I see things. Science and philosophy, science and spirituality even, do coexist in my subjective experience.
Is death really that terrible? There's plenty of things I'd like to try before I die, and I hope to live until I'm much older, but on the other hand becoming immortal doesn't seem like paradise to me. If I were to suggest what we'd be better off eradicating I'd suggest fear of death over death itself. I'd rather live 100 years free from fear of dying than 1000 years in constant fear of dying.