A man who is ageing too fast | Hacker News Reader

A man who is ageing too fast

mosaicscience.com

125 pointsimartin2k31 comments

Summary of pro death arguments, one of which I've seen in this thread (immortal tyrants.)

  Fairness
      Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.)
      Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
  Bad for society
      Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
      Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent)
      Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
            Stop having kids
            Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
      Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
      Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.) 
      Old people suck.  (death is an inferior cure to robustness.)
  Bad for individual
      You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
      You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
      You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
      Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
      People will force you to live forever (They already try to do that.)

Do you think less people make progress faster? What's your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years?

More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.

Man up, save your family, save yourself.

P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.

Often wondered why deathism is so popular and I have come to conclusion it is a protective mechanism against disappointment. People really don’t want to age, but they don’t think anything can be done so they come up with all sorts of reasons it is good.

> Often wondered why deathism is so popular and I have come to conclusion it is a protective mechanism against disappointment. People really don’t want to age, but they don’t think anything can be done so they come up with all sorts of reasons it is good.

One reason—not one I necessarily endorse, but a possibility—might be a conviction that people really aren't very good, deep down. Perhaps its cousin conviction that I'm not really all that good deep down.

Put another way, it may be rooted not in a protective mechanism about disappointment as much as a persuasion about human nature.

Not popular as much as natural.

Without deathism, race could go extinct during famine. Opposite, during nice times, longer life has evolutionary benefit via mentoring, safety etc.

I'm sorry to be negative, but your argument seems to boil down to "because I say so". Max Planck (quoted above [1]) suggested death is necessary for the progress of science. Your counterargument seems to be... that I should kill myself?

On a slightly unrelated note: making a blanket list of arguments you disagree with and then dismissing them all rarely leads (in my opinion) to a productive discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19975834

> Max Planck (quoted above [1]) suggested death is necessary for the progress of science.

Appeal to authority at best. Rather than "I said so", you're pulling a "he said so" - not much better.

Human Progress isnt defined by evolution anymore but by our Technology and Knowledge. There is no reason in an evolutionary sense to die anymore.

But i think The biggest benefit would be the ability for a society to pursue long term projects because you will actually see the benefits even if it takes a 100 years.

Many people, including myself, choose to exist rather than not exist. It's very simple.

Of course, you need to take into account that the more people do this, the probability of natural accidents are higher given that this would basically stop evolution/adaptation. So you will have to engineer a lot of other things to compensate.

> Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident.

So the problem is reduced to having a good body shield and few extra planets.

I really like the random blocks forming around the highlights effect.

I came here to say the same thing. Not overused, but unique and a cute take on "mosaic" branding.

This is unbelievably sad. What a tragic existence.

  Beneath, his skin is raw, revealing red ulcers caused by his disease. “Itai,” he says. It hurts. Then he smiles. “Gambatte,” he says – I will endure.

I hope I live to see the day when we humans can die on our own terms rather than it being forced upon us.

It would be cool, but I fear some world leaders (be it politics, economy, science, etc.) would never want to die, stagnating the status quo for centuries until they die from accidents.

Agelessness might cause some social problems, but if the choice is between "everyone dying" and "needing societal innovation to avoid stagnation", it's hardly a choice at all.

In an alternate Earth where humans never aged to begin with and society started stagnating (or worse) because of it, I doubt that the world's top minds would come up with 'kill literally everyone at X years of age' as their first option (or second, or third...). That would be comic book supervillainy.

These kinds of concerns aren't invalid, I just hope they are considered with a wide enough perspective. In terms of direct and indirect suffering, it's hard to do worse than aging.

> "Agelessness might cause some social problems, but if the choice is between "everyone dying" and "needing societal innovation to avoid stagnation", it's hardly a choice at all."

Needing societal innovation does not mean you're going to get societal innovation, though.

Also, a cure for aging does not mean that nobody will die from old age. It means that the people who can afford the treatment won't die of old age. The poor will continue to die.

Both of those things are potential issues, yes. And they should be kept in mind so the future can be less bad.

But they are not unsolvable problems, nor do they imply that aging is better than agelessness. They just imply we have to work harder, because again, the alternative is the death of everyone.

The fact that autocrats eventually die of old age is one of the main things discouraging people from bloody revolution—because it’s a lot cheaper (in lives lost, for one) to just wait and let nature take its course.

Without death by aging, this moderating influence wouldn’t be there, so we’d see far more assassination attempts and coup staging.

"Humans should only die on their own terms... except for the most influential people, who shouldn't live longer than I say they should." Hmm.

"Dictator for life" is definitely less of an issue than "Dictator for eternity".

You misinterpret my words. I meant if everyone was ageless it would be good, but influential people would get more influential the same as wealth tends to accumulate.

Scientists living forever seems like something that could accelerate progress.

"Science progresses one funeral at a time" -Max Planck

This was the quote I had in mind but couldn't quite recall.

Why do you think any other people would want to die? I would expect wanting to die to be be as anomalous as it is now unless the life extension therapy doesn't work well.

Also "stagnating the status quo for centuries " sounds bad because you expect to live decades. If you say it as "stagnating the status quo for time comparable to half of the human lifetime" you'll see it's not any worse than what we have now.

"Kill literally everyone" seems like a poor way to deal with that (or any) problem.

yeah... "accidents" ;)

My desire to make it so for myself. No I am not a psycho, I am an educated and balanced individual. It pains me to see how people do not realize that sometimes it is worthwhile to die peacefully than living in utter pain. Worse, it drags down immediate family, society and govt money. All for trying to reduce the torture they are going through. Sometimes there are individuals who have no knowledge of torture they are going through - they cannot eat, cannot sleep, always in pain, do not have money, and yet do not know what to do.

I am going to live and die on my own terms, unless it is a sudden unnatural death (ex. Accident).

This is a motive of the book/serie Altered Carbon. Highly educational material regarding possible scenarios.

I don't mind it being forced on us but I think we all wish the circumstances weren't so often, so cruel.

I hope the time is soon that we have some way of detecting and, hopefully, fixing generic abberations like this in embryos (or even among those diagnosed when they are older), anyone having to endure this is truly heartbreaking.

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