By living longer you are merely stealing resources from those that follow you.
You can have immortality or reproduction - choose.
You can have immortality or reproduction - choose.
Not to mention the theft framework is nonsensical - while it is a good thing to have sustainable systems and resources how can one steal from that which does not exist and may not ever even?
Under that framework I could accuse anyone of wrongfully occupying the space of an entity which may only exist at the end of time after all intelligent life is dead - which is more absurd than the invisible pink unicorn arguements.
Under your philosophy wouldn’t reproducing steal even more resources? If you have three children then you’re stealing them 3X faster.
You would be forever chasing the dopamine hit of understanding more of the fields that interest you. Or you could just shoot heroin. Without mortality or problems to confront, all meaning would be lost. Math, heroin, sex, all the same. Consider the dissolution of meaning, and the fact that infinity is a very very long time.
And if you get bored after 500 years, you can always opt out. I'd like to have the choice to see if I do like it.
No, that is not the reason for my comment.
It seems clear to me, both by life experience and reading related research that humans require meaning to have lives worth living. This might be a hard pill to swallow, but I suspect that it is ultimately our mortality that gives our lives meaning. If there is nothing to strive for, then there is only pleasure seeking. Your life becomes an infinitely long hedonistic binge. Human beings were not designed to withstand hedonistic binges for too long without dark consequences (as in, dissolution of meaning, extreme depression, etc).
I guess you could argue that with infinite time, you could figure out how to redesign yourself until you are comfortable with immortality. But are you still yourself by then? Or is this problem also already solved by... just dying?
Few people are trying to make the case for shortening life in the interest of having more children, so is there anything special about the current balance to suggest we should not continue to push it further away from this?
If ageing becomes something we can turn off, and we become biologically immortal, then I think the main unfortunate consequence is that the remaining causes of death become more dominant and are unnatural and unpredictable: accident; poverty; war; disease.
There's plenty of room on the planet for more people, but not if everyone wants to live like a suburban American with 2 big SUVs and a McMansion with a huge lawn. If everyone lived like in Tokyo, we wouldn't be so worried about overpopulation. Better technology will also help us create more food without having to take up more land for it. Finally, technology will allow us to push into space and use that for both resource extraction, manufacturing, farming, and living, giving us space only limited by the amount of building material we can gather there.
Reproduction, thanks! Wouldn't mind spending the last 10 years in good health though.
Not for a long, long while in any case.
Have you carefully examined the logical outcome of such a line of thinking? Carousel, anyone? Is your life clock blinking?