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Comment by squibbles | Hacker News Reader

Mortality is inevitable and necessary. I posit that the purpose of technology should be to reduce suffering. The purpose of technology should not be the redistribution of wealth from the masses to those who are adept at manipulating the systems employed by civilization.

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"At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no."

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...

Though it may be depressing to contemplate, death is an essential element of a fitness function, a requirement for evolution in the broadest sense. No death would lead to either depletion of resources or a stagnation of growth that would inevitably lead to extinction due to inevitable and unanticipated catastrophe.

That said, a reduction of suffering may naturally lead to extended lifespans. However, the elimination of mortality is something altogether different.

You don't need to wait around for natural selection to make changes (we don't do that for medicine).

We have an entire universe to grow and expand into, along with the capability for long-term thinking. These problems are solvable problems and a critical part of reducing suffering.

This sounds to me like someone looking at premodern child mortality and saying "well, you know, families would have too many children if a quarter of them didn't die as babies". I have no doubt that a society where people don't die would require other major changes to compensate - but it's hard to imagine those changes could be so tragic that death is preferable!

One probably doesnt want immortality but permanent middle-age.

Why? Why not expand and build fucking O'Neill cylinders, Ark/Generation ships of hollowed out asteroids, Ring worlds, Dyson spheres, whatever, until the end of the universe? Then we can die, transcend, whatever!

With a partial tongue-in-cheek, I will defer to Max Planck, who said:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth." [0]

One can see Planck's Principle throughout human civilization, in practically every human endeavor. This is how we evolve as a species. Not just biologically, but culturally.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Imagine if we have an immortal evil dictator(s)

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