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I agree that the presented view does little to calm me. Yet, while I am an extreme proponent of life extension, death will still come to all.

At the tail end there is only so much energy available and I am pessimistic that basic physics, like heat death of the universe, can be overcome.

However, we don’t even need to reach this tail end. Extreme events happen all the time and on a long enough time scale they become certainty. Maybe we can conquer aging but we are still physical bodies, which will forever be fragile (on the cosmic scale of supernovae and formation of compact objects, but really even on the scale of planetary calamities like sufficiently energetic asteroids or super volcanoes).

Heck, even if we spread everywhere in space, without ftl travel, which I am somewhat comfortable will never happen, we are stuck with the destiny of Milky Way, and that’s a very finite destiny.

me: "ug, I think I got the group permissions right but not sure why that user still can't read it. So irritating. I'll sort it out but, ug, maybe it's not so bad to procrastinate a bit on hackernews. "

hackernews: "here's some more reasons to fear death"

me: man chgrp

Bounce the login session first or test after "bash --login"

The thought that some day I will cease to exist used to terrify me. It still does, but it has lost some of its sharpness since I decided to work against my fear of dying.

The fear of death was seriously bothering me and I thought: " You can either try to achieve immortality or try to loose your fear of death within your lifetime."

The second one is a solvable problem, the first one, for me personally, not. It gives a strange comfort that one day I might be free of the fear of death even if I know that still I will die.

Thanks for this. I know there are benefits of living with awareness of death (like practicing your values more), but I cannot reap them as long as I avoid thinking about death.

> Fix death please, that's a good way to prevent the fear.

Even if you were able to postpone your non-existence to some late stage of the Universe, it's all but assured you will have to end eventually in light of postulated Cosmological denouements. In other words, you will not exist forever due to physics.

That being said it would be nice to know it's possible to get at least a few hundred years of healthy and happy living in. Yet, would the fear of the end grow even greater then?

If you redefine "you" and "exist" I'm not so sure. What if "I" am just my conscious being, and what if I "exist" across many systems that have a ~0% chance of failing catastrophically.

Anyway, this is going all scifi and silly. My point is really that death sucks, trying to say "oh but you can't fear death because it's not a thing" doesn't seem helpful, and we can probably do massively better than a ~125 year max lifespan.

> But more importantly I don't fear things that have happened, I fear things that are impending - a pretty key distinction here, which I feel fundamentally breaks the symmetry (ie: time is not symmetrical).

Why is time not symmetrical? I don’t mean from your subjective point of view but in terms of objective physical reality. The answer is: entropy increases over time. Which is the same reason that death is inevitable. Perhaps one day people will live for ten thousand years and perhaps that would be nice, but death will still find us all eventually.

A lot of comments are talking about the inevitability of death due to physical laws as a certainty.

1. I think there's a big difference between 100 years and quadrillions of years.

2. I think that in quadrillions of years our interpretation of life and the value we derive from it, and our knowledge of the physical universe, may shift enough that "death" is not actually inevitable.

3. I'm no physicist but it seems a bit extreme to believe that we can predict quadrillions of years into the future based on an extremely limited view of the existing world and past. Is heat death inevitable? I don't know.

> I think there's a big difference between 100 years and quadrillions of years.

Maybe so. Or maybe this is a defense mechanism borne from denial and the urge to put off the inevitable. You’re talking about outliving the stars themselves when we can barely get piles of rocks to survive a few millennia.

> I think that in quadrillions of years our interpretation of life and the value we derive from it, and our knowledge of the physical universe, may shift enough that "death" is not actually inevitable.

But it was already thousands of years ago that our interpretation of life and the value we derive from it reached the understanding that death was not to be feared in the first place.

>Or maybe this is a defense mechanism borne from denial and the urge to put off the inevitable.

Sure, could be.

> You’re talking about outliving the stars themselves when we can barely get piles of rocks to survive a few millennia.

Maybe so. I won't pretend to understand what would go into such a thing. I don't personally believe our understanding of the universe is sufficient to rule it out.

> But it was already thousands of years ago that our interpretation of life and the value we derive from it reached the understanding that death was not to be feared in the first place.

I guess I missed that! I mostly see a lot of mental gymnastics or denial in the form of believe in an after-life.

> I guess I missed that! I mostly see a lot of mental gymnastics or denial in the form of believe in an after-life.

I guess I don’t see the big distinction between some science-fiction fantasy of living for a quadrillion years and disproving the second law of thermodynamics and just believing in an afterlife. The alternative to either approach is discussed in OP :)

Ha, that's definitely fair. I suppose the false premise is that either is necessarily achievable. Sometimes there isn't a good answer.

I think it really depends on what definition of death we are talking about. If it's the act of dying, I can understand the comparisons to starvation and loneliness, because you are still alive and are actively experiencing death, starvation, and loneliness. However, I think this guide is talking more about death as the state of being dead, i.e. being without life. Without life, you cannot experience starvation or loneliness.

I was talking about the same definition as the article. Of course, when I am dead, I will not fear death. That is not much consolation.

> Of course, when I am dead, I will not fear death. That is not much consolation.

I see what you mean. What is it about death you fear? I think for these things, like starvation, loneliness, and dying, I don't fear them inherently, I fear their effects. I will feel physical pain while starving; I will feel emotional pain while lonely; I might feel pain while dying. But while living, I don't fear being dead because principally, I fear pain, and I won't be experiencing pain when I am dead. I understand not everyone will feel the same way about being dead, though.

Fear is actually a bad word for it. It's just that I desire to live, and death robs me of that. I really like what the article quoted:

> As the philosopher Thomas Nagel observed, death is the great deprivation.

That really resonates with me. Death deprives me of all things that I love and want.

Thank you for sharing that. I understand completely.

>I wish people were more afraid of death. Maybe we'd be doing more about it.

The line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise logically speaking we ought to force everyone into permanent suspended animation on life support machines. But clearly that would be a very bad thing to do.

What line? I didn't say anything about "at all costs". I said we should work to prevent death.

If I said "we should cure the flu" would you say "Well sure but we can't just cure the flu by murdering everyone" ? Like yes, I guess there's a line there?

>I said we should work to prevent death.

But we already are, in the sense that medical and safety research is constantly being conducted and there are professionals whose job is to rescue people from fires and similar disasters. There's always trade-offs though. A lot of death could be prevented by banning motor vehicles, should we do that? Of course not. In some ways, it could be argued that we're already going too far to prevent death, for example by banning doctor-assisted suicide.

I think the argument is we aren’t spending enough on anti-aging research.

I believe that we are working kinda sorta well against so-called 'premature' death. But I do not believe that death is widely considered to be itself a solvable problem - this article itself starts with this defeatist statement:

> Your demise is inevitable. I hope that doesn’t come as too much of a shock.

There's a lot less work going into increasing our maximum lifespan that there is going into increasing our average lifespan.

If death scares you, I would certainly not recommend eternal life. That, to me, is far more terrifying.

Well, if you get eternal life, and you don't like it, you can always change your mind.

I consider death as the only absolute fairness. Once it’s fixed, the first batch of people who can afford it must be those in power (you know, Xi, Trump, Kim, etc).