Monday was my 46th birthday and likely my last (2013)
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[1] https://www.drupal.org/community/cwg/aaron-winborn-award
After you die, your consciousness fades, and so do all your desires and regrets.
To me, death is the ultimate respite.
To me, this makes a virtue of necessity. We have deep philosophies around death only because it's inescapable. But if we could change that, then we could also change those philosophies.
The first thing that's going to be immortal when death isn't inescapable is Kim Jong Un. No thanks, if you want to see a world without death read Altered Carbon
Knowing humanity, though, it probably would be.
[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...
There's no (physics based) reason we have to die, just like there was no reason for all the deaths in child birth in early human history. It's a failure of our current capabilities.
I don't know if any of the claims in Lifespan [1] hold up, but if they do stopping aging may be easier than people previously thought. Either way - I'm hoping we figure it out sooner rather than later.
If stars cannot sustain themselves forever, how can we compete? We are far more complex with a far smaller energy budget.
On a more relatable scale, humans do grow in complexity, order, and capability in their early years, until eventually decay turns the tide toward the end of our natural lifespans. It would be rather odd if it's physically impossible to re-activate those growth and healing mechanisms—much more likely that we just haven't figured out how yet.
[Edit: I'm amazed at the posts saying it's not worth trying to live longer because you'll never outlast A STAR. It's not a competition people!]
Seriously though, what is the point? You're gonna have the same fomo with death in the future as you do now.
We've already found out how to reactivate those growth and healing mechanisms. Have children, then grand children, then great grandchildren, etc. Each generation gets its own activation
I'm sure my ancestors worried constantly about their next meal because starvation was a very real possibility, but luckily I don't think about starving even though it's technically still possible. I hope that in the future the same is true of disease and non-accidental death.
The point is having as much time as you want to do the things that interest you. Nobody should be forced to live when they don't want to, and nobody should be forced to die when they don't want to. Pretty simple really.
> We've already found out how … Have children
Come on now, we both know that a legacy isn't remotely the same as not dying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
Most likely outcome of immortality as humans currently are would be stagnation and power being concentrated in a few hands
Regardless, it's still not a reason to die. You could argue that progress is meaningless with death.
Finally, progress being slowed down is something we can solve independently of death. I think it's a good idea to find alternative solutions to stagnation than literally dying - that's like solving an issue with your OS by throwing your whole computer in the trash.
Alternatively phrased, if power was already stagnated and concentrated, and you had a button to start killing a couple million random people like clockwork every year to "solve" this problem, it would be insane to press it.
[0] https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fiscal-year-2021-budget
Today anti-aging solutions are likely within reach should we concentrate research and funding in a massive push to solve the issue.
We ought to abandon our fatalistic outlook (that existed solely due to prior necessity) and sprint towards this goal with every fiber of our beings.
I don't think I'd want to live forever, but I think the time we get is far too short. I want to see an end to scarcity and poverty. I want to see thriving colonies on Mars. I want to see us figure out superluminal travel and visit other star systems.
Sure, we may also annihilate ourselves in the next century, but I'd rather be optimistic about these things, and it bums me out that I almost certainly won't be around to see them.
I've spent a lot of time on Alcor's website, reading about cryopreservation, and have considered signing up. But I'm worried about what could happen if it works. The culture shock of waking up even a century after your death sounds difficult to handle, let alone many centuries. Aside from being a small window to the past, what of value would I have to a future society? Would I feel without purpose, and wish I hadn't done it?
In the unlikely event it does work, there'd at least be a handful of people - it'd be pretty unlikely to be the only success story I think. Downside risk seems small?
Humanity's genetics will naturally deteriorate without death.
And humans haven't been subject to natural selection for ages. Pretty much the entire civilization is a cushion between you and forces of nature. Even mastering fire and learning to shoot an arrow from a bow were major developments away from natural selection.
The person you replied to specifically said that they don't care for immortality. People are simply advocating for death on their own terms, instead of the pathetically short lives we have today.
Don't want to live forever means what? You can't know what your desire and wants will be in 20 years, let alone 100 or 500 years. It's like asking a person when they will go to a bathroom in 20 years.
Actually I think trying to eliminate death (at least if we're talking about letting people live >1000 years or choose when they die) is extremely bad and will have awful, awful consequences.
You think inequality is bad now? Can you imagine what it will be like when people can amass power and fortunes for thousands of years? How progressive do you think our views on race and sex would be if there were still people voting who were 800 years old? Or science, for that matter (science progresses one funeral at a time, as they say). House prices are astronomically bad where I live... how bad will it be when houses are held forever?
Old age and death create the space for our lives to be young and free, albeit for a short glorious period. I don't doubt it will eventually happen, and the world will become a far more static, miserable place as humanity pushes endlessly forward in our quest to avoid pain and grab all we can for ourselves instead of trying to enjoy life for the ephemeral experience it is.
2. It is arguable that life and freedom are meaningless if we are doomed to lose everything we ever have and are in the end, after such a short amount of time.
3. "Enjoying life for the ephemeral experience it is" is something we do out of hard necessity. I'd take a bit less enjoyment as opposed to, well, not existing at all. Even then, enjoyment and long lives do not have to be mutually exclusive should we solve our problems in time.
Relying on death to solve problems with our government and politics is like relying on a nuclear bomb to heat your dinner. It'll work, it'll also cause immense pain and suffering.
We can and should solve these problems in a separate thread. Alternatively phrased, if power was already stagnated and concentrated, and you had a button to start killing ~100 million random people a year to "solve" this problem, it would be insane to press it. We must find alternative solutions.
But we don't do it. We sit here worrying about dying and trying to ensure we will live forever instead of enjoying the time we do have alive. Read experiences of people who suddenly find out they are going to die relatively soon- the richness of their life takes on a whole new dimension.
These are problems to solve independently of death.
And why do you have 100% faith they will be solved? Is that how the world generally tends to work? Or will things just get worse and people will blame it on the government instead of the thing that changed and allowed things to be bad?
This happens all the time. Technology comes in, makes peoples lives shit, "It's not a problem with the technology it's how we use it". What does that matter if we're not capable of using it better? If the world is going to be shit if people can live forever, then people living forever is shit.
It is arguable that life and freedom are meaningless if...
If you look at how people behave, it is actually the opposite- things don't have value unless they are scarce, limited. We value our life and youth because it runs out.
This doesn't change the fact that using death to solve inequality is like using a nuclear bomb to heat your dinner. We ought to find a better solution and solve it independently.
I do not understand your pessimism. Historically speaking, humanity tends to solve the problems it encounters. A look over the past few centuries alone reveals this. We'll solve this problem too.
I'm not saying it will solve inequality, I'm saying it is preventing it from being far, far, far worse than it already is. Do you feel like we're solving the inequalities we currently have enough to unleash something that will make things one hundred times worse? Knowing that once it is unleashed it will be almost impossible to reverse?
is like using a nuclear bomb to heat your dinner.
You're proposing that we remove the nuclear bomb that has been heating the food we've been eating for the last 1 billion years and assuming we'll just figure out something else.
I do not understand your pessimism. Historically speaking, humanity tends to solve the problems it encounters
I guess my pessimism stems from a different perspective of what it means to "solve our problems". I look around the world as it is today and I don't feel like we genuinely have solved any of the problems at the core of human existence.
This is a false dilemma. People can enjoy the time being alive while optimizing for the long term.
Exercising increases our health and make us enjoy life more.
Read experiences of people who suddenly find out they are going to die relatively soon- the richness of their life takes on a whole new dimension.
This is a rationalization or terror management. Moreover, the richness of life should come before having to face one's own mortality.
We always have a choice of living life to our fullest, or don't at any given time, immortal or mortal.
So pessimistic. Basically all tech (except perhaps certain weapons advances) improves our lives. Yeah doomscrolling sucks but is it worse than watching the grass grow while you get drunk on the porch a hundred years ago? (Assuming you had a porch, or booze for that matter.) Yeah biased AI sucks, but is it worse than overtly racist societies from 50 years ago? We certainly can and must keep improving our collective lot in live, but "all is shit" is fundamentally lacking perspective.
> We value our life and youth because it runs out.
No, we value life because it affords us agency and positive experience. We value the memory of youth for its limited responsibility, higher fecundity, and being earlier in our life's decision tree.
Do you think the Amish live a life vastly inferior to yours?
As a matter of focus, we should solve those other problems first, especially since increasing life expectancy is already having bad effects, both in wealth and power concentration. Eg. Boomers not retiring, and not dying, so gen x and millenials have bad careers and nowhere to live
For another rephrasing, if I had the option to go back in time, and prolong the life of all the slave owners and the people they enslaved, I wouldn't subject the poor people to 1000 years of torture.
I'm calling bullshit on "time constraints as meaningfulness" too. That's just the subjective time dilation we experience during stressful situations, like in sports.
We have so many aphorisms to sooth the fear of death, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily true in a post-mortality culture.
Wealth isn't zero-sum, and so it's always weird to see people arguing about how bad inequality is.
If the standard of living isn't improving, that's a problem we should address. If the standard of living is improving and the rich are getting richer, why is that an issue?
From perspectives of history, intuition, and statistics, it's clear that inequality and overall quality of life aren't inversely correlated as many today believe they are.
> House prices are astronomically bad where I live... how bad will it be when houses are held forever?
I imagine someone will get bored of a house after a few decades, certainly after a century, and so they won't be held forever. Additionally, as the population increases, we'll create new housing.
Also, doesn't physics and the Big Bang rule out this eternal recurrence idea? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
For your second point, I don't think physics rules out the big bang "recurring" because it does not deal with time before time. The big bang theory is not at all in conflict with cyclic conformal cosmology or eternal expansion.
The grim black traditions of my culture are almost self centered by comparison.
This is especially true when you looked at some of our oldest myth such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Now pray it never happens?
I think that's a poor framing. Yes, cure diseases, absolutely, but mortality is intrinsic to humanity. Suffering is a problem to solve. How we should live, knowing that we will most assuredly die is a problem to solve.
Treating death as a problem to solve I think is a conceit and ultimately a fools errand.
Why?
Ultimately you need to address what is the meaning of life, and what is your purpose.
I think if you offered immortality to me tomorrow I wouldn't take it.
I think if we offered it to you on your deathbed, as you are seconds away from it, you would.
Not everyone frames such problems the same.
A cure for your ailment is almost certainly implied by an offer of immortality. If we are capable of such a feat we will almost certainly have solved the problem of making humans youthful and healthy indefinitely.
And realistically speaking, death would still be optional, just not forced upon you and your hopes and dreams by random ailments.
There's value in acknowledging we probably can't solve death, and coming to terms with that, but if you had a button sitting in front of you that would completely eradicate cardiovascular disease, you'd press it, right? There's no form of death that I'd even think about keeping, with the exception of suicide and maybe execution.
The computer could be a near copy, but the actual me dies
In that sense, there is nothing to fear, nothing to solve. If the manner in which one is dying is painful, then I should have a means of getting to a quick end.
Your consciousness - who you are - will end, truly, once and for all. You will never again experience hopes, dreams, memories, or love. You won't experience anything at all for the rest of eternity.
If people lived indefinitely but society was a bit stagnant, and you pressed a button to kill 100M random people a year to "encourage change", you'd be regarded as insane, and rightfully so.
Death is not the solution to our problems, just like throwing your computer in the trash isn't a solution to a crashing program.
Once you've solved the other problems, you can work on death
> If people lived indefinitely but society was a bit stagnant, and you pressed a button to kill 100M random people a year to "encourage change", you'd be regarded as insane, and rightfully so.
highlights that it's baseless to put off solving death or even using it as a solution.
I don't know what comes after death but I'm not scared of it.
Step one would be to allow euthanasia. Until we allow that, we cannot pretend that anyone is ever going to be allowed to die on their own terms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis
If you count healthy years I agree, sometimes it's too little for certain people. But in general 90 years seems like more than enough to me, what would you want to accomplish you couldn't in the 70 years form your 20s to your 90s? People peak quite early. Also seeing your values, beliefs and lifestyles being ridiculed by the new generations isn't that much fun...who knows how people 80 years from now will view our generation that messed up the climate (and countless other things we do now that we think are normal but are really not). Probably how we now see slave owners.
It's mostly about our fear of dying, I'm sure when the average life span becomes 120 or 200 everyone will yell it's too damn short. If you're scared of dying your'e scared of dying, in fact the more you fight it with treatments probably the more scared you become.
Implicit in this is that people can't change.
More time alive to experience different cultures, form relationships with different people, and perform different roles in society are all likely to encourage people to be more accepting and adaptable, not less.
Put another way, I don't have to change if I'm just running out the clock, but if I'm going to be around a while then it's worth staying engaged with my community.
If you get another 100 years, and you spend it at the 9-5, you're still going to find your life pathetically short.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7zzQpvoYcQ
It is also an excellent book.
We never know what life has in store for us, and the best thing we can do is to enjoy each and every day to the fullest.
Sooner or later, it's going to be our last.
We are all going to die.
Aaron Winborn lived.
I found his obituary: https://obits.pennlive.com/us/obituaries/pennlive/name/jeffr... It looks like he made it to 47.
Apologies.
This is a very uncomfortable reality about our care system and the way our society is structured in general. Nobody deserves this kind of treatment, but we also don't really have the lattitude in our lives to spend time caring for our family. Also this kind of care is commoditized by our insurance system where paying for these kinds of systems is more supported than assisted care in-home.
I'm hoping that as a result of COVID with people finding more lattitude to work flexibly from home and more people focussing on their families that more people can avoid this kind of end-of-life care.
It doesn’t matter how much money you have, because without someone to actively advocate for you it won’t go well.
Two weeks ago, Bill died.
Bill was an old friend of mine. We'd known each other for 25 years or more. His wife used to work at the company that employed me, and Bill and I shared extracurricular interests.
Bill was trained as a Maritime Engineer. Due to a story that is not mine to tell, his engineering career was destroyed, and he became a housepainter. A really good one. Because of his erudite approach, he got high-dollar customers. Many of his jobs brought in six-figure gross.
He sent his three kids to college. They all did awesome. He left his wife in great shape, financially.
Bill died of kidney disease. He had been on home dialysis for years. It sucked.
Even with the dialysis, his body started to deteriorate. It was getting worse and worse.
a couple of months ago, he made the decision to stop dialysis, and just check out.
His bags were packed. He had done his job, and left the world a better place.
The last few weeks, I made a point of popping by his house as often as possible. I'd usually pop in five or six days a week, and sit with him for an hour or so. Towards the end, it was ten minutes, because he was in a parallel universe, and my being there didn't do more than make it a pain for his family.
Helping him to die was a deep Honor.
Seeing death in a neutral light is wrong, seeing it as a virtue is absolutely sadistic. We need to stop this medieval way of thinking.
[0] https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fiscal-year-2021-budget
I don't know many people that think death itself is virtuous, but I think seeing sacrifice (even of life) for something good can be extremely virtuous.
I would, however, disagree with the view that seeing death in a neutral light is wrong. I very much enjoy life and I'm looking forward to a long time living it, but I think it's totally fine that I'll die one day. Granted I'm not looking forward to it, but I don't think it's a bad thing that it'll happen.
—Miyamoto Musashi
I'm glad that he already finds his peace. Seems like a genuine and nice person that is grateful for everything.
I think people too often miss the significance of their own existence, independent of their relatively brief tasks and accomplishments. I certainly do not mean to belittle or speak poorly of anyone's accomplishments, but the importance of simply being is so significant and people so rarely appreciate that significance.
Maybe he just knew the audience that he was speaking to. After all, if it wasn't for that he probably wouldn't be linked here.
No need to overanalyze.
Drupal developers are numerous and not the most important people in anyone's life solely because they are Drupal developers.
Single-handedly writing software that touches nearly every human being around the world - only few have done that.
This reminds me of that Bill Burr skit where he talks about mothers convincing themselves that theirs is the "most difficult job in the world".
I think to myself sometimes, "How long till I'm 80?" From that point on it's just waiting to die. What am I going to do and accomplish in the time between now and then?
One concern as I get older is the whole aspect that you can reach a point of so much pain and limitations that life becomes a living torture, and with that - my appreciation of the need for legal euthanasia is something that my support grows with age.
After all, it's not worth worrying about death and I don't. What worries me is how I die. Dignity goes a long way and I sure don't want to husk out for days on end in so much pain and medication to combat the pain that I'm dribbling wreck unable to function. That's not my idea of life and I'd like to have that choice and whilst living wills have some carry, the limitations due to dated laws regarding euthanasia and ending ones life early are in need of revision.
Previous discussion (as noted in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28150698):
It is interesting and valuable to see new discussion threads emerge over the course of almost a decade, as culture changes and the lens through which we view our lives and problems evolves.