I hope everyone on this planet dies. No one should live forever.
I'd like this material existence I am currently experiencing to have no end (i.e., I hope I never die), so this comes as a shock. I can understand not wanting yourself to live forever, but wanting everyone to die?
We humans sometimes forget we're a part of Life, but we are, and we benefit from death just as much as the rest of Life.
With an immortal life -- assuming physical decay is arrested with immortality -- you have endless time to reconsider your ideas and expand on them using your wealth of knowledge and experience.
I don't see Planck's principle as inevitable, but an aberration that we can cure.
Would you tell a society of immortals living in an idyllic and peaceful village that they need to die "for science?"
Societal issues can be solved without science. Once you tackle scarcity and long+healthy lives, science becomes much less important.
Anyways, the pace of scientific progress is irrelevant if you live forever. You would experience infinitely more net progress if you were immortal.
I'd also challenge the idea that innovation happens outside of death and birth. It often takes a new pair of eyes to see a new solution to a problem.
> It often takes a new pair of eyes to see a new solution to a problem.
Why does this require death of current people and not simply more eyes that already exist?
If confronted with a society of people that live forever, but are relatively stagnant, would you propose to them that they all kill themselves every 80 years or so, so they "adapt?"
Why is adaptation more important than a life? A life is incredibly precious. Evolutionary adaptation barely works anymore and the cost in blood is immeasurable. Otherwise, adaptation can be achieved easily with technology, without costing so many people their hopes, dreams, and existence.
In the interest of the future of humanity, I hope we don't figure out extreme longevity anytime soon. A few more years or even decades, okay, any more and you have even more old people at the top of society with even more power.
Next time we come across a fundamental social issue, should we just kill everyone involved?
We can give people long, happy lives - as long as they want - while solving societal issues on a separate track. There is no reason to use death as a sledgehammer for an issue that is not more valuable than life.
It is, actually, kind of insulting to imply that people on the opposite spectrum of the rich don't want to live long, don't want to spend time with their family, hopes and loves - that they are expendable in the name of crudely brute-forcing some arbitrary wealth equation which is apparently more important to you than their very lives.
I would be quite happy being poor and getting to spend as long as I want with the loves of my life. Being poor barely even registers compared to the upside. No amount of money can compensate for time spent with loved ones, as anyone that has experienced the death of a loved one can attest to.
1. If immortality is a reality, the health issues that come with the disease of aging are likely going to make it so your 'prime' lasts forever.
2. I neither have nor want children
(Edit: Removed bits on my personal beliefs. I don't want to get into them right now. I do have views on the soul that aren't based in materialism and they result in different conclusions than yours.)
GP said nothing about how or when they wish everyone to die. It's as banal a statement as "I wish the earth will keep spinning". If GP is in a death cult, so are the overwhelming majority of known organisms.
> Death should be a personal choice.
This almost sounds like a satire of Western toxic individualism taken to a supernatural extreme. To me, the pursuit of immortality looks a lot more like a death cult than the acceptance of our finitude does.
I'd be surprised if people didn't have some sort of instinct to die under the right circumstances just like they have an instinct to procreate under the right circumstances.
In fact I'm positive of it because people kill themselves sometimes. What a strange phenomenon that is if you think about it. I've never understood it and can't imagine wanting to end my own life but apparently the tendency exists given the right set of circumstances.
He was Gladwell before people talked about Gladwell, so expect science-y conjecture, not science.