Just think, if the recent advances in longevity work out, we could have Putin and Trump around for decades more.
Defeating death just feels larger than human politics, it reaches into the entirety of biology unlike who The Favorite Person is at the moment.
Is it though? Who wants to live forever? Even Lestat got bored.
You mean the fictional vampire character?
It's like saying "even the tooth fairy got bored".
I don't think either of these are recognized by the DSM-5.
Putin and Trump are not political enemies though, they are criminals. No dietary supplement can offset the premature deaths caused by Putin in Ukraine.
Death is great, frees up limited resources, removes old farts who think they know how future for everybody should look like without actually having a good reason why.
Lets expand reasonably at least around out solar system first (meaning say >50% of human population not on earth), and then start looming into immortality.
Show me 1 truly powerful person in the past who wasnt an arrogant self centered a-hole.
We talk about enslavement of whole human race potentially forever in worst possible case. If that is something you can ignore, well I can't.
It's a lot easier for "truly powerful person" to keep "his subjects [from] actively resisting" than you seem to think.
>> Syria is at 40% opposition, 40% pro-government, and Assad has been hanging on during an active civil war for 11 years:
> This illustrates my point
How so? The implication of your GGP comment was that any powerful person with that much opposition should not be able to survive, but the example shows a powerful person with more opposition surviving.
On the day of Tiananmen massacre, it occurred to me that it would have even stronger repercussions at country scale.
Taking democratic countries’ shift to the policy of non-involvement and combining it with hypothetical advancements that continuously extend Supreme Leaders’ ages essentially sentences generations of dictatorships’ subjects to hardship, exploitation and gaslit life under a kleptocracy.
Add to that increased existential threat to democracy, since such a dictator never would have to deal with inefficiencies of internal power and knowledge transfer or spending resources on facilitating an honest voting process, infinitely building connections and spinning its webs around the remaining parts of the free world.
One wicked old man interminably learning new ways to turn the world into a zero-sum game and win at it, as generations of servants come and go around him they are even easier to control.
Note that in thought experiments I mentioned it is considered to exacerbate inequalities even if it is distributed equally to all. A thought experiment that reflects reality a bit better would be one where the rich not only get more rich thanks to money dynamics (plus a vicious circle of theft and violence in case of dictators, who are the bigger concern) but also never die.
I don't think you're thinking this through. Immortality plus "kids, grandkids" (without sci-fi spaceships or suicide/euthanasia) will pretty quickly lead to overpopulation and a lot of obvious problems.
Tens of thousands of people die in car accidents alone every year. The geriatric population is exploding and we can’t take care of all of them. We need a cure for the disease of aging.
The corollary of immortality for everyone (without sci-fi spaceships or suicide/euthanasia) is either stagnation (more or less the same set of people existing until resources run out) or overpopulation (and prompt resource exhaustion).