> “I hope to see the concept of watching your parents and grandparents die, disappear from the public consciousness as a thing that happens over the course of half a century.” — Vitalik Buterin
A storage problem on the horizon...
A storage problem on the horizon...
It's a good thing for society and humanity that people die. It ensures change, innovation and the flow of new ideas.
Don't get me wrong: I think we should invest money and resources that help people live healthy lifes. But the idea of stopping aging or wanting to live to hundreds of years just seems that it comes from people who have deep psychological problems with themselves.
If we had a way to live forever healthily, essentially no one would chose to die except the people with deep psychological problems with themselves
You are probably rational enough to give up getting new kids if that means achieving longlevity/immortality. But most people aren't as rational as HN forum members.
Earth could easily carry 100 billion people, we could build cities on venus and mars, and if people could live for thousands of years, 100 year journey to another star on a slow ship would become quite acceptable.
Bedsides, In most places birth rate is already below replacement level, so longer lifespan is necessary to prevent population collapse.
No, it's not. Current estimates are that population will stabilize around 10bn people, not collapse: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
There would also be a necessity to allow (and even force) euthanasia for people in persistent vegetative state.
Source? Based on what standard of living/level of technology? There was even a time I thought Julian Simon had a point, but in the years since then everything I've witnessed has suggested quite the opposite. The more of us there are it's just as likely a tiny percentage will destroy the planet for the rest of us than it is a few geniuses will help us invent our way out of trouble.
(Edit: Just saw that you aren't the person who left the original comment, so I guess the above is moot unless the original commenter feels the same way.)
This is not hypocritical in my mind. It would be hypocritical if I myself would work on or invest money into longevity tech and make a statement like this.
> [Y]ou might want to consider why many folks would believe your stance on the matter of human longevity to be fundamentally inconsistent.
Why? Why should I be content with the years nature has given me? Why should I not seek to have more? Do you not get joy from living? From being with the people you love? From exploring, learning, experiencing?
Why is a 'normal' human lifetime the perfect and most moral amount of years to have?
Your attitude is so full of suppositions. Frankly it seems to me that anyone who doesn't want more life must have deep psychological problems, some deep rooted depression or ennui.
Without the cycle of life there's no evolution, with no evolution there's no progress. That goes for biology, but certainly also for ideas.
Actually we don't have to imagine, for instance we can see that in general birth rates drop when infant mortality falls.
The idea that stagnation is the only possible outcome of longer lifespans seems ... reductivist.
The answer is I don’t know, and further, that trying to predict the outcome of societal change like that is probably a fool’s game. Pre-emptive, discriminatory rules seem like the absolute worst way to start out. Well, perhaps second worst compared to an outright ban on the technology, which is unfortunately where I think we’ll probably go first due to societal fear of change. Which is ironic given how much you and the OP think it would cause stagnation…
You've started by assuming the same as the OP, that having older people will necessarily cause societal stasis. But you're basing that both on a preconception of what you think older people are like now (personally I dispute this, and I'm not that old), and on a supposition that whatever longevity treatment we come up with won't change that. How do we know? How do we know that a particular treatment to, say, keep people younger for longer, wouldn't result in more youthful and dynamic society?
We don't know. And any supposition is based on flawed ideas.
I do think that we as a humans need to become more responsible with developing new technologies. There are technologies that do more bad than good, and we should develop techniques to better asses this before we just yolo a technology and then try to damage control later.
And once upon a time 40% of children died before the age of 5. That had been the norm throughout the entirety of human history, and indeed throughout the entire history of all animals.
Things will change and we will look back upon the times when people only lived to 70 years as the dark ages, and the justifications given for this brutal mortality as a coping mechanism.
The anti-longevity position doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Just think: we locked down billions of people to prevent the spread of COVID, mostly because of the toll it takes on those over the age of 70, who died at a rate 5 percent upon infection, yet aging is going to kill the vast majority of those over the age of 70 within a decade, and the resources going toward stopping it are infinitismal in comparison to those spent trying to stop COVID.
I aleady had one parent die before their time, and would love to not experience that again.
I don't think we can become immortal within my lifetime, nor will we live for hundreds of years but it would be nice if all our parents could at least live into their 90s.
Beyond that, I don't see what's wrong with immortality as a goal. Yes it's impractical but if you fail to attain it, at least you gain massive health benefits for the already elderly who have poor quality of life.
Immortality has no tolerance for stagnant dynasties. Intertwined with mortality and death is one chimp tribe believing they are superior to another, biologically identical chimp tribe simply due to differing starting circumstances or chance (right place, right time, right background, “wow I must be a genius!”).
As long as our economy plays out via genetic and social lottery instead of true merit, rewards the unrewarding, and allows small groups to profit while large groups toil and suffer, immortality will be out of reach.
Might also want to be in space, too, since Earth has limited capacity. May also want to have more reliable energy that can come with us into the depths of space.
What do I know though, just some nobody.
I’d you are immortal then why worry about not having children, over a long enough timeline eventually your turn in the queue will come.
But that’s just philosophical thought. In reality, we are too far away from even living to 200 years old to start worrying about what comes after that.