Seems like a false dichotomy.
Aside from life support in one's final days, most practical medical interventions for prolonging life also result in significant improvements in quality of life.
For example, healthy diet and exercise contribute to extended lifespan, but they also improve quality of life significantly during all stages of life.
I can assure you that you'd never ever hold that opinion if you were a healthcare worker. A big part of our job is to maintain alive people with a horrible quality of life who should be long dead, oftentimes without even being able to know if they'd in fact prefer dying...
A related concept is the quality-adjusted life year (QALY), which is used when weighing the cost/benefits of certain interventions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
Health-wise yeah it’s great to be young :)
Healthy diet for example is not a singularly defined term and depending on specifics can be argued to lower quality of life even if they improve health.
I don’t do life science anymore, but deal with computers now. And it’s a whole lot more predictable and malleable. (Heck, it’s easy if I were to compare it to running gels or prepping cell lines.)
But I would be ecstatic if I could witness some science fiction level advancement in this field in my lifetime. I doubt it, but I would be amazed should it happen.
This is known: https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit
Like the reproducibility is contingent on so many factors. Very depressing and tedious.
There’s definitely a lot we don’t know and the knowledge gap is huge. And even if it can be done in the lab, translating some finding to a workable therapeutic is another story.
The trick is to have some cells starting the process over. Sexual reproduction always started from pre-existing cells, rebuilding a full individual.
Using this process to repair all the living cells does not seem impossible.
Our understanding of DNA programming is far from sufficient to enable this kind of project, but I don't see why it could not be possible at some point.
Then there are transposons, elements of ancient retroviruses embedded in our DNA, that can awaken and spray themselves thousands of times over the cell's genome. Usually, these new inserts don't hit anything important. Usually. Germline cells have mechanisms to suppress this, but most cells undergo this once a month.
You are talking about a lot of damage to repair in an older cell.
There's probably extreme cases with bad metastasis where it's very unlikely that they can be saved, and they can probably tell some of those. But I think not all the time.
Must be a very depressing job to observe this over the years.
Nothing profound in being scared shitless of it either
I mean, it'll flip our whole value system.
I've seen what appears to be a literal "city of the dead".
No doubt a metaphor. But metaphor appears to be a big part of "reality".
I've also seen what appears to be a "creator of reality".
So ya, it's a weird world.
It seems like if most people could choose, they'd prefer to have the mental and physical abilities of a 20-something while living as long as they wanted. Eventually, medical technology will get to the point where that is possible. Why not hasten such a day rather than let more people get old and frail? Yes, people will still eventually die, but living for 300 years in peak condition seems better than the status quo.
as the website article typed, there is a long way to tickle trustable keys to preservation, let alone reviving a frozen body, let alone understanding what we have to do to live in peak capacity for 50 years, let alone to live 300…
i sincerely prefer public and private money being wasted on improving our ‘short’ lives than MAYBE discovering some esotericism that probably very few people will have access
As for a solid foundation to discover and create things, you need to be healthy and have time first of all. The logistics of life just suck as it is now unless you are really lucky. It used to be much worse but it can get much better.
If you asked someone centuries back if we would go to the moon, they will laugh you out of the room. Similarly, if you said that people will consistently live to their 90+ years of age.
Do you think GP's decision not to focus their work on life extension is forcing you to die?
And here, because freedom, people are advocating for the freedom to pretend death isn’t approaching, at the cost of millions to society.
[1] https://majorspoilers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Sandman...
I mean maybe we can stick some pipes in a corpse and get it to move around or make a digital echo of a dead personality and have that rattle around inside a robot. However, I feel like we're drifting into wishful thinking if we figure genuine immortality is a going to be a some sort of scientific given.
It did though.[0]
There is likely very little evolutionary pressure for immortality, therefore this kind of thing isn't more widespread. If anything, at population level evolution might generally select for the population that produces a new generation and dies quicker.
Nature doesn't have goals. Humans, as far as I can tell, very much do. Put another way. Evolution didn't find a way to get life onto the Moon. Humans did.
This is Stockholm syndrome. We all die, so some of us choose to think it's a good thing. Death in general is needed for recycling, but not human death. Humans represent 0.00000001% (warning, made up number) of the available matter. We don't need to die for others to live.
You're not recognizing anything you're deluding yourself to accept the incredible loss that is death.
You have no idea if that is true or not though.