Imagine tomorrow, some mystical cosmic event made it impossible for people to die of natural causes. Would you institute a law that once someone made it to 100 years old, they should be executed? This would prevent most of the downsides curing death would spring.
I think the answer to this is obviously no, that would be completely foolish, if not immoral. But when we start with the status quo of death existing, puzzlingly, most people think death is a good thing.
If it weren't, it would certainly become a focus, and probably within reach.
This isn't quite true. Suppose no one dies. Starting from a population of 10 billion, suppose every person can have one child.
The population after one iteration is 15 billion. If those 5 billion then each have one child, the next iteration's population is 17.5 billion. This converges to 2x the original population. In fact, so long as not everyone has 2 kids, it will converge to a finite value.
(Edit: also, this problem takes places on the timescale of HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of years. The year 2500 is not going to look like today.)
>The really bad people of history could find themselves in permanent long-lasting power (think Putin for a modern example).
In many cases, dictatorships do not end with the dictator's old age. This is true both in the sense that they sometimes die early, and in the sense that they're prone to dynasties. The system of a dictatorship already has agelessness, just not indestructibility.
>I think you can come up with 100 reasons why curing death would be bad.
You can indeed do that, but it's worth keeping the screaming torture of the default in perspective. It's really hard to do worse than aging. I wouldn't want to see my parents wither, suffer, and die. I don't want to die knowing my children would wither, suffer, and die. I don't want you to wither, suffer, and die. I don't want people to have to grieve the loss of their loved ones.
We can just... get rid of the ultrabadness, and have more of the good things. There are new problems that would have to be addressed, but they are addressable! Sometimes, things just aren't that complicated.
On the contrary, Putin showed how dictatorships are vulnerable to defeat, if not collapse.
It seems more like we're justifying death rather than solving challenges.
The elimination of death would necessitate that each individual would consume indefinitely, whereas the planet has finite resources. So, at some point, children must stop being born, and governments must either enforce infertility or make having sex illegal.
I would imagine if death were cured, a very small percentage of people would actually want to live forever. I imagine most people would want to live between 1x and say, 5x an average lifespan.
Do you think about where you will go to the restroom 20 years into the future? No. Same thing with lifespan questions. You'll presumably die in some sort of accident.