Makes me wonder how many more billions will have to die before we bother to put some actual effort into ending death, but I know that's a very obscure opinion. https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
It's part of life that it ends, it seems. No way of getting around that no matter how many sci-fi solutions Bostrom proposes as realistic.
The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed.
We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0.
Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like.
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrs...
For me, Bostrom is an egotist of the type that wishes to escape his thanatotic drive and acceptance that life just ends. It’s unfortunate, terrible even, but it seems as natural as birth. Proposing solutions such as “mind uploading” are not only ridiculous but the reality of the idea would be hellish. What’s worse is that he’s a philosopher so actually creating the technology to do it simply is not his problem – someone else will have to do the implementation, regardless of how nightmarishly difficult it could be. He could just as easily be inventing hoverboards or time machines. It’s not his problem to stay within the bounds of possibility, even the accepted bounds of what can realistically be designed and coded and implemented – he just has his graphs and statistics of work that other people have done in the past, and can now order them to fulfil his desires in future, one of the main ones being his egotistic desire for his ego to never die.
>delay it by decades
Yes, but we aren't solving the problems, we are dealing with symptoms. The entire industry is currently treating old age diseases as diseases, and not as symptoms of bodily decay. This is covered extensively by the work of Dr Aubrey de Grey (yes, that one), in any case, he documents 7 different ways in which the body accrues damage over time, and is actively researching in all these fields to find methods to mitigate, and reverse said damage.
To aid in this regard, feel free to visit the SENS research foundation website at https://www.sens.org/
This approach is very different from the one currently deployed in the field afaik. The idea is that the human body, like a car, can be kept in pristine condition if these 7 sources of deterioration is reversed/addressed.
It is really quite fascinating. I would advise you to go check out the healthspan discord on https://discord.gg/sCwyPXu
There are a number of highly motivated individuals actively researching and following the SOTA as well as excellent news aggregation.
This is the initial reason I got interested in this in the first place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWtSUdOWVI
One of Dr de Grey's quotes that I find quite compelling is:
"There is no difference between saving lives and extending lives, because in both cases we are giving people the chance of more life."
That's not a general truth. The Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is biological immortal.
Entropy guarantees that every system will eventually disintegrate
so it’s not like it was ever not part of the conversation
That said it’s a loonshot that will undoubtedly have spinoff benefits for increased life quality.
If death becomes a choice, then the character of prevailing culture will likely match the characteristics of those who choose not to die. What would that look like? Would that be a culture worth living in?
Your brain's capacity to handle memory would still be a blocker for any meaningful extended survival.
Any decent scifi novel would name many of the very simple problems it would cause at an individual and societal level, not to speak of every other biological ramification of the body.
You'd most likely have been born into society as something between a serf and a slave, with your life strictly by controlled to ensure you never might imperil the perpetuation of those who would almost certainly come to see themselves as Gods. And no, you wouldn't be immortal. That'd be too risky for the Gods. It'd be the absolute worst of humanity, frozen in time, due to the lack of death.
And oh boy, imagine the punishments they could contrive for anybody who might indeed imperil (or even deny) their utter supremacy. How about a million years of torture, if for no other reason than to use you (and the millions of others granted similar accommodation) as warnings to the rest of society? I can say, with at least as much confidence as you express about there being nothing after this life, that this life will end. But the thing I can add to this, is that that's also a very good thing for all of humanity to come.
They were looking to experience all that life could offer, because in the end - what's the worst that happens? Well you die, but you're going to die anyhow. And living a rich life, ended prematurely, seems infinitely more desirable than living a drawn out life, doing everything to minimize risk, where you die all the same but perhaps without having ever given yourself a chance to live.
But imagine those individuals could have reasonably expected they might be able to live forever. I expect there is exactly 0 chance they would have even considered going on that sub, in one of Bezos' rockets, or engaged in basically any activity with any possible risk whatsoever. Because suddenly what you're risking, your life, has literally infinite value unless you happen to be suicidal to begin with. And this would pose a major problem for society doing much of anything.
There's going to be a high rate of mortality for the first colonists on Mars because there's a zillion things that can go wrong, and we aren't going to be able to anticipate even a fraction of them. Who in the world would ever want to risk this if you could live forever?
Eh, you can't slow an exponential growth with a linear gain in living space. There might be a lot of space out there but not nearly enough of the stuff we need to live in order to consider physical space the limiting factor. You might buy time but you'll run up against the familiar discomfort of too little living space again, and will have to downsize or expand out again before very long. Same as it ever was.
You dont treat any other piece of knowledge with the same demand as you do the (lack of) afterlife.
This is just a limitation of science, because we need a conscious mind to test and/or interpret the results.
Human exceptionalism -- our nascent ability to reason -- does not exempt us from being animals in the biosphere in which we evolved.
And space (beyond our planet) is observably not a paradise for things that live on Earth. Unless we are all reincarnated as tardigrades.
Where's your evidence?
What if I claimed when you die you are reincarnated as a zebra on omnicrom-5? Why is that more or less reasonable than an explanation some religious leader made up one time when he was high?
Anyone can come up with some ungabunga, but unless you have evidence there's no rational to believe it.
> All empirical evidence from thousands of years of scrutiny
Yes, I'm very curious to see empirical evidence of what happens post-death and someone who lived to tell us.
On other hand, guess since we don't know what is after death, we can't also say with complete 100% certainty that it is nothing. But for there to be something, then that would mean there is something in this physical reality that gets transported, and we should be able to detect it. And since there has been nothing detected after a lot of tries (experiments), at this time there is nothing.
Maybe I should hold out for "and everyone gets a pony."
And I'm not sure what Lazarus has to do with this unless your suggesting that his raising means that he couldn't die i.e. he's still alive. That would be a very unusual interpretation.
Worth looking into?
* not Christian other religions in the Roman Empire, or (more generally)
* not Christian religions.
Easier to say most, if not all, religions have an afterlife story.
The early usage (according to the OED) was
[ad. L. pāgān-us, orig. ‘villager, rustic; civilian, non-militant’, opposed to mīlēs ‘soldier, one of the army’, in Christian L. (Tertullian, Augustine) ‘heathen’ as opposed to Christian or Jewish. The Christians called themselves mīlitēs ‘enrolled soldiers’ of Christ, members of his militant church, and applied to non-Christians the term applied by soldiers to all who were ‘not enrolled in the army’. Cf. Tertullian De Corona Militis xi, ‘Apud hunc [Christum] tam miles est paganus fidelis quam paganus est miles infidelis’. See also Gibbon xxi.
Cf. payen.
The explanation of L. pāgānus in the sense ‘non-Christian, heathen’, as arising out of that of ‘villager, rustic’, (supposedly indicating the fact that the ancient idolatry lingered on in the rural villages and hamlets after Christianity had been generally accepted in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire: see Trench Study of Words 102, and cf. Orosius i Præf. ‘Ex locorum agrestium compitis et pagis pagani vocantur’) has been shown to be chronologically and historically untenable, for this use of the word goes back to Tertullian c 202, when paganism was still the public and dominant religion, and even appears, according to Lanciani, in an epitaph of the 2nd cent.]
1. One of a nation or community which does not hold the true religion, or does not worship the true God; a heathen. (†In earlier use practically = non-Christian, and so including Muslims and, sometimes, Jews.)
2. fig. or allusively. A person of heathenish character or habits, or one who holds a position analogous to that of a heathen in relation to Christian society.
So maybe they didn't use Pagan, but Figuratively, they thought of Christians as the weird/low class/savage, "A person of heathenish character or habits, or one who holds a position analogous to that of a heathen".
If you are disputing this because by definition "Pagan" means non-Christian, thus by definition Christians can't be "Pagan".
Fine, how about "Superstitio"?
Suetonius and Tacitus used the terms "superstitio"
"On the other hand, Romans believed Christians, who were thought to take part in strange rituals and nocturnal rites, cultivated a dangerous and superstitious" sect.[60]: 125
I just meant to reaffirm that it's not an Abrahamic religion innovation.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
whatever that means
eg: at least 50k established by genetics for most of the land area:
And if you think owning a home is hard, just wait until every property in your city is owned by a group of immortal British lords who insist on women dressing modestly and "No Irish need apply" signs everywhere. This may not be too far away from what your actual town looks like right now, but at least we currently have the hope that those people will die and be replaced by slightly-saner ones.
First of all, such technology would be usurped by dictators for dictators only. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Putin and endless stream of other pathetic figures, they all desperately clinged to life and would burn this world to the ashes 1000x over just to stay immortal. I can't imagine how we could avoid global semi-permanent slavery, not with actual real human nature that we see manifested in the news every day. Its fine if you wouldn't use it malevolently, that says nothing about more capable and more sinister individuals who are out there in numbers you probably would have hard time accepting.
Second, where do we put all those folks if we actually achieve some hippie paradise? How do we feed them? Concept of individual ownership goes very much against this. The opposite is communism, which has 100% failure rate, and we tested it already on few hundred millions, no thank you. You have to live through it to see and feel its failures in their many aspects to understand, I did and never ever want that back in any form.
Two, they would all die from a number of things over the course of a thousand year journey