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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand people who don't want to be immortal.

At five years old I cried because I learned that I was going to die one day.

It’s not so much that I don’t want to be immortal - although I do think it’s a huge positivist assumption that your current human existence is the “peak state”, the best possible thing to continue being forever. It may turn out that this life is just an unpleasant dream of a superior consciousness. Maybe it’s not, and this life is all you get. But we don’t know that and it seems extremely self-absorbed and myopic (a common trait throughout human history) to consider this existence as the only real thing.

My concern is more that the world required to keep people immortal is almost certainly one removed of all risk, danger, adventure, and dynamism. I don’t want to live in a world where people hide inside staring at screens, because they’re afraid of physical accidents ending their otherwise immortal lives.

I remember reading an analysis that if people only died by accident then the average life span would between 900 and 2000 years. That assumes no more conservative living than today. Surely things like cars and guns would be much less prevalent.

> Surely things like cars and guns would be much less prevalent.

Why “surely”? I don’t see why people would try to stop killing each other if everyone were immortal. There would still be fighting for resources, power, land…

You’d still end up with any slightly dangerous activity being banned or discouraged. No bicycling, no skiing, no martial arts, etc. The risk would be considered not worth it.

And that’s not mentioning inherently dangerous things like exploring the cosmos.

It would be a very small, sad, scared little world, in my opinion.

> You’d still end up with any slightly dangerous activity being banned or discouraged. No bicycling, no skiing, no martial arts, etc.

I'm unconvinced. Humans' maximum age has barely budged over the millenia. What drove our increasing concern for safety was external to that. We also don't see evidence of increased risk taking as one's risk-adjusted remaining years decline.

My feeling is that longevity will have an s-curve effect. Every disease and malady we solve today only extends life until some other problem kills you. However, the further we push things, the more problems we are capable of resolving, the fewer things that will pop up and kill you - until, probably surprisingly, people are living significantly longer lifespans than ever before.

The most generalised effects of aging will probably be the most problematic (muscle loss and the like), but there are plenty of stories of people in their 90s who are plenty spry until they are brought low by a heart attack, stroke, cancer and so on.

If the only way you could die was by physical accident, you don’t think people would do less physically risky things?

Historical examples are not really relevant, as getting older is not equivalent to getting older then dying and living forever.

> If the only way you could die was by physical accident, you don’t think people would do less physically risky things?

On average, sure. But look at how the wealthy spend their time today. Rationally, they should be more conservative. In reality, the infinity of experience calls out.

Similarly, having biological immortality doesn't mean your time preference goes to zero [1]. And if that number is positive then value of a statistical life is finite [2]. We're thus shifting our place on a scale, not throwing the scale out. Hence why the examples are relevant: we've shifted on this scale before.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference

[2] https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v...

I still don’t think this is a relevant example at all. Rich people are still going to die. If they’re careful, which they tend to be relative to the population, they live a decade or two longer than average people.

That isn’t the same thing as immortality.

> That isn’t the same thing as immortality

Biological immortality still means you'll die, somewhow, somewhere. Or at least, I believe enough will believe that to continue to have fun. There will be folks who lock themselves in a room to keep the world away, but we have those today as well.

Or perhaps, lives being so long, there wouldn’t be any perceived difference between dying at a hundred and a thousand years old.

Today, a twenty-something dying in a car crash after drinking alcohol is as stupid and preventable as deaths gets. And we known that people drive more safely later in their lives. And yet, we let twenty-somethings get a driving license and drive a car around.

I don’t think you could discount the Foucault power dynamics either. The people running society would all be hundreds of years old, so it would have an effect on culture.

I don’t agree that preventing twenty somethings from dying in drunk crashes is easy or preventable at all. You’d need to redo the entire transportation and city planning infrastructure of almost the entire United States to do that.

It’s not a US specific problem.

Young drunks also ride electric mopeds in European capitals, usually renting them through apps. Sometimes without even a driving license.

So while public transports might be a part of the issue, I doubt they are the root cause.

But that wasn’t my point. My point was that, although it is stupidly dangerous, since they statistically have significantly more accidents than older drivers, young people are still allowed to get a driving license and drive.

Even though they are those that stand the most to lose in terms of life expectancy.

What makes you think everyone would adopt that attitude? Plenty of people today risk losing decades of their lives doing those things in addition to more risky ones like rock climbing. Why would centuries instead of decades change that?

Living for centuries or longer would be an entirely different thing. If the baseline assumption is that you’re going to live forever unless you have a dumb accident, I think society will ultimately orient itself around avoiding that possibility.

Of course you still might be a counter cultural movement against it, but if the powers running society are all centuries-old people, I don’t think that counter culture will have much institutional support.

Just to make a small note: most martial arts are not in any way dangerous. I think crossfit has more chances to mess someone up than practicing a martial art.

If people only died by accident, it implies the absence of murder, which implies either a state of enlightenment or non-humanness. I doubt we can meaningfully conjecture on such a world.

Why would dangerous activities be discouraged more then they already are?

My friends and I argue about "eternity is hell" all the time - how even a christian heaven would actually be hell since it's never ending. However for me, I could easily create a 20 or 30 year cycle of activities that would eternally satisfy me. It's a little silly but for example I'm starting to hanker for some old TV shows I watched 20 years ago. The argument typically goes that in eternity, you'd run out of things to do, but I just don't see how that's possible, I do things I've done before and enjoy it the second, third, fourth time around, so there's no such thing for me as "running out of things to do."

There is that saying Amateurs talk strategy, Professionals talk logistics.

I think it is a case of the strategy is fine (wanting immortality), but the logistics are just not there. So as much as it may pain us, focusing on not dying would mean you could spend your life not living in try to achieve said additional life.

I can think of a thousand futures on what I could do in a certain position but odds are that none of these situations will ever come up. So to have a clear mind, don't cling to things that might not happen.

I am glad that many are trying to achieve immortality, I will not stand in the way of them, but I also won't be holding my breath on it happening in my lifetime.

Loss is cumulative. After so many scars life can start to feel like a burden.

At five years old I cried because my parents made me ride space mountain at Disney and I thought roller coasters were scary, but since then ive learned to enjoy the big rides.

World weariness hits many who live past middle age.

Yes, aging is terrible.

Not at all the same thing.

Suffering is unavoidable, and loss accumulates. It is a comfort to know that it will someday end, one way or another.

I did, too. And it haunted me until my fourties.

And still I'm fine with it today.

One of the most constant lessons of literature and mythology is that people who dedicate themselves to becoming immortal inevitably spend their life harming others.

You understand that those "lessons" are nothing but texts invented by someone just like ourselves?

Most people try in their own way to achieve immortality by being nice to others, staying active and healthy and trying to die as late as possible.

I'm guessing advanced alien civilizations have figured out how to live a much longer time. Immortality isn't a physically achievable goal, but death from natural causes doesn't have to be necessary with a deep enough understanding of biology.

It’s a pretty big assumption that alien civilizations would even have a concept of the personal self that is interested in personal immortality. Even human beings had less of an interest in personal immortality prior to roughly ~2,000 years ago - before that, your group identity and memory tended to be more important, or your soul was something very different from a continuation of your earthly self.

It’s just as likely that an alien civilization is a biological system akin to insects or trees, where the individual existence of one entity is not relevant at all.

I wonder if that's more a matter of incapability than anything else, though.

Currently, we have more ability to move the needle on lifespan and illness than we've ever had before, and we learn more about it at increasingly accelerated rates. Doing the same 200 years ago (or earlier) was not really feasible. Today, we more or less have a decent grasp of the majority of diseases that end life.

I think you meant to reply to someone else? Or are you saying that the concept of a personal self is tied to the increased ability to reduce illness and lengthen lifespan? Which is an interesting idea and probably defendable.

The Hebrew scriptures and Buddha were plenty troubled by death prior to Christianity. I don't see why the equivalent of an intelligent ant civilization wouldn't remove aging from individuals once they were advanced enough. Jellyfish don't age, and one of The Expanse aliens (to mention a scifi example) were jellyfish-like, and had made themselves immune to biological forms of death.

Somehow, all people suddenly do wish to be immortal when they realize their death is very close. At this point I'm convinced it's a very strong, socially normalized form of learned helplessness.

> Somehow, all people suddenly do wish to be immortal when they realize their death is very close.

Any source for this claim or are you just projecting your own thoughts on all humans?

I spend some time working in a nursing home for the elderly. I never heard that.

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