My personal preference is pro-death. I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus. The fact that it's not under my control also makes me feel calmer - it's out of my hands.
My personal preference is pro-death. I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus. The fact that it's not under my control also makes me feel calmer - it's out of my hands.
A worse problem is that whatever generation is in control when immortality is achieved will rule the world forever. Falling fertility makes this even more likely.
Even if you argue that this would go against the interests of the highest class, what could they do? Technology is pretty unstoppable, and individual actors are usually pretty bad at conspiring together unless there's something in it for everyone involved. Not to mention that there's not even a way to define what specific dollar amount moves you from "wealthy commoner" to the "wealthy elite", especially if taking into account different countries.
Odds are we're talking about a suite of many procedures, some of which are intrinsically very expensive and that humanity doesn't have the resources to provide to everyone. But if it's really cheap...
> The providers will surely want to sell it to the maximum number of customers in all countries.
The maximum profit point isn't likely to be just above that really cheap price. People would be willing to give a significant fraction of their wealth for a magic bullet life extension, and most of the world's population has no wealth. Providers' ability to perform price discrimination isn't going to be perfect.
If it's anything like medical procedures that exist today, it sounds like at least in the US it will be impossible to afford without insurance, and therefore employment. "You can live forever, as long as you work forever" is exactly the amount of depressing I'd expect from real life.
https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Time-Joe-Haldeman/dp/038070439...
There was a followup comic book series, which was decent.
That book popped into my mind; it took two tries to find it with Copilot and I was pleasantly reminded of who the author was.
>particularly the ones where he sets out to kill a Heinlein book
Interesting statement, I'm grabbing those books now.
Recurring revenue is best revenue. Customer's LTV would be only limited by astronomical circumstances like the Sun turning into a red giant.
It will be an spectacle: the true test of how useful wealth is against the Universe, compared to other things like knowledge or wisdom.
This is casting categories of people in very rigid and binary terms. Wisdom and knowledge is not more prevalent amongst the non-elite is it? Isn’t it distributed more evenly?
Iain M. Banks probably said it best. "I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame?"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the...
If by forever, you mean until they actually disappear from something they have failed to foresee or couldn’t avoid, then, yes maybe.
Nothing is forever. Prolongating human life would probably barely make a dent in the grand scheme of things.
Falling fertility makes us extinct very soon. The idea that the youngest generation, raised by many generations to be dismissive or even outright hostile to fertility will, by some miracle, be the ones who say "no, I will have 2.1 children" is silly. And because it's falling fertility and not just "stable but below replacement fertility", demographic collapse comes quickly. and extinction within 200 years.
If you're worried about immortality, then the good news is we don't even have enough time to figure it out.
Evolutionary processes will prevent total extinction, even if "the next generation is raised" one way, new trends will emerge.
A population of few thousand is enough for humanity to come back. Even if population dropped 50% every 30 years, it's still 500 years to get down that low. And we haven't even started trending downward yet.
The earth currently has billions more people than are necessary to keep humanity going; there's plenty of slack in the current system. Yes societies will have to evolve if birthrates stay low for a while, but they always have to evolve and if populations ever did drop precipitously low people already know how to make more babies.
For example, a war would kill lots of young healthy soldiers, leaving even fewer people in to care for the old, young, and infirm.
I’m guessing Ukrainian and Russian dependency ratios are getting worse and worse.
They couldn't. They're not exactly wishy-washy, they happen to be one of the most authoritarian regimes on this planet, even if they understand the benefits of a velvet glove. If they couldn't raise it, why would you think anyone else can?
And we're already at sub-replacement. The same people who make the next generation of people (as small as it is), are the ones who also raise that generation and instill their values in them. What does having one child teach that child about their parents' values? It teaches them that, at most, they should have just one. Or maybe even that they should have none at all. Not only is this a self-reinforcing problem, it accelerates. You don't have a few decades to solve this.
Nor will "evolution" fix it as the other guy said. While some still have large families, it's not just the parents' own values that are instilled, but that of our society collectively. The many who have few or no children have far greater influence on the children of those families, than those families have on everyone else.
Population is counter-intuitive, and none of you understand it.
I think it's inevitable that such a change would cause big social upheavals. I find it highly ironic that those people who call this out as a negative often also call out how people living longer are change averse.
> I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus.
Can I ask why, genuinely?
The fact that I will likely die sometime in the next 50 years doesn't make the evening out I have planned any better or worse. The band I'm going to see are getting older, but I'm going to see them because they're coming to my town and it'll be enjoyable. My eventual death has no bearing on it at all as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, the only moment in which you have direct control and could actually affect is the current one.
When Pinocchio made his wish, was “agency” all he wanted, or was there something more?
I have recently been envious of a neighbours bushes - they flowered uninterrupted for many months, all spring, summer and autumn. Fantastic sprays of cream and crimson blooms. Both beautiful and long-lasting, I would love to plant those over more temporally limited ones that only flower for a few days per year.
It is not the permanence that is unappealing about fake blooms, nor the brevity that makes flowers beautiful. To me anyway. Silk wallpaper with floral prints that has survived for hundreds of years in old British castles and country homes is no less beautiful for its age.
I’m not sure I see the relevance of your other points. I guess we see things very differently.
It isn’t obvious to me that that is given. An alternative would be that the breadth of parallel ideas would expand, more competition. There could then also be more depth because individuals behind groundbreaking ideas can build on their cognitive foundations for longer.
One major change, which it thibk would be a positive is that we will be directed to thibk more long term. With extreme life extension, the cosmos also becomes smaller because we could travel and explore space and time more extensively.
Our five year old self is already dead.
I don't think I would want a future immortal billionaire with access to accumulated generations of power to enter a new adolescence with the brain reset that comes along with it.
We need young people to be stupid and brash and occasionally fearless and brilliant and unburdened by the lessons (or scars) of the past to keep society moving forward but those can't be the same people in charge of the world. There are roles for both.
Because its the end of any worry, doubt, suffering, fear, uncertainty. Because its over. And youll be dead, so you wont be able to feel what youre missing out on.
The finality of death is a beautiful and comforting eventuality in my opinion.
Personally, I don’t want to die. There’s so much to do, see, and experience. One lifetime isn’t even close to enough, and that only got worse since I had children.
Perhaps this a personal view but I had conversations with elder people and most will tell you the same, a very long life (even a healthy one) is quite boring and depressing, you start to see the same patterns again and again, everything and everyone you loved dissappear and the essence of humanity doesn’t change. Same play, different actors and costumes.
> everything and everyone you loved disappear
Perhaps with immortality, there would be less of this?
Maybe I am just too young to understand the wisdom of the old people. I am almost 50, so in the optimistic case I might get the same amount of time again. That is definitely not enough to see all the things I want to see, try all the things I want to try, learn all the things I want to learn.
I imagine that when your health becomes shit, life sucks and you get tired of it. Good immortality should come with perfect (or at least average, from out current perspective) health. That includes mental health.
But if someone believes that he already understands everything and it's all just the same patterns over and over again... dude, where are all your Nobel prices? Maybe your life is boring because you don't try new things.
“Semantics” is simply “meaning”. If something has a different meaning, the equation no longer solves the same way.
If you feel defensive and want ways to put someone down, you can replace “semantics” with “sophism” or something like that.
> I'd rather live a few centuries than tell myself that.
But you can’t, can you? So might as well look into what life, death, and immortality might really be, beyond the naive and wrong intuitions we have picked up from fiction books about vampires.
Unless you believe in life after death (which I would not blame you for as many do, among scientists included), there is no span of time available to you in which you are not alive.