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Comment by cannonpr | Hacker News Reader

I want to live forever. That doesn't mean I want to remain static and unchanging or to stagnate. I want death through change, not because my mind collapses due to biological causes. If I ever stagnate, that's a form of death, and I bet sooner or later I'll choose to check out, or become irrelevant enough for society and my peers to check me out, directly or indirectly, through social exclusion.

I strongly resent those who try to tell me what's best for me or predict what will happen if I live a long time. If you think death within 40-90 years is best for you, choose that path, stop trying to validate your life philosophy by imposing it on others and leave the rest of us alone to develop technology and strive for something more than what we are today.

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Agreed. The amount of people trying to tell that dying is the right way of life is baffling. Vast majority of natural deaths arent graceful, they often are quite painful and ugly. If we develop means to at least extend the average -healthy- lifespan that would be a great achievement by itself.

> The amount of people trying to tell that dying is the right way of life is baffling. Vast majority of natural deaths arent graceful, they often are quite painful and ugly

Both statements are true, but they are not necessarily causally related. _Even if_ all natural deaths were graceful, painless, and beautiful, it would still be a horrific senseless tragedy that "lives have to end"

Somehow, people in real life are pretty capable of recognizing why arguments based around what others think is "natural" are completely useless - yet this is ignored completely in discussions of prolonging people's lives. Suddenly, the natural is all that matters. And here, natural means "precisely the current status quo" - no one's eager to return to the life expectancy of the past.

I was thinking of this book

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Enough-Love-Robert-Heinlein-eboo...

which paints a vivid picture of what somebody might do with a few centuries. It's one of the last books that my evil twin checked out from the library that I haven't returned yet.

Is anyone actually trying to stop you or others from developing the technology? IMO just ignore the haters doesn't sound like they can really do anything

While I agree with the "live and let live" (or perhaps "die and let live") spirit of your latter paragraph, it does not address one of the more vivid arguments against your position: that the vast network of machinery with which you propose to extend your own life may itself be a formidable threat to the long-term viability of life on this planet

So generally speaking I don’t think extending life will take much resources once we figure out the biochemistry of it. If it does and that deprives others of their enjoyment of life, sure I get it, I will just work to make life extension cheaper. However frankly consumerism and an addiction to travel and tourism eats up a lot more resources than the research and production of high tech biotech etc. If we end up with too much population, well I ask for nothing more than that my life is valued as much as the life of a baby, so long as I remain useful to society, don’t value someone’s right to have a child, more than my right to continue to live.

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