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Comment by nxc18 | Hacker News Reader

Do you not want other people to die and be replaced?

How can you want for other people what you don't want for yourself? Why should other people die, for example of cancer, when having the chance I'll opt for the cure?

I don’t want to live longer than a natural human lifespan. When I was younger and immature I did, but I’ve outgrown that. Death is as natural a part of life as birth.

Perhaps I will mature enough to appreciate death if I'm given a few hundred, or a few thousand, years to think on it. For now, I stand firm in my conviction that death is bad in the general case.

I assure you it can happen as young as thirty. Or you can desperately cling to life until it is ripped away forcefully, leaving you in a panic.

I think early death is bad in the general case.

What is an early death?

Life expectancy has changed a lot. In 1900 the life expectancy was around 40. A while before that it was 30. What will it be if we cure cancer, alzheimers, dementia, heart disease (the main killers of "old age")?

This sounds like you've just accepted that death is inevitable and you might as well not fight it, which is fair, but that's quite different from not wanting to live longer if the opportunity was available.

The question is not if you want to live longer. It's "when you'll get cancer, will you refuse the cure to get rid of it"? And when you'll be old and frail and full of aches, will you refuse medicines to make your mind sharper and your body stronger? And when you'll be a strong, healthy and sharp 95 yo, will you choose euthanasia because you've reached the natural human lifespan?

This is just copium. On your deathbed, offered the chance to live another decade with the vitality of your 20s alongside your loved ones, you almost certainly would not say this unless you were actually just suicidal.

I don't have kids. I have not caused a need for me to die to make room or to be "replaced" (though "overpopulation" arguments are often eugenicist and/or racist propaganda, and don't engage with actual density/agricultural limits, so I'm hesitant to make any arguments based on whether there is room for people to not die).

Obviously not? What an insane question

You would like Trump and Biden and their generation of leadership to be in power for the next 200 years? You would like for there to never be a disruptive new generation of people bringing fresh ideas and fresh thinking ever again? You wish to be encumbered by 17th century thinking and ideas for the rest of eternity because those people never died and grew set in their ways?

Do we really need 8 billion people to die to keep a few dozen out of power? Surely we can come up with some alternatives? Just spit balling, but I've heard of something called "term limits", which, as far as I know, does not require mass death.

a) I don't want any of those things b) I don't understand why you think those things are necessary consequences of people living much longer c) Even if they were, I don't want 'fresh ideas' so much that I am willing to sacrifice billions of lives for them

> I don't understand why you think those things are necessary consequences of people living much longer

You’ve seen the consequences already of people routinely living into their late 80s and you think adding a few hundred years would make that better?

Yes, people should grow old and die.

do these other people have a fertility rate of at least 2.1?

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