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Comment by gazrogers | Hacker News Reader

I don't want immortality. And I'd suggest that anyone that does has not properly considered the consequences.

That's a pretty "square headed" way to put it :) Ok, some do, some don't. The "has not properly considered the consequences" is a bad argument for anything. You can say that people shouldn't have developed the atom bomb or chemical or bio warfare agents because "they haven't properly considered the consequences". I for one am glad that the atom bomb and other "horrible things" have been invented, weird as this may seem. Your perspective on life and everything really changes when you stop thinking in terms of "right" or "wrong" or of there being a difference between them, and just think in terms of "going further, no matter where this takes you" - I think that even the darkest corners of whatever "hell" you imagine are worth exploring. Just try thinking like this and see what you can see from this pov. - you'll never be the same again, trust me :) Death just limits the possibility of what one can explore and I believe all limits should be destroyed - but if you want the limit, you can have it for yourself, nobody will force you to live forever. The argument would be that one should have a choice of when it happens.

I like Nitzsche's take on immortality: "One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive." - I would actually love to be able to have this experience, no matter how terrible it seems to some (think about it: your self now is no longer your self from 20 years ago, this older self of you has, in a way, already died... If I'd live to be 1000 years old, an infinity of my older selfs would be already dead and maybe I won't really have any "real memory" of them anymore, except in an "archive" stored somewhere, that I could choose to "browse" if I ever wished to do so. In a way it would be like dying forever, but I would choose this over anything else, at least over "anything" that I've thought of so far.) ...I can't believe I've bothered to answer to this ...no back to work, back to trying to blow up some other "limits" :)

If people's lifespan was no longer determined by their body succumbing to the ageing process, they would still be able to die by other means. The population would explode (even more than it currently is) because far fewer people were dying and most people were still having sex and creating more immortals. At some future point (probably not too far away) there would not be enough food on the planet to sustain the lives of all the people living on it. This would lead to mass starvation and/or world wars over land to grow food.

Unless our research into creating immortals also throws up a way for us to photosynthesize, it's really not worth it. Far better, I think, to accept that our time on this earth is limited, and to make the most of what time we have. :-)

Tackle one problem at a time. For one, we may be able to photosynthetise, we just need to create tools for that, and that's what humanity is good at. If not, there are other venues for dealing with overpopulation: population control, out of planet migration... Sci Fi novels have approached this problem for ages.

Even assuming infinite ingenuity in humankind, our lifespan will still be limited by the lifespan of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics is not going to be broken no matter how clever we are. :-)

But then the timescale and physical extent of the universe are conditions of such magnitude that tackling the problem is the poster child of premature optimization.

...not resisting the temptation (deleted my other com because it pushed things in a whole wrong direction...): second law of thermodynamics applies to a finite closed system. We know incredibly little about the universe, it may very well be infinite (not just as "time and space" but also as matter and also as complexity of matter - yep I even accept the fact that there may be no fundamental particles, just infinite complexity somehow "simulating" order at our level, and this leads to the fact that we don't really know how little energy do you need to sustain human-type intelligence and it may be very, very little actually) and the "universe" may very well contain "gateways" that inject or subtract energy from our own to other infinite or finite universes - our primitive astronomy neither proves nor disproves anything. Oh, then there's the complicated problem with mathematics and logic - you can't really use the latter as a sound base to explain all of the former according to some so you might have all sorts of interesting consequences like "infinity of logic" or "mathematics" itself - the kind of problems that you can't even dream to tackle when limited to a human lifespan and a human body or brain... The fact is we are incredibly small and stupid at the scale of the universe! The point in living more is the pleasure of discovering more, always more - the pure and beautiful greed and hunger for more and more life, knowledge and power, the hunger that fuels everything.

And the second law of thermodynamics itself... well, we don't have "general" definitions for neither lifer nor consciousness so the truth is we have no freaking idea how something like the second law connects to anything about us. Then again the universe is so big that by the time we think our offspring will have to ask themselves these question in order to survive, they will probably even laugh at our primitive minds and the stupid questions they asked.

EDIT: some intellectual hard drugs for those that find it hard to "believe in the future": http://thisisjasonsilva.com/ - nobody expresses my view better than this kid.

Your reasoning is quite weird to me. First you mention the atom bomb as something good, that you are happy with. Then you say that you "should" have a choice of when to die, almost like that's a moral imperative?

Who says you should be able to choose when to die, while not wanting to extend that choice to the inhabitants of Hiroshima?

I'm guessing that you haven't experienced much of a hell. Have you even traveled to places outside of the Western world? I've met Hiroshima survivors, let them tell you about hell.

Yeah, I tried to see things from your POV. I didn't like it -- I felt too much like a Sith lord.

The atom bomb had large positive effects on world conflicts. Suddenly, the threat of mutual annihilation made large wars unattractive. You may thank the atom bomb for the absence of world War III.

If WW3 comes to pass, then WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones (Einstein said it, in different words)

That's definitely one side of it. There are also enormous amounts of bombs which were not too sure what to do with, which worries me.

Btw, I don't interpret Einstein's quote as support of the atom bomb (I'm not saying that you are. Just wanted to make that clear).

The Einstein reference was actually to preserve the notion that atom bombs have a hugely negative side, even if they had positive effects so far.

Thanks for the clarification. Yeah, the thing is that it's seventy years since the last time, but there is so much longer time left.

We need to change our ways.

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