Hacker News Reader

Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

Due to these circumstances, I suspect that this having possible applications into life extension is a really good way to get funding for your research, because death is 100% certain, and a .0001% chance of evading it sounds so good to some people that you can just about write your own check. Agreed though, death can be terrifying, but the idea of immortality is flawed in more ways than one. Are you really the same person you were 10 years ago? 10 Months? Weeks? Days? Minutes? Seconds? What is it, other than one's own fragile ego, that people are trying to perpetuate into eternity? A few extra years is one thing, immortality sounds like a fool's paradise to me.

View on HN

> A few extra years is one thing, immortality sounds like a fool's paradise to me.

Feel free to pass on it then, assuming you'd actually make that decision if you really had the choice. That problem will naturally solve itself: the set of people still alive will trend towards 100% rejection of having a limited lifespan.

"Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, _died_, a generation before. [...] didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them." -- Cory Doctorow, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".

So you're going to volunteer for the sterilization and family-size controls necessary to make an indefinitely-living population feasible on a finite planet whose resources we're already overconsuming?

Or are you just full-on into the Google-executive mindset where you use life extension to live long enough to deliberately invoke every other Singularity/transhuman/futurist douchebag trope in the damn book and go sailing off to space to find more resources for your exponentially-expanding population to consume?

Those are obviously problems, but there are solutions. Among them, "everyone dies" is just about the shittiest. Yes, I would happily volunteer to be sterilized in exchange for living forever. In a heartbeat.

And you've already refrained from having children?

Then, ok, fair enough. The question is, how do you make that fully general so that our ecosystem doesn't collapse and kill the lot of us?

And then, how do you make the economics work out? Immortal transhumans need to eat, too, but once they get some kind of capital base going that expands faster than inflation, as long as they've got even the barest livable income, they'll eventually live long enough for their wealth to grow into "OWN EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE" levels.

And we thought today's asset bubbles were large!

Meanwhile, the young of the future will be even more screwed than we young are today, for precisely the same reasons but more so.

The thing is, none of these problems happen the instant we solve death (and "solving death" is not itself going to be instant). Life expectancy will increase, population will gradually increase with it, and we'll be able to see the problems we have to deal with as a result a very long way off.

It's similar to an argument people sometimes give me when I tell them I'm vegan, which goes along the lines of "If everyone suddenly became vegan, imagine what that would do to the world economy! How would we feed all of these people when our food producing infrastructure is animal based?"

And the reason I don't worry about that is that I know that scenario isn't going to happen. When people stop using animal products, which I think will happen - not for ethical reasons, but for economic reasons as cheaper, more authentic substitutes arise, and the sustainability of animal farming dwindles - it will not be an overnight process, and the world will have plenty of time to adjust.

It's basically the same with extreme longevity. We don't have to solve these problems with the tools we have today, because we don't even know when they will be problems that need solving. And we have no idea what tools will be available to us once we actually do have to solve those problems.

But if you flip the scenario around, and imagine that everyone already lives forever, and these problems start to show up, do you really think that anyone would even think to suggest "Let's have everyone die after around 70 years or so"? That idea would be grimly hilarious in a very Modest Proposal sort of way.

The problem is that the economic and ecological problems are problems we already have today, even before the application of any life-extension therapy more powerful than Good Old Fashioned Diet and Exercise.

Add me up.

Also, we are nowhere near being immortal and in many developed countries people already have stopped reproducing (Germany, Japan, Spain, etc)

> Yes, I would happily volunteer to be sterilized in exchange for living forever. In a heartbeat.

A world without kids and young people is a really, really sad state of affairs. I don't know and I don't care about what others would do, but I think I will just choose to end my own life rather than continue to live in such a dystopian future.

A couple things.

1. There wouldn't be zero kids and young people. Just not very many. The death rate will always be non-zero, and our ability to support new people will grow over time.

2. I get that no more children is a bummer, but I'm not really understanding how it is so awful that it could be described as "dystopian", much less something to kill yourself over. The world is vast and interesting, and children are just one neat facet of it.

In any case, I can see how it might work to give people a choice. If you'd rather die sooner and also have children, you could opt out of both the sterilization and the immortality.

The problems of an ageless population are not worth lining up and machine gunning 100,000 random humans per day with no regard to innocence or value.

And so neither are they worth permitting age to kill 100,000 random humans per day with no regard to innocence or value.

And what is your solution to not getting hit by a truck over an infinite period of time?

That's a technical problem, not a moral one.

More seriously, we could scan backups. Or we could live in the Matrix, not as meatbags plugged through the neck, but as programs –which could be backed up as well. (Don't ask me who gets to be root.)

It's funny, because Eli was making a moral argument, but I was not, yet that seems to be the default argument against immortality. I think you last question is actually close to what I was striking at - who is it that's immortal? What does it mean to be a consciousness freed from its humanity? I honestly am not sure that many people would end up being happy in such an arrangement, or necessarily actually survive in any sense as "themselves" for very long, despite the persistence of a body or simulant or whatever.

We should be able to do digital backups of a brain within the next century. If we can attach robotics directly to the spinal column and regrow dead / damaged neurons with stem cells, we can also put people in a literal brain in a jar robot, which would hopefully have the brain effectively reinforced (or better yet, just be a brain in a jar in a secure vault remote controlling an avatar robot).

Improving truck-exterior safety standards: deformable impact points, robot drivers. Combine that with environmental improvements - fewer places to get squished between a truck and arbitrary railings, say. And add medical improvements to the point where you'd have to splat a brain to get a sure kill. Safety standards that require a Culture-style life-support collar on all trucks.

All engineering. It's not good against infinite time, but it ought to make traffic fatalities rare and remarkable.

I think it's even simpler than that - if you are a billionaire life is pretty good, and the only thing that can get in your way is death so it's a natural place to want to invest - it's basically one of the only problems you have left!

I'm not a billionaire, but I love my life and death/ageing is one of the few real problems I have. I'd rather have billionaires thinking like me and investing their money in solving real problems than buying yachts and marrying/divorcing every year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com