And imagine how wise he would be now if still alive. Fight Aging.
Insofar as death is oblivion, the destruction of the self, it is rational to be unconcerned about being dead. You won't exist to have feelings on the matter - which is exactly the same situation as for all time prior to the point in your development at which you like to think that you became yourself.
Equally, it is rational to be very concerned about being dead at some point in the future. Humans are creatures of action. We like to achieve, observe, and experience. We place value upon these things, and death will stop us from gathering that value.
So the world of people might be divided at any point in time into (a) the group that is horrified by the prospect of oblivion, and (b) the group that is unbothered by personal extinction. It's a very sharp dividing line, not often explored in casual conversation, for all that one person's views might cross back and forth between camps over the years. Try a poll of the folk you know at some point in time: I think you'll find the results interesting.
Whatever your opinions on oblivion, however, it seems near universally agreed that the process of becoming dead is something to be feared - so much so that we work to hide the ugly reality from daily life, we put it from our mind, and we even rise up in anger to confront those trying to do something about it by fighting aging through the development of new medicine.
Terrible pain, injury, and degeneration are not on anyone's wish list. But we'll all be receiving these dubious gifts anyway - unless something is done about it. The difference between our age and the age of the Greek stoics is that we have the chance to do something about it: defeat aging by repairing its damage, improve our biochemistry, and ultimately replace our bodies with superior technology that is immune to all that plagues us now.
But that's the rub, right? When we have shuffled off this mortal coil...
Old men should die, their children should be allowed a tilt at creating a better future for themselves.
I think children's ability to internalize a world system is possibly an advantage now given that the world of now is sharply different from the world of the 1970's when I grew up. When they come to formulate new ideas about how to run things they may have a much more solid grasp of reality than the view of our generation.
From an evolutionary fitness standpoint people who stop thinking are not likely to live very long so there would be pressure toward plasticity.
Equating the natural order of the world and universe (the old die, entropy increases, things change) with genocide is not a good thing to do. Genocide is the knowing murder of a race or group; the death of the old is the order of the universe.
One observes a current state of the world; the other implies that you value your concept of "natural" and "change" more than you value every living human.
Writing "people should die" and then "surprised I'm being down-voted for this one" ... is weird.
Do you still think old men should die? Then they have to be killed. Do you not? Then why should they die in this world?
Your ultimate values shouldn't change depending on the challenges that the universe throws at you. If people shouldn't die, and the universe says that they shall, well, the universe is a cold and uncaring place and it's our job to make it better.
Also, "I guess that mortality is something people struggle with" is kind of a condescending thing to say. Like, "you're downvoting me because you're not mature enough to understand the things that I understand".
Not only that, do you think they should die not by being humanely euthanized when they hit MAX_AGE, but by releasing a disease that slowly cripples everyone's body and mind over the course of several decades?
Death is bad, but at least one can make the case that a person doesn't suffer after they're dead. Aging is terrible for everyone.
If the option was to enjoy (say) 130 years of middle age life followed by a sudden painless and invariably fatal brain seizure then I would agree that would be better than the current slide into a nightmare.
No
And I doubt that it would cause a population explosion either. The only countries that have a low enough non-aging-related mortality rate tend to be the countries that have a birthrate below replacement anyways.
Remember, ~2.1cpw is replacement rate. Even with no deaths, you'd need 2.0cpw for replacement rate. That's not a large variation.
So I think innovation and progress requires turnover, fair enough. I also don't believe that "current human society" is necessarily any better at decision making than "Middle Ages society", so I wouldn't think that humankind is now equipped to deal with immortality.
So yeah, I guess I'm saying that old men should die. I wish it weren't awful as it so often is, and I wish that maybe it were a bit longer, but there it is.
* also fair to question the assumption of historical "progress"; I'm not sure but humans weren't better off as hunter-gatherers than what I fear our future could become.
Let's apply that test. The old do not die (of old age) instead they live on, and what happens?
Does the world reach a new nirvana? Does peace reign? Or do things go on as they are now? If we're such a hot bunch where are the solutions for the wars that are currently pumping the news cycle?
Lay them on the page and I will listen and believe me, I will change my mind.
That's just what we have on our plate now, think on to the future. When society faces new challenges where will the new thought (and thinkers) come from to meet them?
But forget the questions and the species preserving game theory. The moral issue is that getting rid of ageing and installing a gerontocracy is selfish and penalizes all subsequent generations, actual and imagined, either through snuffing them out, or by subduing them and taking their chances from them.
I can live with a cold and uncaring universe, that's just the way it is (if you take the view that we count for anything on the scale of the Universe and anthropomorphizing something that we have neither the perception or cognition to form a proper understanding of). But, human arrogance (for example, imagining that human agents might be able to change the aforementioned non anthropomorphic, non perceptable, non cognitively encompassed universe) and overweening selfishness (ie. all future children count for nothing) is something I think is a matter of choice and something that anyone wise enough to merit living forever will be able to opt out of.
And here is the answer to the conundrum of let's kill the old. If we as a species have the intrinsic merit to live forever we will opt out of doing so to make way for our children. If we don't merit this then there will be no death camps and euthanasia programs, just nuclear war, famine, environmental collapse and all the rest of it.
But if you think that in the world where people don't die of old age, we should kill them ourselves - I want you to come right out and say it. I won't tell you that you're wrong.
But you don't get to hide behind "the natural order of the universe". That's not how ethics works.
If we should let people die in this world, we should kill them in that one. If we should let people live in that world, we should try to save them in this.
> human arrogance (for example, imagining that human agents might be able to change the aforementioned non anthropomorphic, non perceptable, non cognitively encompassed universe)
This just strikes me as bullshit. What are you saying we can't do, exactly? In one sense, we can't change the universe: the laws of physics are constant and inviolable. And yet we went to the moon.
But eliminating aging wouldn't be changing the universe in that sense, any more than eliminating smallpox was. Was that arrogance? Was it bad to mess with the natural order of the universe like that?
To the contrary, everything you are and believe depends entirely on the peculiarities of the universe we live in. To claim that you have a higher moral compass than that is like a brain in a vat talking about the weather outside the vat maintenance facility.