Do you want to die?
Of course we will want to. I am sure there will be lots of side effects, but almost anything beats dying.
Of course we will want to. I am sure there will be lots of side effects, but almost anything beats dying.
IMHO this is the wrong question to ask. As long as you continue to age, and your body degrades, you'll eventually not object to dying any more, because living isn't much fun.
The much more interesting question is: do you want to age beyond a certain point?
I mean that I don't want my 4 year old to stop ageing, please :-)
So "stop ageing" is only good as long as we have some decent measure of control over it.
(I feel like I'm really stating the obvious here, but I don't know the whole discussion well enough to know if I can assume that obvious stuff is well-understood...)
Someone must have written sci-fi of this.
For me if a population of immortals means a population without children I'm not sure it's such a great idea. I'm concerned about intellectual, cultural and technological ossification and ultimately degeneration without a continually renewing population.
From a moral point of view, I don't buy the idea that death is something horrific to be avoided at all costs. Historically it's generally been accepted that there are things worth dying for, and countless throngs have sacrificed their lives, or at least willingly risked them, for causes they believed in. I'm specifically reminded of the case of a father a few years back that leaped in front of a lorry to push a child to safety, obviously knowing that he was sacrificing his own life to do so.
Human life is precious and valuable, but not infinitely so and it's not obvious to me that an existing life is necessarily more valuable than a potential new one. I don't expect it will be politicaly possible or desirable to suppress life extending treatments and I don't really have any idea how this will all play out, but for me it's not a foregone conclusion that a future in which it is normal to indefinitely extend life is an ideal one.
They had lots of children, overpopulation was not a problem because of huge habitats that hosted billions of individuals (and that were built with relative ease - The Player of Games). Also I don't agree with the intellectual degradation argument, it's just silly in the Culture AGI context.
Whatever the value of life I think it's best for the individual to decide what to do with it. Most would probably euthanasiate after a while anyway. I would very much prefer suicide than a random age related problem, but I don't really have a choice do I?
A brilliant short story by asminov also briefly touches living forever and running out of space as it were.