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Comment by TheSisb2 | Hacker News Reader

Allowing people to live indefinitely/much longer than currently won't make the world a better place. Children humble and ground adults. Younger brains are more malleable and young people carry newer gene evolutions. Our species would halt exactly where we are, ignorance would never vanish, our species would stop adapting.

80 year old racists would be 200 year old racists.

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Or people would live long enough to grow wiser... realize the errors of their ways.

People might start caring about their communities if they knew they had to deal with it 200 years from now.

Imagine politicians being accountable for their decisions, or relaxing the pressure that women are under to reproduce before they are 30. Mastering aging would allow the human race to significantly rise about our natural apeish behaviour that has to be unlearned through education during adolescents.

Hmm, but isn't the cliche that people with more future ahead of them live more recklessly, take more things for granted, "waste" more time, etc – that "what really counts in life" becomes especially apparent when some threat instills a sense of urgency?

People might stop caring about their communities because of a prolonged phase of youthful self-centeredness and a lack of any urgency?

Children make adults self-entitled. Younger brains are stupider, and prone to cruelty before they learn compassion. The tyranny of youth prevents us from ever maturing as a species, having to relearn the same lessons over and over again. If we could stop wasting our time with the inefficiency of use, perhaps we could finally start adapting and conquer our own flaws.

Our natural evolution was mostly halted in the past century. Humans take too long to develop and probably don't have enough lifetime to put that education to good use (imagine einstein living 50 more years). There are technologies being developed to make old minds think like young.

So, supposing for the sake of argument that scientists had discovered a way to allow humans to live healthily and happily until the age 200, how would your position change? Surely you wouldn't want to murder everyone at the arbitrary age of 80, because those eighty-year-olds are so darn 'ignorant' and incapable of change?

From there I ask: how great or small is the moral difference between preventing such technologies from coming to fruition, and killing people off once those technologies have been developed?

Antibiotics are a Good Thing. So is having doctors wash their hands. If we can use science to buy some more time for humans to live, all the better. I know it's hard to believe, but maybe not having people literally lose their minds and decay to the point of death between ages 70-100 would be kind of nice.

People here don't care about the future, they just want to live forever. They think they are the end-all-be-all of life, that after them nobody younger needs be born.

>"People here don't care about the future, they just want to live forever."

Living forever is caring about the future. Just not caring about the future in the way you deem "right", or "true".

Also, wanting to live forever has nothing at all do with the birth, nor does it mean that birth can't occur anymore. How about you leave your doomsday straw-man out of this, please.

Well, if we really discover a way to live indefinitely, we will surely have to care about the future way more than we do know, since we will have to live in it.

Countries like Japan have more deaths than births. The more advanced a society is, the closer the ratio of births/deaths is, so I'm not that worried.

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