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Summary of pro death arguments re: longevity progress Fairness Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Better to give money to th

• djsumdog 10y ago
  For you Sci-Fi fans out there, I highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. In his fictional world, humans do discover how to extend longevity and it goes into many of the social issues that arise (who gets treatments? The rich? The poor? How do we deal with over population?).
  • AstralStorm 10y ago
    Dealing with overpopulation is best done the Elon Musk way - go to space, it is empty. A trip to Mars of three months in a lifetime of few hundred could be considered an interesting interlude.
  • gaius 10y ago
    But other than a couple of concepts, the books are excruciatingly bad. Without giving the plot away too much, his characters literally cure cancer, fix pollution, and invent an economic system that everyone in the world agrees is fair, in between taking loads of drugs and having loads of sex. It's wish fulfilment for 14-year-olds who are bored in science class. I'd give all 3 0 stars on Amazon if I could.
• ceejayoz 10y ago
  > Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Virtually every tech starts that way, though. The societal upheaval of rich people getting smartphones a few years earlier is probably not something you can extrapolate to the societal upheaval from "you could live forever but you don't have enough money right now".
  • naasking 10y ago
    > The societal upheaval of rich people getting smartphones a few years earlier is probably not something you can extrapolate to the societal upheaval from "you could live forever but you don't have enough money right now". I'm not sure that would happen. Consider that they have an eternity to pay it back -- or really, a few hundred years given everyone will likely experience at a fatal accident on such a long timeline. What person couldn't pay back an exceedingly high price on an installment plan lasting a few hundred years?
    • fapjacks 10y ago
      Oh, interesting. Like a whole new kind of financial indentured servitude that you can't even die your way out of.
      • EGreg 10y ago
        Look people, it's very simple. Many countries are currently addicted to population growth. Their mentality hasn't adjusted to the rise of automation and the decline of demand for human labor. They still think we need to keep high birth rates to fund social security schemes. What will happen in the next few decades is that fewer people will be needed to do anything really productive. More people will study and raise their kids. A smaller, richer population would be more sustainable when it comes to overfishing, overpolluting etc. We will turn the world into farms and hopefully plug all the holes that will result. Ecosystems will be much different with less variation, and humans will be trying to constantly keep the balance. It is in this environment that we place advances in longevity.
        • 10y ago
• andrewfelix 10y ago
  This is a bit of a straw man technique. You've framed the argument to suit your counterpoint.
  • HaveCourage 10y ago
    A straw man would be more something like "since no one has ever seen how badly immortal societies have gone, no one can say they're bad."
    • andrewfelix 10y ago
      From Wikipedia: "A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent." I'm probably what you would describe as 'pro-death'. But I would never have made any of the arguments you listed. I could just as easily frame your positions to suit my argument. For example; 'More people make more progress faster.' (India has not made as large a contribution to modern technology as the USA)
      • naasking 10y ago
        > For example; 'More people make more progress faster.' (India has not made as large a contribution to modern technology as the USA) Only if you take the statement as some immutable law and not the intended meaning as a description of a general trend.
• YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  Fairness Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Already, modern medicine expands lifetime and in particularly healthy lifetime significantly and the richer you are the more of it you can access. Like, I don't have the same chances to get to 70 and still feel alright as someone born today in Bangladesh, or Zambia. The world is already very unfair, and the only solution to that is to make it more fair, not to avoid developing treatments that, if the world was fair, would benfit everyone.
  • AstralStorm 10y ago
    Specifically, make the treatments cheap and scalable, then ignore IP.
    • gaius 10y ago
      Then you will have no new treatments, and be back to square one.
      • waterhouse 10y ago
        Adapting a suggestion that I've heard and haven't studied too closely: Find insurance companies that essentially bet that people won't die in the next N years, find very large companies of this sort or form some kind of aggregation of them, and make the case to them that if they spend a bunch of money funding the development of some treatments that work, then they will make a profit because their bets will turn out better.
        • hueving 10y ago
          These companies exist, they sell a product called life insurance...
          • waterhouse 10y ago
            Yes, I was referring to that. I'm just not aware of such companies doing large-scale funding of life extension research to increase profits. I suspect it could be done, just that you might need to aggregate a lot of insurance companies to make it profitable.
• anigbrowl 10y ago
  What fear is motivating me to ask other people to die, as you put it? Eternal life would be sort of cool but I dispute your proposition that more people automatically make more progress faster. More people increases competition which incentivizes some kinds of progress but arguably retards others - consider our lamentable record of environmental destruction. I don't think your aspirations are morally wrong in any way but your thesis seems unproven and I could just as easily argue that your efforts are primarily motivated by your own fear of death. Having had far more near-death experiences than most people I've met. I'm broadly OK with it because my experiences suggest to me that there's a lot more to consciousness than the everyday world, and that if and insofar as life has a purpose, it may be to reach some higher level of knowledge within finite constraints. I sometimes consider that life-as-we-know-it might be like some elaborated version of a book a film or a game (similar to but not the same as Bostrom's simulation argument). Would you enjoy a book or a movie that never ended? Obviously there's a market for such things based on the continued existence of daytime TV soap operas, but nobody seems to think those shows have much cultural value.
  • HaveCourage 10y ago
    You never step in the same river twice. If life gets too boring for you, remember the saying, cut down the tracks, not across the street. Might it be easier to cure boredom than decay? You need only become forgetful right? You wouldn't ask the restaurant to take items off the menu because you might not like them, would you?
    • AstralStorm 10y ago
      I would expect a great cultural and scientific renaissance because you could devote a lot more time to creative pursuits. Even if many people are too lazy, the few geniuses with much longer lifespans would turn the world over. An interesting side effect could be that public figures would become more careful, because if you're sunk, you'd be done forever. Plus the shift from old people retirement driven politics. Much bigger focus on handling employment.
      • 10y ago
• naasking 10y ago
  > Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) [...] Stop having kids This already happens. The more affluent a country becomes, with its better healthcare, better education, and greater career opportunity, the lower its birthrate. The big crisis in 50 years will be population decline.
  • kiba 10y ago
    Ending aging will reverse this trend. The crisis then won't be population decline but the side effect of population growth.
    • jacalata 10y ago
      Ending aging won't stop accidents, homicide, suicide or (probably) even most modern physical failures like diabetes and heart attacks.
      • AstralStorm 10y ago
        It might fix the latter. The mechanisms involved in heart disease and diabetes are related to general aging as well. Accidents and suicide could be handled too. Former by outlawing machines of murder (cars) and spare or artificial organs, latter by improving our understanding of neuroscience and psychology.
      • patall 10y ago
        yes and no. Aging research wont, but that does not mean other science stops. Traffic accidents are at all time lows (in comparison to the amount of traffic) and will continue to do so (via automated driving, imidiate ambulance dispatching, etc.), homicide as well (maybe not in US but certainly in europe), and depression is under active research like being partly caused by the microbiome etc. Nothing is endless but getting 600 years old would still change a lot.
    • Qwertious 10y ago
      There's a really simple solution to this: Have a cultural policy that what's normal/acceptable is to delay having children for quite a while, and then to have only one child per couple. One child per couple means that the total population caps out at double the current population (a population of 32 would have 16 children, who'd have 8, who'd have 4, who'd 2, then 1 person who's SOL - 32+16+8+4+2+1=63). A single order of magnitude is an acceptable loss, and everyone gets a child of their own. Note: Not as in "literally force people to have only one child", just make it frowned upon like smoking generally is - most people won't care enough to defy it, and in the long term it should be enough. Although IMO families like the Duggars[1] shouldn't be provided immortality unless they start using birth control. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_Kids_and_Counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_Kids_and_Counting
• copperx 10y ago
  So in a few decades there will be two camps: Pro-Death and Pro-Lifers?
• closeparen 10y ago
  How about: bad ideas get to remain in power for much longer, because the generations of administrators/voters/executives that enforce them don't turn over. Death ensures adaptation. For example, climate change denying oil barons have done much damage to the world, but we can take some comfort in the knowledge that they will soon die (or at least retire) and that their successors will probably be a little more enlightened. It may be too late by then, but at least it will happen. >Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant) One resource we are running out of is housing in economically productive areas, and it's not for lack of ingenuity, but by choice. The choice of the established, whose grip on power you propose to extend. Similarly, there is plenty of food to go around, just not enough value to trade for it in some parts of the world. What we're missing is not farming methods, but economic systems and power structures to implement then. >You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear The currently powerful, propertied generation is in a position to hold onto that power and property forever, via compound interest and seniority. If the current crop of 60-year-olds gets to be 600, the age of majority for voting will be 540 by the time they get there. And we will never outspend them on anything; even 20 years is a significant head start on saving and investing. If they continue in their policies of environmental destruction and the monopolization of critical resources, like the underdevelopment of city land on aesthetic grounds, then we might not just be asking them to die, but going to war to claim those resources (and the helms of government, business, etc) for the young, to manage in different ways. Not to get too bogged down in the specifics of particular issues, but age-related death does ensure a peaceful transition of power towards people more concerned with the present era's challenges and realities, rather than trying to, i.e., save the jobs of the last century or the sexual morality of the one before it. Maybe age doesn't come to them soon enough to prevent the damage, but it does mitigate it.
  • gaius 10y ago
    How about: bad ideas get to remain in power for much longer, because the generations of administrators/voters/executives that enforce them don't turn over. But also: you can have people with literally double or more experience, working on your hard problems. You also have a government that will look out much further into the future, because they will see the outcomes themselves.