6 ms·

Probably no better chance for humanity to transcend its current perennial state of warfare and short term thinking than to make people live for a few centuries.

Probably no better chance for humanity to transcend its current perennial state of warfare and short term thinking than to make people live for a few centuries. Imagine a world where life is precious and they have to live with the consequences of their choices rather than having the next generation deal with their decisions.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
M_Grey 10y ago
By the same token, humanity hasn't changed so much that the rich and powerful don't eventually realize the terror of their mortality, and desperately try to buy their way out of it. While it's always possible that this will be the generation to discover the Philosopher's Stone, there is no real indication that's the case. I wish I could agree with your rosy outlook, but my view of a realistic form of immortality is in line with Richard K. Morgan's vis a vis 'Altered Carbon'. People keep looking for a technology to change us as humans, but we're going to have to do it ourselves, and soon, or die. Technology doesn't change our nature, it just empowers us to act more freely on it.
- BadassFractal 10y ago
  At the end of the day the impetus behind the desire to extend life doesn't matter. If the outcome is that we are around for centuries at a time, we all win as a species. It's a bit idealistic but it would be wonderful to have truly wise people in power who have to care about the long term for once, even if at first not all of the masses get to live much longer. Right now life is so short that by the time you barely start getting a grasp of what's going on, it's already time to go.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    That's true, but nothing on the horizon is changing that for us in our lifetimes, no matter how desperately we wish for something else. Meanwhile problems with solutions do exist, which could enable our species to be around and civilized for long enough to eventually reach that dream. Our current course ends in death, not immortality.
    - BadassFractal 10y ago
      Well, not with that attitude.
      - M_Grey 10y ago
        Believe it or not, a positive attitude isn't the magic ingredient to immortality, any more than a lack of skepticism helps a psychic work better. Science is a beautiful edifice, in part because it works in spite of attitude and expectation. The world can laugh at you while you putter away in your shed, but if you can fly at the end of the day, you're going down in history. The only thing that needs a positive attitude and a suspension of disbelief is fraud.
        JoshTriplett 10y ago
        Suspension of disbelief doesn't make science go better, but science that doesn't get popular support or widespread credibility doesn't get funded as readily, or accepted as quickly, or treated as urgent. And an excess of incredulity can become fear and rejection. 150,000 people die every day. That's bigger than a moderate-sized city. That's not a problem to casually get around to maybe thinking about in the perpetual "a few years from now but really never"; that's a problem we should be devoting a substantial part of our total resources to.
        nradov 10y ago
        Why? There's no reason other than wishful thinking to expect that devoting substantially more resources would actually deliver significant life extension.
        JoshTriplett 10y ago
        There are many such reasons to expect that research would produce good results, including past research that already has, and ongoing research that continues to.
  - tomc1985 10y ago
    How would everyone win? Not having deaths to offset birth grows the population even faster. Unless such a thing were more likely to produce people capable of solving humanity's imminent crises, within a decade or two you'd see life getting a lot worse if immortality went mainstream
    - BadassFractal 10y ago
      Assuming quality of life is high enough for most of the world, births will automatically adjust themselves. If you know you have a couple of centuries to decide whether you want a kid or not, you don't have to rush into it, you have options.
      - larsiusprime 10y ago
        I'm a bit skeptical that the human sex drive is going to automatically adjust itself downwards at the same rate as the death rate suddenly plunging, even with modern contraception.
      - foobarchu 10y ago
        People don't rush into it because they're worried about time, they rush into because: - its an accident - they want some sort of benefit, e.g. farm help or gov assistants - biological urges Making people immortal wouldn't affect any of those. Which do you think is worse for the poor who tend to rush into kids: a lifetime of poverty, or an eternity of it?
        BadassFractal 10y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348
        tomc1985 10y ago
        Nevermind that it feels good?
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >It's a bit idealistic but it would be wonderful to have truly wise people in power who have to care about the long term for once No it's not. Idealistic is to have the masses wise and involved enough to get rid of persistent leader-castes. This sort of getting-rid is likely to happen quite soon, especially if we in the masses hear that the leader-caste are likely to become immortal while we remain subject to the Reaper.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Old people can be wise (i.e. experienced) but they also become conservative and rigid. Youth is what drives change and when people do their best work. Old people need to get out of the way at some point.
    - Rapzid 10y ago
      And unfortunately they are back in power now in the US. Prime example IMHO. Both Trump and Clinton were like giving the AARP the reigns. Now it's like the old boy's club is having one last run at managing our country. After the 40-something Obama from 2008 it really feels like a step backwards. Wise? How far has these people's thinking evolved from their 30's or 40's? How "wise" was our country back then? It's morbid to say it but I have no reservations in admitting that I(and I'll throw out there most others I know) am looking forward to these people "moving on". And by "moving on" I mean dying and getting out of the way.
      - Arizhel 10y ago
        The thing is, if you don't like the old people and they way they govern, you're free to not elect them. They're only "in the way" because stupid voters elect them. On top of that, we had an extremely progressive candidate running; his name was "Bernie", and he was older than both Hillary and Donald. He was far more progressive than "young" Obama, and he was also very popular with the youngest voters. You don't have to be young to be popular with young people, and think in idealistic ways like younger people. I don't want to see these people die of old age; I'd rather keep great old people like Bernie around. If the people of our country are so stupid that they keep electing people like Hillary and Trump and rejecting people like Bernie, then they deserve that kind of governance.
    - BadassFractal 10y ago
      Unfortunately young people also sign up for many unfortunate causes because they have no historical perspective, nor do they understand how subtle and not black-and-white real life can be. Young people aren't a panacea and there absolutely is such a thing as a wise but also modern older leader.
    - 10y ago
ekianjo 10y ago
> Imagine a world where life is precious We are in a world that has stretched overall life expectancy by dozens of years already in the past 100 years. Humans have not changed THAT much for it.
- BadassFractal 10y ago
  Life expectancy has changed in the sense that fewer people die to do preventable causes such as childbirth, bacteria, viruses etc, not that our life span has increased in any significant way: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/life-expectancy-myth-and-why-many-ancient-humans-lived-long-077889 http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/...
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    better nutrition and hygiene, and generally lower alcohol and tobacco consumption (in the West anyway) have slightly extended the total lifespan for people who don't die early of accidental or pathogenic deaths. however, you're still absolutely right that senescence is inevitable and we have very little, besides nutrition and exercise, that can do anything about it.
closeparen 10y ago
Look at the values of the people who ruled a mere hundred years ago. It's a damn good thing for "savages," women, LGBT folks, etc. that ruling classes, no matter how authoritarian, eventually abdicate by dying and that the next generation views the world a little differently. Could you imagine being governed the way that your 500-year-old elders deem fitting? We wouldn't need violent extremists to try to reimpose 16th century public morals. They would simply never have left. To support this, you have to believe we are perfect now, that there are no more controverises between the young and the old that the young need to win. Otherwise, this is one of those moments where society pulls up the drawbridge, comes full circle. We'll have leaned so far into science and technology that the next time the elders cry "Witchcraft!" they will never go away.
- BadassFractal 10y ago
  Suppose I could imagine being ruled by people from a couple of millenia ago when homosexuality was normal. Morality progresses and regresses all the time, unfortunately it is not guaranteed to go in the "right" direction either way. See what happened to same sex relationships in Western history. There were plenty of young folks who deemed it to be worth killing for at one point. Unfortunately the young are much more likely to give in to the latest moral fashions and mob mentality than they are to do a fully informed historical evaluation of the current state of morality.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    My current belief is that morality is indirectly related to the progress of technology, by being directly related to the stability and wealth of the society. Basically, when most people aren't afraid of going hungry or getting invaded by their neighbours, they suddenly have time to discuss issues like homosexuality and generally relax the social norms that in the past were necessary for survival (by maintaining group cohesion).
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > It's a damn good thing for "savages," women, LGBT folks, etc When will religion die out? In time to save the religious from persecution?
Terr_ 10y ago
That could easily backfire if the problem is a matter of nature, rather than nurture. Cycles of vengeance wouldn't burn themselves out. > "How fortunate that science hasn't cracked human immortality. It's a great blessing that we can outlive old wars. And old warriors." -- Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold
SkyMarshal 10y ago
"When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable." The human race is like a giant fuzzing machine, we just try everything, push every boundary, bad and good, and see what happens. But, our lives are too short for the lessons to last very long, and we repeat our mistakes relatively frequently. We try to encode some of the lessons into social structures, from religion to literature to law, to pass onto future generations. But I can't help but wonder how things would be in this regard if we all just lived an order of magnitude longer. Less war? Fewer financial collapses? I also wonder if less innovation too, but I imagine if the great inventors of our time lived 10x longer we'd get more rather than less, given that it takes an increasingly large portion of a lifetime to learn enough of our growing body of scientific knowledge to be able to make real contributions to it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

M_Grey 10y ago

By the same token, humanity hasn't changed so much that the rich and powerful don't eventually realize the terror of their mortality, and desperately try to buy their way out of it. While it's always possible that this will be the generation to discover the Philosopher's Stone, there is no real indication that's the case. I wish I could agree with your rosy outlook, but my view of a realistic form of immortality is in line with Richard K. Morgan's vis a vis 'Altered Carbon'. People keep looking for a technology to change us as humans, but we're going to have to do it ourselves, and soon, or die. Technology doesn't change our nature, it just empowers us to act more freely on it.

BadassFractal 10y ago
At the end of the day the impetus behind the desire to extend life doesn't matter. If the outcome is that we are around for centuries at a time, we all win as a species. It's a bit idealistic but it would be wonderful to have truly wise people in power who have to care about the long term for once, even if at first not all of the masses get to live much longer. Right now life is so short that by the time you barely start getting a grasp of what's going on, it's already time to go.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  That's true, but nothing on the horizon is changing that for us in our lifetimes, no matter how desperately we wish for something else. Meanwhile problems with solutions do exist, which could enable our species to be around and civilized for long enough to eventually reach that dream. Our current course ends in death, not immortality.
  - BadassFractal 10y ago
    Well, not with that attitude.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      Believe it or not, a positive attitude isn't the magic ingredient to immortality, any more than a lack of skepticism helps a psychic work better. Science is a beautiful edifice, in part because it works in spite of attitude and expectation. The world can laugh at you while you putter away in your shed, but if you can fly at the end of the day, you're going down in history. The only thing that needs a positive attitude and a suspension of disbelief is fraud.
      - JoshTriplett 10y ago
        Suspension of disbelief doesn't make science go better, but science that doesn't get popular support or widespread credibility doesn't get funded as readily, or accepted as quickly, or treated as urgent. And an excess of incredulity can become fear and rejection. 150,000 people die every day. That's bigger than a moderate-sized city. That's not a problem to casually get around to maybe thinking about in the perpetual "a few years from now but really never"; that's a problem we should be devoting a substantial part of our total resources to.
        nradov 10y ago
        Why? There's no reason other than wishful thinking to expect that devoting substantially more resources would actually deliver significant life extension.
        JoshTriplett 10y ago
        There are many such reasons to expect that research would produce good results, including past research that already has, and ongoing research that continues to.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  How would everyone win? Not having deaths to offset birth grows the population even faster. Unless such a thing were more likely to produce people capable of solving humanity's imminent crises, within a decade or two you'd see life getting a lot worse if immortality went mainstream
  - BadassFractal 10y ago
    Assuming quality of life is high enough for most of the world, births will automatically adjust themselves. If you know you have a couple of centuries to decide whether you want a kid or not, you don't have to rush into it, you have options.
    - larsiusprime 10y ago
      I'm a bit skeptical that the human sex drive is going to automatically adjust itself downwards at the same rate as the death rate suddenly plunging, even with modern contraception.
    - foobarchu 10y ago
      People don't rush into it because they're worried about time, they rush into because: - its an accident - they want some sort of benefit, e.g. farm help or gov assistants - biological urges Making people immortal wouldn't affect any of those. Which do you think is worse for the poor who tend to rush into kids: a lifetime of poverty, or an eternity of it?
      - BadassFractal 10y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348
      - tomc1985 10y ago
        Nevermind that it feels good?
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >It's a bit idealistic but it would be wonderful to have truly wise people in power who have to care about the long term for once No it's not. Idealistic is to have the masses wise and involved enough to get rid of persistent leader-castes. This sort of getting-rid is likely to happen quite soon, especially if we in the masses hear that the leader-caste are likely to become immortal while we remain subject to the Reaper.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Old people can be wise (i.e. experienced) but they also become conservative and rigid. Youth is what drives change and when people do their best work. Old people need to get out of the way at some point.
  - Rapzid 10y ago
    And unfortunately they are back in power now in the US. Prime example IMHO. Both Trump and Clinton were like giving the AARP the reigns. Now it's like the old boy's club is having one last run at managing our country. After the 40-something Obama from 2008 it really feels like a step backwards. Wise? How far has these people's thinking evolved from their 30's or 40's? How "wise" was our country back then? It's morbid to say it but I have no reservations in admitting that I(and I'll throw out there most others I know) am looking forward to these people "moving on". And by "moving on" I mean dying and getting out of the way.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      The thing is, if you don't like the old people and they way they govern, you're free to not elect them. They're only "in the way" because stupid voters elect them. On top of that, we had an extremely progressive candidate running; his name was "Bernie", and he was older than both Hillary and Donald. He was far more progressive than "young" Obama, and he was also very popular with the youngest voters. You don't have to be young to be popular with young people, and think in idealistic ways like younger people. I don't want to see these people die of old age; I'd rather keep great old people like Bernie around. If the people of our country are so stupid that they keep electing people like Hillary and Trump and rejecting people like Bernie, then they deserve that kind of governance.
  - BadassFractal 10y ago
    Unfortunately young people also sign up for many unfortunate causes because they have no historical perspective, nor do they understand how subtle and not black-and-white real life can be. Young people aren't a panacea and there absolutely is such a thing as a wise but also modern older leader.
  - 10y ago

ekianjo 10y ago

> Imagine a world where life is precious We are in a world that has stretched overall life expectancy by dozens of years already in the past 100 years. Humans have not changed THAT much for it.

BadassFractal 10y ago
Life expectancy has changed in the sense that fewer people die to do preventable causes such as childbirth, bacteria, viruses etc, not that our life span has increased in any significant way: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/life-expectancy-myth-and-why-many-ancient-humans-lived-long-077889 http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/...
- metaphorm 10y ago
  better nutrition and hygiene, and generally lower alcohol and tobacco consumption (in the West anyway) have slightly extended the total lifespan for people who don't die early of accidental or pathogenic deaths. however, you're still absolutely right that senescence is inevitable and we have very little, besides nutrition and exercise, that can do anything about it.

closeparen 10y ago

Look at the values of the people who ruled a mere hundred years ago. It's a damn good thing for "savages," women, LGBT folks, etc. that ruling classes, no matter how authoritarian, eventually abdicate by dying and that the next generation views the world a little differently. Could you imagine being governed the way that your 500-year-old elders deem fitting? We wouldn't need violent extremists to try to reimpose 16th century public morals. They would simply never have left. To support this, you have to believe we are perfect now, that there are no more controverises between the young and the old that the young need to win. Otherwise, this is one of those moments where society pulls up the drawbridge, comes full circle. We'll have leaned so far into science and technology that the next time the elders cry "Witchcraft!" they will never go away.

BadassFractal 10y ago
Suppose I could imagine being ruled by people from a couple of millenia ago when homosexuality was normal. Morality progresses and regresses all the time, unfortunately it is not guaranteed to go in the "right" direction either way. See what happened to same sex relationships in Western history. There were plenty of young folks who deemed it to be worth killing for at one point. Unfortunately the young are much more likely to give in to the latest moral fashions and mob mentality than they are to do a fully informed historical evaluation of the current state of morality.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  My current belief is that morality is indirectly related to the progress of technology, by being directly related to the stability and wealth of the society. Basically, when most people aren't afraid of going hungry or getting invaded by their neighbours, they suddenly have time to discuss issues like homosexuality and generally relax the social norms that in the past were necessary for survival (by maintaining group cohesion).
Chris2048 10y ago
> It's a damn good thing for "savages," women, LGBT folks, etc When will religion die out? In time to save the religious from persecution?

Terr_ 10y ago

That could easily backfire if the problem is a matter of nature, rather than nurture. Cycles of vengeance wouldn't burn themselves out. > "How fortunate that science hasn't cracked human immortality. It's a great blessing that we can outlive old wars. And old warriors." -- Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

SkyMarshal 10y ago

"When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable." The human race is like a giant fuzzing machine, we just try everything, push every boundary, bad and good, and see what happens. But, our lives are too short for the lessons to last very long, and we repeat our mistakes relatively frequently. We try to encode some of the lessons into social structures, from religion to literature to law, to pass onto future generations. But I can't help but wonder how things would be in this regard if we all just lived an order of magnitude longer. Less war? Fewer financial collapses? I also wonder if less innovation too, but I imagine if the great inventors of our time lived 10x longer we'd get more rather than less, given that it takes an increasingly large portion of a lifetime to learn enough of our growing body of scientific knowledge to be able to make real contributions to it.