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Can you imagine what this planet would be like if people didn't die? How much more crowded we'd be? How much more of a strain we'd be placing on the earth's res

Can you imagine what this planet would be like if people didn't die? How much more crowded we'd be? How much more of a strain we'd be placing on the earth's resources?

GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
Can you imagine a better incentive for off-planet migration and terra-forming?
- Retra 9y ago
  Why is incentivizing that a priority? If it is something that needs to happen, then it will need to happen regardless of the incentives.
  - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
    Well in an argument between "everyone should die by 150 years" and "lets have the happy problem of people not dying of old age" I'm in the latter camp. Similarly having all of your species susceptible to any out of context problem that destroys a planet... yeah planetary existential risks are low probability with game ending penalty I'd like to see mitigated.
    - Retra 9y ago
      Sure, but if you put half of humanity on Mars, you'd clearly be increasing our risk, as the difficulty of surviving on Mars is nearly insurmountable. If you want people on other planets, they need to be self-sustaining. And if we can't even be self-sustaining on Earth, why would we be elsewhere? We're a very very long way away from being able to survive if Earth fails. It is foolish to bet on any kind of interplanetary survival strategy at this point. Getting humans to other worlds is by far the easiest part of that equation.
      - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
        I wouldn't put half of humanity anywhere right now. You just need enough to keep a population (with immigration) after they face a horrific mortality rate as they figure out how to lower the risk; hopefully highly trained and well equipped as sparse mitigation, but exploration and pioneering are hungry gods that will be fed human sacrifices. I'm personally more partial to an O'Neill cylinder or a Lunar colony than Mars and the lunar colony will probably come first, Mars is a big step backwards in delta-v, but yes the mass required to get that going is currently prohibitively expensive, and the biosciences are going to be really tricky.
wwwtyro 9y ago
Are you suggesting we not save lives so that we can avoid some unrealized fear of overcrowding? Suppose humanity attains indefinite life spans in the near future. Would you then advocate murder in order to save space? Should we outlaw antibiotics because they save lives, and those lives take up resources? I find this argument both unimaginative (improving technology changes the nature of our challenges) and repulsive (it's advocating murder through inaction).
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Are you seriously suggesting that anyone who does not want to preserve all humans indefinitely is a murderer?
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  "Are you suggesting we not save lives so that we can avoid some unrealized fear of overcrowding?" No, and putting words in my mouth like that is extremely uncivil. We're talking about people who have already died. "I find this argument both unimaginative (improving technology changes the nature of our challenges) and repulsive (it's advocating murder through inaction)." And I find your tone repulsive and uncivil, as you're making extreme assumptions about my positions. Not to mention, you're only advocating that we save the rich. I don't see you setting up a GoFundMe to preserve homeless people.
evanpw 9y ago
> How much more of a strain we'd be placing on the earth's resources? If the immortality is based on "brain uploading", maybe just an extra EC2 instance per family of four.
tene 9y ago
There will be challenges and struggles and costs to be paid to significantly reduce death, but my personal philosophy is that involuntary death is bad and should be fought, and that the costs of increased crowding are worth paying to cut down on the deaths of billions. The general principle, to me, is that whatever the "ideal" rate of death is, for any given set of values and preferences, it would be an astonishing coincidence if it coincidentally happened to be exactly the current rate today. If we woke up tomorrow to a world where humans didn't suffer degenerative aging and the vast majority of fatal illness (cancer) were treatable, would you start by advocating for mass executions, or would you advocate for increased birth control, renewable energy, reduced resource consumption rates, finding ways to make productive use of otherwise-uninhabited areas of earth, space travel, etc. before you started advocating for murdering billions of humans?
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  "would you start by advocating for mass executions" The very idea that this would cross your mind after reading my comment shows that you are not interested in having any kind of serious discussion about this topic.
  - tene 9y ago
    Re-reading your comment, I did overreact, and assumed that you were implying a position that you didn't actually assert. I'm sorry for assuming that you were advocating for a pro-death position. If your comment wasn't intended to advocate for pro-death policies, I'm very confused about what you were trying to communicate here. My reading of your comment is that you first asked the reader if they can imagine what the planet would be like if nobody died, then implied through what appears to be rhetorical questions that it would be much more crowded and much more of a strain on the earth's resources. There's a lot of diversity in the use of English, so we may have experience with different rhetorical traditions, but my experience is that rhetorical structures like that are pretty exclusively intended to express condemnation of the subject and anyone who would support it, implying that they're ignoring the disastrous consequences of their policy. The assumptions I inferred from your questions, stated directly, are something like the following. If you're uninterested in engaging with me after my earlier reply, I understand, but if not I'm curious which of these you disagree with. 1) If life-extension technology manages to dramatically reduce nonconsensual death, we will have a population explosion on Earth. 2) If we have a population explosion on Earth, quality of life for most humans will drop significantly. 3) If we have a population explosion on Earth, consumption of nonrenewable resources will increase dramatically, leading to resource shortages dangerous to human civilization. 4) In order to avoid a population explosion, we should stop work on life-extension technology. 5) It is better for the majority of currently-living humans to die after less than 100 years of life than for Earth civilization to undergo a population explosion. By my best attempts at moral reasoning, withholding life-saving medical technology is morally equivalent to murder, and although I've fortunately never been in a situation to make such a decision, I hope that I can be the kind of person who would never decide for people to die through inaction that I wouldn't be theoretically willing to kill myself for the same benefits. I hope that's given you enough perspective on my position that it doesn't seem completely hostile to serious discussion. [edited for formatting]
rmcpherson 9y ago
For a fascinating and realistic exploration of what that might look like, I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. In the series, a longevity treatment is developed that significantly extends lives. Beyond the strain on resources, there are the issues of older generations delaying progress by not relinquishing power (much like the current octogenarian U.S. congress) and other issues.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  I would also recommend The Postmortal, by Drew Magary. It explores a world where the cure for aging is found, so no one has to die through natural means anymore.

Can you imagine what this planet would be like if people didn't die? How much more crowded we'd be? How much more of a strain we'd be placing on the earth's resources?

GCU-Empiricist 9y ago

Can you imagine a better incentive for off-planet migration and terra-forming?

Retra 9y ago
Why is incentivizing that a priority? If it is something that needs to happen, then it will need to happen regardless of the incentives.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  Well in an argument between "everyone should die by 150 years" and "lets have the happy problem of people not dying of old age" I'm in the latter camp. Similarly having all of your species susceptible to any out of context problem that destroys a planet... yeah planetary existential risks are low probability with game ending penalty I'd like to see mitigated.
  - Retra 9y ago
    Sure, but if you put half of humanity on Mars, you'd clearly be increasing our risk, as the difficulty of surviving on Mars is nearly insurmountable. If you want people on other planets, they need to be self-sustaining. And if we can't even be self-sustaining on Earth, why would we be elsewhere? We're a very very long way away from being able to survive if Earth fails. It is foolish to bet on any kind of interplanetary survival strategy at this point. Getting humans to other worlds is by far the easiest part of that equation.
    - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
      I wouldn't put half of humanity anywhere right now. You just need enough to keep a population (with immigration) after they face a horrific mortality rate as they figure out how to lower the risk; hopefully highly trained and well equipped as sparse mitigation, but exploration and pioneering are hungry gods that will be fed human sacrifices. I'm personally more partial to an O'Neill cylinder or a Lunar colony than Mars and the lunar colony will probably come first, Mars is a big step backwards in delta-v, but yes the mass required to get that going is currently prohibitively expensive, and the biosciences are going to be really tricky.

wwwtyro 9y ago

Are you suggesting we not save lives so that we can avoid some unrealized fear of overcrowding? Suppose humanity attains indefinite life spans in the near future. Would you then advocate murder in order to save space? Should we outlaw antibiotics because they save lives, and those lives take up resources? I find this argument both unimaginative (improving technology changes the nature of our challenges) and repulsive (it's advocating murder through inaction).

craftyguy 9y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that anyone who does not want to preserve all humans indefinitely is a murderer?
s73v3r_ 9y ago
"Are you suggesting we not save lives so that we can avoid some unrealized fear of overcrowding?" No, and putting words in my mouth like that is extremely uncivil. We're talking about people who have already died. "I find this argument both unimaginative (improving technology changes the nature of our challenges) and repulsive (it's advocating murder through inaction)." And I find your tone repulsive and uncivil, as you're making extreme assumptions about my positions. Not to mention, you're only advocating that we save the rich. I don't see you setting up a GoFundMe to preserve homeless people.

evanpw 9y ago

> How much more of a strain we'd be placing on the earth's resources? If the immortality is based on "brain uploading", maybe just an extra EC2 instance per family of four.

tene 9y ago

There will be challenges and struggles and costs to be paid to significantly reduce death, but my personal philosophy is that involuntary death is bad and should be fought, and that the costs of increased crowding are worth paying to cut down on the deaths of billions. The general principle, to me, is that whatever the "ideal" rate of death is, for any given set of values and preferences, it would be an astonishing coincidence if it coincidentally happened to be exactly the current rate today. If we woke up tomorrow to a world where humans didn't suffer degenerative aging and the vast majority of fatal illness (cancer) were treatable, would you start by advocating for mass executions, or would you advocate for increased birth control, renewable energy, reduced resource consumption rates, finding ways to make productive use of otherwise-uninhabited areas of earth, space travel, etc. before you started advocating for murdering billions of humans?

s73v3r_ 9y ago
"would you start by advocating for mass executions" The very idea that this would cross your mind after reading my comment shows that you are not interested in having any kind of serious discussion about this topic.
- tene 9y ago
  Re-reading your comment, I did overreact, and assumed that you were implying a position that you didn't actually assert. I'm sorry for assuming that you were advocating for a pro-death position. If your comment wasn't intended to advocate for pro-death policies, I'm very confused about what you were trying to communicate here. My reading of your comment is that you first asked the reader if they can imagine what the planet would be like if nobody died, then implied through what appears to be rhetorical questions that it would be much more crowded and much more of a strain on the earth's resources. There's a lot of diversity in the use of English, so we may have experience with different rhetorical traditions, but my experience is that rhetorical structures like that are pretty exclusively intended to express condemnation of the subject and anyone who would support it, implying that they're ignoring the disastrous consequences of their policy. The assumptions I inferred from your questions, stated directly, are something like the following. If you're uninterested in engaging with me after my earlier reply, I understand, but if not I'm curious which of these you disagree with. 1) If life-extension technology manages to dramatically reduce nonconsensual death, we will have a population explosion on Earth. 2) If we have a population explosion on Earth, quality of life for most humans will drop significantly. 3) If we have a population explosion on Earth, consumption of nonrenewable resources will increase dramatically, leading to resource shortages dangerous to human civilization. 4) In order to avoid a population explosion, we should stop work on life-extension technology. 5) It is better for the majority of currently-living humans to die after less than 100 years of life than for Earth civilization to undergo a population explosion. By my best attempts at moral reasoning, withholding life-saving medical technology is morally equivalent to murder, and although I've fortunately never been in a situation to make such a decision, I hope that I can be the kind of person who would never decide for people to die through inaction that I wouldn't be theoretically willing to kill myself for the same benefits. I hope that's given you enough perspective on my position that it doesn't seem completely hostile to serious discussion. [edited for formatting]

rmcpherson 9y ago

For a fascinating and realistic exploration of what that might look like, I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. In the series, a longevity treatment is developed that significantly extends lives. Beyond the strain on resources, there are the issues of older generations delaying progress by not relinquishing power (much like the current octogenarian U.S. congress) and other issues.

s73v3r_ 9y ago
I would also recommend The Postmortal, by Drew Magary. It explores a world where the cure for aging is found, so no one has to die through natural means anymore.