5 ms·

So it is unethical to try to help save 100,000 people from a painful, struggling death each and every day? I've always found the mindset bizarre in which abstra

So it is unethical to try to help save 100,000 people from a painful, struggling death each and every day? I've always found the mindset bizarre in which abstract ideas and concepts (like "future sustainment of humanity"), utterly disconnected from any form of rigorous examination or critique, are thought important enough to justify the sacrifice tens of millions of lives - every year - and perpetuate the unrelieved pain and madness suffered constantly by hundreds of millions more. You would drown the world in blood to make yourself feel just a little more comfortable in your own self-delusions. You don't have to go far to see that rigorous examination of the world shows overpopulation, "sustainability" concerns on a global scale, and other outgrowths of Malthusianism to be myths and illusions, things that vanish as soon as you start looking into them. http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/11/overpopulation-too-many-damned-malthusians.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/11/overpopulation-to... http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/08/there-is-no-overpopulation-only-waste-corruption-and-inhumanity.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/08/there-is-no-overp... http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/02/malthusian-visions.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/02/malthusian-vision... Malthusian ideas were wrong when they first emerged, and have not stopped being wrong at any time since then. They are wrong now - and dangerous, as they lead people to support destructive acts of relinquishment and regulation.

pantaloons 15y ago
It's a straw man -- overpopulation is not the only reason to be against anti-aging remedies. The so called "sacrifice" of death is necessary for progress -- death is a prime mover of dogma, nepotism, wealth, and many more. Humanity benefits immensely from the periodic refreshing of the old guard. It's a question of whether you want a better life for yourself or for your children.
- jerf 15y ago
  "Humanity benefits immensely from the periodic refreshing of the old guard." Prove it to be a net gain, when the negative side of the equation is the death of billions. You can make anything look good by considering only the positives, or vice versa, but it's no way to make decisions.
  - polyfractal 15y ago
    Furthermore, death comes at a huge cost of losing the accumulated knowledge of all those people. Really, "cure aging" is the same as "cure cancer" or "cure diabetes". Disease prevention is just a shortsighted version of curing the problem of aging in general.
- svdad 15y ago
  It's not the only, nor by a long stretch the best reason to be against "ending aging". Human culture fundamentally depends on death and the passage of time. Our myths, rituals, literature and sense of history depend on death. I may be an old romantic, but to me life without the sense of impermanence and transience would be an impoverished life indeed.
mladenkovacevic 15y ago
I didn't know what Malthusianism is, so thank you for educating me on that topic. I can definitely assure you that I wasn't referring solely to overpopulation as the only problem to curing ageing. I AM mildly (and perhaps, based on the links you included, naively) worried about overpopulation several decades down the line but I don't have the stats nor the expertise to passionately argue in defence of this view. I was more referring to the problems associated with commercializing the "anti-aging" drug. Making such a drug in the corporate funded environment of our biotech industry would certainly result in an extreme imbalance of the availability of the drug. So in a world where the balance of food supply, resources, income and power of influence is already impossibly and unfairly askew, it is very likely that the existence of the anti-death drug would be the final nail in the coffin of many impoverished populations. What chance would a smart, young African (who is already faced with overcoming hunger, poverty and lack of health care) have in a world where Americans and Germans, for example, have a near unlimited supply of food, money, influence... and now time.
paganel 15y ago
> Malthusian ideas were wrong when they first emerged, and have not stopped being wrong at any time since then Funny you mentioning Malthus, he reminds me of Hobbes, very few people have actually read their works but they've been demonized and thrown "they're utterly and completely wrong"-phrases at that you begin to wonder "if Malthus is wrong, why is every discussion about world demographics mentioning him in one way or another?" (the same goes for Hobbes, you just have to replace "world demographics" with "politics" and "geometric population growth" with "we're always one step away from (civil) war"). Or maybe I like Malthus just because my dad had bought his "Essay on the Principle of Population" and I read it when I was 16.
prodigal_erik 15y ago
The Green Revolution was a one-time technology transfer. We didn't hold further advances in reserve which could spur another radical increase in worldwide food production, nor do we have an ever-expanding supply of petroleum-based fertilizers. Those articles assert that the free market will somehow provide enough food to meet any demand, but unless there's immediate and unprecedented progress in both cold fusion and nanotechnology, I don't see how we can expect that to happen.

pantaloons 15y ago

It's a straw man -- overpopulation is not the only reason to be against anti-aging remedies. The so called "sacrifice" of death is necessary for progress -- death is a prime mover of dogma, nepotism, wealth, and many more. Humanity benefits immensely from the periodic refreshing of the old guard. It's a question of whether you want a better life for yourself or for your children.

jerf 15y ago
"Humanity benefits immensely from the periodic refreshing of the old guard." Prove it to be a net gain, when the negative side of the equation is the death of billions. You can make anything look good by considering only the positives, or vice versa, but it's no way to make decisions.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  Furthermore, death comes at a huge cost of losing the accumulated knowledge of all those people. Really, "cure aging" is the same as "cure cancer" or "cure diabetes". Disease prevention is just a shortsighted version of curing the problem of aging in general.
svdad 15y ago
It's not the only, nor by a long stretch the best reason to be against "ending aging". Human culture fundamentally depends on death and the passage of time. Our myths, rituals, literature and sense of history depend on death. I may be an old romantic, but to me life without the sense of impermanence and transience would be an impoverished life indeed.

mladenkovacevic 15y ago

I didn't know what Malthusianism is, so thank you for educating me on that topic. I can definitely assure you that I wasn't referring solely to overpopulation as the only problem to curing ageing. I AM mildly (and perhaps, based on the links you included, naively) worried about overpopulation several decades down the line but I don't have the stats nor the expertise to passionately argue in defence of this view. I was more referring to the problems associated with commercializing the "anti-aging" drug. Making such a drug in the corporate funded environment of our biotech industry would certainly result in an extreme imbalance of the availability of the drug. So in a world where the balance of food supply, resources, income and power of influence is already impossibly and unfairly askew, it is very likely that the existence of the anti-death drug would be the final nail in the coffin of many impoverished populations. What chance would a smart, young African (who is already faced with overcoming hunger, poverty and lack of health care) have in a world where Americans and Germans, for example, have a near unlimited supply of food, money, influence... and now time.

paganel 15y ago

> Malthusian ideas were wrong when they first emerged, and have not stopped being wrong at any time since then Funny you mentioning Malthus, he reminds me of Hobbes, very few people have actually read their works but they've been demonized and thrown "they're utterly and completely wrong"-phrases at that you begin to wonder "if Malthus is wrong, why is every discussion about world demographics mentioning him in one way or another?" (the same goes for Hobbes, you just have to replace "world demographics" with "politics" and "geometric population growth" with "we're always one step away from (civil) war"). Or maybe I like Malthus just because my dad had bought his "Essay on the Principle of Population" and I read it when I was 16.

prodigal_erik 15y ago

The Green Revolution was a one-time technology transfer. We didn't hold further advances in reserve which could spur another radical increase in worldwide food production, nor do we have an ever-expanding supply of petroleum-based fertilizers. Those articles assert that the free market will somehow provide enough food to meet any demand, but unless there's immediate and unprecedented progress in both cold fusion and nanotechnology, I don't see how we can expect that to happen.