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Every single time the possibility of curing aging comes up, we get those misanthropes who demand loudly that It's Very Important That You Must Die, for The Grea

• Upvoter33 4y ago
  If you look around, you can pretty readily see what people in power do: consolidate power, consolidate wealth. I mean, seriously, look at the U.S.: rich country, but so many struggling in the middle or below. Even though we live an age of information, we are easily controlled by those who have the money and influence. Now, imagine them living forever. You could almost guarantee how crummy the world would become, with an elite few running everything. On top of that, if you believe that adding new people is important, eventually you run out of room/resources/etc. So, for these reasons, death as part of our life cycle is a good thing. Fortunately, we didn't have to invent it.
  • elevatortrim 4y ago
    Then let's solve those problems as well? I do not think death is going away any time soon, we are not even able to extend lifetimes by a meaningful amount yet. For now, we can more meaningfully discuss a world where poeple are living for 150 years. Running out of resources is not necessarily an eventuality. Arguably, it would be possible to live sustainably but regardless of people dying or not, we are not doing that anyway. That's a separate discussion. Running out of room is a serious concern. I do not have a good answer to that.
    • Firmwarrior 4y ago
      There's unlimited space and resources available in space. Even on the Earth, we could sustainably support many more people with some very modest adjustments to the way we live. (Eating more vegetables, not being assholes about nuclear power, etc)
      • briandear 4y ago
        Most people that say we are running out of room have never been to West Texas. Or Siberia. Or Alaska. They make these comments from traffic congested suburbia or in the middle of Venice, Italy in August.
        • Firmwarrior 4y ago
          Yeah.. If we're talking about imposing taxes and environmental restrictions on people in proportion to the damage they're doing to the biosphere, I'm on board I just hate it when people talk about not having kids or not curing cancer because of some Malthusian desire to see humanity wither and die
          • llamaLord 4y ago
            It does raise an interesting question re: should you be allowed to have kids if you want to live forever? To me it's always seemed like an interesting and somewhat fair trade. Also prevents the whole "perpetual population expansion" issue.
  • JamesBarney 4y ago
    I'd prefer to live in a world where wealth was a little more concentrated and I lived to 150 than a world where it's a little less concentrated and I lived to 75. If you look at the demographics for most countries, we're not running into an overpopulation problem anywhere in the developed world. If banning medical care after 50 reduced inequality by reducing lifespans should we do it?
    • fauxpause_ 4y ago
      Yeah imagine how great it would for all the wealth and power to be held by people over 100 years older than you. We could have presidents from before WWI telling us about how they bought a house for $100 dollars and disparaging the youth for not doing the same in a market that is, oh by the way, many times more expensive because these old folks just won’t die.
• jjtheblunt 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run
  • gcanyon 4y ago
    Hello, fellow old! I immediately thought of Logan's Run as well. In the movie it was 30(?) years old and in the book 21(?). I would have died some time ago in that world...
    • lr4444lr 4y ago
      Such a pessimist: YOU might have won the renewal lottery!
      • gcanyon 4y ago
        Friend, I have bad news for you...
• rhyme-boss 4y ago
  I love Bostrom but holy s- is that a long-winded fable.
  • gcanyon 4y ago
    I was going to have GPT-4 summarize it, but: "Input too long, submit something shorter."
    • pps 4y ago
      You can give it the article in parts. Here is the summary by GPT-4: In a kingdom plagued by a dragon that demands a daily human sacrifice, the people have come to accept the beast as an inevitable fact of life. The dragon represents human aging and the sacrifices symbolize the lives lost to senescence. Eventually, a boy challenges the kingdom's resignation to the dragon's tyranny, igniting a movement to find a way to kill the dragon. Technological advancements lead to the development of a missile capable of killing the dragon. Despite initial resistance from the king and his advisors, who worry about the social ramifications of killing the dragon, the beast is eventually slain, and the people celebrate their newfound freedom. The fable teaches several moral lessons: Acceptance of the "inevitable" can blind us to the suffering it causes. A static view of technology may cause us to underestimate the possibility of finding solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. Society may prioritize damage control over addressing the root cause of an issue. Societal good must ultimately benefit individuals. A sense of proportion and priority is essential. Rhetoric can obscure the truth and hinder progress. Addressing urgent problems, like aging, should be a top priority. Societal reorganization and adaptation will be necessary after overcoming long-standing challenges. In conclusion, the fable urges society to invest in research to extend the human health-span, combat aging, and improve the quality of life, rather than merely accepting it as an inescapable fact.
      • gcanyon 4y ago
        Thanks, but I was just piling on to the parent comment's complaint of the fable being too long :-)
• pbae 4y ago
  Not the same, because if we were already living longer, our societies would have been adapted to that environment.
• dwaltrip 4y ago
  It doesn’t take much imagination to see how it would radically alter human existence and civilization in ways we can hardly fathom. That said, death is rather terrible so I am in favor of curing aging to the extent that we can, while working hard to ensure things don’t go into the shitter in the process.
• livelielife 4y ago
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• nosianu 4y ago
  I made a comment a few days ago in the context of increasing complexity of a lot of things in our lives, in which I mentioned > The problem is, continuously educating new people to know ever more and to be able to handle more and more sophisticated systems has a continuously increasing cost to society too, since we don't live any longer than before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35470905#35477122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35470905#35477122 This is one thing where aging slower could be very important for us. Increasing complexity alone requires more time for developing, planning, handling and maintaining a lot of our devices and infrastructure. Experience gained over long periods is worth much more. It also requires a higher up-front "penalty" in the form of more education before we can even get started with being productive in many interesting and worthwhile projects. For example, compare starting with Linux kernel programming in the 1990s vs. now, or building a house many decades ago vs. now. On the other hand, our capacity to place the anto-aging benefits with the right people are questionable. We can only hope that higher-level processes, not controlled by us, will still lead us to good outcomes overall. Similar with a lot of stuff already going on which we hardly have any direct control over, even in cases where "in theory" (meaning a theory that does things like "if we all just..", disregarding that coordination and information are physical and cost time and energy and a working algorithm) we could. So adding one more thing for the universe to sort out for us may not make much of a difference anyway, and having the moneyed classes go first, probably for a long time because the anti-aging solution probably won't be a simple pill, but a complex ongoing long-term process, might still work out. For humanity as a whole, if not for the (less lucky) individuals. It probably widens the gaps even more, in wealth and in education and in opportunities. Might still be worth a shot.
  • gcanyon 4y ago
    But there are so, so many things abstracted away from our need to understand them. People a 120 years ago had to memorize trig tables. People 60 years ago had to learn how to operate a slide rule and understand how to handle accuracy. People 30 years ago had to learn how to do algebra and calculus. People 10 years ago needed to know how to set up the equations to ask Wolfram Alpha to solve the problem. Today, we're closing in on being able to say, "Draw up plans to build a mixed-use building on this plot with at least 20,000 square feet of retail and 60 residential units." And getting back an answer.
• abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  We don't have to convince the people who want to die of anything. We just have to wait for them to die.
• voldacar 4y ago
  Do you have a better solution though? I don't see why you dismiss this, it's a real enough problem. If people lived centuries, it would just be eternal tyranny of the old and decrepit over the young and beautiful. It would be a stagnant and ugly world. We already have gerontocracy, even with regular lifespans.
  • briandear 4y ago
    Old people have more wisdom than young people. And for those Americans complaining about be victims of tyrannical old people, why do y’all keep voting for Pelosi,, Hillary, Trump, Biden, Feinstein, McConnell, and the other dinosaurs that didn’t make it through the first cut when casting Cocoon?
    • lordnacho 4y ago
      More experienced people have more wisdom then less experienced people. That doesn't really correlate with age though, plenty of people have lived a long time and not seen much of anything. As for old people in politics, it's because there's a lot of old people who get to vote. If it were up to me, your vote would depend on some rough measure of remaining time in the society, plus you'd get to vote for your underage children.
      • whiddershins 4y ago
        If it were up to me we would raise the voting age to 25, and maybe restrict it to homeowners and small business owners with more than X revenue or more than Y full time employees. Too many people are voting emotionally based on something someone told them one time about how the world should be. Not enough people voting based on having to grapple with accomplishing something difficult, wanting to improve the circumstances of their community, and seeing what human nature looks like over time. But no one asked me.
        • lordnacho 4y ago
          But homeowners and businesspeople couldn't possibly vote based on emotions? Or are you suggesting they don't vote based on what they've been told the world should be?
• asciimov 4y ago
  Two thoughts come to mind: One, all those in favor of living forever will out live the detractors. Two, enshrine the right to die before making everybody live forever. Our bodies break down, parts stop working. Sure you might cure death, but what happens to those that will forever suffer due to some ailment that isn't curable? Do you let masses of people endlessly suffer just because someone can't fathom letting go?
• srcreigh 4y ago
  Christians for one believe death is already taken care of. God man Trojan horsed himself into the other side and cleaned the place up. It’s more of a question of whether somebody would want to stay in this world forever vs go elsewhere after death.
• downWidOutaFite 4y ago
  Since misanthropy is hatred of the human species, it is those that care only about longevity of individuals with no regards for its effects on the species as a whole that are more likely to be misanthropes.
• ASalazarMX 4y ago
  I wouldn't qualify those in favor of death as misanthropes, they have a very valid point, even if some have it for the wrong reasons. Humanity is not ready for the wealthy to live forever. They say science advances one funeral at a time, and that is true for all of humanity. Political, legal, and economical systems would have to be prepared before that, otherwise countries would stagnate as undying parasites embed themselves in society for centuries. As they won't want competition, the most effective antiaging treatments would be priced out of the commoners forever. In some countries like USA people struggle to pay for insulin, much less antiaging treatments. Edit: regarding your question, if people lived naturally forever, and it became a problem just recently, I think they're already adapted to living forever, and the problems come from something new. Anyway, let's suppose the problems are caused by overpopulation, then the solution would be to limit reproduction, and let the population fall down a bit as accidents/murders happen naturally.
  • solveit 4y ago
    Even if every problem you mentioned was real, "let's kill literally everyone until we figure things out" does not seem a reasonable response.
• black_13 4y ago
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• arcastroe 4y ago
  Your theoretical scenario is equally concerning. In a world where the status quo is "everyone dies after a certain age", then a drug that cures aging is a drastic change to the equilibrium and we should proceed with caution so that this change doesn't disrupt the equilibrium enough to lead to eventual extinction of the population. In a world where the status quo is "nobody ages", then having everyone die after a certain age is also a drastic change to the already proven equilibrium. In both cases, it's a drastic change, so in both cases we should proceed with caution. (Related) I seem to recall an example of wolves and rabbits in equilibrium, with the wolves controlling the rabbit population. Take away the wolves and the rabbit population increases to the point where they eat all the vegetation and eventually all starve. (I'm not sure where I remember this from, or if it's even true)
  • feoren 4y ago
    > we should proceed with caution We're talking about people dying. Would you "proceed with caution" pulling a person from a burning building, because of some vague reasons about status quos and upsetting balances? No, you'd save their life. There are times to proceed with caution, but it's not when billions of lives are at stake, equilibrium or not. Freeing the slaves was a drastic change to a "proven equilibrium" economic situation. If we could have done it even a year earlier than we did, we should have. It was unconscionable that it even took that long. And messing up the comfy status quo and throwing the economy out of balance were absolutely reasons that slave-owners gave as to why they should be allowed to own humans forever. It was all bullshit. Fuck your equilibrium; billions of people are dying!