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Makes me wonder how many more billions will have to die before we bother to put some actual effort into ending death, but I know that's a very obscure opinion.

• delgaudm 3y ago
  Why would you want to end death?
  • Towaway69 3y ago
    I think it was Ayn Rand who said that with her death all life ends. Well it did for her thankfully not for the rest of us.
    • csomar 3y ago
      From her perspective, it is still correct.
      • tetris11 3y ago
        Indeed, but it's a perspective shared primarily by sociopaths.
  • wiseowise 3y ago
    Because not all want to die.
  • soligern 3y ago
    Because I love life and there’s nothing after this?
    • theodorejb 3y ago
      Jesus claimed to offer everlasting life to those who believe in him (see Gospel of John). Worth looking into?
      • ithkuil 3y ago
        So did Muhammad (see Quran). Worth looking into?
        • defrost 3y ago
          So do Yolngu and Wiradjuri Dreamtime stories that date back 70,000+ years. Worth looking into?
          • ithkuil 3y ago
            Yeah pretty much any pagan religion has some sort of post mortuary soothing story. Worth looking into?
            • defrost 3y ago
              Seems redundant given 'pagan' means either * not Christian other religions in the Roman Empire, or (more generally) * not Christian religions. Easier to say most, if not all, religions have an afterlife story.
              • ithkuil 3y ago
                Yeah I love picking nits too. I just meant to reaffirm that it's not an Abrahamic religion innovation.
                • defrost 3y ago
                  I have trouble working out who the pagans are: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-converts-who-are-setting-fire-to-sacred-aboriginal/11527402 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
                  • ithkuil 3y ago
                    Pagan: "a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main or recognized religions." whatever that means
    • proc0 3y ago
      You don't know that.
      • aydyn 3y ago
        You do know it. All empirical evidence from thousands of years of scrutiny points to you ending when your body dies. You dont treat any other piece of knowledge with the same demand as you do the (lack of) afterlife.
        • Bombinator 3y ago
          dude... whether it's jesus or eternal nothingness, it takes faith to believe in both. There's no evidence for any of this so the only correct answer is we don't know. > All empirical evidence from thousands of years of scrutiny Yes, I'm very curious to see empirical evidence of what happens post-death and someone who lived to tell us.
          • FrustratedMonky 3y ago
            Since religions come and go, there are hundreds, it can be empirically reasoned that it isn't Jesus, because Jesus is just the latest made up thing. IF there was one true god/religion, then why haven't we stuck with the same one for 200k years, right from the beginning. Why aren't we born knowing it? Why don't we know it from birth? Instead we believe whatever we were raised with. And that is a pretty flimsy basis to base some actual physical reality that exists after death. On other hand, guess since we don't know what is after death, we can't also say with complete 100% certainty that it is nothing. But for there to be something, then that would mean there is something in this physical reality that gets transported, and we should be able to detect it. And since there has been nothing detected after a lot of tries (experiments), at this time there is nothing.
        • proc0 3y ago
          It's not empirically testable. Nobody has truly died and come back and no one can. Even if all religions are false it does not follow that there is absolutely nothing after clinical death. This is just a limitation of science, because we need a conscious mind to test and/or interpret the results.
    • somenameforme 3y ago
      What do you think would happen if perpetual longevity were achieved? I mean realistically, not ideally? I think it's almost certain we'd see those at the top become [even more] vainly obsessed with their own mortality to the point of doing absolutely every single thing they could, with no norms of behavior, to ensure no other human could ever, under any circumstance - no matter how remote, pose a possible threat to them. You'd most likely have been born into society as something between a serf and a slave, with your life strictly by controlled to ensure you never might imperil the perpetuation of those who would almost certainly come to see themselves as Gods. And no, you wouldn't be immortal. That'd be too risky for the Gods. It'd be the absolute worst of humanity, frozen in time, due to the lack of death. And oh boy, imagine the punishments they could contrive for anybody who might indeed imperil (or even deny) their utter supremacy. How about a million years of torture, if for no other reason than to use you (and the millions of others granted similar accommodation) as warnings to the rest of society? I can say, with at least as much confidence as you express about there being nothing after this life, that this life will end. But the thing I can add to this, is that that's also a very good thing for all of humanity to come.
      • fractallyte 3y ago
        This is precisely Emperor Cleon's storyline in the TV series Foundation...
      • animal531 3y ago
        Would it be good for the species even if life was fair for everyone? One can easily imagine that it would create stagnation where very little would change over very long periods of time.
      • soligern 3y ago
        Since we’re doing hypotheticals how about this. We colonize mars and have large habitation modules flotations in space. Humanity has a large new space to expand into and doesn’t have to curtail growth rates.
        • inkcapmushroom 3y ago
• irrational 3y ago
  Yes, because I totally want to continue working to pay taxes, rent, utilities, clothing, food, etc. forever. Frankly, I am not trying to hasten my death, but I am looking forward to it. Finally a break from the eternal go go go go, just to maintain life.
  • tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
    Tang ping
  • shanks512 3y ago
    Or you could just take that break from work now and do better things with life without having to necessarily wait for death.
    • irrational 3y ago
      I have a family who is relying on me, so that is not possible.
• gizajob 3y ago
  We do put huge amounts of effort into ending it, which so far has only served to delay it by decades. It's part of life that it ends, it seems. No way of getting around that no matter how many sci-fi solutions Bostrom proposes as realistic.
  • somenameforme 3y ago
    I think there's a much more firm reason you're right - life expectancy isn't increasing how most think it is. There was an interesting study [1] that examined the life expectancy of all known individuals from Ancient Greece, excluding those with violent deaths (assassination, forced suicide, etc) and found the average male born before 100BC lived to 72 years old on average. In America in 2019 (to avoid COVID biases), the life expectancy for a male was 76.3 years. The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed. We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0. Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like. [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrsocmed00089-0029.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrs...
    • gizajob 3y ago
      Well we’ve made heaps more people live that long, and live their potential. For me, Bostrom is an egotist of the type that wishes to escape his thanatotic drive and acceptance that life just ends. It’s unfortunate, terrible even, but it seems as natural as birth. Proposing solutions such as “mind uploading” are not only ridiculous but the reality of the idea would be hellish. What’s worse is that he’s a philosopher so actually creating the technology to do it simply is not his problem – someone else will have to do the implementation, regardless of how nightmarishly difficult it could be. He could just as easily be inventing hoverboards or time machines. It’s not his problem to stay within the bounds of possibility, even the accepted bounds of what can realistically be designed and coded and implemented – he just has his graphs and statistics of work that other people have done in the past, and can now order them to fulfil his desires in future, one of the main ones being his egotistic desire for his ego to never die.
• PUSH_AX 3y ago
  I think technically what would be desirable would be to end or pause aging, not death. I have this feeling that if I reach some crazy 3 figure age and have the body to go with it, death is going to be a welcome concept.
• flakeoil 3y ago
  Wow, imagine having 117B people walking around on earth right now. No thank you.
  • probably_wrong 3y ago
    I'd like to substitute your picture for a more plausible one: imagine a world full of incredibly wealthy robber barons, using their fortunes to ensure that "colored" workers stick to their designated bathrooms, putting lead into everything because dying is something that only happens to the poor, and refusing jobs to workers with the wrong skull shape. And if you think owning a home is hard, just wait until every property in your city is owned by a group of immortal British lords who insist on women dressing modestly and "No Irish need apply" signs everywhere. This may not be too far away from what your actual town looks like right now, but at least we currently have the hope that those people will die and be replaced by slightly-saner ones.
    • saiya-jin 3y ago
      Yeah the naivety and/or selfishness of folks wishing to be immortal is beyond me, something about primary school math lessons skipped. I do hope they are not parents (at least yet). I can accept it in some form once we reach other stars, but not in this century and definitely not in next one neither. First of all, such technology would be usurped by dictators for dictators only. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Putin and endless stream of other pathetic figures, they all desperately clinged to life and would burn this world to the ashes 1000x over just to stay immortal. I can't imagine how we could avoid global semi-permanent slavery, not with actual real human nature that we see manifested in the news every day. Its fine if you wouldn't use it malevolently, that says nothing about more capable and more sinister individuals who are out there in numbers you probably would have hard time accepting. Second, where do we put all those folks if we actually achieve some hippie paradise? How do we feed them? Concept of individual ownership goes very much against this. The opposite is communism, which has 100% failure rate, and we tested it already on few hundred millions, no thank you. You have to live through it to see and feel its failures in their many aspects to understand, I did and never ever want that back in any form.
  • 3y ago
• isaacremuant 3y ago
  Why would you want to end death? Or you mean ageing so your body never deteriorates from a certain point? Your brain's capacity to handle memory would still be a blocker for any meaningful extended survival. Any decent scifi novel would name many of the very simple problems it would cause at an individual and societal level, not to speak of every other biological ramification of the body.
• adolph 3y ago
  Death has its advantages: for the living, it is clarifying and for the future it is clearing. That said it’s a loonshot that will undoubtedly have spinoff benefits for increased life quality. If death becomes a choice, then the character of prevailing culture will likely match the characteristics of those who choose not to die. What would that look like? Would that be a culture worth living in?