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Eventually we will reach a point where humans are immortal. They’ll still die if they’re shot or clog their arteries etc but they won’t die purely based on runn

Eventually we will reach a point where humans are immortal. They’ll still die if they’re shot or clog their arteries etc but they won’t die purely based on running down a clock. There’s no inherent reason we have to die. It’s an evolved strategy to allow newer models to replace us. Turn that off and you’d stay around until physical damage and irreparable decay takes you out. It will be interesting from a societal standpoint. You’ll have the real scum people wanting free immortality and people arguing they should get it even though they’re horrible. You’ll have the rich people who want to keep it to themselves because the poor don’t deserve it. Things like prison sentences and the general value of time would all be messed up.

kyriakos 3y ago
Immortality raises a lot of ethical and philosophical questions that we will need to tackle if it ever becomes real. For example, if you live 200 years, how much would you remember of your first 30 years of life? Will that 200 year old person still technically be the same as the one that was born if he hardly remembers anything?
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  No it doesn't. I'm a good bit younger than 200 and barely remember large portions of my earlier life already. What's so special about 200 that makes it any different?
  - acters 3y ago
    In another comment I spoke about how many more people are able to reach 60+ years of age, and that the amount of people living longer have exponentially grown. Our world population reaching another billions milestone at faster timeframes. Scarily, life expectancy was always at around 20-30 years for a large portion of history for humans.(most who reached 15 years of age were capable of living to 50 years albeit they were considered to be outliers) Around neolithic times, we had moved towards increasing population density and promoting growths. This time period was odd as it lowered the overall life expectancy because there were more humans that died from other methods as lifestyles changed from hunter-gatherer to more sedentary lifestyles. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles required loads of land for a single human to survive, which the neolithic era had been able to fix with the introduction of farming. Due to density, more people started attacking one another for variety of reasons and heavily relied on farm crops to sustain increased human populations. Societal growth of centers such as towns and cities then countries continued. Excluding many outliers, life expectancy only started to rise in the 1950s and has kept further increasing past 50+ years and 60+ years. So yes there is something special about reaching 200 years of age. As it will singal a milestone no other human has ever reached from all of history. On the other hand, life expectancy growing at an alarming rate is putting a lot of strain on resources and land availability.
    - throw__away7391 3y ago
      So by your logic we should be trying to reduce human life expectancy?! But honestly I really don't think these arguments are motivated by/a consequence of real belief in them, it's more a kind of cope with the current situation that we've become acclimated to, something in the vein of "if god intended men to fly they'd have wings".
      - acters 3y ago
        It is ignorant to not plan on methods of habilitating more people. There is an unsolved problem of space constraints and transportation costs of essentials and optional resources. Reducing life expectancy and population will not solve these fundamental issues. If these two constraints are able to be solved sufficiently enough, then people will be able to live in larger swaths of land or in outer/near orbit space or within the oceans. It all depends on how we progress from here. Right now we are having the same issues that plagued the neolithic era. Our increase in population and life expectancy will end up hurting us because of the unsolved logistical issues.
acters 3y ago
Who is to say we are not reaching the levels of irreparable decay or physical damage to render death more likely? Instead of death, how about the years or months before the eventuality where we are losing our capabilities in a variety of methods? I say we are reaching this type of milestone you have spoken about in your comment. Even the tidbit about rich people hogging resources because they are doing exactly that right now! I say this because I do believe that a lot of research into aging is just finding a lot of strange oddities in our genes, and biological mechanisms. There was never any long term biological process such as natural selection, darwinism and survivorship bias to remove or refine them into something that works better or works for indefinite lengths of time. It is only recently that more humans are able to live 60+ years and that there is billions of humans compared to the numbers of live humans in previous centuries.
jbotz 3y ago
> [death is] an evolved strategy to allow newer models to replace us I don't think that's true and it's pretty difficult to argue that it is given how close to universal death is among living things... if it were true evolution would also have explored the adjacent possible of near immortality more often. After all living longer also means potentially producing more offspring, so it's not an impediment to natural selection. Probably more accurate to say that between the complexity required to keep repairing the accumulated damage in an individual organism over time and simply replacing the organism with a new model every so often, evolution prudently chose the later. Evolution is economical... making highly complex systems that are eternally resilient and repairable is not. I don't doubt we'll soon be able to extend lifespan (and healthspan) by quite a bit but not indefinitely unless we can transfer the mind to a new body. And frankly I doubt that makes a lot of sense because I don't think 200-year-old me will feel much identity with 20-year-old me anyway. The Buddhists probably have it right that the sense of a continuous self is largely an illusion.

kyriakos 3y ago

Immortality raises a lot of ethical and philosophical questions that we will need to tackle if it ever becomes real. For example, if you live 200 years, how much would you remember of your first 30 years of life? Will that 200 year old person still technically be the same as the one that was born if he hardly remembers anything?

throw__away7391 3y ago
No it doesn't. I'm a good bit younger than 200 and barely remember large portions of my earlier life already. What's so special about 200 that makes it any different?
- acters 3y ago
  In another comment I spoke about how many more people are able to reach 60+ years of age, and that the amount of people living longer have exponentially grown. Our world population reaching another billions milestone at faster timeframes. Scarily, life expectancy was always at around 20-30 years for a large portion of history for humans.(most who reached 15 years of age were capable of living to 50 years albeit they were considered to be outliers) Around neolithic times, we had moved towards increasing population density and promoting growths. This time period was odd as it lowered the overall life expectancy because there were more humans that died from other methods as lifestyles changed from hunter-gatherer to more sedentary lifestyles. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles required loads of land for a single human to survive, which the neolithic era had been able to fix with the introduction of farming. Due to density, more people started attacking one another for variety of reasons and heavily relied on farm crops to sustain increased human populations. Societal growth of centers such as towns and cities then countries continued. Excluding many outliers, life expectancy only started to rise in the 1950s and has kept further increasing past 50+ years and 60+ years. So yes there is something special about reaching 200 years of age. As it will singal a milestone no other human has ever reached from all of history. On the other hand, life expectancy growing at an alarming rate is putting a lot of strain on resources and land availability.
  - throw__away7391 3y ago
    So by your logic we should be trying to reduce human life expectancy?! But honestly I really don't think these arguments are motivated by/a consequence of real belief in them, it's more a kind of cope with the current situation that we've become acclimated to, something in the vein of "if god intended men to fly they'd have wings".
    - acters 3y ago
      It is ignorant to not plan on methods of habilitating more people. There is an unsolved problem of space constraints and transportation costs of essentials and optional resources. Reducing life expectancy and population will not solve these fundamental issues. If these two constraints are able to be solved sufficiently enough, then people will be able to live in larger swaths of land or in outer/near orbit space or within the oceans. It all depends on how we progress from here. Right now we are having the same issues that plagued the neolithic era. Our increase in population and life expectancy will end up hurting us because of the unsolved logistical issues.

acters 3y ago

Who is to say we are not reaching the levels of irreparable decay or physical damage to render death more likely? Instead of death, how about the years or months before the eventuality where we are losing our capabilities in a variety of methods? I say we are reaching this type of milestone you have spoken about in your comment. Even the tidbit about rich people hogging resources because they are doing exactly that right now! I say this because I do believe that a lot of research into aging is just finding a lot of strange oddities in our genes, and biological mechanisms. There was never any long term biological process such as natural selection, darwinism and survivorship bias to remove or refine them into something that works better or works for indefinite lengths of time. It is only recently that more humans are able to live 60+ years and that there is billions of humans compared to the numbers of live humans in previous centuries.

jbotz 3y ago

> [death is] an evolved strategy to allow newer models to replace us I don't think that's true and it's pretty difficult to argue that it is given how close to universal death is among living things... if it were true evolution would also have explored the adjacent possible of near immortality more often. After all living longer also means potentially producing more offspring, so it's not an impediment to natural selection. Probably more accurate to say that between the complexity required to keep repairing the accumulated damage in an individual organism over time and simply replacing the organism with a new model every so often, evolution prudently chose the later. Evolution is economical... making highly complex systems that are eternally resilient and repairable is not. I don't doubt we'll soon be able to extend lifespan (and healthspan) by quite a bit but not indefinitely unless we can transfer the mind to a new body. And frankly I doubt that makes a lot of sense because I don't think 200-year-old me will feel much identity with 20-year-old me anyway. The Buddhists probably have it right that the sense of a continuous self is largely an illusion.