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> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish > Over the past ten years, the [longevity research] industry has grown in financing from $500 million in 20
by yks 3y ago
> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish
> Over the past ten years, the [longevity research] industry has grown in financing from $500 million in 2013 to a peak of $6.2 billion in 2021.
- carlosjobim 3y agoDeath is God's greatest safe guard to counter human evil. Nobody escapes it.
- quantum_state 3y agoIt is also for keeping man from misery ..
- hooho 3y ago[dead]
- zirror 3y agoEverytime I read about longevity research and how many people are in favor of it I can't stop thinking about this speech. And one of the endings of Cyberpunk 2077.
- Lorkki 3y agoAltered Carbon also.
- roughly 3y agoI think people generally, and the Silicon Valley set in particular, have a hard time abstracting from “would I like” to “would the world be a better place if”. Would I like to live a thousand years? Yes, with the obvious caveats. Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today. There’s a great many people around right now who’s primary redeeming quality is their impending mortality - it’s not just science that advances one funeral at a time.
- KittenInABox 3y agoImagine if Henry Kissinger could continue to advise US Foreign Policy for 10 centuries, given all the horrors he accomplished in just 1.
- nox100 3y agoHow many times has your life or someone close to you in your life not died from something they would have died of 100yrs ago? If you're happy medical tech saved their lives then you're arguably for life extension because all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.
- roughly 3y agoI don’t know if this is supposed to be a dunk or something, but - yes, my grandma lived to 93 because of modern medicine. I was happy she did. That’s the tension: things that are good for me personally can be bad for the world at large (I mean, not my grandma’s longevity specifically - she was a lovely woman), and a big part of emotional and intellectual maturity is recognizing that indeed the world is full of tradeoffs and I can’t have everything I want. Specific to: > all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them. No, that’s not all it really means, not in our society, not in our time. As Ted Chiang put it, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us,” and that’s also the case here: the outcome of this technology isn’t that my grandma lives to 150, it’s that Vladimir Putin lives to 150. If my grandma needs to die at 90 so we don’t have immortal god-emperors - if I have to die at 90 - then so be it. Some day we may live in a world where longevity technology is an unalloyed good, but until that day, we don’t get to just put the good stuff on the ledger and ignore the bad stuff.
- mydogcanpurr 3y agoNot everything that’s good remains good when you take it to an extreme.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago> There’s a great many people around right now who’s primary redeeming quality is their impending mortality Ha ha, that's funny (but not nice — but I like it).
- squigz 3y agoWe could live for 20 years or 200 and it wouldn't matter - entities will emerge that will attempt to consolidate and abuse power. Those may be individual dictators, tyrannical governments, or global conglomerates. The answer is the same, and it doesn't involve hampering scientific progress.
- borbulon 3y agoI think also in some respects Altered Carbon, the Netflix series (at least the first season).
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoLongevity doesn't mean men won't die.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]