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It's not possible to escape death, and all timelines will feel short when it comes to their end. Reducing the suffering of life, whether mental or physical, see

It's not possible to escape death, and all timelines will feel short when it comes to their end. Reducing the suffering of life, whether mental or physical, seems a more achievable pursuit. To die without cancer, dementia, chronic pain or the so many other ailments would be amazing.

JoshTriplett 2y ago
They go hand in hand. Any reasonable path to eliminating mortality will entail eliminating aging and degenerative conditions. Often, when people first imagine living much much longer, they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of age that also end up killing you.
- zerocrates 2y ago
  If the pathway to where you're looking to go runs mostly through a fight against age-related degeneration, why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept? Who's out there handwringing against fighting, just to pick a random example, dementia?
  - stale2002 2y ago
    > why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept? There are both drawbacks and benefits to the controversy of "ending death". You have mentioned the drawbacks, but the benefits are that it attracts the interest of the individuals that care about the most important problem in the world, which is specifically this problem of ending death.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    That's the idea behind marketing campaigns like "healthspan". It's a trade-off. It's very easy to get dragged into a pivot that focuses on one specific condition rather than mortality and age-related degeneration in general.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Aging is a set of degenerative diseases that are 100% fatal and affect 100% of the human population.
xvector 2y ago
If we told someone 200 years ago that I'd be typing this on a pane of glass that talks to satellites in low earth orbit at the speed of light, accessing the entire repository of human knowledge while hurtling through the air at 600 MPH in a man made bird, they'd call it impossible (and probably burn us at the stake.) If we told the same person that we have managed to create a crude facsimile of intelligence and expect to have full intelligence in our lifetimes, running on lightning trapped in purified sand, their mind would simply break. I am confident that humanity will solve death on all relevant timescales, out to the heat-death of the universe itself. I am optimistic that today will be looked back on as "that era when people died, isn't that sad?"
- nullindividual 2y ago
  No, it isn’t sad that we die. It’s extremely important that we do — if not just for getting rid of some of humanity’s worst humans.
  - xvector 2y ago
    It is not an issue to me if <bad human> lives longer, if I get to enjoy more time with my loved ones, watch humanity build Dyson spheres, explore the galaxy, etc. Bad humans then become social issues - and those, we can solve.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      Name one social issue our species has comprehensively solved in the last century.
      - zo1 2y ago
        We haven't. Even simple ones like poverty, hunger, homelessness that are just a matter of admin and money. We've been captured by self-perpetuating and effectively immortal institutions (NGO's and arguably governments) that will not let us solve them because that would mean their own death.

JoshTriplett 2y ago

They go hand in hand. Any reasonable path to eliminating mortality will entail eliminating aging and degenerative conditions. Often, when people first imagine living much much longer, they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of age that also end up killing you.

zerocrates 2y ago
If the pathway to where you're looking to go runs mostly through a fight against age-related degeneration, why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept? Who's out there handwringing against fighting, just to pick a random example, dementia?
- stale2002 2y ago
  > why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept? There are both drawbacks and benefits to the controversy of "ending death". You have mentioned the drawbacks, but the benefits are that it attracts the interest of the individuals that care about the most important problem in the world, which is specifically this problem of ending death.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  That's the idea behind marketing campaigns like "healthspan". It's a trade-off. It's very easy to get dragged into a pivot that focuses on one specific condition rather than mortality and age-related degeneration in general.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Aging is a set of degenerative diseases that are 100% fatal and affect 100% of the human population.

xvector 2y ago

If we told someone 200 years ago that I'd be typing this on a pane of glass that talks to satellites in low earth orbit at the speed of light, accessing the entire repository of human knowledge while hurtling through the air at 600 MPH in a man made bird, they'd call it impossible (and probably burn us at the stake.) If we told the same person that we have managed to create a crude facsimile of intelligence and expect to have full intelligence in our lifetimes, running on lightning trapped in purified sand, their mind would simply break. I am confident that humanity will solve death on all relevant timescales, out to the heat-death of the universe itself. I am optimistic that today will be looked back on as "that era when people died, isn't that sad?"

nullindividual 2y ago
No, it isn’t sad that we die. It’s extremely important that we do — if not just for getting rid of some of humanity’s worst humans.
- xvector 2y ago
  It is not an issue to me if <bad human> lives longer, if I get to enjoy more time with my loved ones, watch humanity build Dyson spheres, explore the galaxy, etc. Bad humans then become social issues - and those, we can solve.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Name one social issue our species has comprehensively solved in the last century.
    - zo1 2y ago
      We haven't. Even simple ones like poverty, hunger, homelessness that are just a matter of admin and money. We've been captured by self-perpetuating and effectively immortal institutions (NGO's and arguably governments) that will not let us solve them because that would mean their own death.