I sometimes talk about wanting to live forever and get weird stares. Are you joking me?? I want to hike every trail in the world. I want to climb every mountain. I want to play every video game. I want to beat the hardest raids in every expansion of WoW. I want to learn multiple langauges. I want to spend several years living in every biome. I want to learn all of the programming languages. I want to go back to school for more degrees. I want to build several businesses. I want to write computer games from scratch. I want to travel to the stars. I want to live on the moon. I want to live on Mars. I want to get a doctorate degree. Or two or three? Gah, not enough time.
Thankfully death comes along and sorts through the wants from the willing. It has a nice way of making space for a newer generation of thinkers. Old prejudices die, new thinkers arrive.
There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else. I guess this is the rub I get from most people that extol the Silicon Valley dream of extending the lives*
*of those that will inevitably be able to pay for it.
>There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else.
Oh shush. You know, I've got a 93-year-old grandmother with a damned sharp wit who should not fucking need assisted living and should be able to remember what we were talking about five minutes ago. I've also got a 68-or-so uncle who came down with Parkinson's Disease almost instantly upon his retirement from a lifetime of practicing medicine.
That's not to mention the in-laws with fibromyalgia and the step-father with several "bad lifestyle" diseases.
If your argument in favor of aging and death is, "Indiscriminately inflicting extreme suffering to randomly-selected people for every moment of their lives really helps to freshen up the world", you should reconsider. The problems I mentioned are not unique and special things that happened like a car accident happens. They're just what happens to everyone from living long enough. The bit at the end where you go to sleep and never wake up is nothing; the problem is the decades of suffering followed by that.
People like to assume the natural course its somehow the best course, but its far from the true, the fact its that from a biological perspective its much easier to start from scratch than to remain alive for too long; and that's how evolution works, evolution does not care much about what happens after your reproductive years have gone by (so to speak), maybe only enough so you can take care of your offspring while is needed, but thats about it.
Dragon Flys only live for 4 weeks, but its enough time to reproduce and that's all "mother nature" cares about, and hardly anyone would suggest that living 4 weeks is long enough; so we need to understand our lifespans are just as arbitrary.
The tools that made us successful as a species capped our lifespans. Technology may have changed that equation such that it makes more sense to live longer (or forever), but if immortality had made evolutionary sense up to this point we'd see a few immortals walking around.
For whatever reason, hardcoded death was the more successful route for a species to take. (with some notable exceptions. I believe there are species of lobsters that won't die if you put them in the right environment, I believe a species of jellyfish as well, and then some microorganisms as well)
Mother nature could never have awareness for the contexts in which we live now.
Purely biological success knows nothing of the societies we have built and the knowledge, ability to experience, and the complex contexts within which we all live our lives. Death really doesn't make sense for an individual, and no one is really itching for Humans V1.1 so the idea of letting evolution continue doesn't make much sense either.
If I could stop aging right now, I would be content with what I am capable of. Even if I die in 30 years from bus to head syndrome, I will have been fit and active for those years and that is a much better situation than slowly deteriorating to death.
That is the reality medicine has given us already, and anti-aging is only the focusing of a subset of general health issues that tend to cause problems as we age. It isn't the search for the imoral and exclusive elixr of life as some people seem to claim it is.
Then why are we spending so much energy trying to augment ourselves? Better exercise, better diets, better schools, less disease, etc.
I would say that almost everyone can name something about themselves that they wish evolution had optimized more. (And if not evolution, then direct intervention).
I guess that was my point, no one is expecting to enjoy the benefits of evolution (because of course they will be dead). So the argument of halting evolution or that it goes against the so far proven way to become a better species makes no sense. Better that we focus on working with what we have.
Perhaps the version was number a bad way to express that though!
Basically you are saying that it's better we die so that a new generation can come and then die for others come around just to die to make way for others.
Whats the purpose of that for the individual? Why is that by any metrics desirable for humans to die for other humans to come along to just die for yet others?
Well, I can understand how from your perspective it makes sense for you to want to live forever, but from an evolutionary perspective your species is more successful if you die after a while.
If if immortality didn't have negative consequences as severe as stunting an entire species, we'd probably see more species that were capable of immortal individuals. Such species do exist, but not in the Mammal kingdom as far as I'm aware.
But I also think it sets a good guideline. Death improves a species, because it leaves room for more children + more generations (for a given set of resources), which means more opportunity for improvements to evolutionary fitness.
edit: another commenter pointed out something I think is fairly profound. When a group of cells in your body decides to pursue immortality, it's usually cancer. And if you don't address it, it kills you, and them too. Science theoretically has a way to grant our individual cells immortality without causing cancer, but it'd have to be orchestrated carefully.
You are missing the point. Op claimed that the continuation of adding new life and letting other life die out was important. I am questioning that argument not evolution. Why should i care about the continuation of life for anyone but me.
Those were lives well lived and a lot of the meaning and wisdom now derived from their lives is because they are gone. Same can not be said for the multitude that just wants more time.
All of the meaning and wisdom derived from their lives was because they were alive. Now they aren't, and we don't get any more of their particular genius, and that is a damned shame.
It's also a damned shame that my grandfather, who is precisely nobody on the world stage, but still somebody, and currently in the hospital and I might get a text any minute saying he's dead, is on the brink of exiting the world, joining the hundred billion or so other humans who've ceased to exist for no good reason other than that the blind god Nature doesn't care about anything we care about. What Nature has ordained, she has ordained without reference to meaning or wisdom or the interests of those who live and die within her system, and we will be doing right when we remake her.
Reflection requires pause. It would not be the same if all those people were contemporaries of current modern scientists. In fact I have no clue how much value current scientists are adding or not adding or whether Feynman and friends would still be contributing in any way as you are assuming. The geniuses will appear after some reflection in a hundred years or so. Long after they're all gone.
I'm sorry for your eventual loss but immortality does not appeal to me the way I guess it appeals to others. Cycles in nature don't seem like a disease to me that need curing. Alleviating the pain and suffering of aging is fine and that's what these guys seem to be doing.
Perhaps. There might be a lot more cynicism and conservatism. Our legislators might not have adjusted to the implications of telephone and tv, let alone apps and online privacy.
Oh, I see. You mean we should be able to run on to 200 don't you? ;)
This is probably the best pro-death argument -- the social consequences. The rest can be solved.
But in two to seven decades, when they have this problem, I doubt they will see it as a moral choice to kill (/refuse to save) people because a lot of them will be conservative.
> "orators argued that the dragon has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up in the dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good for the human species because it kept the population size down"
The article paints death in a very black and white, good-vs-evil picture, but I hold that it's a much more complex mechanism.
And I don't mean to suggest that we should accept death or not pursue the escape of death, but most species (with some notable exceptions) who have enjoyed evolutionary success have death hardcoded into their genome.
Which suggests to me that over a sufficient timescale (probably dozens to thousands of generations), death is beneficial to a species. Death means that there are more resources available to younger generations, and means that you get more cycles of genetic optimization. That makes the species more successful as a whole.
Humans may find some way to get optimization cycles that don't involve death, but I hold the opinion that if we don't continuously pursue optimization cycles, we'll eventually be out-competed evolutionary by something that does. We have a huge head start, but in the fable, so did the dragon.
Something doesn't need to be beneficial to be conserved, being not too harmful is enough. Or even being harmful but pointlessly crosslinked with something essential such that it's hard for evolution to escape the local minima.
More over, human values are not the same as the objectives of evolution, nor should they be.
> but I hold the opinion that if we don't continuously pursue optimization cycles
We can undermine the optimization of evolution just fine, without ending death from aging--
I seem to recall that both of us wear corrective lenses, thus largely excluding the selective pressure for naturally better eyesight that we might otherwise be subjected to. :)
With that in mind, it's something of a false choice that you present: It's not like mankind is subject to the full force of evolutionary pressure with aging and completely free of it without.
Besides, I seem to recall the the rate for accidental death in adults suggests that we'd end up with a roughly 500 year life span even if we completely cured all aging related issues. A lot longer in human terms, but hardly anything for evolution.
Another perspective would be that the biggest threat to mankinds survival isn't anything evolution is well equip to protect us from-- us killing ourselves with phenomenal weapons and bad policy. Because our bad decisions could wipe our mankind worldwide evolution has no real chance to fabricate less problematic future humans. ... But perhaps humans acting in their own perpetually immortal interest might just behave a little more prudently.
> Humans may find some way to get optimization cycles that don't involve death, but I hold the opinion that if we don't continuously pursue optimization cycles, we'll eventually be out-competed evolutionary by something that does. We have a huge head start, but in the fable, so did the dragon.
I think we're pretty safe. Evolution works really, really slowly. Even the earliest humans recorded optimized their lives much faster than evolution. That's our advantage - a brain that can do the iterations in abstract, many orders of magnitude faster than nature does in matter.
At first I thought the article was going to explain why it isn't worth pursuing agelessness, but I'm impressed at how well it wrapped everything up. Great article, thanks.
I'm disappointed that this isn't the top-rated response, because I think it's totally fair. The parent post resonated with me incredibly -- I want to do all the things. Yes, I fully expect to die in a motorcycle accident far from modern health care. I'm ok with that. I suspect the parent would agree.
"I f*cked up spectacularly" is an acceptable way to go. "I watched a lot of TV" is not. 80 years is not long enough to attempt all the spectacular things.
Hah, yea, good point. Honestly though, I live in northern California, and I have climbed a good handful of the 10k peaks around here, but there are just so many more I have not had the time to visit. So many parts of the Pacific Crest Trail that I havn't been able to hike. And that's just stuff in a 2 hour drive. I've climbed a few dozen of the Tahoe peaks, but there are so many more to do. Over the past few years, I've probably gotten to a mountain top once every 4 weeks. Some months I go every weekend, other months I get busy with other things. I never want to do Everest. But, there are some 14k in Denver that might be fun. Believe me, I'll hike more trails and mountains than most people, but there are just so many hikes, and not enough weekends.
Not enough time? Perhaps, but forever is a long time. Quite possibly it's exactly our limited time that has us achieve great things. If you have all the time in the world why bother starting that business or learning that new skill today? Might as well start tomorrow ...
I also find it at least a bit disturbing that WoW is so high on that list. Then again, if you have all the time in the world ...
Also, no one is trying for immortality. You will still die, just not from standard health decline. Hack, why not at least try and see what happens, going back to normal dying will be easy (depending on the cure, but most likely).
Depending on the solution, normal dying might indeed be impossible. I remember a piece of dystopian fiction (I think it was an Outer Limits episode) where characters couldn't even kill themselves anymore because nanobots would instantly repair any damage.
Not that this scenario is extremely likely but there might be ramifications we can't think about yet. Immortality after all isn't a particularly well-trodden path.
The items were not listed in order. I've had a couple spins of playing WoW and DotA, and often times the reason I quit are because there are so many other things I want to do. I work full time, I have a rental property, I have a small business (with my wife), 1 dog, 3 cats, no kids yet, but soon hopefully. We get outdoors, go camping, visit family. Probably getting into sailing next summer. Life's great. Don't get me wrong. But, dang. With "forever" I could get so much done. I'm also fairly patient, and conservative, so with time on my side, the safest investments will pay off well. But, then again, if you have time to work, why not jump into the risky investments. If you lose everything, you can just rebuild. Maybe a hybrid of both approaches. However, if death were cured, then money, investing, and finance would probably change quite radically as well.
I love thinking about this concept. I hope that over the next 20 years, they figure out how to extend life to 125 years, so that then in the following 20-40 years they can extend life indefinitely. Here's to hoping.
I disagree. I believe that a big reason kids are so good at learning and trying things is that they haven't yet internalized the concept of "not enough time" - there's always shitloads of time; if not today, then tomorrow. If not this summer, then next summer. When you don't have to worry about running out of time, you don't mind blowing it on learning stuff.
There's the rub. The feeling of "There's just not enough time." precisely stems from the fact that our time is limited. If that's no longer given that feeling might disappear from humanity entirely, which in turn could lead to stagnation and ultimately - and ironically - to mankind dying out.
The guy on the farm next door is happy killing leopards which threaten his sheep. Leopards are endangered. He doesn't care, in his world view there have always been many Leopards.
He has his reasons for wanting to kill leopards, but eventually humans are going to kill them all and that can't be right.
Like you, I'm excited by the idea of living longer, but it's selfish. For the world it would be better if we lived even shorter. You'd have a faster churn of ideas. Think of ignorant people consuming ivory or rhino horn out of ignorance. This ignorant generation is going to wipe out these animals outside zoos and tiny protected reserves. Their children would likely be more educated and likely not follow the ignorant behaviour of their parents. But the parents(we) live too long.
I'm sure there is an analogue in my appetite for beef and the destruction of the Amazon or my desire to own and drive a fossil fuel driven vehicle.
That is, unless you get yourself a time-traveling space ship and dedicate yourself to the engrossing project of personally insulting every single being in the universe, in alphabetical order.
Like the movie the green mile you may not want to live forever when everyone you love dies and that cycle continues over and over. Emotionally you might wish you too followed the cycle of life all those you love were following.
I'm in my mid 30's. There are a few hikes that I do repeatedly. One to a peak, one to a riverbed. I've done them dozens of time. Sitting by the rushing water, no cars, no people, no industrial sounds, trees everywhere. Rejuvenates me every time.
Yea, there are typically trees, bushes, rocks and dirt on every trail. But, they're different. Even the same trail changes over time. Trees fall, views change. Sometimes you see a deer. Sometimes you find a crazy looking flower, or bug, or plant. Sometimes it's just exhilarating to hike quickly and elevate your heartrate in the crisp cold mountain air.
I know what you're saying though. I have been on a trail, where it was the first time on that trail, and I though, geez, same ol' same ol'. But, I quickly forgot that a few minutes later as I left the highway, and got deeper in the wilderness.
I love it. As I mentioned earlier, I work a full time. Sitting at a desk. So, these times on the trail are so refreshing.
Obviously, I'd like to maintain my body and will. When I was in Maryland for a year, my landlady was 104 years old, and quite sharp. Her daughter was 80 and crazy spry. Every day my landlady would be out on the porch, cleaning and organizing. She couldn't run around, and she was probably past the point where I'd enjoy spending eternity, but the point is that her bloodline was amazing. I could certainly spend an eternity with the health that her 80 year old daughter had. She could pick up her grandson, and get around the yard just fine.
Part of the whole agelessness thing is that some of the mechanics of how our cells breakdown and begin to fail would need to be cured. At which point, our bones, and muscles, if cured of that deterioration, would lead to curing death, but it would also lead to the ability to maintain your health and body. As long as you continue to exercise, and eat well, you'd probably have a body similar to an average fit modern 40 year old I'd expect. Or somewhere between the crazy metabolism of 20 year olds, and the deterioration of 70 year olds.
I don't know any of the science though, so just speculating based on what I've read, and my opinions.
