On the one hand you say without death life would lack urgency, yet you seem to be open to life after death. If there was life after death... wouldn't it lack urgency?
If there isn't life after death, you simply don't exist anymore and there are no more possibilities open to you. So I'd be more than happy to postpone finding about out for as long as possible.
That way they would be incentivized to think about the long term actions of their actions, like not dying before getting affected by global warming etc.
And once aging is understood and solved, maybe it’s possible to iterate on the approach and make it cheaper and more accessible. That would greatly help the aging populations of the west.
If you’re around forever I’d imagine you would care more about what people think of you, too. If not your number of enemies would just rise forever.
If you can have ten, your worry becomes more about how/if your children preserve your legacy.
It’s a beautiful short novel exploring this idea.
In the book almost anyone that has lived could live forever but that could never happen with limited resources/space so only the ultra-wealthy are able to.
I'd skip the tv show. Also, the books (it's a series) seem to be unfinished? I could be wrong, it's been so long since I read it but it seems like some sub-story about extinct aliens wasn't finished.
Such a person, upon becoming say potus, would on day 1 dismantle any option to be removed from power and basically did what trump is doing otherwise, and/or worse.
I keep saying this over and over - for greater good of humanity, we should be shooting these immortality scientists, all of them, regardless of horrible it sounds. 1000s vs hundreds of billions.
There is no conceivable way this will end in anything but catastrophe for mankind. One could theoretise that there could be Leto II Atreides type of situation (mankind needs to experience absolutely horrible things for millenia to go on a path which is overall better in extremely long term), but I am not holding my breath. We could also just die from our stupidity, and this is one prime example of it thats anyway still far in future.
We need to be at least multiplanetary civilization before achieving this, ideally in multiple solar systems so any catastrophe is not absolute.
Then they'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
After a while the compounding energy input of the negentropic tax overwhelms the control mechanisms that feed it into the "preserved" system, and it blows up.
It's a common feature across disciplines: content management, biology, programming, maintainability engineering, neural networks, chemical engineering . . I imagine the list is pretty close to boundless. Ha, turns out human knowledge is also a complex natural system.
So I guess what I'm saying is only dead things live forever. Which should say a lot about the internal life of the standard tech/finbro. "I want to be just like I am right this second for all time!"
Speaking personally, I'm always amused by the Eternal Life pitch whether I hear it in church or on the internet. Everyone gets eternal life. We're surrounded by it, we eat it, we poop it out every day. Our grandfathers are in our lungs, old friends in the leaves of trees, giant parts of your brain die every morning as you wake. Eternal Life is not for the selfish. Something that the Bible thumpers could read for themselves, if they bothered to read the thing.
The article is heavily biased against the evil tech billionaires. So much so, that it has to outright lie about Bryan Johnson? His "proprietary longevity routine" is actually fully public. The most important parts aren't some expensive surgeries but 1) regular sleep 2) healthy food 3) exercise.
Either you want everyone to live as long as possible, or you want people to die. And if the tech elites scare you that much, remember that longevity protocols protect against death by aging, _not_ assassinations.
On a very dark night I would have expected worse.
> I agree that wealth and power accumulation are a problem. But the conclusion obviously isn't to have everyone forcibly DIE. If anything, this is an argument to make longevity more accessible.
Maybe there is some corner of the article that advocates people forcibly dying... but from skimming it, the topic is about powerful people using things like “brainless clones” to extend their lives.
The following is essentially the implied wish of this piece: I solemnly wish, with all my non-power, for tyrannical heads of states and tech billionaires to not live abnormally long.
This is what you take offense to. The wish that our overlords do not live unnaturally long.
> The article is heavily biased against the evil tech billionaires. So much so, that it has to outright lie about Bryan Johnson? His "proprietary longevity routine" is actually fully public. The most important parts aren't some expensive surgeries but 1) regular sleep 2) healthy food 3) exercise.
This I care about.
> Either you want everyone to live as long as possible, or you want people to die.
May we all live as long as possible, for it is our equal right as human beings.~
But may also tyrants and tech billionaires remain as such. For all men are not equal.
> And if the tech elites scare you that much, remember that longevity protocols protect against death by aging, _not_ assassinations.
Assassination is forcible death. Something you took offense to above.
This is the premise in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, phantastic book but really devastating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipex_Alligator
Poof ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Looks like I’m going to avoid drinking tea in the foreseeable future.
Thoughtful critique is fine, of course.
The Western world lives under democracy. Power is held by the population at large. If it appears that the older population is holding more power, that is simply because they have more time, being retired, to exert their democratic duty.
Nations haven't tried to implement mass immigration because they are woke- it's a last desperate gamble.
The power balance of local politics and national politics also got changed with TV and the internet, things which would've happened regardless of how good a 'generation' is.
Just great. And who is to decide how long is "too long"? You?
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
This hardfought wisdom has served the planet well for a couple billion years. What are the odds the Silicon Valley tech-bros have thought this through?
There’s a comment down below that says “most young people would do it”. Why don’t you say anything to that person?
Who wouldn't select a part of the population they find unsaveable, say evil genocidal billionaires, and sacrifice them for extending their own lifespan + improving how they believe the world should be? Win-win.
I feel sad that you seemingly have met more people who lack compassion and empathy than ones who have it. Personally, I don't know (or "hang out" rather maybe) many people who'd sacrifice anyone's life just to live a day longer, and I don't think that's a useful default view to have of people, most people I've met don't want to hurt others. Most people will hurt others if they can avoid getting hurt themselves by doing so, but that doesn't mean those same people would sacrifice someone's life to get another day.
So who am I to judge? I have impurities in my heart because I dislike people who cause harm. Best wait for the saints to weigh in.
Ours are not the Masters of Industry from the Industrial Age[1], or the fission-missile-kings of the Nuclear Age. They're not ready to teach a Physics unit at a community college.
The tippity top of the uber-wealthy today are remarkably short on actual formal knowledge. This makes sense in their ideological system: scientific acumen as more of a commodity than a value.
In this view, everything should look like the stock market. But this is a profoundly stupid view. It requires not just ideology, but willfully not looking at the universe.
I'm probably steering afoul of about 90% of ycombinator here, so I'll just pull the throttles back and stop there.
[1] "Isambard Kingdom Brunel . . But Got-DAMN did men used to have some proper-ass names" - Achewood
Share and Enjoy.
I'm not a nihilist and I do eat meat. I think we should minimize suffering to others. But I can see how anybody could be conditioned to think otherwise. It's not some inherent human instinct to want to preserve others' lives. We've had to develop that instinct culturally.
One is general anaesthesia, where you are "out"
The other is with something like fentanyl where you could have a whole conversation during the procedure, but when you finish the procedure, you don't remember it.
The experience afterwards is pretty much identical, but philosophically both seem very different.
Except of course, that's nonsense. mRNA vaccines are super advanced and available for a majority of humans. And tech drops in price if it's popular enough.
People have been reaching the age of 100 since antiquity, reaching 110 probably happened hundreds of years ago as well. Which just shows the biological limit hasn't been extended just that there's more people reaching it.
At least in Western cultures, 70 was long considered the "natural" lifespan for humans. E.g., Dante's Divine Comedy takes place when the main character is at the literal midpoint of his life, 35.
I am glad that in my country people retire and fuck off to spend their last days on holiday. Spending their accumulated wealth has become a major engine of the national economy.
In times of rapid technological development, the old are not wise. They are reactionary and cannot adapt. Their brain stopped developing before the internet. To expect them to make adequate decisions for the current landscape is to expect them to understand a world they simply weren’t built for.
A lot of older people are more adaptable, have a better understanding of technology. The older you are the more change you will have experienced.
Not that you owe the rich and powerful better, necessarily, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
> Why don’t you say anything to that person?
Purely because I didn't see it. It's flagkilled now.
We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted to HN—there's far too much. When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, that's the likeliest explanation. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- Insulin isn't crazy expensive outside the broken US system
- Let's assume it was, or some other medical advance was, so what? A few examples of something only very slowly going down in price doesn't change the fact that a lot of things DO go down in price or just exists at all due to basic science being done.
Are as abstract as death. Names that we use to label certain phenomenon. You need more to demonstrate that the equivalence is false here.
Just because it’s ageist doesn’t mean it’s wrong.