| It's going to take a long time to move past the limitations of biology, and in the meantime we need lots of work on biology to save people we have today. > It's not as easy as "let's fix dying neurons". Fortunately, people working on the problem don't think it's that easy either. They're also not giving up on it just because it's difficult. > You and your beloved ones are going to die. Just accept it. Why is it important to you that people accept that particular premise (which I will never do), and thus stop working on the problem or supporting those who do? Why is it important to you to make this argument? The first step towards solving a problem is refusing to simply "accept it". > It's just that on long enough time probability of your pattern being destroyed goes to one, whether you are a living organism, a program or some handy-wavy. We will have a very long time to deal with problems like the heat death of the universe, or shorter-term problems like our sun burning out, once we've dealt with more time-critical problems. We're not going to be able to suddenly flip a switch and everyone lives forever, but we can save as many people as we can and help them live longer and ultimately put the probability of everyone's continued survival as close to 1 as possible. Imagine, just for a moment, a world in which actual death is so incredibly rare that one person dying makes news around the world, and after time is spent figuring out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again, people mourn the senseless tragedy. > And if you really want to fight biology, why put longevity over decreasing suffering? What makes you think I do? They go hand in hand. A huge amount of suffering arises from aging-related degeneration. People working on extending lifespans are in the process extending healthy life. |