Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _Microft 1947 days ago
> Our acquiescence of death is the greatest tragedy ever and collectively we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

Death is a tragedy for relatives of the deceased but for society it is the most rejuvenating thing one could imagine. Change is so much easier when old ideas just die out.

Immortality/longevity might be great on an individual level but it is stagnation and death on a societal one.

3 comments

Id say this goes in the same category with the benefits of war. Death is also a tragedy for the person who dies. That adds up to a heck of a lot of tragedy.

Perhaps old people would be far less resistant to change if their mortality wasn't breathing down their necks and they knew they had all the time in the universe to change to new careers, enjoy those societal change benefits, etc.

The decades of middle then old age, tired, first from scrambling to establish ourselves, then raise children, and then as they come to adulthood, we find ourselves an exhausted hollow shadow of what we had hoped to be. It’s not that people need to die so culture can evolve, it’s that we spend so much of our lifetime in decline, what we need is to give people decades or centuries of vitality. It takes so long for us to learn the basics of what others have done before us, decades in school for a short window in which to add to the frontier, its a heartbreaking waste, Longer healthy lives might mean, decades or centuries of flexible open minded thinking, centuries to learn more and become wiser, longer lives, and more robust repairable bodies put the stars and back in reach in a lifetime
Just put the old people on a different planet and solve this rejuvenation issue
Ah, the "just move" argument
They are being moved into the ground anyway so you just change the location.