[feoren]

It absolutely boggles my mind that this is such a controversial viewpoint. We're talking about a machine that can keep people not just alive, but awake, talking, and riding an exercise bike, without working lungs or a heart. It's an insane, miraculous treatment, and extremely strong evidence that death is something we can conquer. And people come along and just downvote comments like yours, with no explanation at all, because it's so deeply engrained in their brains they they and everyone they love simply must die, and everyone who believes otherwise must be naive and stupid. Because death is this magical, spiritual, special problem unlike any other problem humanity has ever faced: the one thing we will never be able to solve?

It absolutely is a dead-end, anti-growth mindset, and I don't understand it. Why is everyone so in love with death?

[jprival]

It’s not a particularly fair accounting of the framing of the article, which also profiles people who are working precisely on making the technology more practical and portable and ends on a hopeful note. For the time being it’s a high maintenance way to keep people alive, though, so the ethical dilemmas of resource allocation are real.