Longevity is neither necessary nor required for "running out of space".
If the mean person has more than 2 kids, the population grows until it can't, no matter how long or short our lives.
If we cure aging and all disease, our half-life due to accidents and homicide is (currently) somewhere around 1000 years — the same "2 kids" rule applies.
Alzheimer's, leading to not drinking enough water (not that anyone around her was aware of that until the coroner's report), leading to kidney failure.
Her last day was very obviously painful, and given the nature of the condition, I suspect that the instantaneous experience of pain was her whole universe.
My dad died from bowel cancer; took a year of gradually wasting away. That was also natural.
I would much rather spend another 900+ years with my loved ones (or however long I want) rather than being forced to die so ridiculously early.
Put another way: if you knew for a fact that you would get murdered 40 years from now, would you choose end it all via peaceful lethal injection today? I very much doubt it.
For every person dying "peacefully" on their deathbed, truly happy to succumb to death, there are 1000 more people that would do anything in their final moments to physically reset to the age of 20.
Also, think bigger - if technology continues to progress, we won't be biological a few hundred years from now. We'll be digitized, each consciousness likely spanning multiple redundant nodes throughout the planet or solar system. So these freak accidents are not relevant - nothing short of a cosmic event would kill you. It's highly unlikely that you'll die before whenever you choose to die - our lives would be indefinite for all practical purposes.
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Edit because of the ridiculous HN rate limit:
> The "short" life span is one reason we take risks.
No, it's why you take risks. I'm happy to take risks - the fact that I'll die one day has no bearing on, say, my decision to go paragliding this weekend, or to push hard for a promo.
Risk does not necessarily arise out of the certainty of death, it can arise out of any number of other factors.
> I bet we would get a dystopia with long living dicators and short living peasants.
People have said this about most therapies historically but this has never come to pass.
Anyways, why throw up your hands and give up immediately? That attitude never got our species anywhere.
> Altered Carbon style, eh? Cool, sign me up for a cortical stack.
A bit more clever than that :) Individual consciousnesses could be distributed to avoid death from a single cortical stack being crushed.
1000 years would give me time to climb all the mountains, walk all the rivers, hike all the trails, and start a family, write those books, and learn to play those instruments, and still have time for a round-trip to another star.
Sure, it might also figure out energy before longevity or neither of them. I think what we are looking for is the vague ‘AGI’ goal and that, by its (vague) definition , is capable of finding multiple solutions to many problems.
Solutions clearly exist for managing diseases (we keep finding ways to give years to cancers that were an instant death sentence just 15-20 years ago); I have no clue if they exist for making us 180 in good health; I am not that smart.
And space flight is also solvable if energy is solvable and that also seems possible, but again, I am not smart enough otherwise I would be in that business.
Human conflict is solvable in a simple way; just eradicate us all. That solves all but longevity anyway for some definition of solve. But seriously speaking; if a human had a solution for these conflicts, they wouldn’t be there so either a solution without peril to humans is not there or we are too dumb to come up with one and need a 400 point iq increase to do so. I am not saying AI will ever do it but so far it seems to be the our only hope. Then again, it’s only been a few 1000 years of modern human so we might figure it out without finding AGI.
Anyway, currently this is more ‘religion’ (aka hope) than science on my side; there is no clear sign agi or super intelligence will happen soon; I am now more deadly afraid of ‘intelligence-ish simulators’ (LLMs) used everywhere to replace people and making everything vastly worse for almost everyone. Which is what’s happening at the moment.
If the mean person has more than 2 kids, the population grows until it can't, no matter how long or short our lives.
If we cure aging and all disease, our half-life due to accidents and homicide is (currently) somewhere around 1000 years — the same "2 kids" rule applies.