[makeitshine]

It's not possible to escape death, and all timelines will feel short when it comes to their end. Reducing the suffering of life, whether mental or physical, seems a more achievable pursuit. To die without cancer, dementia, chronic pain or the so many other ailments would be amazing.

[JoshTriplett]

They go hand in hand. Any reasonable path to eliminating mortality will entail eliminating aging and degenerative conditions.

Often, when people first imagine living much much longer, they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of age that also end up killing you.

[zerocrates]

If the pathway to where you're looking to go runs mostly through a fight against age-related degeneration, why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept?

Who's out there handwringing against fighting, just to pick a random example, dementia?

[stale2002]

> why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept?

There are both drawbacks and benefits to the controversy of "ending death".

You have mentioned the drawbacks, but the benefits are that it attracts the interest of the individuals that care about the most important problem in the world, which is specifically this problem of ending death.

[JoshTriplett]

That's the idea behind marketing campaigns like "healthspan". It's a trade-off. It's very easy to get dragged into a pivot that focuses on one specific condition rather than mortality and age-related degeneration in general.

[rbanffy]

Aging is a set of degenerative diseases that are 100% fatal and affect 100% of the human population.

[xvector]

If we told someone 200 years ago that I'd be typing this on a pane of glass that talks to satellites in low earth orbit at the speed of light, accessing the entire repository of human knowledge while hurtling through the air at 600 MPH in a man made bird, they'd call it impossible (and probably burn us at the stake.)

If we told the same person that we have managed to create a crude facsimile of intelligence and expect to have full intelligence in our lifetimes, running on lightning trapped in purified sand, their mind would simply break.

I am confident that humanity will solve death on all relevant timescales, out to the heat-death of the universe itself.

I am optimistic that today will be looked back on as "that era when people died, isn't that sad?"

[nullindividual]

No, it isn’t sad that we die. It’s extremely important that we do — if not just for getting rid of some of humanity’s worst humans.

[D-Coder]

> No, it isn’t sad that we die. It’s extremely important that we do — if not just for getting rid of some of humanity’s worst humans.

So, kill off all of humanity to make sure you get rid of the worst ones? To me that seems... non-optimal.

[Ygg2]

Consider this, those that command most resources will be able to get this tech, not you. This isn't everyone gets an iPhone. It's the richest get the best health insurance.

[ben_w]

If it was invented in isolation of all other tech, it would still be in the interests of the rich that everyone else got to use it.

More users, more awareness of limitations and side effects and how to treat them.

Longer working lives for the labour force, less need for expensive pensions and expensive old age care.

But this isn't in isolation, the changes to AI and robotics, even without AGI/ASI or von Neumann replication, will make us unfathomably better off by 2050 (and with, no more labour). What does "rich" even mean when anti-aging stops being a choice between "snake oil" and "in mice"?

[Ygg2]

> It would still be in the interests of the rich that everyone else got to use it.

Why though? More users? Economy is already moving to a free-to-pay model. You earn more catering to rich people than the middle class/poor. Look at hardware nVidia is earning more extracting money from the richest people buying 4090 and 4080 than from rest, and that's dwarfed by their AI offerings.

The way I see it, basically you earn money from whales, rich people and you toss breadcrumbs to the rest.

[nullindividual]

> So, kill off all of humanity to make sure you get rid of the worst ones?

No one said to kill off all of humanity. Certainly 'bad' people have died in the long (short) history of humanity without the remainder of the species disappearing.

Life doesn't occur without death. Death is a necessary component. Life _comes from_ death.

Walk into an old growth forest some time.

[losvedir]

I think you misinterpreted the response. They said "humanity" but probably meant "every single human".

You said: "It’s extremely important that we [die] — if not just for getting rid of some of humanity’s worst humans"

Their retort is that this is a very blunt instrument. You are advocating killing literally billions of humans (not all at once), just to make sure you get the bad ones. That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.

I'm ambivalent on the question of improving healthspan and longevity, but I agree with the other person that this is a bad argument against it.

[nullindividual]

> You are advocating killing literally billions of humans (not all at once), just to make sure you get the bad ones. That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.

I think you misinterpreted my comment. I was not advocating for killing. Killing is an unnatural process.

[forgetfreeman]

It may be non-optimal but it certainly beats the shit out of most of the alternatives.

[xvector]

It is not an issue to me if <bad human> lives longer, if I get to enjoy more time with my loved ones, watch humanity build Dyson spheres, explore the galaxy, etc.

Bad humans then become social issues - and those, we can solve.

[jajko]

You live in society, not alone on far side of the moon. In any society including worst communism terror Earth has seen, the worst and most potent humans bubble up to the top, always, without exception.

No mechamism to wipe this clean means absolute dictatorship with no end in sight, you always see it even in democracies, strong persons tend to bend rules as they like and the only stopping power is re-election force, or you end up eith some form of forever putin.

Death brings correction, even if individually of course it sucks pretty badly. Even for just avoiding endless dictatures its necessary.

[_w1tm]

I think you are mixing up concepts. Curing mortality doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be killed.

Authoritarian regimes don’t end because the dictator gets old and dies, they end because the people rise up against the oppressive government. If mortality was the liberator you imagine it to be then North Korea would already be rid of their nightmare.

[stale2002]

> Death brings correction, even if individually of course it sucks pretty badly.

There is no real correction though.

Because for every person who you think that you helped, you should know that those people are going to eventually die anyway, meaning that it was all for naught.

[forgetfreeman]

Name one social issue our species has comprehensively solved in the last century.

[ben_w]

Comprehensive, as in extensively but not necessarily totally? And why as a species rather than as countries, given we don't have a single world government?

Equality issues still exist, but compared to 1924?

Is literacy is a social issue or not? 31% to 87%.

Is extreme poverty? 54% of about 2 billion, now 10% of about 8 billion, reduced in absolute numbers and not just as a percentage.

[zo1]

We haven't. Even simple ones like poverty, hunger, homelessness that are just a matter of admin and money. We've been captured by self-perpetuating and effectively immortal institutions (NGO's and arguably governments) that will not let us solve them because that would mean their own death.

[forgetfreeman]

I agree with the spirit of your argument but maybe not the villains you've chosen. Given legislative capture is absolutely a thing I think your criticism is more effectively pointed at the individuals and organizations responsible for funding reelection campaigns for the politicians that aren't obviously servicing the needs of their notional constituency.

[xvector]

Sounds like dying isn't very effective at solving social issues either, then, so the argument that it helps is somewhat moot.

[blkhawk]

Most of the worst humans do not die of old age. I doubt we will ever solve death (aka entropy) completely.

[rowanG077]

Death is not really the result of entropy. No life we know of is the opposite of a closed system.

[8372049]

> accessing the entire repository of human knowledge

I know this is a common trope, but just think about how far it is from the truth. And not just because of business secrets, classified information, privacy rules and so on—think of the signal to noise ratio, the vast quantities of "fake news", propaganda, misconceptions, not to mention how hard it is to find reliable and detailed information about niche stuff. Information is vastly more accessible than ever before, but we still have a very long way to go.

[vundercind]

Many not-even-that-obscure topics hit “you’ll need to go get a university press book that’s not online to continue” surprisingly fast. Any decent used book store is full of information that’s not online.

Library Genesis is the only reason this is even kind-of close to true.

As someone who grew up alongside the growth of the Internet (and remembers a time before it), I gotta say it hasn’t lived up to the hype.

[anthk]

200 years ago were close to the industrial revolution. Not so far fetched to stories from "The Anachronopete" and Jules Verne's novels.

Look at this, from the 1700's:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passarola

[getlawgdon]

The entire repository of human knowledge? Certainly not.