[slibhb]

I'm in favor of research into life extension. But I don't think this response really deals with the fundamental objection of:

"Change is necessary

Death creates change

Therefore, death is necessary"

Perhaps humans are not very capable of change once we reach adulthood and so significantly (or indefinitely) extending human lifespan would result in civilizational stasis. I don't see a simple way to overcome this argument.

[orangecat]

The argument is invalid because it ignores the possibility of something other than death creating change. As the article notes, there are plenty of examples of widespread societal change that didn't require previous generations to die off.

[prmph]

I agree. One other problem with the death-necessary-for-change mantra is that it assumes very change is good.

There have been plenty of changes in recent memory that have been disastrous.

[GMoromisato]

There is a logical flaw in that syllogism: Just because death creates change doesn't mean that death is the only thing that creates change. And if you can substitute some other process to create change, then death is not necessary.

It's like this syllogism:

1. We must do something about unemployment.

2. Slavery is something.

3. Therefore, we must do slavery.

Once the syllogism falls apart, it's obvious that there are many (and even better) ways to create change. The entire history of humanity is filled with them.

[slibhb]

But maybe death is necessary for change. It's cerainly necessary for evolution.

It's not so much that I buy this argument...it's that I don't see a simple way to rebut it. To me, it's an empirical question that we can't answer a priori, i.e. "what would human civilization look like if everyone lived forever?"

[GMoromisato]

Another argument is that death is a continuum. You can die after 80 years or after 120 or after 1,200 or after 1.2 million.

Sure, maybe if we lived 1 million years there would be problems. But it's a strawman to say that living for 1 million years is bad, so we should kill people at 100.

Honestly, (in my uninformed opinion) of all the potentially disruptive technologies, life extension is the least problematic. Disruption is worst when it happens quickly (witness AI). But life extension is not likely to happen quickly exactly because it is a complex problem with myriad causes.