[terryf]

Wow these comments are depressing here.

Of course I want to live as long as possible! Because life is awesome! I want more of it!

The fear of death is of course real, but that's not the main reason for wanting to live longer. I want more experience, I want to see what happens in the future! I want to understand more, learn more and be able to do it at a more relaxed pace without the feeling that time will run out!

[olalonde]

I think it's a bit similar to the deaf community hating on hearing aids or bald people hating on hair transplants. Psychologically, it's challenging to accept certain conditions, so our brains create rationalizations as a defense mechanism. Similarly, with death, we have no option but to accept it (at least for now), and so we develop rationalizations to convince ourselves that it's actually desirable.

[keiferski]

No, it’s not similar at all.

The modern technological world has a certain approach to the individual Self and its experience of the world - it ought to be focused on almost to the exclusion of anything else. Nothing else ultimately matters, as long as your personal life experience continues - is what this philosophy ultimates boils down to.

Other people, in other places, value different things. Merely existing as long as possible is not their primary goal. And in fact, the lack of such ways to “use” one’s life and death in a meaningful way other than simply existing is one major cause of the modern malaise affecting many developed nations. To live and die for a purpose other than extending your own personal experience is something many people hunger for in current times.

[lynx23]

Dont forget blind people "hating" on bionic eyes and similar nonesense. And no, you haven't understood the underlying issue at all. All you can do is claim a minority group isn't quite in their right mind, thats pretty sad to read. Maybe you can read up on Ableism, but thats not the whole story. Tech based implants are very poor quality-wise. Bionic eyes have a few hundred pixels across, and hearing implants sound quite harsh and unnatural. What those minority groups are "hating" on (what a strange way to put it) is them being forced into this, without seeing a lot of gain. I am blind 45 years now. If someone would force me into a bionic eye, I would need the next 10 to 20 years at least to learn basic reading. I'd have to start at the very basics, and its likely too late for me to adapt to the visual world. My way of dealing with things, as a native blind man, is superior to every technology you undisabled people can give me. And if I decline, you say I am hating on technology. This is soooooooo fucked up, you have no idea.

[elzbardico]

A lot of what we call "The X community" is just a portion of a said larger group that is incredibly vocal and politically organized.

[greenthrow]

I thought everybidy hated on hair transplants because they look like doll's hair and are distractingly terrible?

[8372049]

The primary reason the Deaf community "hates on hearing aids" is mostly because it comes at the expense of sign language.

If you're deaf and live in a Deaf community (i.e. with sign language), you will function normally in virtually every way. If you're deaf and live in a hearing community with hearing aids, you'll be forever impaired. With hearing aids and/or CI you will still be hard of hearing, you will still struggle with group conversations, at the beach or in a swimming pool, in noisy environments and so on.

Secondly, the Deaf community strongly objects to the notion that lack of hearing is a handicap and instead consider it a cultural difference. Somehow, when (we) hearing people think of the deaf we consider it a disability to e.g. have to use a vibrating wakeup alarm, but we don't consider our own inability to fall asleep in a noisy place a disability.

(For reference, deaf=impaired hearing, Deaf=sign language user)

[trueismywork]

"Your" life is awesome.

[nine_k]

«Maturity is when the thoughts of mortality stop to evoke fear and start to induce moderate optimism.»

«I'm not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of dying pointlessly.»

(Don't remember the attribution.)

[YurgenJurgensen]

You have only considered the consequences of you living forever. It wouldn’t just be you, it’d be everyone. Well, more likely, it’d just be the rich, and you’d just have to hope you’re rich enough to afford it. And good luck with social mobility in a world where the ‘generational wealth’ doesn’t need the ‘generational’ part. You’ll find that an internship at a company with the potential to eventually give a high-paying job in a few decades needs 80 years of experience, three PhDs and a personal recommendation letter from at least one legendary figure just to make it to interview because you’re competing in a job market with immortals.

This feels similar to the people who advocate for dictatorships because they picture themselves as the dictators, and end up having their faces eaten by leopards. Statistically, you’re overwhelmingly likely to not end up in the elite in this new deathless world.

[terryf]

I'm certainly not part of the elite even in the current deathful world :)

And yes, of course there will be issues, difficult ones. But life is, was and will always be filled with difficulty, obstacles, struggles and failures. Mine certainly is.

However, I believe in progress and overcoming obstacles and I believe that if we ever manage to extend life, we will figure out ways to make it work.

There is a lot of talk how finding jobs is more difficult these days if you are young and do not have experience. That real-estate is so expensive that nobody is able to afford it.

And I'm sure it's true.

But I also see a lot of young people succeeding and thriving in ways that I could not even have thought of. Therefore, I think there is reason to believe that the next generation will be able to find a way to make it work. As has every generation before.

When I was younger I used to think that situations in the world are now radically different from what the previous generation had to deal with. And on the first level of abstraction, they are! Computers did not exist for the generation before me. So of course it was new.

However, that is just the first level of abstraction. Take the second level of abstraction and you can look back and identify things that are completely new for each new generation. I mean, how different was the concept of going to work in a factory with a loom from the previous generation where machines did not exist at all!

[keiferski]

Yes I think most people here aren’t considering the fact that technology is rarely evenly distributed.

Rawls’ veil of ignorance is relevant here:

In the original position, you are asked to consider which principles you would select for the basic structure of society, but you must select as if you had no knowledge ahead of time what position you would end up having in that society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

[DennisP]

Elites are not the only ones who get cancer treatments. Since the diseases of aging are extremely expensive, it's even likely that national health insurance programs would pay for anti-aging treatments. Longer lifespans would also help counter lower fertility, which is an economic problem for most developed nations.

Long-term, sure, maybe we end up with a social mobility problem. But solving that seems less difficult than solving aging. Even if we didn't solve it, I'm not convinced it would be a bad trade.

Imagine we lived in world with an average lifespan of a thousand years but little social mobility. And some prominent person said "hey I know how to fix this, we'll just kill everyone on their 90th birthday." I doubt many people would consider that a viable solution, rather than a ridiculously bad one.

[robertlagrant]

> This feels similar to the people who advocate for dictatorships because they picture themselves as the dictators, and end up having their faces eaten by leopards. Statistically, you’re overwhelmingly likely to not end up in the elite in this new deathless world.

I don't think I've ever heard of anyone saying this.

[elzbardico]

The idea we have of "Generational Wealth" depends on compouding returns and compounding returns require perpetual economic growth which is something that in a sufficiently long timeline is simply not possible.

Also, on capitalism, economic growth is also dependent at some level on population growth.

Eternal life would probably require some kind of socialism.

[pineaux]

Yeah, I agree with you. I want all those things and would try to attain them if possible. But I also think it's selfish and "not how it works". I think people are not really made for adapting such a long time. I also think the generations after you would want to own a part of your ecological niche to live in themselves. You might be looking over your shoulder the whole time.

[terryf]

Yes, it is a bit selfish. But it is also okay to be a bit selfish from time to time. After all, it is your life. Of course, this needs to be carefully balanced. But doing things every now and then just because you want to, is okay.

However the "not how it works" comment ... well, you could make that pretty much throughout the time that humans have lived. We have been continuously changing the environment around us to suit our needs and wants. Early farmers burned down forests to get fertilized land. We domesticated crops and animals and bred them to grow the way we wanted them. We built things to make life safer, better and easier.

You could say "that's not how it works" about a tractor or wheat with multiple stems from a single seed.

But of course, there will be problems that need to be overcome if we ever do figure out ways of extending life. But again, there always have been problems with new inventions.

I firmly believe that humanity has the ability to overcome problems, develop, learn and improve. And that aligns well with wanting more life!

[chr1]

Well, if people live for really long time like 10000, it would become much easier to travel to other stars with technology that we already have, so there will be plenty of "ecological niche to live in".