I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death.
I have decided that soon I will quit my job ($1M+ TC at FAANG), and I will dedicate the entirety of my remaining life (I am ~30) to helping humanity solve death, even if I never benefit from it.
This is a difficult decision for me because I am giving up a life of guaranteed luxury and comfort for a moonshot that almost certainly will not pan out. But I can think of no greater and more meaningful pursuit. This is my Zero Dawn. Moving the needle here is the only thing that will let me - ironically - die happy.
I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense potential to be leveraged here if we come together.
I will never understand people who say that mortality is what gives life a meaning.
It is exactly opposite. If I can't observe effects of my actions (and most likely "I" would not be able to do so after death), then it does not matter for me what I do during life, since outcome is all the same.
There should be no death. For whatever reason, it is incredibly hard to find people thinking the same, despite, paradoxially no one wants to die.
> I will never understand people who say that mortality is what gives life a meaning.
Same here. I wonder why they don't give even more meaning to their life by killing themselves right now.
Oh wait, it doesn't work that way. Death gives a meaning only when it is in a distant future... or some other excuse like that. But for some people, that future is now, or very soon. They would probably also prefer to have a "meaningful" death later rather than now.
You are confusing You-level and mankind-level, it was never about You. Meaning is there, but its not kind to people who think themselves as center of universe and mandatory part of it (we all are of our own version of reality but thats not what I mean).
Life well lived is a life thats easier to let go, believing in afterlife or not. Now what does that mean is highly individual but for most its around friends, family and children, mostly children. Most prople with kids have no problem seeing that meaning in mortality, plus there are even more logical and potent arguments (resources, selfishness, not ending up with immortal dictator forever etc but thats for longer)
I think the part of "even if I never benefit from it" is a key point in living a meaningful life and transcending the fear of death, though hopefully you have carefully considered your decision from a financial perspective since material aspects are obviously also a part of being able to carry out your plans in this life.
I don't think there is anything wrong in seeking the longest healthiest possible life, but suspect that in many cases that the motivation for it comes more from fear of personal death than the love of what life is. It's great to be an agent in this incredible adventure but my take on it is that when the means (a specific localized self consciousness) become the end ("being me is the most important thing and it should be great forever") then that is where you get stuck in a local maximum and some sort of suffering is bound to follow.
Another aspect is that of how much more time do you think will be enough? 1000 years? 10,000 years? As someone has already stated, you will not be able to avoid death forever and even in the most optimistic case (at least from this myopic view of immortality) you won't win against entropy. No matter how long of a good life you are granted, it will never seem enough because from the subjective point of view it will seem to be over soon at which point personal death will again become very real and very alarming.
It seems the only way out of this is to be able to transcend the personal sense of self and see that your real immortality lies in realizing that in a very real sense you are also something much greater than just a localized version of it.
I'm not some Zen master and am probably afraid of my own personal mortality as much as the next person, but after a long time of thinking deeply about it, this seems to be the most probable conclusion.
> I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death.
A world without death is also necessarily a world without birth once the whole biosphere has been converted to immortals. I'm not sure living amongst a bunch of old people is something to be envied.
I also don't think that people who think that immortality is enviable have really come to grips with how long forever actually is.
You think those numbers are enough to keep the population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers? Consider the global population is increasing now and we're talking about removing a big chunk of all-cause mortality from the field. So unless there's a plan to replace natural causes with artificial causes (which moots functional immortality entirely) some form of population control is an absolute requirement.
>You think those numbers are enough to keep the population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers?
If we keep reproducing at today's rates, of course not. However, birthrates are in free-fall worldwide due to many factors, with the biggest ones probably being education, women's rights, and access to reliable contraception. As the high birthrate countries improve in these areas, their birthrates fall; we've seen this universally in countries across the world. Of course, there's other factors too, like high costs of living, gender divides in some cultures, etc. The latter ones might be solved eventually, but I truly hope we don't regress on the former ones.
With life-extension research, I think it's highly unlikely someone is going to find the Holy Grail anytime soon that suddenly makes humans biologically immortal. Instead, it'll probably be a slow process of incremental improvements. So while those improvements chip away at the death rate, cultural changes will continue to decrease the birthrate: people will continue to choose to have fewer children, people will wait longer to have children, etc.
Not many, no. Not enough to matter. Natural disasters just don't kill that many people [1].
But now that you mention it I do think that anyone living in a world without death will be constantly looking over their shoulder and sleeping with one eye open.
Old people who will likely still look like they are in their mid-20s — few people are going to want to develop something that only extends old age, even though people (not sure if "some" or "many") will still prefer that over death.
Being old is not limited to how you look. It’s also how your world views change, how your personality evolves, etc.
Also you didn’t address my almost-no-children point. That one I think is the stronger point. Looking at my children grow older day after day is the thing that bring me the most joy and sens of meaning in my life.
> Being old is not limited to how you look. It’s also how your world views change, how your personality evolves, etc.
It's also your muscles, which won't be old, and the on-going feeling of a ticking biological clock driving people to say "kids, now, before it is too late".
It's also how much sleep you need, how much energy you have.
It's also your metabolism, your ability to recover from light injuries, to exercise, to excel at sport.
It's also neuro-plasticity.
We don't have good examples to even guess if world-views (or fashion choices) lock in place because of brain age, or because we've seen too much and become bored.
But personality, that we can already change with chemistry; it's not a reason by itself for anything.
> Looking at my children grow older day after day is the thing that bring me the most joy and sens of meaning in my life.
Good for you :)
But for me, I wish I'd had kids already, but I have many other joys until I find someone who can help me with that (most of my friends are deliberately child-free). If I became ageless, it wouldn't be a worry to wait.
What is it you suggest we can change with chemistry?
Is it boredom? Are you suggesting we can keep enjoying the things we are bored with thanks to LSD or something?
So, a childless world with centuries-old people drowning there boredom in drugs?
This is really important. Being young is cool not just because your body works better but because you still have a lot to discover. Discovery is fun. Experiencing something for the first time is fun. But the problem is that you can only experience something for the first time once. The second time it might still be fun, or the third time, but by the time you do something 100 times or 1000 times or 10,000 times it becomes less fun. This is one of the major differences between doing something as a hobby and doing it as a job. When it's a hobby, when it stops being fun, you can just quit. And sooner or later, everything stops being fun if you do it often enough.
The problem is not that we don't live long enough, the problem is that most people don't have the freedom to do the things they want to do in the time they have. That is a much more tractable problem, and it is the one we should be working on, not extending life spans. If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
> The problem is not that we don't live long enough, the problem is that most people don't have the freedom to do the things they want to do in the time they have. That is a much more tractable problem, and it is the one we should be working on, not extending life spans.
We as a species can do both without either slowing down the other — biotech researchers aren't the same skillset as politicians.
> If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
Disagree, that requires a personality which gets bored quickly. Expertise comes from having the passion stay for long enough to get really good — despite the meme this isn't exactly 10k hours, but it's still long enough that you can fail to grow sick of living after properly mastering just fifteen things in a century.
But even if you did, being ageless doesn't take away the opportunity to cease to be. If it's really all that dull, people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.
> If it's really all that dull, people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.
That, or... I know that'll sound crazy but... not everything has to be an adrenalin rush. Just let go, stop taking your keep-me-alive-forever medication, have a peaceful death during your sleep, contemplating the fact that you'll make room for new humans to have the chance to discover all the things you also had the chance to discover during the last 231 years?
That may sound like a punch line, but it is actually a serious point: our existence has externalities that need to be taken into account. If you're going to argue for the value of potential experiences that will never be had by old people because they die, then I think you also need to consider the value of potential experiences that will never be had by young people because they are never born since all available resources are being used in perpetuity by the lucky generation that came along just as the longevity technology matured.
Arguing for the potential future of young people who won't be born, is a thing that some do.
Not me, I think there's a hyperbolic discount to unwritten futures¹, and that we should live in the present with a view to the foreseeable future — a future which is, IMO, currently "about 5 years"², because there's too many things changing to see further than that anyway.
Perhaps one day things will calm down, and we can be confident of what our experiences will be a millennium into the future; or perhaps that future, being filled by other humans just like ourselves who are themselves all making predictions of what will come, will be inherently chaotic beyond our own ability to forecast.
And a millennium is what you want for starters if you are to explore the stars, as space dust becomes dangerous well before relativity makes a huge difference.
> I think there's a hyperbolic discount to unwritten futures.
And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing people.
BTW, it's not just about the actual unborn, it's all the existing people who want the experience of having and raising children who won't be able to. Personally, I am happily childless by choice, but I am given to understand that some people find it a very fulfilling experience.
> And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing people
I can personally experience aging: Every change to my body after the mid 20s sucks. A life of the same length without aging is still an improvement. Unwinding the last 15 years of aging on my body would still be an improvement, even if aging continued normally and lifespan wasn't increased as a side effect.
I have no problem working towards improved quality of life, but I think we should start with the low-lying fruit of improving the quality of life of poor young people rather than old rich people. But either way that's very different from working to extend longevity.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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?"
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.
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"?
> 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.
> First, it's easier to do test on undocumented, homeless and rights deprived people than regular citizens.
Not if you want to do long term analysis, and rule out confounding variables like the impact of sleeping rough.
Though even if you did, that would still be a demonstration that it won't just be for the rich. Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
> Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor will be automatized, who's going to rebel? The automatons?
It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one, followed by log_2(population)*replication_period, before everyone has them. The former is 33, so even if they take a year starting from bashing rocks with pickaxes, this would still be less than half the current human life expectancy.
> Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.
> It might be automated, but then there's no longer a meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have one
Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation. Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.
> Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then run a battery of tests.
We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically. (Not that this means nobody will do them, the Tuskegee study happened, but it was also low-value in addition to being unethical).
> Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full automation.
It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation, as full automation requires anything that a human can do, and we can already do "build robot".
If machines cannot make robots, people will be paid to make robots, and then it won't be fully automated.
> Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they aren't free.
Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.
Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last. And it's only "probably" because there's a reasonable chance Earth gets ejected from the solar system over that time scale.
And before you say it PV is also a thing that we can do and thus a thing that must be fully automatable in any economy deserving of the description "fully automated".
But it doesn't need to last that long; if such a thing takes a year to make a copy of itself, then even limited to the surface of the Earth it would be able to make the last doubling, 4 billion units, if the construction had an energy budget of 247.7 GWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%286000km%29%5E2*pi*...
28.276 megawatts on average for a year is considerably more than we use to reach adulthood, even in countries with high per-capita usage. Biologically speaking, it's about 15700 times the energy consumption we need to reach adulthood (and the disparity is even more severe for, say, a dog which reproduces significantly younger than a human), and we get that energy and those materials by eating plants or animals that ate plants, which is also a clearly sufficient source of both materials and energy that this planet can provide without violating entropy or being magic.
> We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty pointless if you don't do them realistically.
Yeah, and there is a gulf between works in mice and works in humans, as anyone reading science journals will tell you. Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real deal.
> It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation.
Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
It's a very theoretical solution to a problem that can be solved in a much messier but available way. E.g. Warp drive vs Nuclear power generation ships.
> Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing power for about five times longer than our atmosphere will last.
You mean the sun? Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".
> Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-for. We are an existence proof of this.
Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.
> Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real deal.
Only if you don't shoot yourself in the foot in the process.
> Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's piecemeal or sudden.
> Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want to continue to "use it".
The sun is more stable than Earth's orbit and we're using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms ("life") have been running on it for billions of years before we came along.
> Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane, theoretical construct that has little to do with reality. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth and nearby resources.
I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my fingers as I type this, because all life meets the criteria of a VN machine.
> Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's piecemeal or sudden.
You don't have to do it all from scratch. First variation can be built by humans, then the rest can be maintained by machines long term. It's like bootstrapping a compiler versus having compiler write/build itself and hardware.
> I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my fingers as I type this, because all life meets the criteria of a VN machine.
You aren't a Von Neumann replicator. Or at least not a useful one. No human can construct hammer, chairs and PCs given sequence of DNA. Unless you have to learn it yourself, which defeats the purpose, or you have to raise a new one from scratch for 18 years.
Previous statement indicated that they are necessary for full automation, implying they are useful when it comes to generating artifacts useful for humans.
> The sun is more stable than Earth's orbit and we're using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms ("life") have been running on it for billions of years before we came along.
Sun is stable? Could have fooled me. How are the solar flares?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Nearly all of humanities pursuits is giving the middle finger to entropy. Yes, we're accelerating it's eventual win, but in the short term we're comfortable.
Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Living beings are open systems because they constantly exchange energy and matter with their surroundings. Earth is also an open system because it receives energy from the sun (and, to a much lesser degree, from other stars), and sometimes things from outer space fall here.
Entropy applies across the universe. We know the minimum entropy it started with, where we are now, and the maximum entropy possible. We are about halfway there.
You are not alone. I can't retire yet to start working on this, but I'm looking forward to when that day comes. In the meantime, I'm working my day job and writing at night speculative fiction on the intersection of this topic and our current value systems. A big chunk of the problem is that most people are extremely conservative when it comes to death... and perhaps for good reason. But the time has come when more of humanity should leave the shelter of resignation and faith and go into that battlefield.
For now it looks like death can't be "solved" at all.
You may be able to prolong individual human life, even by a lot.
But how to solve entropy and the end of an empty, cold universe?
There is even speculation that life is from a certain angle only an effect to accelerate entropy under the umbrella of the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (but I do not remember the source).
So from the standpoint of current knowledge of how nature works this seems to look dire.
I also personally disagree. I do not think that the beautiful chaos of life is strictly preferable to the requiem eternam of death. I'll go when I have to, without hesitation and regrets. It's not the things that terrify us, but our opinion of the things.
AGI singularity is science fiction and, while interesting, none of that research comes close to biological immortality in humans. Don't deceive yourself.
If you're making 1m +, just work for like 1 or two more years and you have retire to work on this passion project and have your life if comfort. With so much money idk how you couldn't have both?
Email me (address in profile). I’ve already made this step. I am presently launching a molecular nanotechnology startup, under the not unreasonable assumption that better tools are required to fully solve the problem.
Edit: not saying we should join forces or that you should work on nanotechnology, but we are clearly value aligned and should connect.
What's the pathway you're thinking in this effort? I had a similar plan I envisioned in my early 20s, which led me to become an engineer. I'll be ready to go down the same path pretty soon, would love to chat with more people in a similar mindset. Email in the profile if anyone wants to talk more about this.
> I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense potential to be leveraged here if we come together.
Amen. I want to build dyson spheres myself. Gathering the money right now for it. Of course I know it won't happen in my lifetime but you got to start.
"Solving death" won’t help humanity. Isn’t that obvious to you??
For a starter, birth rates and death rates should be about the same otherwise it’s not sustainable. If you "solve death", birth rates will need to drop a lot.
Do you want to live in a world with almost no children? Just very old people all over the place. Sounds like a nightmare to me.
You need to let go, accept your mortality and leave some room for new humans to live. At some point you’ll have had your time, death is part of life.
> birth rates and death rates should be about the same otherwise it’s not sustainable
In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted famine due to overpopulation, because he didn't predict the discovery of nitrogen fixation, which allowed scaling food production.
There are likely many technological leaps we've yet to make which will change your definition of sustainable.
Do you know about exponential growth? If birth and death rates are not about the same, it means the population will double every X years. You’ll need a major breakthrough in food production every X years. For ever.
Even if we achieve that, at some point there just won’t be enough square meters on earth. But I guess it’s okay to you since we’ll have solved space travel and we’ll just send billions of people to Mars? Then other planetary systems? Then other galaxies?
In any case, as I don’t buy we’ll ever be able to send billions of people to other planets, let alone make them habitable, this is exponential growth with finite ressources. Doesn’t sound sustainable to me.
This seems approximately as likely as people not having the courage to enact injustices (since their victims will have unlimited time to plot a perfect revenge and gather all the resources that would require).
Real life accounts always say otherwise. Death is a limited liability card that people can use to commit anything.
People who commit injustices, even today, are often confident enough that they will be in a position to kill themselves before suffering at hands of others.
That doesn't contradict my point: universal mortality means the potential losses of an oppressor are bounded, and the bound is acceptably low to many people. Immortality removes that bound.
Life in itself is worthless. The only reason why life is valuable is because it is a canvas, a vessel through which you can find happiness, meaning and so on.
This means that if you have a life that isn't worth living, you are not at risk of losing anything of value, and so the potential loss is still bounded. Sure, there is the potential that life can change in the future, but whether you have 10, 100 or 1000 years left of potential life, you don't really care much about that if your life is an agonizing living hell.
Sure, lots of philosophers talk about lives barely worth living, and what constitutes the line. Lots of public health researchers work on metrics for quality-adjusted life years, and increasing longevity is useful only insofar as it increases QALY's.
But I really do expect most measures which increase population longevity to increase population QALY's. The conflict between hypothetical immortal tyrants and immortal coup-conspiracies would only be a small part of this; material conditions and overall societal wealth would weigh much heavier on the scale.
Is this sarcasm? Functional immortality without a complete redesign of the economic system guarantees the least ethical among us would come to own and control everything with no failsafes. Beware what you wish for.
> I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death.
There will never be a world without death. Not, unless you have a way to reverse the laws of thermodynamics, on a universe scale. Only world where people die later.
Also, keep in mind, your most disliked people will probably remain in power for longer. Next, Putin or Xi will remain in power for centuries.
I have decided that soon I will quit my job ($1M+ TC at FAANG), and I will dedicate the entirety of my remaining life (I am ~30) to helping humanity solve death, even if I never benefit from it.
This is a difficult decision for me because I am giving up a life of guaranteed luxury and comfort for a moonshot that almost certainly will not pan out. But I can think of no greater and more meaningful pursuit. This is my Zero Dawn. Moving the needle here is the only thing that will let me - ironically - die happy.
I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense potential to be leveraged here if we come together.