Age Reversal

[impalasforpeace]

How do you guys deal with death?

 

there's a consensus in the field of biogerontology that aging will be reversible someday .. so it's possible we may not have to deal with it for a much longer while than we think ..

 

people just have different time-frames of when they think that will be (the SENS foundation which has got millions of dollars from some wealthy donors hopes to bring about serious rejuvenative therapies within our lifetimes).

 

anyway, i think death is more sad than ever nowadays now that we are in a time of so much progress. it's easy to imagine all the awesome things we might miss out by dieing too soon (like for one thing missing out on the advancements that would allow us to live longer! and two doing fun things like exploring other planets maybe).

 

i want to help the people who oppose such an early death .. as in get involved in the human life-extension movement. i'm not doing that yet, but that's what i want to do with my life in the future.

[TTanT]

^A lot of people are completely obsessed with continuing to exist.

 

But really, a never ending story gets stale. Without death life would have no zest to keep us interested. It's the shortness of our time on this planet that makes it so sweet.

[obfuscator]

^A lot of people are completely obsessed with continuing to exist.

 

But really, a never ending story gets stale. Without death life would have no zest to keep us interested. It's the shortness of our time on this planet that makes it so sweet.

Yep.

[impalasforpeace]

Why would anyone *ever* want to prevent people from dying a natural death? Just think of how many more suicides there would be.

 

nah life extension advocates are totally not about forcing people to live longer or anything. it's about the opposite - having the freedom to choose when you die.

 

 

A lot of people are completely obsessed with continuing to exist.

 

But really, a never ending story gets stale. Without death life would have no zest to keep us interested. It's the shortness of our time on this planet that makes it so sweet.

 

yeah no one wants to force anyone to live longer if they are not interested (at least i have never heard this from anyone.. it sounds completely abhorrent though).

 

the concept of 'not death' is a little bit daunting and perhaps not very meaningful in the end. but i know plenty of people who have blacklogs of things they want to do which would take hundreds of years (e.g learn all the sciences or explore other habitable planets). for those people life getting stale wouldn't be a concern for quite a while.

 

also i don't really think painters get tired of painting. fact is it's a completely immersive and rewarding experience every time (the same could be said about other things too). my experience tells me that some things just don't get old to humans. so the theory of things getting stale after x amount of time doesn't hold true for all activities.

 

in addition, i have a hard time believing that death is what keeps us interested in life. I don't think i'm motivated to do what i do by death at all; my impermanence does not linger in the back of my mind. rather i just enjoy life so so so much and science and learning and people, and being kind, and alll those things. my enjoyment of life doesn't depend on it's length.

[TTanT]

Immortality for our entire race would either kill us all or lead to a global police state.

 

If no-one dies naturally, how do we feed everyone?

 

You either have to heavily regulate having children (almost ban it), or you have people executed for being too old.

If neither of those were done we'd suck the planet dry of all resources (especially food) like a horde of locusts.

 

 

Also, anything can get stale if you do it long enough. A good painter enjoys being creative and trying new things. If he paints for 200 years he'll run out of ideas.

However it's almost 1 AM where I am and I had a very long day. I'll argue more tomorrow.

[impalasforpeace]

we simply do not know whether overpopulation will be a problem in the future and whether people living longer lives would contribute to it; not knowing what will happen is not a reason to not develop the technologies to alleviate the suffering that comes from old age and from many sorts of diseases that place burdens on family members. people are dieing every day who do not wish to die, who wish to keep participating in life and being kind and loving those close to them. i think we have a moral imperative to help those people; whatever costs to society them living longer results in, we can figure out how to deal with as they arise. Note that human life expectancy has risen dramatically in the last century already - yet no one has complained about how bad that is for society, and how we should not let so many people live to older ages. why won't further life extension not be the same?

 

there's no reason to think that earth couldn't house 100 billion people. if you asked the hunter and gatherers of 10,000 years ago whether the earth could sustain 100 million people no one would have been able to conceive of that or see how it would be possible - but we made it so. there is a long history of humans doing things that their ancestors would have thought impossible. (letting people live much longer lives while at the same time improving society and people's happiness might go down in history as one of those things).

 

since the 19th century people wrote about population growth and impending food shortages - but none of that has materialized. We are far, far from being close to the limit of efficiency of food production or resource utilization..

 

and then of course humanity is not trapped on earth. though it will be hard to colonize other planets, we can do it, and will do it perhaps sooner than population problems become an issue.

 

i don't want to argue. so i probably won't respond further.. anyway.

[Vezon Dash]

we simply do not know whether overpopulation will be a problem in the future and whether people living longer lives would contribute to it

 

Quite untrue actually. The world is already overpopulated as it is now. Thankfully I'm going to be dead before we reach the carrying capacity though. :thumbup:

[impalasforpeace]

I actually did not imply that we dont have a problem with overpopulation now; just that we may not have one in the future (which is plausible - say if we expand our territory).

 

i do agree that there is a degree of overpopulation right now.. but if you say it's due to people living longer lives that is way wrong .

 

if you say its due to dramatic declines in infant mortality coupled with widespread but capricious access to food, then i think that's closer to true..

 

==

 

vezon - the carrying capacity is not a static quantity but a constantly changing number; hundreds of years ago the earth wouldn't have been able to support a billion people; it can only carry (support the coexistence of) 1 billion people now due to technological advances.

 

what is to say that further technological advances won't increase the carrying capacity further? that is the trend after all..

[Vezon Dash]

I actually did not imply that we dont have a problem with overpopulation now; just that we may not have one in the future (which is plausible - say if we expand our territory).

 

i do agree that there is a degree of overpopulation right now.. but if you say it's due to people living longer lives that is way wrong .

 

if you say its due to dramatic declines in infant mortality coupled with widespread but capricious access to food, then i think that's closer to true..

 

==

 

vezon - the carrying capacity is not a static quantity but a constantly changing number; hundreds of years ago the earth wouldn't have been able to support a billion people; it can only carry (support the coexistence of) 1 billion people now due to technological advances.

 

what is to say that further technological advances won't increase the carrying capacity further? that is the trend after all..

 

 

I have done quite a bit of research on OP, and I never said it was due to an increase of people. Hell, I could have 50 people living in my house if land space was an issue, but it isn't. The problem is the overuse use of limited resources that we have. The really big one that is an issue is food. More and more farmland is being destroyed/degraded every year. Overpopulation won't be an issue if we could remove the need for resources, but it is rather unlikely that it will happen any time soon.

[Assume Nothing]

I wonder if regulations on meat-production would help at all.

[Giordano]

There's two factors to overpopulation: physical space and efficiency . The world has enough physical space to support the current 7 billion people, what it lacks is efficient use of the land. Insects and critters endanger farms, hand plowed farms are the majority, and refrigeration technology is hard to come by in large areas of the world. If every farm in the developing world was as efficient as First World farms, world hunger and thirst would cease and the world won't have an overpopulation issue.

 

Until it runs out of physical space, which can take on several different phases. Such a phase, for example, could be all the land is used up and we would build under/overwater. A second phase could be building upward, after all the water is covered. Then, after all space is exhausted, we would have to build space colonies.

 

As you can see, the problems of overcoming overpopulation is (non-existant) advanced technology, (greedy) political turmoil, and (unchanging) economic principles. Its these three reasons why I think overpopulation will forever be a problem. Only a Heavenly Global Communist state can improve our conditions to fix overpopulation, but lets be real, that's a near impossibility.

 

 

So a Immortality Pill cheap enough to be sold like commodities, would cause severe problems in the long run. Plus, the ethical dilemmas we'd face with the poor who can't afford/obtain food, much less the immortality pill. It's bad enough we already got Capitalism Guilt clause up our sleeves, this immortality pill is just going to be the icing on the cake.

[Assume Nothing]

I'm not sure what we're actually talking about. Is it immortality, or life-extension? A distinction needs to be made before any meaningful discussion could be made out of this.

[impalasforpeace]

If every farm in the developing world was as efficient as First World farms, world hunger and thirst would cease and the world won't have an overpopulation issue.

 

the causes of world hunger and thirst can be slightly counter intuitive to reason about i think. i don't see 'more food' as a solution, because to me more food available means increased carrying capacity but not necessarily better quality of life.

 

maybe if food production dramatically increased world hunger would cease for a few decades. but i fear the population would steadily grow until the food per person was the same as it was before, and there were a proportion of people starving again. i think the potentially dangerous reversion of 'enough food' leading to more people leading to not enough food all over again has to be watched closely. we want people to have enough food so they can live, but not so much to support so many kids that the food runs out.

 

in sense, i think the world tolerates a certain amount of starvation, or is not organized well enough to prevent it.

 

==

 

on another note i'm sad how pessimistic everyone is about this future population problem

 

===

 

 

^ i mentioned life extension in the first place because someone was scared of death. and i thought at least the prospects of a longer than anticipated life might be one thing to delay that fear and make one more optimistic.

 

to be honest i'm not really sure what context it is being talked about in now.. mostly i'm defending the prospects of radically extended life from attacks about how we should not do such a thing because it would cause future societal problems.

 

as i see it people should be able to choose when they die ideally. if they don't want to choose to die as long as they can than that is fine, but i imagine the result would not be 'immortal' but rather 'died due to circumstances they couldn't opt out of'. anyway, talking about the far out future is really not very useful because i think it's so speculative at this point..

[Vezon Dash]

If every farm in the developing world was as efficient as First World farms, world hunger and thirst would cease and the world won't have an overpopulation issue.

 

the causes of world hunger and thirst can be slightly counter intuitive to reason about i think. i don't see 'more food' as a solution, because to me more food available means increased carrying capacity but not necessarily better quality of life.

 

maybe if food production dramatically increased world hunger would cease for a few decades. but i fear the population would steadily grow until the food per person was the same as it was before, and there were a proportion of people starving again. i think the potentially dangerous reversion of 'enough food' leading to more people leading to not enough food all over again has to be watched closely. we want people to have enough food so they can live, but not so much to support so many kids that the food runs out.

 

in sense, i think the world tolerates a certain amount of starvation, or is not organized well enough to prevent it.

 

Quality of life goes down as population goes up, regardless of technology. Seriously, who would want to live on floor 436 in a housing complex? You are missing the point that food creating efficiency is extremely hard to improve. We can't just "make more." Wheat doesn't grown in the African desert as well as it does in Kansas. You are right about the rationing of food, in order for less people to starve, we (privileged people) have to eat less which is something that I am unwilling to do.

[impalasforpeace]

from what i've read there will be ways to dramatically increase the production of good food in the future i think .. so i think earth supporting something like 100 billion people is probably possible.

 

1) there are lots of ideas about vertical farming ( see the extensive wikipedia page if you want http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming) which would increase the efficiency of farming by magnitudes

 

2) and about in vitro meat (being able to produce meat that - in the end - mimics the composition of wild meat in every way.) of course the meat cells still need a substrate to grow, but this could still be magnitudes more efficient that raising animals. (this also has an extensive wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat).

 

 

 

all our energy needs will of course come from renewable/nuclear sources in the future if humanity continues long enough and in enough order to see those developments though..

 

 

i don't really believe in rationing actually.. if we overshot our carrying capacity (which perhaps we have already) than once people starve we will go back down and everything will be okay right? it's not like people have to starve forever. the solution to starving is staying under our carrying capacity OR if starving is due to poorly allocating the available food, then allocating the food better.

[impalasforpeace]

Overpopulation won't be an issue if we could remove the need for resources, but it is rather unlikely that it will happen any time soon.

 

yeah see i've been lead to believe that our resources will be taken care of in the near future and their won't be competition over them which diminishes quality of life, which is why i believe what i do. (i do agree that overpopulation is the threshold when competition for resources has ill effects.. at least that is one way to define it which i like).

 

if i believed it was rather unlikely that our resource problem would be completely solved in the next century, then i think i would think along the same lines as you.

 

i wonder what would convince you that maybe it is not as unlikely as you think?

[Vezon Dash]

One word. Oil.

[impalasforpeace]

two words: clean technology.

 

==

 

at what age to you stop getting called 'sweetie' by random middle aged women? i'm just wondering..

i like being regarded in that way cause it doesn't make me accountable to adult stuff.

[Vezon Dash]

two words: clean technology.

 

==

 

at what age to you stop getting called 'sweetie' by random middle aged women? i'm just wondering..

i like being regarded in that way cause it doesn't make me accountable to adult stuff.

 

Tell me how to make plastic out of oil, and I'll believe you. I don't care about cars and shit. I just want to know about petroleum based products.

 

 

 

It all depends on what you call "middle aged," where you live, and what gender you are.

[Deletion]

 

Tell me how to make plastic out of oil, and I'll believe you. I don't care about cars and shit. I just want to know about petroleum based products.

 

 

I assume you mean replacements for petroleum (crude oil) based products? There is a lot of research and work going into this at the moment as it is seen as more renewable then the petroleum counter-parts. I hate giving Wikipedia links but this sums up, the non-fuel products of petroleum, quite nicely.

[impalasforpeace]

aww i like receiving wiki links.

 

there's also the fact that plastics aren't necessary (at least humans got along fine without them until i guess ~70 years ago). and i don't think an absence of them would create that much more hardship. They make things cheaper to manufacture, sure, but many of those things aren't necessities and don't add value to life (like i guess i'm thinking about toys and such).

 

i don't know, i can't really think of any petroleum based products i use .. besides this laptop. but if the costs of electronics came primarily from the metal which was substituted for the plastics, then we would be in good shape i think.

[Vezon Dash]

aww i like receiving wiki links.

 

there's also the fact that plastics aren't necessary (at least humans got along fine without them until i guess ~70 years ago). and i don't think an absence of them would create that much more hardship. They make things cheaper to manufacture, sure, but many of those things aren't necessities and don't add value to life (like i guess i'm thinking about toys and such).

 

i don't know, i can't really think of any petroleum based products i use .. besides this laptop. but if the costs of electronics came primarily from the metal which was substituted for the plastics, then we would be in good shape i think.

 

We got along fine without computers 70 years ago, so we can get on without them in the future too. Obviously a lack of computers wouldn't bring about much hardship. You also speak of metal.... which once again is a limited resource.... Lol, this is why idealism doesn't work.

[impalasforpeace]

haha you're right my previous point didn't make any sense. the higher cost of metals (which reflect their scarcity) is precisely why we replaced them with this other less scarce, but still non-renewable thing, plastic made from petroleum.

 

well i think it's possible for us to live sustainably. it's just easier not to, and there are not enough regulations to enforce sustainability (not yet at least because we are not in so dire a place yet). that would be my theory anyway. 'cause like when you have businesses competing the non-sustainable options are the ones that win out because they are the cheapest. and they will continue to win out until the technology makes the sustainable ones cheap enough, or the less sustainable ones because to expensive (or until massive regulations are enforced. hmm i sort of repeated myself there sorry).

 

i feel like it would be rather cynical to assume it is impossible for billions of humans to live sustainably (and what i mean by that is live in a way that could be supported for, say, thousands, not hundreds of years). humanity has done more amazing things than that i think (like get to the point where so many people have these personal computers that seem so magical).

 

it is of course true that progress on the sustainable front so far might not have been as fast as people would have liked. but then again progress on computers probably looked pretty bleak until the 20th century.

[TTanT]

Ethically: Some people would be able to afford these pills, other wouldn't. That isn't ethical.

Socially: Crime rates could spike due to people stealing pills. (50 years in prison isn't as bad if you can live an extra 200 years.)

Religiously: Religions everywhere would flip their shit.

Ecologically: Our expanding population would demolish rainforests and other life-harboring areas of Earth. Thousands of species would fall.

Economically: Prices would skyrocket of food, fuel, energy, housing, etc.

 

Only plus side would be people dying less from natural causes.

 

I think old people SHOULD die. Death is a part of life. If you can't except that then either you're too young to (understandable), or are clinging to what is a brief part of a greater cycle far too fiercely.

Even if you're an atheist, death is what makes life sweet. Immortality would get boring fast.

[The_Gabe]

Ethically: Some people would be able to afford these pills, other wouldn't. That isn't ethical.

Socially: Crime rates could spike due to people stealing pills. (50 years in prison isn't as bad if you can live an extra 200 years.)

Religiously: Religions everywhere would flip their shit.

Ecologically: Our expanding population would demolish rainforests and other life-harboring areas of Earth. Thousands of species would fall.

Economically: Prices would skyrocket of food, fuel, energy, housing, etc.

 

Only plus side would be people dying less from natural causes.

 

I think old people SHOULD die. Death is a part of life. If you can't except that then either you're too young to (understandable), or are clinging to what is a brief part of a greater cycle far too fiercely.

Even if you're an atheist, death is what makes life sweet. Immortality would get boring fast.

 

Accept* First time I've seen that misused. Sorry lol but I had to do it.