Beyond longevity: The DIY quest to cheat death and stop aging

If we learn to live forever before we learn to die willingly, humanity will become a cancer. We have not even legalised assisted suicide in cases where it’s clearly needed so we are really far from having a culture of dying gracefully.

By cancer I mean that humanity is a super-organism and humans are the cells of that organism. Cells that stop dying in large numbers (while still reproducing) is the definition of cancer. There’s no reason to think this will affect the super-organism that is humanity any different than any other organisms.

There’s two potentially terrifying outcomes. We could get the equivalent of the human immune system: those who try to stay alive too long will be hunted down and killed involuntarily. With the exception of the ultra elite of course.

The other terrifying option is that we stop having children. This would be infinitely sad. It will probably also lead to a slow decline of humanity.

This is probably one of the best explanations of the Fermi paradox: a civilisation that learns to avoid death will probably have a very small chance of adapting to that change without killing itself (war over resources and such) or slowly decaying to the point of driving itself to a slow extinction or irrelevance. Perhaps becoming so risk averse that the logical conclusion is to just live their infinite lives in a 100% safe virtual reality.

Crazy old coot.