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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to live more than 100 years and I don't want to come back from the dead either. Make way for the next generation and their wants.

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You’re being defeatist and ignoring the evidence presented in the article—even hospice patients want to live longer. You, too, will desire to live before (and hopefully: if!) you breathe your last.

This is because the entire goal of the sentient consciousness is simply to preserve itself as long as possible. DNA has the essential goal of replicating itself in reproduction. Consciousness, by contrast, appears to have no goal other than self-preservation. People sometimes choose to sacrifice themselves, but usually only when death is inevitable and they wish to save someone else from it (Lily/Harry Potter and Medal of Honor type situations).

I'm not really being defeatist nor ignoring evidence. Perhaps I just have a different perspective. There can be moral/ethical arguments for why mortality is a good, or at least useful, thing.

Why 100? You can also make way for the next generation by living 80, or 60, or 40 years. Yet no one would be okay with that option. Funny thing is historically speaking 40 is a lot closer to the useful human lifespan than 100. So this strong belief of yours is really driven by advancements in society and healthcare over the last few decades. Why do you think that won't change drastically another few decades from now?

"Funny thing is historically speaking 40 is a lot closer to the useful human lifespan than 100."

That isn't really true. Life expectancy was historically driven down by high infant mortality and lack of medicine. The meaningful human lifespan has been in the 70s for the majority of history. (Lifespan is different from life expectancy)

"So this strong belief of yours is really driven by advancements in society and healthcare over the last few decades."

Who says it's a strong belief?

"Why do you think that won't change drastically another few decades from now?"

Because there's no real evidence to support that. Life expectancy hasn't gone up drastically over the past 50 years. Rates of chronic illnesses, including things like dementia, have gone up drastically. So even if people are living a couple years longer, they're generally sicker and it's costing more. Even if medicine makes drastic improvements, 100 is still a lofty goal. I'd be fine making it only 80 too. I'm actually skeptical that will even happen. What I do know is that I don't want it to take more than 100 years.

That's fine, but please don't stand in the way of those of us who would love to experience the world on a longer time frame, and are frustrated that the current level of medical knowledge doesn't allow it.

It seems odd to me that you would be frustrated about a fact of the natural world that you have no entitlement to expect it to be different.

Deep down, many people want to be a kind of god. Our technological progress lets that illusion of godhood seem achievable.

Some people just take longer than others. I'm gonna be as patient as I can be with them.

Why shouldn't we be frustrated by aspects of the natural world? Bad weather, disease, death and so on. Was eliminating smallpox odd because we had no entitlement expect to that?

Those things are about the timeliness - bad weather one day vs another, some people get the disease and others don't, early death verses a longer life. It's about what is reasonable to expect. It might be reasonable to expect good weather on a specific day, or even to live past the age of 50. It's unreasonable to expect to live indefinitely.

Yeah it's probably not 'reasonable' to expect to live on. But sometimes the technical possibilities open up to do something new.

Shaw quote: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’

Sure, if the situation changes in the future, then it could be reasonable. That's not the case currently.

Ironic that you would post this to a digital forum, the very concept of which would never be found and nature to the point that it would be beyond fiction and magic only a few hundred years ago. Nature has no inherent will and very often does things that are awful, like cancer. If anything it's our obligation to correct its failures where we can.

Yeah, I find the need to live forever kind of.. juvenile? You can’t let go of your ego for long enough to realise that at some point it’s better to make room for a new human with new perspectives and new ideas?

I like to think of it this way: if life was a game would you want to play the same character forever? No.. if you’re gonna keep playing the game it’s more interesting to start from scratch now and then. I don’t believe in reincarnation. There’s no need to. What you really are deep down is an instance of humanity. Almost all your genes and all your culture comes from and is shared with other humans. Any new instance (new human) is you playing a new character, essentially. If you’ve contributed to shaping the world you’re leaving behind this is even more true.

Unless you’re believe in a soul in the christian/jewish/muslim sense I guess, but then why would you fear death?

IMO the pursuit of immortality is far more dangerous and far more likely to kill humanity than AI. At least it may make us deteriorate to insignificance. Humanity is a super organism and we have a name for the phenomenon where parts of an organism figures out how to die and yet still replicates: cancer

We don't need to live forever as shown by the fact we've got by without it so far but death is kind of depressing. I've never really got the distinction that say killing millions in the holocaust is terrible but similar millions dying through age is desirable.

That distinction should be very clear - killing vs dying.

Both are dying. One killed by age one by gas. My grandfather and his brother went those ways. I'm not sure the years of Alzheimer's were much better than Auschwitz.

You're missing that one is avoidable and was intentionally caused. It's not reasonable to expect to be murdered. It is reasonable to expect to die eventually of some natural cause or accident. It is a necessity that previous generations need to die for the new ones, given constrained resources.

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