If something like this ever becomes a practical application on the organismal level, the octogenarian dictators of the world will rejoice.
What if living 300 years meant the entire tempo of human living changes. That we all just slow right down because having control over our aging and when it happens. To be able to decide to extend your 20s… or not. To spend decades in your 30s. How would that change what’s important to us?
https://fixvx.com/Kalshi/status/2109791302674235656?s=20
Save us all from people like this.
I don't think it matters, mind you.
Well sure, we should become less vulnerable, including biologically. But there are better ways to accomplish this than having people killed.
I feel it’s the ultimate hubris to think we can cheat death.
Moreover, why would you want immortality?
Many books of fiction and poetry discuss the curse of immortality.
Here are a few:
The Immortal, Jorge Luis Borges (1947)
A man discovers a source of immortality, but eternity eventually destroys the significance of individual experiences. When everything can happen infinitely, nothing feels particularly important.
The Mortal Immortal — Mary Shelley (1833) - also wrote Frankenstein
A man drinks an elixir and lives for centuries without substantially aging. He watches his wife grow old and die, and becomes increasingly alienated from humanity. Shelley focuses on loneliness and the psychological weight of endless time.
All Men Are Mortal — Simone de Beauvoir (1946)
An immortal man lives through centuries of history, relationships, and political upheaval. Gradually he discovers that even extraordinary achievements seem meaningless when time is unlimited.
The Makropulos Affair — Karel Čapek (1922)
A woman lives more than 300 years through an elixir. She retains her youth but becomes emotionally exhausted, cynical, and incapable of finding pleasure.
—
There are more. Sure, these are fiction. But use your imagination. Why would you want immortality, even if you could retain perfect health indefinitely?
This is a bit ironic, considering the lifespan of Time Lords in that universe.
If one doesn't have to watch ones spouse, friends and family grow old and die, because it is available widely, that removes some of your objections.
Personally I don't subscribe to the idea that things lose meaning in a longer life, I find it a 'just so' story of self comfort in the face of the inevitable.
I like Alan Watt's view on death: "it's absurd to worry about death because when you're dead, you've got nothing to worry about, so you'll be alright".
And Neil deGrasse Tyson, I think in reference to life after death: "it's the same as before you were born". Kind of mindblowing perspective - you've already experienced the state of not existing, it's the same as before you were born.
This brings it home that really it's the now you should learn to live and appreciate to the fullest instead, not some future you have no control over. Still struggling how that translates into worrying about my future health, but I suppose there is still the now of the future to worry about.
That's how I've long viewed it. As a practical matter we live "forever." Still makes me a tad nervous if I find myself thinking about it in the dark at 2am, but during the day it is a satisfactory explanation.
Your consciousness might have existed before, in another body, and it might do so again after your death.
The fact is you don't know what happens after you die. Maybe you'll cease to exist and will never again come into existence, even over all the hundreds of trillions of years yet to come in this universe, and even in any of the who-knows-how-many other universes that will ever exist.
Or maybe the physical requirements to create your specific consciousness will reoccur again and again and again.
You just don't know. Nor does Neil deGrass Tyson. Nor does, for that matter, the pope or the Dalai Lama.
You may want certainty. You may crave it, even need it. But that's too bad, as you'll never have it.
Wild things to ponder, I wonder if we will ever get a handle on this question.
And if we were meant to fly we'd have wings, and diseases are the gods punishing us for our sins.
Moreover, why would you want immortality?
I don't know about immortality, but I'd definitely like more than 80 years, and I'd like to be in good health for as long as I am alive.
Many books of fiction and poetry discuss the curse of immortality.
Yes, and those are almost entirely cope.
You’re changing the subject; this is about immortality. I’d also like to live more than 80 years, and no book can convince me otherwise. But forever? No thanks.
Imagine a civilization where death from biological aging would've happened at the age of 12. Would authors from such civilization be able to predict how a 45 year old would function? Or just extrapolate their (maximum 12) years old experience and come to the conclusion that being past 40 is so psychologically damaging that it would've been better to keep things the default way?
Note that I have just used my imagination, and came to different conclusions, so we are on the equal terms with said authors.
The context was if biological aging and age-related death can be stopped / prevented / reversed, and I don't see in what you wrote an argument against that. Those are a set of biochemical processes, and if there exist a scientific principle which would prevent modulating them successfully, you didn't name it.
> Moreover, why would you want immortality?
First, this is an orthogonal question. Whether I don't want something to happen, doesn't mean it can't, or won't: I never wanted to be replaced by LLMs, but those got invented anyway. Anyhow, the immortality we're talking about isn't of the kind where you are unable to die no matter what, it's just you don't age. You are permanently 22 - but so is everyone around you. I don't know, maybe it gets boring after 300 years, maybe after 300.000 - but I'd rather try and take myself out when I feel like it than die feeling there's so much more to experience (which is almost certainly going to be the case).
Why does such a “ scientific principle “ need to exist? So that you could finally point to a clear reason that it’s impossible?
Did Newton’s laws of motion exist before they were described by Newton?
No, I cannot endorse this.
So at least two systems run better with the implicit time limit.
Besides, maybe it's the young people who are the most dogmatic. Studies are inconclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle#Rebuttal If we're going to go around killing people for having rigid ideas, perhaps concentrate on the young ones, for statistical reasons.
* Undoubtedly sometimes the spark of malevolence develops into more coherent and sophisticated badness, I have to admit, so an old person has had more time to mature into being truly terrible. But this is against the pressure of rationality.
in western nations where that’s not possible, I could see national bans, but one weak link globally and everyone wealthy will get their treatment there
I'm calling it now, Qatar will be the place that allows these treatments once they're a real thing.
I have to imagine the Uber wealthy are pouring money into youthful longevity science.