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Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

The goal of life is to live it, not to go anywhere particular. No matter what we as a species do or where we go, we're trapped in the universe. There's no escape, ultimately.

Yet you're arguing that people should hurry up and die so 'we' can move on and not stay 'mired in the past' and 'wasting time'. What do they matter? Where are we moving to that's so important?

If we can live until we choose to die or die by accident, feed everyone, keep the planet in good condition, hit virtually 100% nanomechanical recycling / construction and have enough resources for people or virtual people to set off exploring the universe, what else matters? Why do we need everyone to be young? And we might be able to step usefully close to those things in a thousand years or so - and if you agree with Kurzweil, 1000 years of progress will happen in much less than 1000 years. We might even live to see it.

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"Yet you're arguing that people should hurry up and die so 'we' can move on and not stay 'mired in the past' and 'wasting time'. What do they matter? Where are we moving to that's so important?"

For instance, the decline in institutional racism against black people in America wouldn't have been nearly so successful if it wasn't for all the old segregationists dying off in recent decades. There are definitely real costs and benefits to social conservatism.

I didn't say that we should all die young, but instead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth.

There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience, they will die and the next generation will get to try again, hopefully without too much of the negative baggage passed on.

instead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth.

Misses the qualities that make it worth living? Have you checked out what death is? The only way you can have hope and curiosity is by being alive to experience them. Prolonging the state of being alive is a much much better way to address "quality of life" than saying "death is for your own good - you'd probably be miserable otherwise anyway".

There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience, they will die

I think not, because there is nobody outside "people who are alive" to be experiencing the alleged beauty. The next generation don't get to try "again", they get to try ... full stop.

Try what, though? Humanity as a whole isn't trying to do anything. There's no outsider giving points for space exploration and underwater colonies and disease eradication. The only point to progress is to progress the lives of people who are alive, and anything other than that about "the next generation" is a holdover from the fact that we don't have enough power to affect big changes in one lifetime but we can argue that they are worth changing for the next generation. It would be even better, not worse, if we could be changing things to improve our own lives a hundred years on.

haha, I'm hardly saying that "you'd be miserable otherwise anyway."

I'm saying that death and birth together, but only together, allow new starts. Any wild deviations in individuals, be they bad, such as depression, or great, like genius, end with that individual. We lose some wonderful and some damaged people, but the steady stream of endings and beginnings permits us to continuously renew and reassess our values and direction as a society and species.

Yes, you will not get to live forever, but it also means that human beings are healthier for having had so much variety of experience.

I'm saying that death and birth together, but only together, allow new starts

OK - but why is that desirable?

Yes, you will not get to live forever, but it also means that human beings are healthier for having had so much variety of experience.

What do you mean to say human beings are healthier?

I'd hope the species as a whole is benefitting a lot from the 150,000 people who die every day. How is the species benefitting (in ways that could not happen without mass unplanned death)?

I'd hardly say those deaths are unexpected. And planned/unplanned deaths is another discussion entirely. They're quite normal for the most part, and in fact significantly lower than the rate of death in most other species.

Human beings benefit because of resource use and culture change. Imagine if we double the lifespan of the majority of people on earth how insane things would quickly become.

Or are we only talking about doubling the lifespan of those who can afford it? In which case wouldn't it be better to focus these research resources into raising universal quality of life (ie developing malaria drugs), rather than further raising QoL for the rich in the 1st world?

Yeah and missing the age of immortality by just a century or so would be a bit of a bummer.

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