

The War on the War on Death Begins - crayola
http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/12/02/the-war-on-the-war-on-death-begins/

======
tehwalrus
> "Tell me, Harry," said the Headmaster (and now his voice sounded simply
> puzzled, though there was still a hint of pain in his eyes), "why do Dark
> Wizards fear death so greatly?"

> "Er," said Harry, "sorry, I've got to back the Dark Wizards on that one."

from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:

[http://hpmor.com/chapter/39](http://hpmor.com/chapter/39)

~~~
FBT
>"Okay," said Harry, "let me put it this way. Do you want to die? Because if
so, there's this Muggle thing called a suicide prevention hotline -"

------
benpbenp
Here's something I like to point out any time the subject arises. Let's use 39
per 100,000 population as the current accidental death rate[0]. Perhaps you
have reason to believe it is lower for you (you don't have a dangerous
occupation, you aren't clumsy, etc. etc.) but that is hand-wavey and anyway
you can consider it a rough order of magnitude.

Raise .9996 to 10,000th power and you find you will have a 2% chance of living
10,000 years. Raise it to the 100,000th and you get something very very close
to zero.

You should also consider all the thousands of different rare diseases that we
won't have figured out how to cure even if we do cure "ageing".

Long story short, you should be prepared to die at some point.

[0]
[http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/leadingcauses.html](http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/leadingcauses.html)

~~~
kayoone
Thought about that too, thats why i think the approach should be finding a way
to transfer the human consciousness onto machines, or find a way to backup
your mind. That has a whole different set of other ethical implications of
course.

~~~
CmonDev
I say we should go as far as it's possible: multi-body eventually consistent
minds distributed across galaxies.

~~~
kayoone
NoSQL would be the obvious choice to implement this!

~~~
CmonDev
We will have something even less structured providing that the trend carries
on. Perhaps one huge concatenated comma-separated string for everything?

------
anon4
Oh man, this one will be fun.

> Every person must die!

> But I don't want to die.

> But thou must!

> If that's your position, I respect that. I'll go on living and you can die,
> even right now if you want to.

> Oh no no no, I don't want to die right now. I just want at some future
> moment to have died and be dead and have checked off every one of life's
> achievements, including death.

And it is at this point where I cannot continue this sarcastical mock-
conversation -- it gets too surreal for me. As horrible as it sounds, at least
the people who don't want to live past 80 will gradually die off and leave the
rest of us to live.

------
rartichoke
It would be nice to spend trillions of dollars on eliminating death instead of
spending it on pointless wars and other retarded stuff.

I don't understand how anyone would want to die. I believe when you die that's
it. You cease to exist and rot in the ground until you decompose into nothing.
How could you want that rather than to run around for a few thousand years at
some prime age without pain or disease?

~~~
flycaliguy
If people never die then we will never be able to see phrases like "retarded
stuff" finally disappear.

~~~
Udo
Wow, a personal attack for a phrase you don't like, implicitly expressing joy
over the prospect of a commenter's death - and you still got upvoted for it.
Amazing what people get away with here lately.

~~~
flycaliguy
Give me a break, "retarded" is beyond the realm of just being a phrase that I
just don't like.

~~~
Udo
You mean the phrase is so bad that you wish for people who use it to die? Fuck
you, seriously.

~~~
flycaliguy
I mean it's completely offensive and outdated.

My original comment was suggesting that without a generational change via
natural death, we may never see the sort of progress in our society that
renders terms like "retarded" a thing of the past. The word "retarded" being a
now derogatory term for people with a mental handicap.

Are you trolling me or do you just have your heart set on getting mad at me?
It appears you've completely misunderstood my comments.

~~~
Udo
I'm not here to troll anyone (intentionally at least). Maybe I did
misunderstand, but here's what it looks like from my perspective:

There is a huge group of new HN users who just come in here, deliver some
poisonous comments, get upvoted for it, and then mostly move on. Here's how
you fit that description: The thread's subject is death and life extension. A
guy uses a word you really, really hate in a colloquial form. You answer the
upside of death is that when he dies the word will hopefully get extinct with
him. You get karma for, to use your words, trolling someone by being cheerful
of their impending demise.

HN is unpredictable, and sadly you'll sometimes get rewarded for completely
dickish behavior, such as expressing glib joy over the death of a fellow
commenter. I believe you should not have gotten away with this so easily,
because chances are you'll continue to exhibit this behavior here.

Of course you can always say that I'm not the content police and I should just
fuck off instead of complaining about things I can't do anything about.
However, I hope this will have some kind of impact on you. Using the word
"retarded" sets you off, and expressing a wish for people to die sets me off.
When you weigh those two, it should become apparent how different they are.

------
falcolas
The recent Torchwood miniseries Miracle Day spent a good 6 episodes talking
over this very point. It's worth watching, if only for some good speculative
fiction about how humanity would really respond if we suddenly were immortal.

In short, we have a lot more pressing problems to address with the basic human
condition before we make ourselves immortal... Removing things like
homelessness and poverty would be more beneficial first steps (and ironically
would go a long ways to increasing the average lifespan of our population).

~~~
Udo
There are always more pressing problems. There are always more pressing
problems than, say, engaging in space flight, or do a lot of research.

In fact, there is a whole class of problems that cannot be meaningfully
tackled by addressing them directly. I imagine a physician in the dark ages
"treating" people suffering from acute pestilence would say there are more
pressing concerns than research into invisible microbes. An aid worker in
Africa fighting disease and poverty would say there are more pressing things
than life extension and nanotechnology.

And then, unexpectedly to a lot of people, whole classes of problems just
disappear because of the consequences of a newly discovered technology. Right
now, fighting poverty with advanced 3D printers seems like lunacy or heresy,
because our society is based on scarcity. Eliminating unwanted death and
disease looks like a maniacal pipe dream that frightens a lot of people,
because our civilization is based on death and superstition.

From a psychological perspective it's interesting that heroically fighting a
losing battle against certain consequences of our deficiencies is considered
good and honorable, while eliminating the root causes is strictly taboo.

As an aside, I liked Miracle Day (but not as much as The Children of Earth, by
a long shot), but it portrays a very gruesome and technically implausible form
of "immortality". It's clear why they chose to do it like this, because the
whole plot hinged pretty much on the monstrosity of that effect. That's
however not what it would look like if/when we become adept at life extension.

------
drjesusphd
There's something that I don't think gets discussed enough when this topic is
risen. One reason why death is good is that the ideas of old people die with
them. Often, it's the only way to scourge ourselves of bad ideas. Imagine a
country of people still stuck in an 1850s mindset.

~~~
Udo
I believe the idea that people never change is probably somewhat misguided.
Right now, as a culture we reward people for doubling down and never admitting
to being wrong. And no matter how wrong a person is, if they are loud enough,
they'll always have supporters.

That culture would probably begin to change with the advent of life extension,
because you no longer have to make your life about one thing, this one card
you have to choose once and then play until you're dead. I admit it's somewhat
idealistic, but I hope we'd be more rational in the long term. Being alive
does mean constant change.

But even if it doesn't turn out that way, there are certainly a lot of
important voices we have lost over the centuries, a lot of ideas and thoughts
that we never even got to hear about, and people who would have contributed
great things if they had lived long enough. I for one would gladly live in a
world where some ancient philosophers are still alive.

Let's go with the worst case and pick, oh let's say religious bigots, they'll
somehow muster the intellect to extend their lives, remain prolific spouters
of nonsense, and never change for 10000 years. It's a small price to pay to
live in a society where I and the people I care about get to live 10000 years!
I could just filter the bad elements out, just as I do today, and everything
would be absolutely fine.

An argument could be made that those people are bad for society because they
hinder progress or steer it in destructive directions. But on reflection,
those people carrying 2000 year old ideas in their heads _are here and active
in our society right now_ , and we're still moving forward.

------
mattmanser
I occasionally ask friends if they could take a pill to live forever, would
they?

Most say No.

I then add that everyone else would have access to them too, so their friends
and family would also be around. They think a bit more.

Some then say Yes, but some still say No.

I then say they'd go back to a 25 year old's body.

Then they pretty much all say Yes.

The war disappears as soon as you change the conversation. I'm from a secular
country though, so I don't what the American Religious Right would say.

~~~
TausAmmer
What does it takes to enjoy your first ice cream in life, second time?

~~~
twobits
What does it take to enjoy your first ice cream in mars? ..While it floats
away, and you jump 25m vertically, to grab it with your lips? :-)

------
XorNot
Articles and discussions like this seem mostly like trying to comfort
ourselves on the fact that in our lifetimes we probably won't clinically cure
death.

It'll matter a lot more when we've actually done it, and we're asking people
to stop living voluntarily.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> asking people to stop living voluntarily.

Haha, I would love to. Here's my argument: For any single living person
"hogging" the universe, there are an infite number of possible persons waiting
to get a shot at life. After a while of living, most people experience
diminishing returns and get jaded. New people do not have that problem. So if
you're really about _life_ , and not just for your own tiny little sliver and
interpretation of it, the choice is clear. The extreme of that would be
"Logan's Run", so I guess the optimimum is somewhere in between that, and a
bunch of people living forever just because they're either scared or selfish.

~~~
CmonDev
Next step would be genetic engineering to make sure that "shots at life" are
more successful. And of course all the people with low chance of success (e.g.
< 80 IQ) should be put out of misery ASAP.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Right. Because getting more joy from the "tapestry of life" (to quote Asimov)
than from purely concentrating on one's own, means you're not only into
eugenics, but you're also a snob about sentience and intelligence. Speak for
yourself there, I personally don't see what intelligence or even health has to
do with it. I don't think we can tell others what quality of life they have,
even people in pain enjoy the few nice moments they have, and want to live.

But if you think this through, then everybody living forever would mean hardly
any newborns, unless you propose we all cover everything in concrete 10 miles
high until we figured the whole swarming over the galaxy thing out. OR not
everybody would be immortal, and it would likely devolve into a two-tiered
society straight out of dystopia; take your pick, but don't fucking blame _me_
for you not thinking this through, and don't project the Frankenstein/Mengele
possibilities of rushing into immortality headlong on me, either. Just nope.

~~~
XorNot
Well if you consider the effect progress has on birthrates (they drop - below
replacement rate in fact) then it seems likely that we have effectively
unlimited time to delay having children, it's likely birth rates would get
even lower.

However, clinical immortality isn't absolute - an on average we would survive
about 250 years between fatal accidents.

One of the conclusions I've always thought we can draw from this is that it's
a decent explanation of the apparent paucity of life zipping around the
galaxy: civilizations discover immortality before they get warp travel or
whatever, their birthrate drops to near zero and the population stabilizes so
you get no exponential growth across the stars, and so relatively few of them
are actually out exploring.

------
kayoone
Ive been thinking alot about the ethics of it and its really hard. Personally
id love to live forever but i am not sure if any form of meaningful live
extension is due within my generation (i am 30 now). Probably not. Would be
kind of sad to be the last gen to have normal lifespans though. On the other
hand dying from non natural causes in a world like that would be even more
dramatic.

~~~
rwmj
You probably wouldn't want to be born into a world where no one dies. You'd
have loads of old people with enormous wealth, and no incentive to give even a
tiny bit of that to the young.

(And please don't say "taxes" ... How do you tax people who hold a massive
insuperable block vote?)

~~~
yardie
With infinite life the entire concept of wealth changes then. At the moment
most people work to better the lives of their offspring because that is how we
handle mortality and immortality. You may not live forever but your genes and
resources (money, property, photo albums) live on with your children and
grandchildren.

With no reason to save I could do whatever I wanted. Walk all the way to
Everest, swim the Atlantic, tell my boss to fuck off. As for wealth, I'd spend
decades hacking into bank accounts, because why not? What are they going to do
send me to prison?

If we could all be immortal it would kinda suck to be wealthy. No one would
need your wealth, and if you they did you'd spend all your time trying to
protect.

~~~
qw
> With no reason to save I could do whatever I wanted.

You still need to pay for food, clothes, housing etc. As a minimum you will
have to sign contracts that bind you to a job for a minimum amount of time
(probably years). Someone will have to "keep the wheels turning". You want
someone to pick up your garbage, pave the roads and other necessities.

Who would want to do that without getting something back? The world would have
to change. Probably by introducing forced labour.

------
wcbeard10
> Callahan seems in no hurry to let his own death have its day, and I can’t
> blame him.

Reminds me of a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) warning against the universal
condemnation of suicide that those who have discovered the most compelling
arguments for it aren't around to give it a proper defense.

------
kayoone
How about transferring human consciousness onto machines? I think its much
more probable than to stop the human body from aging and its also more secure.
Id at least have two offsite backups of my mind somewhere, just in case you
know. And dont forget the encryption in case the NSA gets ahold of it!

~~~
jk4930
The idea is usually to approach several paths (e.g., regenerative or
rejuvenative medicine, mind uploading) in parallel, because we have only so
much time and there's no guarantee that the one we'd prefer will work.

------
Vektorweg
As long as humans are so forgetful, people will experience forever, which is a
good reason to live forever.

------
squozzer
Three conditions would make life extension practical for me.

1) Cost of living becomes negligible or earning a living is still possible at
100+. 2) The additional years are healthy ones. 3) Breeding is reduced or
resource availability is increased.

But even then, I think Asimov's premise that a longer-lived person doesn't
have the urgency of a shorter-lived person has merit (The Naked Sun.)

If you have hundreds of years to live, why do something risky (or even
expressive) RIGHT NOW?

~~~
summerdown2
> If you have hundreds of years to live, why do something risky (or even
> expressive) RIGHT NOW?

If we transitioned into a post-scarcity society (your point 1), then why do we
need people to take risks? How about a society living for self-actualisation?

------
PavlovsCat
What would we need more life for? To consume more experiences, people and
things? Do you really need 100 years to become what you are, learn empathy and
letting go, and to get some perspective? Personally I think if you can't hack
it in 50 years, you can't hack it in 5000 either. Health is nice, youth is
fun, but living longer for the sake of living longer is something I pity
rather than envy.

~~~
brazzy
Status quo bias much?

If there are things worth living for and important to learn, it is incredibly
illogical to postulate there there is a maximum length of lifetime after which
they aren't desirable/important anymore. Especially one that just happens to
be the currently normal one.

How would you react to the assertion that 20 years of adult life are enough to
experience everything worth experiencing and everyone who doesn't commit
suicide at 40 is greedy and pitiable.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> Status quo bias much?

Randomness much? You could say that to _anything_ said in response to a
proposed change. Why is there no possible explanation for what I said in your
mind? Why jump to something I can't possibly prove to not be the case, and
which adds and asks nothing, right away?

I don't like the status quo in a thousand aspects. But from where I stand,
stuff like this is an _extension_ of the status quo, not a meaningful change,
it's just another step down the rabbit hole of selfishness and delusion. And
it's one I have been waiting for since the 90s, I was always astonished by the
creepyness and emptyness of the people talking about such stuff, at least the
ones I saw on TV. They talked about learning more languages or traveling a
lot, and oh yeah, more time for shopping. It's gonna be great. We will _never_
have to stop consuming!

I don't have anything against longer lifespans per se. I just also smell the
petty spirit of this current dream. I see the people ruling this planet, I see
our societies, and I say good luck.

By the way, we already live in a world in which people can get locked up and
have their shoelaces and belts taken away. Are you really worried about people
telling others to stop living? I wouldn't dream of that; but the idea of being
forced to live, now there's some scary fucking shit. Let's assume costs go
towards zero; fuck prison, let's put people in the eternal hell our
forefathers dreamed up.

Nope, not envious. Not envious at all. Just, once again, thinking real hard
about wether I want to have children.

On the plus side, combined with automation and current concentrations of power
and wealth, what do you think would happen if the rich and powerful knew they
could live forever? Do you really think they would share the already burdened
and stinky planet with _everybody_? Haha! Oh wait, you're serious; let me curl
up and cry.

> If there are things worth living for and important to learn

I agree. I also still remember one night realizing that I will die one day,
and that ENDLESS amounts of cool stuff, like discovering the universe and
meeting aliens, will happen while I will simply not exist anymore... that was
the first time in my life I felt real deep grief, incurable grief, I cried so
hard. Thankfully I had no idea about the heat death of the universe then ^^
But on the other hand, I was a kid...

> it is incredibly illogical to postulate there there is a maximum length of
> lifetime after which they aren't desirable/important anymore.

... and as I grew up, I intellectually came to "know" (as far as anyone can
claim that about anything) that there is no free will, that everything is
everything period, and all subdivisions just constructs and ultimately
delusions. If you can reason about this and come to other conclusions, I'd
love to hear them.

Although I'm far from achieving realisation of that, I think ultimately ego is
just a fever to be overcome, that a joy and peace are to be found that way
which are without equal, from what I can tell so far from random bright
moments of the soul. And I think I can be forgiven for assuming that once one
has overcome their ego, life and death and "doing important things" kinda
loose their weight, since why would it be so terribly important that _I_ do an
important thing? If I still have to be continually fed with experiences,
peoples and things, I still haven't found liberation and peace. Like Plutarch
said, the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled. Like Erich
Fromm said, to have or to be.

50 years for that just sounded good, I wasn't actually trying to name a hard
limit here, but I guess the whole point was lost on you anyway. I wasn't
talking of lifespan either, but about 50 years to "become yourself, learn
empathy, get perspective", etc.

You also have to consider that 5000 years doesn't just mean having 5000 years
to go into whatever you would consider a good direction. It could also mean
5000 years to become more sadistic, intellectually dishonest, good at
sociopathy, crazy, sad -- my point being, that in my books, if you go a good
way, you trend towards a happy and content center, of both yourself and the
universe, and once you roughly reached it, you only settle in better, but
don't really move far away from it anymore. On the other hand, if you do NOT
go a good way, you can basically run into the woods as far as you can run for
as long as you live, build better and better walls and illusions. I'd even say
the more deranged people are the more driven they are... Noam Chomsky is a
super busy bee, but not really _driven_ , like, say, Steve Ballmer.

I'd be the first to agree I'm a simpleton in the black and white way I think
about this stuff but it's simply false that I just "want stuff to stay as it
is for the sake of stuff staying as it is". You don't know me, at all, and the
fact that you come out with such a cheap shot right away says more about your
end of the conversation than mine. Even if I'm utterly wrong and misguided,
it's not for that reason.

> How would you react to the assertion that 20 years of adult life are enough
> to experience everything worth experiencing and everyone who doesn't commit
> suicide at 40 is greedy and pitiable.

I already said I wouldn't agree with that, see the reference to "Logan's run".

But hey, let's say there is a pill tomorrow which makes you immortal (and,
while we're at it, physically invincible) for 5000000000 years - would you
take it? If not, you agree that there is _some_ point beyond which it might
not be desirable to live, at least not with our current psychological makeup,
right?. 100 years, 1000, 10000, 100000000000 etc... we could squabble about
that, and I think it really depends on what you consider worthy aims in life,
and how you consider your importance versus others who live or could live - I
tried to roughly answer that for myself, I appreciate that the mileage of
others may vary, but I also reserve the right to frown upon some of the
motivations and horizons that are to be found out there. Simply put, we're
still stunted children in the big scheme of things, and to become immortal
_now_ would be the worst curse imaginable. It's not just the nice people, you
know. It's not just you and your friends and Kurzweil. It's Henry Fucking
Kissinger and Schwarzenegger, too. All the artists and actors who just don't
know when to quit in dignity - forever.

And the people who are already ruthless cutthroats will react in a very
predictable way to the stakes suddenly getting a lot higher. No more
philantropy near the end of your lifetime, now it's literally the winner takes
all. _Good luck with all that, you 'll need it._

~~~
summerdown2
I don't think anyone's suggesting you should be forced to live forever
(physical invincibility) - just that dying is no longer forced upon you.

Presumably in 80 years the Buddha's mind stopped being a fire being kindled?
Do you think he would mind living longer? I don't. I think rather that he
would use that extra time wisely.

In fact, that's the general conclusion I come to about people: given long
enough, people would probably become wiser, not more evil. Some would get
there earlier, but I think everyone would get there in the end.

