Comment by unsupp0rted
5 hours ago
Imagine what a guy like that could do with 79 more years... or 10x of that.
It's not that outlandish: sharks, turtles, etc get far more years than we do.
It's shocking all billionaires aren't devoting all their resources to solving this cosmic crime against humanity.
I know it's cliche, but if he knew he (any of us) knew we might live to 790, would we live life so fully?
I kind of think that's what is behind some people versus others—those that have an intrinsic, constant sense of the brevity of life are the ones that try to experience life to the fullest.
Yes. A lot of people would live life so fully if they knew they had 790 years: in fact more so.
Right now the most ambitious projects people start barely scratch a decade or two.
A complete human experience is to have relatively little time, no point in doing anything if you have 500 years to do it IMO.
Edit: Maybe there wouldn't be nilihism, but I don't think you could get more fulfilled with the extra time. I feel like an insect that lives 24 hours and a shark that lives several hundred have an equal feeling of accomplishment.
You seem to be implying that at after a certain number of years (e.g. 79) you wake up one day and say "I'm fulfilled and have nothing left I'd like to achieve".
As someone who occasionally works with terminal patients, I've never seen that in practice. In reality most people desperately wish that they could carry on living, and have plenty of unfinished business that they'd like to see through. The only exception I've seen is when someone is in so much pain that they just want to end the suffering.
If we turn your argument on its head, a person who dies at 20 is just as fulfilled as a person who dies at 79. So why should anyone bother trying to live a long and healthy life?
500 years is as arbitrary a number as 79 is.
A Craig Venter that lives (a healthy life) to 158 is quite likely to accomplish at least 1 more great thing than one who lives to 79.
More likely that he would live most of those years with compounding mental and physical health issues, quality of life degrading to the point where most would wish for death instead.
3 replies →
I recognize and appreciate that you likely believe your contribution is one of optimism, but respectfully, I feel ill reading things like this.
Ever heard of Chesterton's fence? I don't believe we are more clever than our mother, the computational machinery of the universe. If we remove death, there will be great consequence.
Heck, it's arguable that the slow decline and death spiral we're in on this planet (empathatically NOT just human well-being metrics here), that this is already due to pushing death back, and systematically allowing power/opportunity to accumulate ever more deeply at scale of the selfish individual...
Why didn't anybody warn Alexander Fleming about Chesterton's fence?