Comment by moralestapia
1 day ago
To expand, we might find out the hard way that having an expiration date was a feature of our species, not a flaw.
1 day ago
To expand, we might find out the hard way that having an expiration date was a feature of our species, not a flaw.
Walk me through it: in order to get dictators killed, because they defend themselves very effectively, we should put everybody on the planet under a biological death sentence, which will get the dictators too.
No, I cannot endorse this.
Science moves forward one death at a time
So at least two systems run better with the implicit time limit.
We should kill the dictators deliberately, improve our biology deliberately, and get stuffy old people like me to change their minds deliberately. No stupid use of death as a proxy, it's a horribly blunt instrument. "Let your ideas die in your place".
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.
Humans who get old and comfortable often become quite terrible people.
That's a perception. Do they, though? If so, why? "I hope I die before I get old", sang The Who. Roger Daltrey is 82. Trump (slightly younger) was one of His Generation, although I expect he probably wasn't a mod. But what I mean is, the coercive oppression visited upon you by your elders is coming from the youth of yesterday, who had it lurking in them latently, waiting to gain status and money and influence. Those things arrive gradually (if at all) along with age, and I guess they make a person complacently comfortable, but the driving cause is that the person is a coercive dogmatist with a drive to oppress inferiors, and always was in most cases, because we don't usually learn to be wronger,* only how to express our terrible attitudes. So age isn't doing this, it's just revealing it.
* 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.
It's a feature of every species that evolves. You can't evolve if you're striving to outcompete your offspring. You quickly game out that not having offspring is the winning chess move there. Now you're not having offspring, and thus you're not evolving. Then the environment changes and you, being unable to adapt in any way, go extinct.
Cheating senescence is kind of the ultimate adaptation. If we can crack this then I'd expect designing other artificial adaptations to be quite tractable in the future.
Of course it's a feature; it still doesn't mean it cannot be stopped or considerably postponed.
I’m always fascinated by people who think death can be “stopped” (not postponed, but eliminated). Fascinating.
Is there a reason why it can't possibly be stopped?
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I'm alway fascinated by people who think 80 years of life is the same thing as 1,000 years of life. Fascinating.
Definitely a feature: Disposable soma theory of Kirkwood. Your germline is the real “you”.
Neurogenesis slows for a similar reason
That’s a coping mechanism because we can’t change it.
Wasn't death a requirement for us to reach this current stage of human evolution? I don't think it is a good idea to stop it entirely.
Evolution of humans by natural selection is already over with - or at least proceeding at time scales irrelevant to our civilization.
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Not sure about death being required. It's more that life after reproductive success is not required.
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Curing aging doesn't stop death entirely. There's still the attrition of living in the physical world. Some portion of the population will trip and break their necks every year.
All it would take would be one billionaire who invested in long term bonds, à la Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…
Indeed; the biggest reason is surely cancer.
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