"If you're going to say that people ought to keep dying, by the billions, as they are today, go ahead and say that; don't dance around it."
People ought to keep dying, by the billions, if that is required to keep the organism of humanity alive and healthy.
Cells in your body have programmed senescence - when that mechanism fails (cancer, etc.) the entire organism (you) is at risk. What if the species-level analogy is true ?
I hope that's not the case because I, personally, would like to live a few hundred extra years. However it is ill conceived to frame the debate as a simple dichotomy between bright shiny extropians and grumpy luddites who are happy to die.
> People ought to keep dying, by the billions, if that is required to keep the organism of humanity alive and healthy.
Until we have a widely available means of curing mortality, such statements are idle speculation (though it does detract from efforts to come up with such a cure). Once we do, however, attempting to suppress that cure would be nothing less than mass murder. So if that is a problem we end up needing to solve, let's find a better solution that doesn't involve mass murder. And let's not stop efforts to find such a cure because we're afraid of such a problem.
I think you have a more reasonable outlook on this than most; it's good to approach this as a problem that legitimately needs evaluation, rather than being completely dismissive of it.
> I hope that's not the case because I, personally, would like to live a few hundred extra years.
That'd be a good start, especially if it gets us to the point where further fixes become available. A few billion would be better, though. :)
Mass murder is what our society does to the poor, albeit slowly, on an everyday basis today, if "mass murder" can be defined as simply allowing people to die when we could help them.
I wasn't referring to lack of action, but to actively preventing people from taking advantage of a means available to them to avoid death, out of some belief that death was necessary.
People ought to keep dying, by the billions, if that is required to keep the organism of humanity alive and healthy.
Cells in your body have programmed senescence - when that mechanism fails (cancer, etc.) the entire organism (you) is at risk. What if the species-level analogy is true ?
I hope that's not the case because I, personally, would like to live a few hundred extra years. However it is ill conceived to frame the debate as a simple dichotomy between bright shiny extropians and grumpy luddites who are happy to die.