Death is inevitable.
And even if, by some how, we manage to "conquer" it, it'll still leave us elderly and infirm. If we download our minds into a computer, we still lose what we want.
It's not about just staying alive, it's about staying at the peak of our youth as well, and I doubt that can ever be returned once lost, even if we live forever.
The solution to death will probably also halt the processes that cause us to become infirm. IIRC aging is mostly about damage to DNA accumulating over time, until eventually the damage stacks up to the point where something vital fails.
I think the analogy can also be applied to your own dreams and ambitions.
The heat death of the universe is inevitable, we will all die eventually and we can only delay the inevitable. Death is not something that should be feared, for in death we are all equal.
I think for me it was more Death as a concept rather than a inevitability. As Fulcrum said things that cause death that are within our control but we think we can't do anything about it. Be that global warming, Cancer etc..
I suppose there's an argument to be made that the society in that story considered the dragon 'just part of life' just like death, but overcame it.
There's a bit of a difference between living for thousands, millions, or billions of years, compared to only living until 80.
Aging (and death) is a, as far as we know, a technical problem. I don't see any reason to say that they could never be conquered - with enough time and effort, it could definitely be possible.
You're literally fighting entropy.
Nothing lasts forever, but part of the interesting experience is seeing if you can prolong it to make the most of it.
CITATION NEEDED
Fixing an old bodies' failure to create cells like it used to, and life extension, sound pretty closely linked to me. It's not like when a tool gets rusty, even a young person isn't the same cells they were a decade ago. No one dies of old age they die of the organ failure that comes with it, so beating one beats the other.
So do you make these arguments for cancer? Do you lament the lack of smallpox and polio?
Meh, I fight entropy every time I take a breath. We will all die someday, no matter what, but I see no reason we shouldn't take steps to delay that as long as possible. There's so much more universe to discover.
Good thing the human body isn't a perfectly isolated system, then.
More to aging than just telomers
Also you got issues that were not evolved to live forever, our memory is logarithmic, when you're 20 the last 5 years we're a quarter of your life. When you're 80 it's a much smaller fraction. At 300 your memory would be fucked. You'd love and lose and live a lose till you don't remember people who at one time felt significant. You'd have major nostalgia for the great times you enviably had. You'd miss places and people you used to live with.
If you overcame all that you wouldn't be human anymore. I'd rather choose a natural lifespan
What's so great about being human if it comes with flaws like that?
i'd be okay with living forever so long as i can kill myself at any point that i feel like i am done with it.
amen. The most stressful part about life if you ask me is the feeling of running out of time. I'd gladly accept immortality so I could take everything at my own pace and then sign off when I'm ready for it, don't want none of that time is running out shit.
seems like it'll be a reality at some point in one way or the other. Brain machine interfaces, mind uploading, gene therapy, sufficiently advanced prosthesis and whatever else might pop up could all be used together to extend our lifetimes indefinitely. they've already managed to map the brains of worms to computers aka living worms living inside digital brains which is insane to think about. I'm 99% sure that one day we'll be able to do the exact same thing with human brains
A copy of a brain is hardly immortality for the original consciousness, though.
A lot of people would still get a mindcopy of themselves if possible.
I'd be happy to say it would be if I was copied while unconscious, and my original self euthanised. Even if not, it would be immortality for one branch of me.
This is put together fantastically. I'd already read the short story but this adaptation really got to me.
On the other hand if we do solve death, we really really really need to make sure we get it right, and not allow it to to be restricted to only a certain class of people or otherwise have restrictions. I would not like the world to end up like Altered Carbon if possible, where rich assholes literally live forever, own everything, and wield absolute power. Nor would I like death to end up like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
What a disgusting attitude to have.
If the whole point of prolonging life to eventual immortality is to outrun death in light of the ingrained aversion to it in our minds, what possible value would this copy of you serve to you had you died? What possible reason is there to just seemingly preserve some arbitrary copy of you in the absence of the main you, besides possibly comfort to yet living relatives who had the time to get to know you and be pained by your being gone?
I'm probably missing something here, but it seems a lot like some kind of vanity to me, to perpetuate not a new life separate of you but a new you equally separate. Why not just have a kid instead?
I agree, that would be a tough challenge to overcome. I do think its possible to overcome tho. While a straight up copy wouldn't be you since the original you is left behind, wouldn't it be possible to do a cut and paste instead of copy and paste if we involve for example brain machine interfaces? Instead of scanning the brain we could use a BMI to directly transfer it? I think the most important aspect of our identity and who we are is continuity so as long as that continuity isn't disrupted then wouldn't it be possible that we, the original consciousness, would still be there?
I would probably be fine dying in order to grant life to an immortal, digital clone of myself. A worthy death, I think, to give life to something greater than myself.
If continuity is somehow not disrupted and the stream of consciousness that persists on this hardware is a direct continuation of the one that's gone in the original body, then sure, I guess, but how would we possibly gauge the fact of it being the same consciousness rather than a new one, when this type of consciousness is entirely subjective?
That is, assuming this immortal clone is indeed a clone of you in every way, not some superficially simulated copy of what you seemed to be at the given moment of going through such a procedure; and assuming, of course, that this digital you isn't the property of whoever happens to own the hardware it runs on. A technology sufficiently advanced to store a copy of you will also in all likelihood be sufficiently advanced to have this "you" be a malleable thing to be edited, rather than read-only.
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