Let's Talk About Death
- Thread starter Chazumi
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I figure I only have about 25 more years for cryonics to become mainstream enough to be able to save my loved ones with it. It's a slow set of technologies to develop, in a lot of ways. I've seen more scientific reports on aging mitigation than cryonics by large, large margin.
Why is that? You can get frozen right now.
MagisterCultuum
Great Sage
You can get frozen, but the freezing can cause considerable damage as the fluid within cells crystallizes and expands in ways that can damage cell membranes. We are getting better at limiting this, but are still far from perfect.
Not legally, no. But 'getting frozen' is only half the battle. The other half being long-term maintenance of the cryonics facility. Finally, I was talking about my parents. I have a good 50 years before I run out of time when it comes to medical advancement leading to longevity. Frankly, I'd just rather the medicine advance quickly enough to save my folks, and think that there's an opportunity for synergy from anyone who feels the same (or is a baby boomer themselves)
Daird
Warlord
Believe me, I plan to. Granted, not even my family knows the details of Operation Ice Cube right now. No sense in freaking them out, I'm only 24
One reason to actually feel happy my parents were nothing positive. I mean it is utterly problematic to be of the view that you can push for science to be there just for the noble goal of preserving in life...your parents? Really? What about the other 7 billion people. Do they care enough as well?
FWIW, i would not push for science to be there just so that it could (in theory) make myself live for more decades, or much more even than that. This is rather a horrible goal to have, in this world. Might as well also surround all the like-minded people and assorted drones behind a massive wall, and have the rest of the humans roam endless deserts. All for the higher goal of keeping 0,0001% (at best) of the humans alive for much longer.
No, only a select few people care. Now, do I care about the other 7 billion? Yes. This is why I mentioned synergy upthread. We can all have the same goal (preserve our parents) and end up creating a world where our parents (or our other loved ones) end up getting saved from being killed. I don't need you to give one whit about my folks, as long as you're willing to help preserve your own folks.
The end goal is 99.999% of humanity, not 0.00001%. Other people seem to be interested in preserving the 0.0000% record we have so far ...
Well, if you preserve mass numbers of people who otherwise would be dead due to old age/related, then pretty soon the human population would spiral far more horribly out of any level of sanity.
So i do hope that you aren't suggesting that we preserve some of the people already here, but on the other hand ensure genocidal-level lacks of new births? Cause other that all that, i do not see how your idea is practical at all, making the population be tens of billions of people in a century or a bit more.
This little debate may be of interest.
So? If it blows up in a nuclear war, you probably wouldn't have survived anyway.
Or, people just stop refilling the helium tanks. Ostensibly, the odds of my loved ones being alive in 3200 CE are higher if they're still up and about in the year 2200 CE. Too many things can go wrong with cryonics to make them anything other than a longshot.
Ah Kyriakos, overpopulation. Y'see, it's already a problem. We already need to be reducing the number of births from historical 'norms'. Overpopulation is a problem already. Please note, *I'm* not the one suggesting your parents must die to solve overpopulation. Now, you've expressed distaste for your parents, but you're essentially telling me that *my* loved ones must die for your grand scheme to work. Um, no, no thanks. Solving a problem with 'mass death' is a failure of imagination, at least.
In other words, overpopulation is already 'a thing'. I won't accept that 'your loved ones must die' as part of a solution.
Anyway, you can still have births and not get overpopulated, just not as may as before. That was the problem we already had. And, obviously, it's not 'genocide' if people aren't dying.
Ah Kyriakos, overpopulation. Y'see, it's already a problem. We already need to be reducing the number of births from historical 'norms'. Overpopulation is a problem already. Please note, *I'm* not the one suggesting your parents must die to solve overpopulation. Now, you've expressed distaste for your parents, but you're essentially telling me that *my* loved ones must die for your grand scheme to work. Um, no, no thanks. Solving a problem with 'mass death' is a failure of imagination, at least.
In other words, overpopulation is already 'a thing'. I won't accept that 'your loved ones must die' as part of a solution.
Anyway, you can still have births and not get overpopulated, just not as may as before. That was the problem we already had. And, obviously, it's not 'genocide' if people aren't dying.
I don't understand your objection. The plan is simply to store and preserve the information that makes you "you." This can be done fairly efficiently on a mass scale. By the time we can revive people I doubt overpopulation will be an issue, given that we'd need nanotech and human-equivalent AI.
I don't like that view on this at all, El_Machinae. Sure, if you keep 7 billion people alive for an aeon more, and cancel 7 billion births at the same time, you aren't really doing anyone a service here. You, or I, or any other living person, don't own life of humans here. Your parents or X's parents may be deemed ultra-valuable to you or X, but no one is killing them if they die due to old age, while your nice plan is deliberately sacrificing whole next generations so that we can be stuck with random people that other random currently alive people happened to care about. It is rather bleak as a dream for our species, to say the least.
Really? Um, how about all the people who would have died but who didn't want to die? Their loved ones? You cannot just exchange future people for current people and call it 'tidied up', that's just wrong.
"Letting someone die" isn't really the same as "deliberately killing them", but they're close. We're already letting enough people die, and it's shameful. There doesn't need to be 'human complcity' to try to stop a natural evil, you know.
We already did that when we moved the life expectancy above 32 years and dropped the death of infants. I could have had 4 more siblings (no overpopulation!) if we'd just let more infants die. But, we stopped letting infants die, and now we've got overpopulation. The solution isn't 'let infants die'.
Seriously, you're describing problems that already exist. Your 'solution' is 'let people die'. Um, that's a failure of imagination and a failure in morality. Snap out of it.
It is never a failure in morality to argue against the rise of nepotism to the level of an entire species...
Maybe the first humans should have tried to control stuff like that too, i mean why not, everyone they cared about was already alive so they might as well just keep it that way. -What do you mean they did not have the tech?
Oh, right. Cause the future generations improved on some bits.
You're the one arguing nepotism. You're saying that my parents need to die so that you can have more kids. Maybe my kids not dying lead to the current overpopulation issue? Should they die to so you can have more kids?
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
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That is oldschool, ya know. Throw the babies off the walls and take the womenfolk. Then you get to impregnate them as well as your previous womenfolk.
Sorry but that argument of yours above now has collapsed a bit more than the previous ones. You claim that I am the one arguing nepotism because i pointed out that your parents can die of old age (as in all other parents too), while in your view you are not arguing in favor of massive nepotism when you favor a future where most of the people would be the same ones now and their already alive relatives?
I mean...what?
It's just a useless claim. The nepotism goes both ways. You're not just saying that my parents 'can' die, but that they 'must' die. That's where the error lies, it's a moral error as well as a factual error. "Let them die" is not a really impressive 'solution' to the crisis you're imagining. Do you bemoan the drop in infant mortality leading to the need to have fewer kids?
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Kyriakos, If you use that reasoning towards medicine, is it as distasteful to you to save a life on the operation table?
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