Originally Posted by Alric
That isn't true. Just look at divorce rates. Your idea of love isn't what a huge group of people think of as love. You might think life ending makes it more precious or that love is about spending what time you have with people but clearly that isn't what the majority of people think at all. I am all for giving people choices, but if you die you have no choice. Your just dead, end of story. Even if you don't think immortality is good, I think you should support finding immortality since it gives people a choice. We should all support it so we can all decide as individuals which paths to take. It sucks that we are all stuck with options most of us hate.
The divorce rate is only at about 42% currently. While that seems like a huge number, people seem to get married too hastily these days and for the wrong reasons. A lot of marriages aren't about love. Then you have another 58% that don't end in divorce so that's pretty good in my eyes.
I am impartial to the view of whether or not immortality is good, I kind of would like to have it because as I said before, there's a lot of stuff I want to see, achieve and experience that may not be possible in my lifetime. However, if we gave everybody the choice of having immortality, there may be issues of sustainability. If we got to a point where we could support an exponentially growing population with no problems or had hundreds of space colonies that we could send people to, it wouldn't be that big of an issue to me. But if it's not available to everyone, that's going to create some huge class boundaries, don't you think?
Originally Posted by Alric
This is absolutely about stopping the advancement of medicine. If you improve medicine until it cures and heals everything, then you never die. If the medicine is there to save people, there is always going to be people that will live forever. So really, this is a talk about improvement medicine to the point we can keep people alive forever. That seems like a noble task to me. If someone wants to die, that is their choice but we should have the medicine available to help people if we can.
From my idea of medicine, it is a tool we use to cure disease. The biological clock is not a disease. At least, not in how we think of diseases right now. The lifespan would be extended ridiculously just by eliminating cancer and invading pathogens. That doesn't necessarily mean that it would be inhumane to stop there and give people the longest life possible without tinkering with the biological clock. There are already those who live among us in my generation and the next generation that are going to live well into their 150s. That's a tremendous increase if you ask me. But yeah, I still think preventing aging is a really cool idea. It's just whether or not it is practical.
Originally Posted by Alric
It might be kind of morbid but it is true. For example, if humans never left earth and eventually all humans died, then what did human life matter? Eventually the sun would engulf and destroy all of earth and everything on it. At that point, in this universe, there would be basically no difference if you were never born or not. Your impact on the universe is basically zero. All your memories and all your accomplishments result in nothing changing at all.
Your life matters to you, and that is why you should do what you enjoy in life. However, once you die whatever is left of you is gone forever. What once mattered to you no longer matters in the slightest. Once you are dead, you are basically a rock. Does anyone care what a rock thinks, or experiences? Does the enjoyment a rock has effect anything at all, add anything to the universe? No because a rock in an unaware object. Just like a dead person.
Only living people have value, which is why any time a living person dies it is a crime against humanity.
That seems more like a personal issue that you have with obliteration rather than a reasonable suggestion. I agree that it would be a shame if humans didn't spread out across the cosmos and become an advanced space faring race because that has literally been my vision since I was a little kid. But even if this planet was consumed by the giant inferno that was the sun right his second, it doesn't mean it was all for naught. Think of how many people have lived on this planet, how many have suffered and felt pain, how many have loved
and felt joy. Think about the history that it contains. Thousands of years of civilization and development. Despite all the warring and inhumanity of the past, you should be proud of your race. It does not matter if it were all to disappear because right now, we are the only ones in the known universe that can appreciate it. There is no certainty that we will ever be able to contact the other lifeforms in this universe, or that they will even be interested in our progress and way of life.
Life only has meaning if you assign it meaning. There are many of those who are no longer with us that still have a profound effect on the world around us. Look at Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandella, Oskar Schindler, Leonardo Da Vinci.
We are the only ones who will appreciate our lives and one day, even if we escape the supernova of a sun that threatens to engulf the Earth, there will be an end to everything.
Obliteration does not mean it was all for nothing.
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