I'm not concerned with whether or not it's possible to live forever, my concern is whether it's wise.

"The fact that we drop dead is not a bug, it's a feature. It's how we get rid of all the old assholes." - Louis Black.

I've had this debate before in a different thread but it got sidetracked so I'd like to focus more prominently on the ethics of immortality. I think that while people can continue learning new things, as we age our perspectives grow narrow. The more we learn, the harder it is to see things from a different light. Just as a biologist or a mathematician spends decades focusing solely on one field has trouble viewing the world without applying everything to biology and math, so do the elderly have trouble viewing the world apart from whatever they've come to believe.

In other words, if we stopped changing the generations, our ethos would have difficulty evolving. Blank slates are necessary for better belief systems to be incorporated. Take racism, it's much more difficult to teach a 90 year old tolerance after they grew up where they were essentially expected to be intolerant. Allowing a new generation to replace them that didn't have the same racist indoctrination is necessary. Or take war and revenge. The easiest path to peace between two warring people is to wait for enough of the embittered to simply die off and be replaced by a generation that does not feel the same condemnation.

Response?