Thread: Fear of death - A rational fear?

Technology helps us in a ton of ways. If we had the technology of 5000 years ago, it would be totally impossible for this many humans to be living here on earth. We would all die. Technology has greatly increased the numbers of humans who can survive on earth.

Originally Posted by Alric

Technology helps us in a ton of ways. If we had the technology of 50 years ago, it would be totally impossible for this many humans to be living here on earth. We would all die. Technology has greatly increased the numbers of humans who can survive on earth.

Fixed.

Terraforming or building everywhere and upwards will become a necessity. *waves* Good bye, nature.

Nobody knows it yet, but the next generation of smartphones will actually download your consciousness and store it on a server in the cloud. A hard drive the size of a pack of cards will hold thousands of minds... nature will once again take over most of the earth and humankind will live happily ever after...

Originally Posted by Alric

Technology helps us in a ton of ways. If we had the technology of 5000 years ago, it would be totally impossible for this many humans to be living here on earth. We would all die. Technology has greatly increased the numbers of humans who can survive on earth.

I disagree it just made it easier for us to live comfortably but has not really increased the carrying capacity.

That isn't true at all, it isn't about comfort but about survival. Without modern technology everyone would be starving to death. Cities wouldn't be possible, and everyone would have to have their own farms and there wouldn't be enough clear water to go around. So all those people would have failed farms and would die off by the millions.

Only the people who don't know how to harvest off of the land.

It doesn't matter if everyone knew how to do it. There isn't enough land for that sort of thing. The only reason there is enough land to go around is because like 90% of the world populations are in cities. Without the technology that allows cities to exist we would already be well over the carrying capacity for earth.

Governments pay some farmers to not harvest food as it is, there is too much land, But I kind of see your point but I think its doable the worlds land is badly managed but if we were all spread out it would work.

there are 7,015,105,021 people on earth and 36,794,240,000 acres of land, more than enough, but then again not all of this land would be able to be farmed, but judging from other animals, and the water sources it could work, it would just have to be managed better than it is currently.

We have fertilizers, heavy machinery, irrigation and modern energy. Without those we couldn't survive. Famines were a huge problem throughout history with populations a fraction of what they are today.

It doesn't matter how much people spread out, there is just no way the current world population could be supported with the land we have if we lacked all modern technology.

In fact without modern plumping and water treatment, there isn't even enough water for us to survive.

Ok you are right about our tech right now, but I still stand by my statement, we are not gonna be able to keep doing what we have and increase capacity, unless we find better ways to reuse water, and we find a way to produce food from nothingness, which is impossible, but I don't see us increasing capacity any more. then it is right now.

Originally Posted by Alric

When winter comes and the trees shed their leaves, those trees don't actually die. Its a symbol of life and death that each spring the trees are reborn, but they never actually die. And that is the symbol I see, because a person can be reborn and change views many times in life without ever dying. Things happen and people change, things will always happen and things will always change. Dying isn't a necessarily part of that cycle.

I think those other examples are off, because those people would of still done those things. If you are being oppressed you stand up because you no longer want to be oppressed. You might put yourself in danger, but the danger isn't the cause. You might say I would rather die than be oppressed, but still dying isn't the cause. Living forever doesn't remove the real cause, which is the need to be free from oppression. All it does it allow you to stand up for change with less danger to yourself.

Like you keep saying, everyone is unique. If someone is one of a kind and they die there will never be a person like him again. He is gone forever. If life is important and everyone in unique why shouldn't we strive to preserve that?

When a person is gone their body, their feels, their hopes, their dreams, their goals, their experiences, their memories, they are all gone, forever. We can never get those back. When we lose all those things, how can we not call that destruction. Every day a person dies we lose something important, a unique perspective of the world.

As for the carrying capacity of the earth, we have a ton of physical room left on earth and we are no where near filling that physical space. Using current methods there is a very limited about of water to drink and that limits population. However with technology, we do something like desalination to remove salt from water. Which would give us more water than we could ever use. Our population could increase thousands of times what it is today. The same thing is true about all our needs, increasing food production though things like hydroponics. Increase energy though solar energy, it is renewable and if we get very good solar panels could provide all our energy. Technology most definitely increase how many people can survive on earth.

One's body, their feels, their hopes, their goals, their experiences and their memories are merely leaves compared to what they truly are. What a man truly is is the cause he fights for, and that is why it is okay to sacrifice your life for a good cause. The leaf sheds because it protects the integrity of the tree. The man sheds his life to protect the greater being he is apart of, whether it be his country or his ethos. Ideas have a life of their own, and when we dedicate ourselves to an idea, we become a piece of it.

It seems there are two problems we are having in this discussion, the first is the Integrity of Life. It seems you draw the conclusion that someone's memories, hopes, and body are sacrosanct therefore the loss of these things can be judged as nothing less than negatively destructive. I see it no different from a flower dying after casting out thousands of seeds. These seeds, to me, are ideas. And we plant them everywhere we can before we move on, so they grow in other minds and become other people's dreams and memories. In this way, they dreams and memories do not die. The body also does not die, it breeds more itself before being swallowed up by the soil and returning to cycle of life. It's method is preserved in its offspring and its material is recycled. One's ethos is the same way, it is preserved by those who learn it and then it is recycled. One's ego... well that's an illusion. Illusions must eventually die, but because they never existed, that is not a negative thing, either.

The second problem we are having is efficiency. It appears you believe it's simply wasteful to keep breeding and dying rather than just keep the same functional machines in place. I believe efficiency is maximized by utilizing destruction to test the system for flaws. To be most efficient, we must test ourselves and prove ourselves, continuing to change and grow. In this way, we allow nature to take its course. And I believe humans are most efficient when they get out of nature's way, providing enough control to keep afloat but without rigid condemnation of life's natural systems.

Breeding and having lots of children doesn't test our self, and causes more problems than it fixes. You make it sound like we need a new generation to come in and learn from our mistakes but the reality in that new generations continually repeat the former mistakes of the past. All the economic problems we are having today, wouldn't have happened if people lived forever. People have historically faced all these problems we are having now, and if they were alive back then they would remember them. However, every new generation forgets the lessons of the pass and so repeat them. Things changes but major problems go unresolved.

It is ironic that you talk about it like a cycle because we are spinning around in a circle and we are not going any where. Technology is improving at insane rates and everyone is getting far smarter yet we keep making the same mistakes with wars, and with ruining our economy. Us as humans have vasts amount of knowledge but we don't have the wisdom to use it to its full efficiency. Wisdom comes from experience and age, experience we should hold near and dear and dump like last weeks garbage.

I think our major differences is you are taking a philosophical, almost religious or spiritual view on it. I am looking at it from a very practical point of view. There can be no doubt we have lost vasts amount of information and experiences due to death. Not only we do forever lose that information but when people also suffer emotionally when friends and family die.

From a practical point of view there is no reason to emotionally hurt people, lose vast amounts of information, and endless repeat old lessons we should of learned from history, all to improve the life of future generations who are frankly worse off because their entire family died off.

Let me put it like this. You have two choices.

Choice one. You have your entire family alive all the way back to your great grand parents, and all in good health. Einstein, Aristotle, Plato, George Washington all alive. Eternal youth and health. All current economy and social issues resolved due to people learning from past mistakes. World peace from people having learned from past mistakes.

Choice two. Everyone you ever known or cared about dead. Someone you do not know and will never meet is alive, but they would of been alive any way even if you pick choice one.

I mean, choice one seems vastly superior in every single possible way. Honestly, I think you fear death, and you have come to deal with it by saying your life doesn't matter. I think philosophy is your way of coping with the fact that you are scared of dying. Me? I am scared but I would rather do something about it.

Originally Posted by Alric

Breeding and having lots of children doesn't test our self, and causes more problems than it fixes. You make it sound like we need a new generation to come in and learn from our mistakes but the reality in that new generations continually repeat the former mistakes of the past. All the economic problems we are having today, wouldn't have happened if people lived forever. People have historically faced all these problems we are having now, and if they were alive back then they would remember them. However, every new generation forgets the lessons of the pass and so repeat them. Things changes but major problems go unresolved.

It is ironic that you talk about it like a cycle because we are spinning around in a circle and we are not going any where. Technology is improving at insane rates and everyone is getting far smarter yet we keep making the same mistakes with wars, and with ruining our economy. Us as humans have vasts amount of knowledge but we don't have the wisdom to use it to its full efficiency. Wisdom comes from experience and age, experience we should hold near and dear and dump like last weeks garbage.

We don't make the same mistakes because we don't know, we make the same mistakes because the controlling upper class benefits off of wars and owning the economy. We have the knowledge but we don't really rule the world do we?

Originally Posted by Alric

I think our major differences is you are taking a philosophical, almost religious or spiritual view on it. I am looking at it from a very practical point of view. There can be no doubt we have lost vasts amount of information and experiences due to death. Not only we do forever lose that information but when people also suffer emotionally when friends and family die.

The fact we lose knowledge only shows that the person was greedy with knowledge and didn't share it with the world, which would most likely happen if the key to Immortality was discovered, and it very well might have already and been hidden from public knowledge.

Originally Posted by Alric

From a practical point of view there is no reason to emotionally hurt people, lose vast amounts of information, and endless repeat old lessons we should of learned from history, all to improve the life of future generations who are frankly worse off because their entire family died off.

Let me put it like this. You have two choices.

Choice one. You have your entire family alive all the way back to your great grand parents, and all in good health. Einstein, Aristotle, Plato, George Washington all alive. Eternal youth and health. All current economy and social issues resolved due to people learning from past mistakes. World peace from people having learned from past mistakes.

Choice two. Everyone you ever known or cared about dead. Someone you do not know and will never meet is alive, but they would of been alive any way even if you pick choice one.

I would chose choice two, because if choice one was chosen I probably wouldn't have been born since so many people would have been born and not died, and they would have had to stop the production of new humans in order for earth to stay alive and healthy.

Originally Posted by Alric

I mean, choice one seems vastly superior in every single possible way. Honestly, I think you fear death, and you have come to deal with it by saying your life doesn't matter. I think philosophy is your way of coping with the fact that you are scared of dying. Me? I am scared but I would rather do something about it.

Once again I don't think any one said life was meaningless. I have come to accept that I will die, but like I also said I fear it to an extent. I grew up freaking out constantly around the age five, sometime if my mom was late from work I'd freak out thinking she was dead, I remember one hot day I was sitting outside and the sun was burning me up and I started to freak out thinking the sun was gonna destroy the earth. I was five. Then my aunt passed away, and my family had to explain to me that we all die, and I learned to accept it. Death has always been apart of life. To stop death would feel like me like betraying every human and animal that died before me. So yes I do cope with the fact that people I love have died and that even more will, and I will die, but I accept it and don't fear it like you will, till the day you die.

This was my quote for middle school haha I got it from a video game

'You may be able to prolong your life, but it's not like you can escape your inevitable death"
-Jack Krauser, Resident Evil 4

A question for Photolysis, or anyone who has made general comments about the state and prospect of medical technology (because I'm not following it closely),

What do you think about the problem of antibiotic resistant diseases? This seems to be looming in the future and I've read one source that speculates that this may become the third era of epidemiology; affecting humanity on the scale of events that transformed human pathology profiles only twice in our entire history. The other two being the advent of agriculture, and the advent of modern medicine. These epidemiology eras represented drastic and globally sweeping changes in what people fundamentally died of. The first (agriculture) invented the problem of infectious disease (that's exaggerating only slightly), and the second (modern medicine) literally invented all the "old-age" killers.

The source for this is:
Harper K. & Armelgos G. 2010. The changing disease-scape in the third epidemiological transition. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 7, 675-697.

So they speculate that antibiotic resistant disease is on its way to becoming the next major killer of humans worldwide. I think this is relevant to this discussion because this is all about evolution, and the birth-death cycle that drives evolution. Antibiotic resistant diseases are created because the microbes responsible evolve quickly. But even without antibiotics, the coevolution of humans and their parasites is a major driver of evolution in both. There is a theory that sexual reproduction evolved so that larger organisms could compete with microbial parasites, and that most evolution, particularly at the microscopic/mollecular level is simply an arms race between the two. This is called the Red Queen hypotheses (and is the reference in my signature.)

So Alric, if you think evolution is slow and dull, you might be interested in learning about this. Do you think that medical technology will always be able to give a species, that no longer evolves because they decided that they want individuals to live indefinitely, an edge over quickly-evolving pathogens?

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Nobody knows it yet, but the next generation of smartphones will actually download your consciousness and store it on a server in the cloud. A hard drive the size of a pack of cards will hold thousands of minds... nature will once again take over most of the earth and humankind will live happily ever after...

Until some dickhead unleashes a computer virus on my consciousness. Truly, if this idea ever happened, one's consciousness could be altered in a malicious manner before redownload.

Hehe, I read too much cyberpunk: sounds exactly like Altered Carbon.

Originally Posted by ZeraCook

Governments pay some farmers to not harvest food as it is, there is too much land, But I kind of see your point but I think its doable the worlds land is badly managed but if we were all spread out it would work.

there are 7,015,105,021 people on earth and 36,794,240,000 acres of land, more than enough, but then again not all of this land would be able to be farmed, but judging from other animals, and the water sources it could work, it would just have to be managed better than it is currently.

We do need oxygen from nature's photosynthesis.

Originally Posted by ZeraCook

7,015,105,021 people on earth

This made me laugh

Originally Posted by IndieAnthias

A question for Photolysis, or anyone who has made general comments about the state and prospect of medical technology (because I'm not following it closely),

What do you think about the problem of antibiotic resistant diseases? This seems to be looming in the future and I've read one source that speculates that this may become the third era of epidemiology; affecting humanity on the scale of events that transformed human pathology profiles only twice in our entire history. The other two being the advent of agriculture, and the advent of modern medicine. These epidemiology eras represented drastic and globally sweeping changes in what people fundamentally died of. The first (agriculture) invented the problem of infectious disease (that's exaggerating only slightly), and the second (modern medicine) literally invented all the "old-age" killers.

It's definitely something to be concerned about. Firstly though, it needs to be made clear that antibiotic resistance has largely come about as a result of blatant misuse and misapplication of antibiotics, as well as patients not finishing courses. These behaviours are starting to be tackled, and had they always been in effect then the situation would be almost non-existent I suspect. It's not just the rate of evolution of bacteria but a culture of ignorance.

Going forward, this should become less of a problem as new antibiotics are discovered or developed to replace the ones that there is now a large resistance to, and also because the increased understanding of genetics and increased use of genome sequencing would allow a far more rapid understanding of diseases and subsequently lead to more effective drugs to target it.

An indefinite lifespan also would require the ability to perfectly repair tissue as well as many other things which might well lend itself towards treating diseases. For example, using nanotechnology to repair cell damage could be relatively easily reapplied to target diseases, making them an almost non-existent threat.

So, I suppose the answer to the last question is yes, once you reach a certain level of technology. We're not quite there yet, so we're probably at our most vulnerable right now.

Originally Posted by Pensive Patrick

This made me laugh

U.S. & World Population Clocks thats where I got the number.

Originally Posted by Wolfwood

We do need oxygen from nature's photosynthesis.

Yeah duh everyone should know that.

The thing is that we are not really evolving now. We already have that medicine and we give that medicine to everyone, so people who are resistant to those diseases are not selected for. The only way we could adapt and evolve to be more resistant to them as a species if we stop giving medicine to people and let everyone but the strong die off, which is morally wrong.

If we are trying to live forever that implies that we are trying to treat the diseases. If we reject the idea of long life then that implies we start allowing stuff to kill people off. I think the right choice is obvious.

It is not just about those diseases though, everyone who would have once died early on in life now survive thanks to medicine. Like I said before there is no evolutionary pressures on us, and no survival of the fittest. There isn't that many diseases left that will kill you off before you can have children, especially if you compare it to a 100 years ago or earlier where young people died very easily.

We already stop or at least severely stunted evolution in our species, and it is to late to go back now unless you want to start letting hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people to die. We need to push forward, its the only way to go.

Originally Posted by Alric

The thing is that we are not really evolving now. We already have that medicine and we give that medicine to everyone, so people who are resistant to those diseases are not selected for. The only way we could adapt and evolve to be more resistant to them as a species if we stop giving medicine to people and let everyone but the strong die off, which is morally wrong.

If we are trying to live forever that implies that we are trying to treat the diseases. If we reject the idea of long life then that implies we start allowing stuff to kill people off. I think the right choice is obvious.

I'm assuming you mean that we should keep taking and giving medicine, and I guess I'm the bad guy in this case because I disagree.

Originally Posted by Alric

It is not just about those diseases though, everyone who would have once died early on in life now survive thanks to medicine. Like I said before there is no evolutionary pressures on us, and no survival of the fittest. There isn't that many diseases left that will kill you off before you can have children, especially if you compare it to a 100 years ago or earlier where young people died very easily.

We already stop or at least severely stunted evolution in our species, and it is to late to go back now unless you want to start letting hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people to die. We need to push forward, its the only way to go.

Pretty sure it is impossible to stop evolution. Go research what all our modern medicine has done to viruses and sicknesses, we are actually making them stronger, because they have to.

If you know the definition of parasite and you study parasites you will see humans are parasites to this planet. I think it would be better if we died off, even though extremely morally wrong. pushing forward we are only gonna ruin this planet more. its pretty sad being a human.

Originally Posted by ZeraCook

Yeah duh everyone should know that.

Yeah, like, duhhh.