Eneasz Brodski starts with an initial discussion of his belief in the general goodness of immortality.
PZ Myers talks about information loss in systems. He also talks about how cells need to have death for the good of the population of cells. PZ makes arguments about the disadvantage of longer life for societies that have it. He considers those who would be immortal to be the equivalent of cancer cells. PZ also makes the case that wanting immortality is selfish.
NBF – The longer lived developed world (life expectancy 75-88) does not seem to be at a disadvantage to the less developed countries with life expectancy in the 40-60 year range.
David Brin talks about science fiction that relates to immortality. He talks about his main focus on avoiding messing the enlightenment diamond shaped social structure.
Eliezer talks about the different ranges for immortality. Living to 10,000 years, 1 billion years, the life of the universe, beyond the life of the universe. The first two seem like and maybe the third seem possible but the fourth one seems to have a lot more problems. Eliezer points out that countries might also be immortal and are collections of smaller units. PZ Myers case about it being good to make things more dynamic would suggest that countries should occasionally be wiped out (killed) to keep the system of countries dynamic. It is useful to test the biases in some statements and claims by applying the reverse condition or applying the rules on a different scale.
If it is not good to live longer, then why wouldn’t it be better for everyone to live shorter lives. The Science Fiction example would be Logan’s Run where everyone is killed at about the age of 30.
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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