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Tronith87 t1_j5zr1sk wrote

Reply to comment by Evipicc in Which medical specialty will deal with immortality? by MeronDC

You're more optimistic than I am about solving our issues that are likely to kill off most of us in the next century. So do you think that all 8 billion and counting of us should be immortal? How about the children of those immortal adults? We're going to literally run out of room in less than a century if that's the case. Unless you believe we're going to somehow colonise mars or the moon.

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Evipicc t1_j604tuf wrote

Immortality invalidates the concerns for how long it takes to get places in the universe.

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Tronith87 t1_j607k59 wrote

No it doesn't. Immortality does not mean you don't have to eat and drink and rest. We don't have the resources to care for billions of immortal humans. We will still freeze and starve to death in the harshness of space even though our cells are replacing themselves as quickly as they die.

If this plan does come to fruition, we already know that the richest and most powerful people will use the technology and regular people will not be able to afford access to it. It will become the most extreme form of inequality. A small number of the population will dominant not only finances but time itself. Their offspring will of course also be afforded immortality and there will be ruling dynasties for eternity of the same family unless they are killed.

It's a horrible, horrible plan and I truly pray that we kill ourselves off or reduce in population to the point where this will never become reality.

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adfaer t1_j61rcdc wrote

How is this meme so popular? Why do people turn off their brains and forget about how all technologies start expensive and then get cheaper over time?

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Tronith87 t1_j627ymi wrote

Right, because medical related procedures and specialized medication is super cheap and affordable.

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adfaer t1_j62dd62 wrote

They’re not cheap, but we cover the payment with group spending like taxes or insurance because we agree that it’s right for people to have access to them. Sure the system for doing that is pretty fucked up in America right now, but that’s only in comparison to other advanced nations we could easily emulate. From a historical perspective, the access that even the poorest citizens have to lifesaving medicine is crazy good.

There’s absolutely not a chance in hell, at all, even a little bit, that the majority of citizens would permit rich people to hoard literal immortality. It would be completely politically impossible to prevent ordinary people from seizing the reins and distributing the immortality treatment, even if it were really expensive. And I don’t think it will be inherently all that expensive. It will probably be a genetic mod, which has all sorts of theoretical low expense delivery options.

As for all the problems with overpopulation and feeding people etc, immortality affords us the time and opportunity to solve those problems. If you could have the opportunity to either get yourself out of a tight situation through some challenge, or just choose to die, the choice is obvious. Your “solution” to feeding billions of people in the future is to let billions of people die now. That’s not a solution. That’s just a total abdication of any sense of agency or self-preservation or love of humanity.

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