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[Amperzand]

I mean, from a certain perspective, immortality could help everyone. Namely, by making the people who make things better stick around longer. Unfortunately, I very much doubt that this wonderfully nasty world would be so altruistic with the capability.

[GiglameshDespair]

In terms of potential good done and suffering averted, why is it better to work on maybe giving more people 70-80 years of good life rather than working on giving everyone 200-300 years of life and then working on improving quality later?

Because

continued life has the potential for future good where terminated life does not. The longer your lifespan, the greater the total potential good it can contain.

And I don't mean good life. I mean life. Life expectancy in my country is just over 60 years. In much of Africa it's less than that. People in Canada, the UK and the US can expect to live for two decades longer than most of those on average.

According to the UN, it's less than 50 years in a lot of African countries, and less than 60 in another lot. Meanwhile, their estimates still peg Canada, the UK and the US as ~80.

Expecting to develop an aging treatment that will increase those 40-60 years to 200-300 and somehow be affordable for everyone in those countries in any reasonable timeframe is honestly in my opinion significantly more optimistic than hoping for the Second Coming in my lifetime.

I usually detest saying things like this for obvious reasons, but I really think that a lot of first-worlders don't realise how good they have it. To you guys, natural causes is the Next Big Problem. To me, it's... a desirable outcome. It's better than dying of AIDS, TB, cancer, black lung, malnutrition, homicide, drug overdose... The point is, there are a hell of a lot of issues in the world. Immortality is going to do sod all for someone who'll never live long enough to appreciate it, and would never earn enough to buy it anyway.

There's not really a "natural causes" by itself, so much as many of the things you mentioned are what kills people, becasue they didn't die from accidents or whatever. The leading causes of death in Europe are still heart disease, cancer and the like...

There's also the thing that even if a fancy new anti-cancer drug is invented and distributed to the Africans, at lot of them probably can't afford that, either. Whatever the new improvement is, it's probably out of the reach of those who don't have access to any real medical care at all.

[Amperzand]

Or in some places, infrastructure of any sort.

[Flying Dice]

-snip-

In terms of potential good done and suffering averted, why is it better to work on maybe giving more people 70-80 years of good life rather than working on giving everyone 200-300 years of life and then working on improving quality later?

We could apply many more resources to curing aging if people not living in first world countries could expect to see their 80th birthday.

Please explain where I implied that pursuing longer lifespans worldwide does not include and prioritize pursuing longer lifespans worldwide.

Ensuring that everyone lives to 70-80 != ensuring that everyone has 70-80 years of good life. The progress towards multi-century lifespans does not shift from "current circumstances" to "everyone lives 300 years", but rather occurs over a series of improvements, one of the first of which would be eliminating as many non-accident non-"natural causes" (i.e. cancer, circulatory system failure, &c.) sources of early death, which would predominantly favor the people who die of those, aka non-First-Worlders. As that apparently wasn't self-evident.

You first prioritize getting everyone to live to the maximum current lifespan, which is basically just under a century barring outliers, where everyone who isn't murdered or killed in an accident is dying of "old-age" maladies. Then you work on eliminating those old-age maladies, probably with some sort of gene-therapy or some shit to keep our cells dividing properly. Then you work on making such treatments affordable for everyone.

This has the nice side-effect of forcing us to either drastically cut birthrates or invest in extraplanetary settlement.

[Arx]

See, I wouldn't call that 'working on immortality' in much the same way as I wouldn't call mining iron 'building a computer'. But meh.

[Flying Dice]

Yep, and the Americans and Soviets pressganging German rocket scientists wasn't progress towards spaceflight either, right?

I mean, yeah, if you just take "remove AIDs" in a vacuum, that doesn't constitute working towards immortality. But in the real world things aren't divided up into wholly discrete units.

[Orange Wizard]

Ideally we wouldn't have shitty inefficient governments who don't want to do anything about these things

Socialist dictatorship when

[Arx]

You're arguing over semantics at this point.

My understanding of most peoples' goals when they say they're working on immortality has always been that they want to jump straight to the natural causes part (usually because they're afraid of death) bit I'm chilled with being wrong.

[Flying Dice]

You mean enlightened dictatorship.

remove president

euphoric egalitarian philosopher god-emperor when

You're arguing over semantics at this point.

My understanding of most peoples' goals when they say they're working on immortality has always been that they want to jump straight to the natural causes part (usually because they're afraid of death) bit I'm chilled with being wrong.

I mean, yeah, I don't want to die. But natural causes tends to be the last thing to be worried about. You can personally prevent a lot of accidental/early deaths through cautious behavior and good personal habits, but those are still more likely to kill you, so they're the stuff to focus on first. I, personally, am unlikely to ever die because of AIDs--I don't sleep around, I don't live in an especially AIDs-prone region, &c., but it'd be unethical to only pursue solutions for causes of death which are likely to nail me, personally.

Just because it's a personal concern doesn't mean it has to be a selfish one, if you take my drift.

[Arx]

it'd be unethical to only pursue solutions for causes of death which are likely to nail me, personally.

Just because it's a personal concern doesn't mean it has to be a selfish one, if you take my drift.

Maybe I'm just cynical because I've seen at least several forumites that don't particularly give a damn about anything other than their own survival and apparently feel no shame about it.

[Flying Dice]

I'm disinclined to judge people too harshly for that. Self-interest, like all other aspects of life, isn't objectionable unless it meaningfully interferes with the ability of others to live their lives. Someone who is entirely oriented around personal survival? Okay, yeah, it's selfish, but I'm not going to condemn them for a natural response to a terrifying eventuality. If they cross that line and start harming others for the sake of their own survival, then it's an ethical issue. Someone who runs away from an armed gunman when there are other, more vulnerable people present isn't admirable, but they're not the same as someone who pushes those other people into the line of fire to help themselves survive.

I mean, yes, on a personal level I think that the notion of society operating smoothly because of self-interest is a crock, and that people who are entirely selfish (but who refrain from allowing that selfishness to cause meaningful harm to others) aren't particularly good people, but condemning them for being selfish is too close to thought-crime &c. for my liking.

IOW someone who only cares about their own well-being might be an unpleasant person, but they're not equivalent to someone who actively harms others for their own benefit.

Fuck, man, I don't know. There's too much granularity to ethical issues like this to really present a coherent, comprehensive stance without way more work than I'm willing to put in right now.

[Lord Shonus]

Had to go to Gamestop today because none of the local shops I usually buy my gaming peripherals from had what I was looking for in stock. After spending 5 minutes finding what I was after, 25 minutes turning down constant rewards card offers, and almost 40 minutes waiting for the idiot in front of me to successfully complete the incredibly difficult task of trading in an Xbox 360 with a controller and a half-dozen shitty sports games for an Xbox One and one shitty sports game,  I decide to walk to the Walmart that shares a parking lot, because driving to another store for a single bottle of lemon juice is a rather stupid thing to do.

While I am walking along Walmart's sidewalk toward the door, this ancient piece of shit car misses me by inches as the driver parks on the sidewalk so the passenger can run in. The passenger was the exact same pot-reeking imbecile that was holding me up at Gamestop.

[Tiruin]

it'd be unethical to only pursue solutions for causes of death which are likely to nail me, personally.

Just because it's a personal concern doesn't mean it has to be a selfish one, if you take my drift.

Maybe I'm just cynical because I've seen at least several forumites that don't particularly give a damn about anything other than their own survival and apparently feel no shame about it.

I think that is going cynical. Because that's only seeing other forumites as how they present themselves (It's not taking in the entirety of their lives or such, but more on how they currently seem to be)

[GiglameshDespair]

-snip-

In terms of potential good done and suffering averted, why is it better to work on maybe giving more people 70-80 years of good life rather than working on giving everyone 200-300 years of life and then working on improving quality later?

We could apply many more resources to curing aging if people not living in first world countries could expect to see their 80th birthday.

Please explain where I implied that pursuing longer lifespans worldwide does not include and prioritize pursuing longer lifespans worldwide.

Ensuring that everyone lives to 70-80 != ensuring that everyone has 70-80 years of good life. The progress towards multi-century lifespans does not shift from "current circumstances" to "everyone lives 300 years", but rather occurs over a series of improvements, one of the first of which would be eliminating as many non-accident non-"natural causes" (i.e. cancer, circulatory system failure, &c.) sources of early death, which would predominantly favor the people who die of those, aka non-First-Worlders. As that apparently wasn't self-evident.

Are you saying here that things like cancer counts as a "natural cause" or not? I'm honestly not sure.

Natural things like cancer, heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, are the top killers in europe. Heart disease is the top killer in the USA. People don't just drop dead, generally, something kills them. In the first world's case, those diseases can be treated or held back longer, or something that would have otherwise killed them - an infected wound, a different disease, an accident prevented by better safety regulations - didn't instead.

I think that is going cynical. Because that's only seeing other forumites as how they present themselves (It's not taking in the entirety of their lives or such, but more on how they currently seem to be)

Don't disregard the possibility of how people seem to be is how they are.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

[Tiruin]

Don't disregard the possibility of how people seem to be is how they are.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Yeah, but they're people. All times, they're not just like that cigar. What's 99.99% being described everytime someone describes a person is their attitude and behavior. This goes for when people describe that they're not people--they're basing it all on those two words.

It terrifies me how the power of words can make one's perception of things very different from what really is.