Radical Life Extension
There are a lot of misconceptions about what that phrase means. Mostly, it gets confused with "immortality" in the fictional, supernatural sense. Radical life extension, often shortened to "immortality", is medically preventing aging and making death optional. This does not mean "immortal" in the comic book sense. It means extending life. And, by definition, life can be ended. Biological organisms can die. So in a world where we have cured aging, we can still get hit by a bus.
There are many objections to the idea of radical life extension, but there are 2 I see most often, and they tend to be raised in conjunction with each other. I'm not sure why. But the objections are that we will eventually get bored or run out of things to do, and that we will live alone, forever cursed to watch our loved ones age and die while we remain.
These objections aren't actually related, as far as I can tell, other than those who make them tend to make them both and they come up most often.
So, the first one, that we will get bored or run out of things to do or interest us. I think this profoundly underestimates the complexity of the universe. I could take the time to master each and every profession in existence. That alone would take more time than I can even conceive of, and that only counts the professions currently in operation, not all the ancient jobs that are no longer necessary or the jobs that will develop as society and technology develops. Then there are all the hobbies. Then there are all the books I haven't read yet. There is so much to see and do RIGHT NOW, that I think it's a severe limitation of a person's imagination to think that we would *run out* of things to do and learn and experience.
For some reason, people want to take current conditions and project them onto the future.
In the second case, this actually has a 2-part answer. First, what part of my very finite existence now makes you think I don't already have to watch my loved ones die around me while I live on? I'm beginning to lose track of the number of friends and family members I've seen buried, and I'm not even middle aged. I lost my first close friend when I was 12 years old, and that's not even counting the old, distant relatives that I "knew" by virtue of having once been introduced to someone I was told I was related to. This was a close, personal loss, someone who was a peer and a confidante. I'd lost family and other peers even before then. Being mortal doesn't make me immune to losing loved ones over and over again. It hurts, deeply. But I heal, and I develop more relationships, some of whom I will also lose, but some of whom will lose me first.
And the other part of the answer is that I'm not talking about some kind of supernatural curse or comic book superpower. I'm not talking about being indestructable and alone. I'm not talking about being Hancock. When I, and people like me, talk about "immortality" or radical life extension, I'm talking about a medical procedure that would prevent aging, and as a side effect, eliminate those forms of death that result from the process of aging. Because it would be a medical procedure based in science and technology, and not some magical wish or curse, it would be applicable to more people than just me. And because I'm way down on the economic scale, by the time it was made available to *me*, specifically, it would be made available to pretty much everyone, at least everyone in the US.
I'm nobody special. If there ever comes a day when a medical procedure to radically extend lifespan is made available to me, it won't be made to me alone. I'm not part of the elite rich who could afford some super procedure that only 5 people in the world could afford. I'm not a man behind the curtain, pulling strings and covering up wonderous new treatments for my own, selfish gain. While I understand that I am important to a handful of individuals, in the grand scheme of things, I'm nobody. This sort of treatment will not be available to me unless it's available to everybody.
Which means that I won't be watching my loved ones age and die around me because they will be living indefinitely along with me. In fact, the more likely outcome is that I'll have to go through more breakups because of my multi-hundred-year lifespan as I and my loved ones eventually grow in different directions and become no longer compatible with each other after a few centuries. Which brings me back to the first part of this answer - I'm already doing that. I have breakups, I hurt, I heal, I meet new people and build new relationships.
Maybe, it's possible, that one day I will decided that I don't want to live through another breakup, or another death of a loved one. I have a hard time imagining such a day, but when I was a kid, I would have had a hard time imagining the person I am today too. I mean, the idea that I would be intentionally unmarried, child-free by choice, and have several loving boyfriends who approved of polyamory and liked each other, and whose wives and partners I liked? Preposterous! So, it is entirely possible that after a millenia or so, I might just grow weary of existence. Which brings us back to the original premise - that death should be optional.
Remember, we're not talking about a fairy tale curse here. An organic body can be killed, and a mechanized body can be shut down. The idea that some opponents have of a solitary body sitting alone on a rocky asteroid in the vaccuum of space as the universe around him is destroyed and all life anywhere is gone, forever contemplating his existence and never being allowed to end it even when existence itself is ended, is, to me, about as far-fetched, and fantasy-based, as religion, or Santa Claus, or leprechauns.
Along with the technology to halt aging, and the passage of time, will come other technological advances that I couldn't even guess at. That's what the singularity is, after all - a horizon that we can't see past. With all those changes coming, there is no reason to assume that I will make it through exactly as I am now, with my current body and my current thought-pattern. The very act of eliminating aging will change who I am, how I think, and how I see the world. There is some philosophy that who we are is dependent upon our meat bodies and brains, and that trying to upload ourselves to a non-meat medium isn't even possible because it requires the meat to be "us". I'm not sure where I stand on that issue, specifically, since I don't understand enough about the brain to make that kind of speculation. But the point is that future-me will not be present-me and, by definition, I cannot predict past that horizon anything about how the world will look or what I will think of it. So I, therefore, cannot project any current status onto that future self, such as the idea that I want to live at all costs. I may change my mind someday and want to die. Or I may live long enough that the questions of life and death are something so completely foreign to my current meat-brain and short lifespan, that the questions themselves won't resemble anything I can currently comprehend, let alone the answers.
But I want the opportunity to ask them. If we really were to cure aging, giving us effectively unending lifespans, our society and our way of looking at things will be so different from the viewpoints we have now with our current circumstances, that it is absurd to pose such hypotheticals as "we'll run out of things to do & get bored" or "we'll have to watch our loved ones age and die around us". These are statements wrapped up in a profoundly limited imagination.
There are many objections to the idea of radical life extension, but there are 2 I see most often, and they tend to be raised in conjunction with each other. I'm not sure why. But the objections are that we will eventually get bored or run out of things to do, and that we will live alone, forever cursed to watch our loved ones age and die while we remain.
These objections aren't actually related, as far as I can tell, other than those who make them tend to make them both and they come up most often.
So, the first one, that we will get bored or run out of things to do or interest us. I think this profoundly underestimates the complexity of the universe. I could take the time to master each and every profession in existence. That alone would take more time than I can even conceive of, and that only counts the professions currently in operation, not all the ancient jobs that are no longer necessary or the jobs that will develop as society and technology develops. Then there are all the hobbies. Then there are all the books I haven't read yet. There is so much to see and do RIGHT NOW, that I think it's a severe limitation of a person's imagination to think that we would *run out* of things to do and learn and experience.
For some reason, people want to take current conditions and project them onto the future.
In the second case, this actually has a 2-part answer. First, what part of my very finite existence now makes you think I don't already have to watch my loved ones die around me while I live on? I'm beginning to lose track of the number of friends and family members I've seen buried, and I'm not even middle aged. I lost my first close friend when I was 12 years old, and that's not even counting the old, distant relatives that I "knew" by virtue of having once been introduced to someone I was told I was related to. This was a close, personal loss, someone who was a peer and a confidante. I'd lost family and other peers even before then. Being mortal doesn't make me immune to losing loved ones over and over again. It hurts, deeply. But I heal, and I develop more relationships, some of whom I will also lose, but some of whom will lose me first.
And the other part of the answer is that I'm not talking about some kind of supernatural curse or comic book superpower. I'm not talking about being indestructable and alone. I'm not talking about being Hancock. When I, and people like me, talk about "immortality" or radical life extension, I'm talking about a medical procedure that would prevent aging, and as a side effect, eliminate those forms of death that result from the process of aging. Because it would be a medical procedure based in science and technology, and not some magical wish or curse, it would be applicable to more people than just me. And because I'm way down on the economic scale, by the time it was made available to *me*, specifically, it would be made available to pretty much everyone, at least everyone in the US.
I'm nobody special. If there ever comes a day when a medical procedure to radically extend lifespan is made available to me, it won't be made to me alone. I'm not part of the elite rich who could afford some super procedure that only 5 people in the world could afford. I'm not a man behind the curtain, pulling strings and covering up wonderous new treatments for my own, selfish gain. While I understand that I am important to a handful of individuals, in the grand scheme of things, I'm nobody. This sort of treatment will not be available to me unless it's available to everybody.
Which means that I won't be watching my loved ones age and die around me because they will be living indefinitely along with me. In fact, the more likely outcome is that I'll have to go through more breakups because of my multi-hundred-year lifespan as I and my loved ones eventually grow in different directions and become no longer compatible with each other after a few centuries. Which brings me back to the first part of this answer - I'm already doing that. I have breakups, I hurt, I heal, I meet new people and build new relationships.
Maybe, it's possible, that one day I will decided that I don't want to live through another breakup, or another death of a loved one. I have a hard time imagining such a day, but when I was a kid, I would have had a hard time imagining the person I am today too. I mean, the idea that I would be intentionally unmarried, child-free by choice, and have several loving boyfriends who approved of polyamory and liked each other, and whose wives and partners I liked? Preposterous! So, it is entirely possible that after a millenia or so, I might just grow weary of existence. Which brings us back to the original premise - that death should be optional.
Remember, we're not talking about a fairy tale curse here. An organic body can be killed, and a mechanized body can be shut down. The idea that some opponents have of a solitary body sitting alone on a rocky asteroid in the vaccuum of space as the universe around him is destroyed and all life anywhere is gone, forever contemplating his existence and never being allowed to end it even when existence itself is ended, is, to me, about as far-fetched, and fantasy-based, as religion, or Santa Claus, or leprechauns.
Along with the technology to halt aging, and the passage of time, will come other technological advances that I couldn't even guess at. That's what the singularity is, after all - a horizon that we can't see past. With all those changes coming, there is no reason to assume that I will make it through exactly as I am now, with my current body and my current thought-pattern. The very act of eliminating aging will change who I am, how I think, and how I see the world. There is some philosophy that who we are is dependent upon our meat bodies and brains, and that trying to upload ourselves to a non-meat medium isn't even possible because it requires the meat to be "us". I'm not sure where I stand on that issue, specifically, since I don't understand enough about the brain to make that kind of speculation. But the point is that future-me will not be present-me and, by definition, I cannot predict past that horizon anything about how the world will look or what I will think of it. So I, therefore, cannot project any current status onto that future self, such as the idea that I want to live at all costs. I may change my mind someday and want to die. Or I may live long enough that the questions of life and death are something so completely foreign to my current meat-brain and short lifespan, that the questions themselves won't resemble anything I can currently comprehend, let alone the answers.
But I want the opportunity to ask them. If we really were to cure aging, giving us effectively unending lifespans, our society and our way of looking at things will be so different from the viewpoints we have now with our current circumstances, that it is absurd to pose such hypotheticals as "we'll run out of things to do & get bored" or "we'll have to watch our loved ones age and die around us". These are statements wrapped up in a profoundly limited imagination.