“The joy cry resolved into a jubilating chant: “Long live the king! Long live us all!” The king’s advisors, like everybody that night, were as happy as children; they embraced each other and congratulated the king: “We did it! We did it!”

But the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.” ~Nick Bostrom, The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

Humanity is starting to wake up to the worst of all diseases that’s currently considered a natural part of life. This disease is aging and it is currently incurable. There are multiple creatures that are functionally immortal. Why should we settle for anything less?

The Biggest Objections People Have

I will go over just one argument that people make that are all variants of the status quo argument “death is natural” which is to say natural things are good. This is patently false, the naturalistic fallacy has many variants but this is the most common one.

The search for meaning is rendered meaningless if death no longer exists. Okay, but then we will find other things to garner meaning from and most peoples day to day joy is not hinged upon whether they will live tomorrow.

We will run out of research. Also, this is a well known falsity but it has been heavily pump up from books like The Population Bomb by Paul R Ehrlich. These arguments and their variants all are based in one key fallacy: that resources are finite. Okay, but that’s only true if we stay on one planet and our current planet has enough resources for an enormous amount of growth still. The counter argument to the resource depletion fallacy is The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon. Paul Ehrlich and a man named Julian Simon made a bet about whether certain resources would be more or less abundant in 20+ years, Simon won. Resources are now way more abundant. There is a great episode of Bill Nye “The Eyes of Nye E07” that covers this topic, just estimates give the possibility of highly efficient humans having 10s of billions without any problems.

You may say “well eventually we will run out of resources” which is true! Someone wrote a book on this which was The Limits to Growth by Meadows et al. A Soylent green scenario (“cannibals becomes institutionalized and normalized”), in which mass starvation would occur. None of these things came to pass because more people means more innovation. The only reason I am dedicating this much space to these ideas is because they’re still stuck in the publics imagination. The limits we are facing of limits of not enough people innovating and efficiently using resources properly, not one of resource scarcity.

We will develop social systems to resource the inherent conflicts, there are numerous constellations of possibilities here and they are too numerous to discussion.

Another core assumption and objection is that someone health span cannot be increased only lifespan. Healthspan is the amount of healthy life. This too is also false. We can and should increase every individuals healthy lifespan as far as possible. Medicine 3.0 which is the proactive next step in medicine is working on such solutions. Taking the medical industry from a reactive model to a proactive health model.

Wanting to live a long time is selfish. Okay, selfishness assumes it is hurting someone. Who exactly is it hurting? Name names or people. Hand waving “the environment” is not an argument. The same “the environment” for things like nuclear energy has caused tons of environmental damage. Show me the data.

The other arguments usually follow into ludditism or some variant that basically certain technological advances are forbidden fruit. These claims are inherently anti-empirical and that which can be presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

The Essence of Technologies Purpose Leads Here

“Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.” ― Isaac Asimov

Superstitions won’t do when we have the stars in our future.

The essence of technology is to reduce scarcity. Time is all we really have and spending it wisely is essential. So why not get as much time as possible to create the greatest abundance possible which is time?

Okay, Then What?

We need to align ourselves and technology to the ultimate resource creator which is synthetic and cyborg intelligence super intelligence which is a civilization superorganism.

The more intelligence pointed in a well cooperated set of directions leads to greater abundance of numerous facets of intelligence.

It’s all very simple really, we just need to acknowledge that this fence that has been around for a long time needs to be torn down and replaced. The fence I am referring to is Chesteron’s Fence, the fallacy. In this case we have just cause to remove this fence.

Death the disease needs to be optional for everyone.

The medical field is currently being transformed from it’s current state into one with deterministic outcomes for individuals. Right now the medical fields is still similar to this:

“Doctors are [people] who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.” —Voltaire

This needs to change, anything less is complacency.

Shouldn’t We Get a Choice?

If none of this convinced you let me simply as you a question:

“Shouldn’t we get to choose in some way what number we get to live to?” ~ Laura Deming

Additional Resources

You can read my daily lifestyle checklist but major research is going into longevity and the taboo is starting to be lifted around aging being fought.

Some of my favorite thinkers on the subject are

1. Peter Attia

2. Laura Deming

3. Ray Kurzweil

4. Peter Diamandis

5. Bryan Johnson

Still not convinced?

If none of that convinced you let me ask you this, do you think you will be gung ho to die if until your very last moment you were in peak mental and physical condition?