Screenshot of a Mastodon post - A picture of the bridge of the Enterprise-D from Star Trek The Next Generation’s first season. In it are Captain Picard, Doctor Crusher, and Wesley Crusher in the Captain’s chair.
The text reads:
“Wil Wheaton is now five years older than Patrick Stewart was in the pilot of Star Trek the next generation. Have your bones demineralized and fallen apart yet?”
Original post @ Mastodon
Every 20 year old is going to be a 90 year old someday (if they are lucky). Complaining about age is unnecessary, because all those young people you see running around and envy…
You can be content in knowing they’ll pine after youth the same way in a few decades. You can feel smug in knowing that they too will despair in a midlife crisis and look in horror upon the wrinkles in the mirror. That they too will feel the fathomless sadness of knowing that all the things they dreamed about and never achieved will weigh them down deep into murky depth.
That they too will live in the future as old people and not get to fully enjoy its marvels.
You may rejoice, for you have already climbed that mountain. You stand on its peak or near enough, and soon you will jump off into everlasting oblivion…
To be fair, there is someday going to be a generation where that doesn’t happen (assuming humans don’t obliterate themselves first). Eventually it’s practically a certainty that we will develop the means to preserve humans indefinitely.
I wonder if we do ever create some form of immortality, if we discover that the human psyche has some kind of ‘wall’ where a person just doesn’t want to live anymore. Not due to health or personal life issues, just that there is a time limit on sanity that we don’t know about.
That’s a very common trope in sci-fi. More recently, I remember it from In Time with Justin Timberlake.
I’d be fine with being biologically immortal and having the option to choose when to die, that seems absolutely perfect to me
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Many old people are too frail to enjoy the things they used to. I mean maybe one would still get bored of life if they had eternal youth, but I suspect it would take much longer, not considering mental illness and such.
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You may achieve biologic immortality, but you will still age mentally, get jaded and bored. Unless someone also invents being mind wiped after so many centuries. But then you might as well just die normally again right? What is the difference between a person who has no memory of their past and a new person.
Is this not reincarnation with extra steps?
It’s not a certainty. It makes sense to the “monkey chatter” in your head, but it doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary psychology point of view. The individual has no real value to the genetic processes that drive us. Individuals that hang around too long are detrimental to those genetic processes. There are biological reasons that suicide and “going off to die” is so common not only among humans, but many other animals. Outside of our ego, which contributes so strongly to our monkey chatter but less strongly to our actual behaviours, we don’t really want to live forever.
Even from a technical point of view, it flies in the face of every assumption life is built upon. Death is essential to every biological process that spans organisms. We would have to create an inhuman thing outside of biology that is neither alive nor dead. It is debatable whether that is an extension of life rather than a transformation into something else, still destroying the old thing.