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Transhumanist Children's Book Argues, "Death Is Wrong"
destinyland writes "Hoping to inspire life-extending medical research, science fiction author Gennady Stolyarov has launched a campaign to give away 1,000 free copies of his transhumanist picture book for children, Death is Wrong. 'My greatest fear about the future is not of technology running out of control or posing existential risks to humankind,' he explains. 'Rather, my greatest fear is that, in the year 2045, I will be...wondering, "What happened to that Singularity we were promised by now...?"' Along with recent scientific discoveries, the book tells its young readers about long-lived plants and animals '"that point the way toward lengthening lifespans in humans,' in an attempt to avoid a future where children 'would pay no more attention to technological progress and life-extension possibilities than their predecessors did.'"
This is here .... why?
There's already far too many humans on the planet. If we stop dying there'll be nothing to eat and nowhere to stand.
when quality of life is what really matters? Maybe once we can create a sustainable society where people are actually happy we can focus on resource drains like people who never die.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Wow, I get the strong impression the author has only lived and traveled in developed nations his entire life. Its fun to wish for the things he writes about but they're unrealistic given human history.
It's especially awkward how he keeps saying he's not espousing a libertarian view and then does just that.
Grow up, death is desirable, just imagine someone like Zuckerberg alive forever.
No one "promised" you a singularity, it was a prediction like flying cars (which are an absurdity when you think about it) and a very small percentage of population deserve such things.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If only there was some way to prevent unwanted pregnancies... a sort of "birth control". Nah, better just resign ourselves and all future humans to the horrible infinite nothingness of death. Working on solutions to problems is hard! It's easier to just spout off some drivel about the circle of life.
for all the negative remarks, maybe i'm the only one who wonders how awesome this would be for space travel XD
we would be able to explore a meaningful part of the galaxy XD.
the 100 year ban is over.
we waste time.
Okay, let's only consider wanted pregnancies. Add people without ever removing any and see if overpopulation gets better or worse. Furthermore, do you understand how species development works? Have you heard of this "evolution" thing? Part of the deal is that unsuccessful traits need to fall away.
Without death, there's no evolution possible as one generation can no longer replace the previous one. Immortality would be death of the specie (*), just the same as when cells become immortal we call it cancer and the organism dies. If it happened at once society would collapse as children would no longer inherit (and be able to afford a house), you'd no longuer be able to replace your boss at work, and indeed never get a job because nobody would move up the corporate ladder... A pretty good novel about that: The Postmortal by Drew Magary.
(*) A justification is that an immortal 'specie' stays static. If another similar specie keeps evolving, it'll eventually outcompete it and beat it to death.
Want longer life spans ? Very simple: start breeding later in life and let evolution sort it out.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Death is appropriate and welcome when timely... it is untimely death (accident, too young, pain filled, etc) that is a tragedy.
The singularity is a fascinating idea that ain't going to happen. Vernor Vinge himself did a much better treatment on what happens in this case.
We're already living in the Age of Failed Dreams. Advancements in technology, aside from computing, have all but halted. Flying cars? We can barely improve planes; yes, that IS your fathers airframe. Cheap and limitless energy? Nope. Life extension? John Adams died at 90 over 200 years ago, and he wasn't THAT unusual; many more live that long today, but few live much longer. Progress on stopping disease has even stopped and regressed. And most notably for the purposes of the singularity, strong general AI hasn't progressed much.
and look out a window. The last time I landed in Las Vegas I was stunned at how much of the us is completely and totally unoccupied.
Drive out to state college PA sometime - nothing but trees on either side of you for hours on end.
I heard a stat a few years ago saying the entire population of the world could fit into the state of Texas at the density of NYC. Yes, that doesn't account for infrastructure, and food production, but the point is that the entire world would be left over for that.
There is lots of room on this blue marble. Technology will find a way to support us all.
the new Childrens Storybook Fiction Writer overlords.
Gently reply
What happened to that Singularity we were promised by now...?
I didn't promise anyone a singularity. Did you?
Sure, it'd be nice if it came along before I shuffle off, but right now life's too short to keep getting annoyed because you think you're entitled to stuff from sci-fi.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's really sad to see the comments about life extension being bad or we are going to overpopulate the planet etc. They truly show the lack of imagination and understanding of much of the /. readership. There are some truly closed minds here among people calling them selves Liberals, Libertarians and Progressives. The reactions are very much like those of a society and system of thinking that thinks a cat can steal the breath of a baby, a society where superstition is given more weight than science.
The population models of Thomas Malthus were wrong. Paul Ehrlich's reuse of those models was wrong and reusing those same tired models will continue to be wrong. You are placing your hopes in Armageddon and self distraction instead of the creativity and ingenuity of humanity to make more from what we have than the last generation thought possible.
Stop being small minded lovers of doom!
It all starts at 0
Science fiction author "Gennady Stolyarov" isn't listed in Internet Speculative Fiction Database either, and the book's publisher, "Rational Argumentator Press" has a grand total of *one* publication, and its web presence is a section of Mr. Stolyarov's personal site. So what we're dealing with here is the self-published work by an unpublished crank sci-fi author -- not that there's any dishonor in being an unpublished crank sci-fi author. There's lots of us around.
I peeked inside the book, and what strikes me is that if you squint, this *looks* like a religious tract pitched toward children, right down to the colorful but stiff illustrations. Take a look at the cover, with it's child dressed in a blue oxford shirt, red tie and khaki chinos banishing death. This is peculiar, in a way that I applaud; an image pitched at children by someone so far out of the mainstream that she has no idea what a culturally "normal" child looks like. That's a good thing for the world, although it may not do much for the author's message. It's more important for people with an oddball streak to write books than people who think like everyone else.
This book appears to come out of the same impetus that underlies a lot of religious impulse: rage at the fact we're are going to die. It's a fact we *should* be uncomfortable with. Religion does the most damage when it makes us too comfortable with the prospect of death. The afterlife becomes a make-up session where we can do the things we put off line life like reconciling with estranged loved ones.
Anyone who regards speculation about technological singularity enabling indefinite human life extension as a "promise" is taking far too much comfort in what is, at best, an intriguing idea. But the universe itself has a finite lifespan; any being who could last to the heat death of the universe, or even a single 2 million century "galactic year" would be so far from human that calling it "transhuman" would be like calling ourselves "transprotozoans".
Whether we just disappear after a mere century or so, or survive as something unrecognizable as human, our opportunity to experience the universe as ourselves, as humans, is brief. We should make the most of it, no matter what we plan to leave behind when our human existence is done.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
An essence of life is the continuation and gradual improvement of the self-sustainment capabilities of the information pattern that is conserved; that is, the genome.
Individual organisms are temporary containers (guardians) of the pattern, ensuring that the pattern survives (remains embodied in local matter and energy) for some more time. But each individual is almost always a redundant guardian of the information. There are many backups.
The inevitability of either accidental catastrophic destruction of the organism container, or of slow entropic decay of the complex structure and complex process of the container, is why life a) creates multiple copies of the pattern, and b) has a "reproduction of the container" mechanism, whereby the physical container's complex structure and process can be periodically rebooted. The container of the information is recreated in its simplest possible physical form, that uses the least material, and is again at a relatively simple and uniform beginning of its structural evolution. The beginning (embryonic) stage of the form, being simpler and smaller and newer in arrangement of atoms, is refreshed and cleaned of defect (like a rebooted computer), ready to begin its new round of combatting accident and entropy.
Another essence of life is entailed in the simultaneous creation of multiple almost identical but subtly varying containers of almost identical but slightly varying information patterns. This does not have to be specially engineered, because the variation (by accident and entropy) would be the natural expected outcome of multiple concurrent complex physical construction processes. It is generally the prevention of the variation that is remarkable, and was among the first results of the evolutionary selection process. By creation of multiple co-existent almost identical copies, a game playing field is set up, and competition (and co-operation strategies) ensue, and evolutionary selection creates more viable forms, and forms more viable) that become able to inhabit more general physical environments over time.
Endless perpetuation of one individual organism instance is not an essential feature of this evolution of self-maintaining information patterns, and may arguably be counter-productive to the larger maintenance of life agenda of life.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I welcome the centenarian SAT, wherein the desiccated (if not decrepit) demonstrate that they retain the mental flexibility to allow necessary social change to redefine the terms of continued living.
The movement loses most of its gloss when retirement age gets bumped to 165. Under present conditions, the extremely gifted can amass enough wealth by the present retirement age to coast on equity for a long time.
This of course all changes once life extension begins to rock the boat. Living forever will, however, always remain highly appealing for the 1% of the 1% of the 1%.
Fuck evolution and fuck nature. I don't give a shit how species development works or if it will continue to work at all. Intelligence has made evolution obsolete. If you think it's so important, then feel free to line yourself up to die.
Furthermore, do you understand how species development works? Have you heard of this "evolution" thing?
That would be the natural tendency of people with normal vision to out-compete people with impaired vision, and for people without diabetes to out-compete those with it, right?
Didn't we kind of lose that pressure when we started intervening technologically by putting up audible crossing indicators, manufacturing glasses, manufacturing injectable insulin, doing allergy testing, developed cochlear implants, started vaccinating people against diseases, and so on?
Most of the historical evolutionary pressures on humans which kept the number of recessive genes in the gene pool small (because the people who had them who expressed the traits... well, they died, rather than reproducing..) are no longer applicable. Thanks for playing, though.
We were promised flying cars, home fusion reactors and hoverboards for next year. We already should had sent a tripulated mission to Jupiter, and the world should had ended 2 years ago. Sometimes our expectations have no grounds on the real world.
But anyway, maybe believing in some fantasies (like there is such thing as justice, and in this case, living forever) could improve things, maybe with that belief we could finally care about making our world to be sustainable in the long term.
Perhaps you should reread what "recessive genes" actually are. ... has nothing to do with your rant.
E.g. the gene for red hair is recessive
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Even if we get the population sorted out, if we live forever, what drive do we have to accomplish anything?
Not everyone holds off on things simply because it'll be a while before they die. Lots of people just, you know, want to get things done.
Death is the drive behind making life meaningful.
People decide their own meaning.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Long (or unending) life is pointless if your quality of life keeps gradually decreasing over time.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The author is looking forward towards a better world, one filled with hope instead of one filled with suffering. You seem to be arguing that we should not be positive in our outlook as long as the current reality is bleak.
If I may say so, yours is a horribly blinkered and tragic viewpoint, one which condemns everyone to misery until some magical point in the future when our problems are finally solved, only then permitting us to consider good things.
The real world is bleak enough already. It doesn't need to be bleak in our hearts and minds and foresight as well.
I like this line of thinking. I mean, there's fish and lizards and stuff out there that live for hundreds of years... Why not humans?
I for one think that a longer life might be the key first step to that bright-shiny technological future we've been promised; Imagine what some of the greatest minds of our time could accomplish with an extra hundred years, or even an extra sixty.
Besides... Future generations should have a better life than us, otherwise what was the point?
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I have an aunt about to hit 99....
Her life is in pain....
The fact of the matter is that nature cannot be beat.
If functional immortality is achieved it will by way of rejuvenation. No-one is interested in an eternity of infirmity. The laws of physics do not prohibit it, provided there is a source of energy available to combat entropy with. Any other hand-waving about 'nature' is cryptoreligiocrap.
The meaning of our lives is to reproduce.
To what end? To perpetuate the cycle of meaningless? Can any meaning emerge from that? More cryptoreligiocrap.
The meaning of our lives is to reproduce.
Wrong, simply wrong. The meaning of our lives is to improve everyone around us in addition to ourselves. I believe this meaning is lost on many today, because we are taught and shown wrong messages constantly (these messages are not new, this was happening when I was young long ago). Ask a kid today "How much money is to much money?" and most will laugh and claim there is no such thing. Yet "The Allegory of the Artisan" explained over 2.5 thousand years ago explained why this was wrong and society would not function allowing this. In that same text is "The Allegory of the Cave" which very few people know about, let alone understand and put into practice.
I'll agree with you that some of our efforts to prolong life are not the best (wrong reasons, questionable results, etc...), and further agree that the current methods of trying to extend life will only benefit a select few so should not really be pursued until we can improve society drastically. That said, some of the reasons we have an increased life span is that a few in each society does work toward altruistic goals and society reaps the benefits when that occurs.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
With present technology we have no way of knowing whether immportality is even possible, aside from the whole desirability debate.
If I were selling transhumanism to children, I would try to inculcate a love of science (finding out about the unknown) combined with an adventurous, can-do attitude toward technology. If you can influence a generation of children away from the fearful, suspicious anti-science culture of their parents, you will be the greatest children's author in history by increasing the possibility that some of those transhumanist ideas might actually come to pass.
Most people here seem to be arguing about the effects of a cure for aging as though it would be cheap and readily available to anyone. Experience has shown that that's not always the case. Certain substances are hard to synthesize and certain operations are very difficult to perform without killing the patient.
So, hypothetical scenario: the treatment is so incredibly difficult and expensive that you can extend your life and "freeze" the aging process, but only at the cost (in 2014 US dollars) of $1,000,000 per year or more.
Now, question: who starts living forever, and what are the economic effects? And will efforts be made by that population to actually keep the costs high and the treatment relatively inaccessible to those outside it?
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Perhaps you should reread what "recessive genes" actually are. ... has nothing to do with your rant.
E.g. the gene for red hair is recessive
Your argument would be sound if all we were talking about were recessive genetic disorders, like color blindness.
Perhaps you should read about adrenoleukodystrophy caused by a mutation on ABCD1 which can happen to anyone, and which was normally removed from the gene pool by way of the effected person dying at a young age before they could reproduce. Or any of thousands of similar genetic diseases which we now treat, and therefore retain in the gene pool.
I find it the essence of emotional immaturity to fear death so much we need to somehow eradicate it or even just call it "wrong." Death is quite right and quite natural. We'd do much better getting to know death as a good thing, as the natural term limit to our personal administrations, so that we can get out there and live...fully!
I believe the most powerful thing you can do is make death your friend. Let it advise you, guide you, make you stronger. It takes work, maybe most of a lifetime, but I believe it's well worth it, and certainly a much more sensible approach than railing against the bars of your emotional crib, screaming over not having enough.
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
It's here b/c it's relevant...and hilarious!
A transhumanist childrens book called "Death is Wrong"
i lol'ed
also, I noted with joy at the category TFA was placed in..."sci-fi"...well played, samzenpus
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's right next to the jetpack.
We already should had sent a tripulated mission to Jupiter
o_O ... a what now?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
hell I'm still waiting to get a decent winter out of this so-called global warming a promised 'singularity' ain't even on my radar! And don't even get me started on the flying cars!
Speak for yourself, chump.
Many people reach a point in life at which death is no longer an enemy but a welcome friend. Perhaps it is better never to hang on to that terrible point in life. Perhaps we could look towards the idea of finding ways to make end days enjoyable and concentrate more on premature death preventions. Once we can do those things extending life longer than a reasonable span would seem to then be a goal to establish. Imagine America with one hundred million Alzheimer victims with a greatly extended life span. What a nightmare that could be.
For life to have a meaning (other than the personal which no one can nay say another's decision), there would have had to be a creator of life who gave it an agenda. There is no agenda on an individual basis. Overall, to continue perhaps, but on a personal level there is no meaning other than the one you find for yourself.
My paret (or is that you?) assumed that all recessive gens are harmfullor a sign of illness or an genetic illness.
They are not.
Brining some more genetic illnesses as argument implies you make the same mistake.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's impossible. At most it's a phase..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If things didn't die, we would have far too many creatures to live in comfort together.
Yeah, no. Predictions of overcrowding due to population growth have been made generation after generation and, as Julian Simon demonstrated in "The Ultimate Resource" and "The Ultimate Resource 2", all else being equal, such events not only do not happen on a global scale but they cannot happen on a global scale. The reason for such lack of occurrence is the fact, if demand growth outpaces supply growth for a particular product or service, the price of that product or service will increase to the point it becomes worthwhile for People to innovate alternatives, reducing the demand for the original product or service compared to where it would otherwise be and effectively increasing the supply of product or service available to fulfill what economic need the original product or service was meant to fulfill. In the case of food, We innovate ways of increasing food supply, such as thru semi-dwarf wheat which can grow in areas traditional wheat cannot. In the case of "where to stand", We innovate ways to increase the total surface area of the planet by, for example, constructing taller buildings and converting otherwise inhospitable areas into livable space.
Because any geek who knows his/her science knows what forever means AND thus logically won't want to live forever
That does not follow, at all.
I doubt people are psychologically able and stable enough to _enjoy_ a mere billion years of existence. A thousand years, ten thousand years, maybe
Statistically speaking even if your body can live forever, some kind of accident will almost certainly kill you in that ten thousand year timeframe. So a real geek knowing that would have no problem with any technology that lets you live "forever" knowing the actual range of life will be "reasonably" short due to many other circumstances.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The meaning of our lives is to reproduce.
That's some nice religious thinking you've got there. We (most people) may want to reproduce, but we are also intelligent enough to decide what we want to do. There is no magical fairy that decides any of this for us.
Thank you Dave Raggett
To some extent, perhaps. Belief in a creator is a very logical thing to believe, it's at least as rational and logical as the alternative. Don't mistake that with Theology, because it's not the same thing and the majority of people on this site refuse to differentiate. A Philosophical answer as opposed to "it's in this book" tends to get lost in noise.
That said, it's not quite as simple as belief in a creator to make such a claim. Thriving requires much more than simply reproduction. Maintenance of our houses, maintenance of the world we live in, respect for each other, people doing the right jobs for the right reasons all add up to our purpose.
As an example Bees that don't take out dead or produce honey can have as many young as you wish. Those bees won't survive any longer than bees that clean up and gather food and have no babies. That is the model of the world we should be looking at.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
We'd be immortal, sure, but we'd be sad all the time, have incredibly low birthrates, watch some lesser race take over the world, and then sail into the west. What kind of life is that?
cognitive dissonance much?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Best of luck with that. I all in favour of boat floating, and whatever floats your boat, as they say.
By the way, how did the each of the 80,000 servants and 72 virgins available as a reward for each one of "the people of heaven" die, anyway, and do they remain virgins forever? Just pondering, and these little "logic viruses" keep invading my beautiful dreams.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
My paret (or is that you?) assumed that all recessive gens are harmfullor a sign of illness or an genetic illness.
They are not.
Brining some more genetic illnesses as argument implies you make the same mistake.
A genetic mutation resulting in illness is not a "genetic illness" unless the gene's host survives to reproduce. It doesn't require that the parents each pass on a recessive trait to activate the disease in the offspring, cosmic rays can cause it.
Perhaps you would be happier were I to use the terminology "previously non-heritable genetic disorder that is now heritable and incorporated into the human gene pool in general as a result of preventing the death of the host".
That seems a bit of semantic hair splitting, but the point is we routinely engage in technological intervention into these cases today, such as the SIRT1 gene that JDRF funded the discovery of, and which, prior to insulin treatment for T1D, would not have survived into a second generation, and was therefore a self-limiting mutation.
The argument isn't whether we are going to extend human life or not, or whether the resulting extensions are "natural" or not in terms of the population, and speaking to Travis Mansbridge's argument, it's too damn late to make that argument: we've already thrown a stick in the spokes of that wheel, and now it's only a matter of how many sticks and how many wheels, not a matter of "if we can".
Yet another thread full of Death Cultists singing the praises of Death over Life.
Bite me.
the logic how it was produced:
1). the author is afraid of death, because he is lazy and needs more time to do things he deserves to have time to do.
2). the author decides that it's a job for someone else to do to invent living forever.
3). the author thinks he'll live long enough that kids of today will be old adults and that kids are stupid and easily manipulated.
4). so the author makes a childrens book, to manipulate kids of today to make him immortal tomorrow, since it's just a tedious simple task(to invent immortality) that just needs a little bit of motivation to accomplish.
oh and if an author writes something that makes Zardoz seem like a documentary filmed in real time then the author should just go fuck himself.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Interesting how the 'science' people believe in non-determinism.
cognitive dissonance much?
Ever heard of quantum mechanics?
Ever heard of god? Fucking neophytes.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Ever heard of god?
Yeah, he's supposed to be Santa Claus's dad, or something.
...is a thought experiment by early computer scientists... popularized by a work of science fiction. Perhaps Stolyarov should take off his plastic Spock ears and live on Earth for a while.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I've wondered for a while if the preservation of knowledge has exceeded the value of evolution. The internet is great as an information repository but having people with first hand knowledge and experience is so much more valueable. Possibly in the future the need to evolve will exceed the need of knowledge but at the moment, it seems like human potential with knowledge has execeeded present life spans.
I see this get tossed around a lot and, somehow, it ended up +4 insightful this time. Why do you seem to think that we should only work on one single problem at a time? Should we put all medical research on hold to stop wars? Should we give up on finding new forms of efficient energy because people are fighting each other? The fact that people are "killing each other" (different people, by the way; the author's not really involved with that and probably isn't a specialist in that field, so his ideas wouldn't be helpful there) does not mean that we can't work on improving ourselves in other ways while continuing to work on that particular problem. The solutions and the pursuit of them are not mutually exclusive.
I like how it's "if we don't live forever in 2045, it's because we didn't take it serious enough" without the possibility that it should be "by 2045 we know it's not possible to live wildly longer than we did in 2014 and these guys whole schtick has been a fools errand".
Death is quite right and quite natural
What significance does death being natural have here? It is your own assumption that something which is natural is automatically good or at the very least should be followed. Now I completely agree that the preservation of many of the things I care about on Earth is maintained by nature in somewhat of a fragile equilibrium, but there are far too many exceptions to make such a generalization. "Nature could decide" to incinerate all of it in the next 10 minutes--is that a good thing to you? And our tendency to fuck things up simply means we need to be more careful. Not to mention there are creatures on Earth that do not undergo senescence, so even assuming the appeal to nature was ever a valid reason for anything, it would be somewhat wrong to apply it here.
...to fear death so much we need to somehow eradicate it.
Why are you so certain that the desire for an extended lifespan is motivated purely by fear? For example, I personally accept that my death by old age is quite likely and I've decided that what is inevitable (or at least is quite likely to be) is not worth worrying about any more than is innate. However, I would still like to live longer simply because life is so enjoyable. There are so many things to experience that I'll never have the time to, so many things to learn, so many things to explore (on this planet and otherwise, in the mind...), etc etc. I want to live longer not out of negative emotions, but of positive. You state that death motivates you to live your life to the fullest--that's great if that's what works for you, but not all of us need that. We'll go on living just as happy as otherwise (and perhaps less anxiously than you) because life on its own can be just great.
Lastly, you keep describing those that fear death as immature babies. What relevance does this have? Even assuming these people are "immature" and childlike, this lends no reason to the debate--it's pointless. Or is this how you intend to motivate them to agree with you? By attacking their egos? "I've given up on the desire to live longer because someone on the internet called me a baby!" How about using some reason.
I'm not semantic hairsplitting.
You either express yourself wrong or don'tg et my point or both.
We have hundret of recessice genes that are not a reason for an illness, like the ones for red or blond hair or for blue eyes.
The usage of the terms recessive and dominant is outdated anyway, it is only used for school book genetics.
Regarding the question if our modern treatments 'harm the gene pool', well in a few decades we will do 'genetic treatments' and clean the gene pool again, at least we hope so :)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Why would you find it "funny" to have someone destroyed his life by not living to the fullest?
I guess you haven't studied Mimbari humour.
I guess you've never used Windows 8? But I guess you're accidentally right in that it is off-topic.
Killing is wrong; death is a part of life.
That's a huge self-contradiction.
Work (sometimes) when rational arguments fail...
There's already far too many humans on the planet. If we stop dying there'll be nothing to eat and nowhere to stand.
People don't taste like chicken, they taste like pork.
Does that mean they aren't Kosher/Halal?
Of course, Kosher/Halal people taste like pork, too.
No Problemo.
--
If life gives you dichotomies, pick any two.
Re-read what I posted.
"I'm all for advances in science improving the QUALITY of life and allowing us to live as long as we naturally can -- but to live forever? "
Where do I say we aren't living past our "natural lifespan". You seem to read "average" in to my sentence though I never said "average".