Fight Aging!

What is so terrible about the prospect of failing to suffer years of hideous pain, disfigurement, and disability that it forces people to wax lyrical and beat their breasts and say, woe is me, we might have the chance to not suffer and not be diseased and not be forced into a painful death not of our choice? I believe near everyone you can find to ask is generally in favor of cancer research. That's absolutely about preventing all of the above. But the prospect of treating the medical condition we call aging and removing its consequences? Suddenly everyone is a poet, inclined to the morbid, building nebulous castles of fancy and feeling in praise of suffering and death:

I've got some bad news: You're going to die. Well, probably; thanks to the new wave of immortality innovation, you might not. So what happens if we ditch our biological bodies for technological ones that don't face the limitations of organic DNA and death? Technological evolution has the potential to decouple us from death and other basic biological constraints, which would allow us to move forward with the group instead of waiting to become obsolete and, well, dead. This is probably a good thing, but also a potentially terrible thing too.

If you have offspring, that offspring isn't you. They have some of your DNA and some of your partner's in a new combination that adds variation to the population at large. This is how evolution works - it acts on the population, not the person. I think this is the greatest tragedy of evolution. It doesn't happen to each of us; it happens to all of us. And the only way for the whole to progress is for you, me, and everyone else to eventually be left behind.

We may be able to prevent ourselves from dying by linking ourselves to technology rather than biology, but in doing so have we inadvertently killed meaningful progress in other ways? Or are we capable of evolving ourselves mentally to not get mired in the morality and wrongheadedness of the past and let society, ideas, and ourselves progress even without the fear of death? While there are lots of advantages to multi-generational societies, at some point it's better for the gander if the older geese get gone. If everyone hung around forever, the genetics of the population would stagnate, never able to move in any new direction. And in evolution, stagnation often leads to extinction.

Link: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-humanness-of-death