zlacker

>>patric+(OP)
"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

- Steve Jobs

>>kristo+42
"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life."

Quotes like this get me thinking back to my fascination reading about Cognitive Dissonance in Psych 101.

>>jquery+F3
What do you mean?

>>Helian+T5
Death is not good; it is very bad. If given the opportunity to live "forever" (and not age), you'd take it. In a world without death, nobody would think introducing it was a good idea. But because we currently can't do anything about it, we try to tell ourselves it's a good thing.

>>orange+27
That's only cognitive dissonance if you're hopelessly egocentric. Death is obviously bad for you as an individual, but is crucial to the long-term survival on a species. Without death, you can't have evolution or adaptability. The only thing wrong here are the people responding with the fallacy of composition.

>>wtalli+38
I don't care about some dreamy ideal of evolution or adaptability so much that I would choose to die for it.

[Edit for more substance: you imply evolution is driving humanity towards some 'good' destination, such that more evolution is better. This isn't how evolution works.]

>>jodrel+7b
"you imply evolution is driving humanity towards some 'good' destination"

No. All I'm implying is that humanity, in its current form, cannot survive all possible natural threats to its existence. We're still competing with other species, and we're still vulnerable to things like the effects of climate change, so if we completely stop evolving, it's likely that in only a few thousand years, we'll be completely dependent on our technology for survival.

>>wtalli+Vv
I'm trying to understand what your view of evolution is if you think we're going to be significantly different in a few thousand years given we stopped all technological process today and let "nature take its course", or if you think we can survive things like climate change without using our intelligence and technology (perhaps it will even be necessary to augment both). Evolution is slow, evolution is dumb, evolution isn't going to magically make us more likely to survive threats to our existence. You would rather subject yourself to such a blind, dumb, uncaring process, than a future product, perhaps itself intelligent, of our own intelligence that outclasses a natural evolutionary process in every way? Do you think evolution is going to magically get our species off this planet should an asteroid wander this way, or in the future when the Sun dies? Our long-term survival is completely dependent on our technology already.

I would be very surprised and disappointed if our technological processes in a mere hundred years are not more robust and better than evolutionary equivalents--indeed we can already do many things evolution could never do itself, the last big step is doing that more on the micro scale. Work on that has already begun, it's pretty exciting to look at it. E. glowli is just the very beginning.