(February 15, 2016 at 12:37 am)Excited Penguin Wrote:(February 14, 2016 at 11:31 pm)God of Mr. Hanky Wrote: Oh no, we'd be committing infanticide at record rates, or there would not be sufficient resources to sustain those who just stubbornly refuse to die and make way for new generations. This in turn would cause stagnation of our culture with stalled intellectual progress, art would become lifeless and boring, and then why would anyone want to go on living anyway?
The only way of avoiding the above scenario, short of sending billions of people to colonize the planet, or board a generation ship to the stars (a one-way journey in any case since there's no safe return to Earth gravity after a few years, so who wants to volunteer?) is to impose an arbitrary and mandatory cap on the human life-span. Ever see this movie?
Your argument is irrational. The whole point of reproduction is so that a species can survive. Ensuring indefinite lifespans would be the best way to do that.
As for your stagnation scenario, I find it ridiculous and baseless.
Slowing down reproduction -- which would be required with the great expansion of life-span lest we court overpopulation -- also reduces the variability of the gene-pool, all other things being equal.
This is why bacteria evolve faster than do insects, why insects evolve faster than do fish, and so on.
