{"id":33141,"date":"2017-01-04T05:39:43","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T13:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/why-live-longer-when-the-future-looks-so-grim"},"modified":"2017-04-24T19:05:07","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T02:05:07","slug":"why-live-longer-when-the-future-looks-so-grim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/why-live-longer-when-the-future-looks-so-grim","title":{"rendered":"Why live longer when the future looks so grim?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Is the future really going to be so bad that you wouldn\u2019t want to live longer? Hardly!<\/p>\n

#aging<\/p>\n

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The future looks grim? That\u2019s quite an interesting claim, and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. In fact, I think there\u2019s plenty of evidence to believe the opposite, i.e. that the future will be bright indeed. However, I can\u2019t promise<\/em> the future will certainly be bright. I am no madame clearvoyant, but neither are doomsday prophets. We can all only speculate, no matter how \u2018sure\u2019 pessimists may say they are about the horrible dystopian future that allegedly awaits us. I\u2019m soon going to present the evidence of the bright future I believe in, but before I do, I would like to point out a few problems in the reasoning of the professional catastrophists who say that life won\u2019t be worth living and there\u2019s thus no point in extending it anyway.<\/p>\n

First, we need to take into account that the quality of human life has been improving, not worsening, throughout history. Granted, there still are things that are not optimal, but there used to be many more. Sure, it sucks that your pet-peeve politician has been appointed president of your country (any reference to recent historical events is entirely coincidental), and it sucks that poverty and famine haven\u2019t yet been entirely eradicated, but none of these implies that things will get worse. There\u2019s a limit to how long a president can be such, and poverty and famine are disappearing all over the world. It takes time for changes to take place, and the fact the world isn\u2019t perfect yet doesn\u2019t mean it will never be. Especially people who are still chronologically young should appreciate the fact that by the time they\u2019re 80 or 90, a long time will have passed, and the world will certainly have changed in the meanwhile.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is the future really going to be so bad that you wouldn\u2019t want to live longer? Hardly! #aging The future looks grim? That\u2019s quite an interesting claim, and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. In fact, I think there\u2019s plenty of evidence to believe the opposite, i.e. that the future will [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":418,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,269],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-existential-risks","category-life-extension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/418"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33141"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49385,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33141\/revisions\/49385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}