[extropy-chat] TechnologyReview joins anti-transhumanists

[Damien Broderick]

>title: Do You Want to Live Forever?
>source: 
>http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/feature_aging.asp?p=0
>author: Sherwin Nuland

This statement is typical yet strange:

<I should declare here that I have no desire to live beyond the life span 
that nature has granted to our species. For reasons that are pragmatic, 
scientific, demographic, economic, political, social, emotional, and 
secularly spiritual, I am committed to the notion that both individual 
fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best 
served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do. I am equally 
committed to making that age as close to our biologically probable maximum 
of approximately 120 years as modern biomedicine can achieve, and also to 
efforts at decreasing and compressing the years of morbidity and 
disabilities now attendant on extreme old age. But I cannot imagine that 
the consequences of doing a single thing beyond these efforts will be 
anything but baleful, not only for each of us as an individual, but for 
every other living creature in our world. >

`When our inherent biology decrees'. But pragmatically `our inherent 
biology' seemed perfectly content for almost every human in history and 
prehistory to perish at about half that maximum, if not very much sooner. I 
deplore this sad hankering after an essentialist `decree' that allows 
doctors like Nuland to squeeze the last drop out of what is in nature 
wildly`*un*natural' while clinging to some masked version of authoritative 
or `sacred' prohibition.

Nuland's essay is notable as well for its whiny and reiterated complaints 
about Aubrey's intelligence and energy. (What a nerve! Being smart! Being 
confident! Being articulate!) I expect to see this sort of complaint in 
Halfwits Review, not Technology Review.

Damien Broderick