An argument against immortality

Not as good as it sounds

Opponents of radical life extension typically trot out a couple of arguments:

1. Immortality is unnatural and/or defeats the purpose of being human.
2. If people didn't die, the earth would become too crowded and/or run out of resources.

These have been well hashed out in numerous forums, so I won't go into them here, other than to opine that 1) is inane beyond words, and 2) is probably solvable (although space travel gets you nothing more than a brief postponement of the inevitable). Instead, let me add a third objection that seems obvious to me, but which I haven't heard voiced explicitly before:

The only way that old ideas will die is for old people to die, and the only way for new ideas to be born is for new people to be born.

The fundamental point is this: human progress requires that old ideas be discarded, and new ideas accepted in their place. However, a fundamental reality of our species is that generally speaking, people don't (perhaps can't) change. Most people have essentially fixed their worldview by their late teens or early twenties, and are largely incapable of substantial progress after that point. This applies from the trivial (taste in music) to the profound (opinions about civil rights).

I believe that across a broad range of metrics from support for gay rights to understanding the Internet, people of my generation are better humans than people of my grandparents' generation. I think the world is a better place because we are taking it over from them. Not because we're younger, but because we're more enlightened.

I have no illusions about my place in the scheme of things-- I fully believe that people of my grandchildren's generation will be better humans than people of my generation, and the world will be a better place when we die and they inherit it from us.

The inability to change is a fundamental, defining weakness of our species. Like all weaknesses, I believe it's fixable. I fully believe that one day, we'll re-engineer our species to be more adaptable, so that if we live to be a million years old, we're still able to change with our world. But until then, I hope we keep dying.