kwk

What's sickening is the way you devalue life by thinking you're helpless to sustain it.

Life is just another phenomenon subtended by physical law. We, as intelligent creatures, have the tools necessary to use those laws to our advantage.

If you're not willing to use those tools, that's you're prerogative, but don't look down on those of us who would like to make the most of our time on this earth.

"We are already unsustainable, so the problem of stopping people from spawning more is really unrelated..."

"Extending quality of life has the added benefit of meaning you get more bang for your buck per person..."

Amen.

"Would the results of its research trickle down to the masses. Or would it stay with the upper tier of society?"

Only one way to find out.

"We might be better off without death, but it's truly hard to say."

Absolutely. We are simply actors in a complex environment; we have access to limited data points among an equation containing dizzyingly many variables. However, if none of us were to ever press forth for fear of uncertainty, we'd all recede into stasis and eventual extinction.

If you're worried about whether or not this planet contains enough resources to sustain an immortal populace indefinitely, which seems to be a common sentiment, that's a different issue entirely. For the record, it doesn't, but neither does it contain enough resources to sustain a mortal populace indefinitely.

"I've made one that is exactly parallel. ... pizza ..."

Also for the record, this isn't _exactly_ parallel. In your example, if I were to stop eating pizza, I would retain the potential to resume eating it at some later point. The point I was trying to make is that once you're dead, you're absolutely impotent, i.e., unable to effect any further change on reality. For the life of me (pun intended), I can't understand why anyone would be content to forfeit their potential.

"You're given a decent amount of time on this Earth, already make it count and move on."

I hear this all the time, but I still can't wrap my head around it. If you value life, why wouldn't you want to sustain it? If you're content to die, why don't you get it over with?

Why isn't this part of the national defense budget? You know, we've sunk >$1.5T over the past decade into preventing our citizens from becoming casualties of "terrorism", which account for ~0% of all fatalities in a given year.

I don't know about you, but I'd feel much better about our leadership if that money would have been spent on something more relevant to the health of the average citizen, such as anti-aging research.