Men to blame for EVERYTHING

[Rye]

Interesting. But I have to say that I'm disgusted by this:

"I think humans have a good innings on the whole and we should try and be content with that."

No, we shouldn't be content with having a "a good innings on the whole". I want to live longer.

Everyone wants to live longer. That doesn't mean it's worth it. Consider how much you, as an American I'm guessing, consume. You're probably not too bad, for an American, but still, it'll be more than most people on the planet. Now imagine you have that consumption rate, as do your kids, and their kids, and nobody's fucking dying off? What if you're aging normally, but not dying? Where's all that extra production going to come from to provide for a quality of life, and why won't the planet react poorly to it? If the desire to go on living ruins life and the environment as we know it, is it more harmful to rage against the dying of the light than to accept your place in the ground?

[Lord of the Abyss]

Consider how much you, as an American I'm guessing, consume. You're probably not too bad, for an American, but still, it'll be more than most people on the planet. Now imagine you have that consumption rate, as do your kids, and their kids, and nobody's fucking dying off? What if you're aging normally, but not dying? Where's all that extra production going to come from to provide for a quality of life, and why won't the planet react poorly to it?

Greater efficiency and durability. Americans consume so much because they are wasteful, not because they live well. Stop making everything so it falls apart so fast, require greater energy efficiency, and go nuclear. And wasteful is just as wasteful regardless of if you are aging during the process of wasting things.

We wouldn't be "aging normally but not dying", because aging normally leads to dying, outside of a fantasy novel. We'd get much of any extra needed production simply by being able to work for longer. And if nobody dies at all, then we'd be saving an awful lot by not having a huge number of elderly who need to be supported because they can't do it themselves any longer.

If the desire to go on living ruins life and the environment as we know it, is it more harmful to rage against the dying of the light than to accept your place in the ground?

Frankly, if I die and everyone I know dies, I care little what happens after that. Has it occurred to you that people might care more about the environment if they expected to reap the consequences of abusing it?

[Starglider]

Starglider, perhaps you would understand my attitude about your "wholesale genetic modification for everyone's comfort and convenience is inevitable" thing better if you imagined me saying to you, in all seriousness, "making a 'good' AI who loves humans would be a trivial affair. All you have to do is make 'i heart humans' flash in front of its eyes like in Terminator!"

Not comparable. Failed genetic modification of humans is just going to cause medical problems for the person modified (e.g. give them cancer and kill them). It doesn't pose a systematic risk to other people or the biosphere - unlike genetically engineering bacteria or plants, but even there the risk is small unless you're doing biowarfare. Futhermore only a fraction of concepts for anti-aging treatments involve modification of DNA.

I'm extremely skeptical of any pronouncement of the inevitability of progress considering that one of the few pretty solid future predictions we can make is the impending/worsening ecological crisis and we can't even get up off our asses as a species and successfully deal with that.

I've already said, economic and political issues are the province of the masses, science progresses due to the efforts of small well-educated and usually brilliant elites (the serious research community for any given field is quite small). The efforts of the later frequently enable progress by the former, but they are the followers. Economic/political progress can stall, but as long as civilisation remains more or less intact science will continue.