My argument is that if we could develop functional immortality we could preserve the lives of the next Newton, Einstein, or even some currently living scientific minds like Hawking. Rather than have the great generational risk of losing all the collective knowledge such people accumulate and then suddenly have them die and expect their void to be filled by bright young minds interested in the same material, who then have to commit half a century just catching back up to where their progenitors were, it would be a never ending cascade of innovation and progress.
I agree with your optimistic stance however everyone has at least a small amount of valuable knowledge. I trust we will extend the lives of all those wish to remain alive.
Since you're an optimist, you'll probably be one of them :-)
dasil003 doesn't say what the ethical question is, but I think he's got it the wrong way around with motivation. As Aubrey de Grey has argued, it is the fear of death, coupled with the pessimistic assumption of death's inevitability, which makes talk of life extension taboo in many circles.
('If you can't avoid something unpleasant then embrace it' is a viable psychological strategy.)
One ethical objection to not researching life extension is that huge amounts of healthcare budget go into extending the lives of frail, sick people in their final years. When we know how to keep people healthy indefinitely this problem will be solved, although pessimistic individuals will then have to take the responsibility of choosing when to die (if ever).
The collective knowledge of Newton, Einstein, Lagrange, Maxwell, Bohr, and hundreds of other physicists are written down and more or less distilled into the brains of thousands of physics students within a decade. We already have a never ending cascade of innovation and progress. Getting new perspectives and fresh minds on the problem are more valuable than wringing another year of work out of the aging geniuses of yesterday, which is why many of the greatest physicists like Hawking and Feynman were so focused on teaching and popularizing the field. Yeah, it would be great to still have Newton around, but it turned out to be even more useful to have Lagrange around instead.
Besides, if you look at the actual lives of these people, most of them stopped producing useful output eventually. Newton spent more of his life arguing about theology than inventing calculus and physics.
we could preserve the lives of the next Newton, Einstein, or even some currently living scientific minds like Hawking
No we couldn't, because its not up-to you or anyone else to decide how long another person should live. How do you know if Newton or Einstein would have wanted to live longer?
If a choice was available to increase ones lifespan, the choice should lie with the individual.
Perhaps artificial intelligence is a much saner choice than immortality.
I think quite the opposite. Everyone's lifespan should be increased at birth. Then once they're sentient adults, they can choose to reduce their lives to the so called 'natural' expectancy, or even below it if they wish.
Under current US law suicide is illegal and so on so forth. Mainly because it is mental illness to want to end ones life in most cases, but mercy killing is also forbidden, so on so forth.
And I do agree, people should have the choice to end their lives whenever they wish it. However, having the potential available for immortality means we don't need to have the upcoming intellectuals spend half their lives catching up to where the last generation died off at. If they don't want to, nobody forces them, but having the option means so much potential knowledge.
And then we overpopulate the planet in a decade and everyone dies of starvation, global warming, or world war 3 nuking everything into oblivion due to the breakdown of society.
