This comment perplexes me. Do you think there is no research happening? In that view, what do you think disease research, anti-aging research, and medical/pharmacological research is? And do you suppose that there are a finite amount of great minds, that the current set of them dying off implies that we'll be left without any soon enough, or that the current set needs to be maintained forever? As important as his work was, do we need to keep him around forever as some sort of special class of person?
I think people should eventually die. I don’t think that’s a controversial viewpoint. I don’t want billionaires turning into trillionaires simply because they took their money, threw it into index funds, and waited a few hundred years.
Just about every project is looking at things from a material perspective.
The "spiritual" perspective has legs with respect to life-extension, as well, though there are at least two distinct scientific definitions of spirituality, one based on mindfulness and one based on its exact opposite, mind-wandering resting.
Both strategies (based on distinctly different meditation practices) have research suggesting that lifespan can be extended by their approach.
Transcriptomics of Long-Term Meditation Practice: Evidence for Prevention or Reversal of Stress Effects Harmful to Health
https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/57/3/218
See also:
On the Neurobiology of Meditation: Comparison of Three Organizing Strategies to Investigate Brain Patterns during Meditation Practice
https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/56/12/712
For how distinctly different types of meditation have different effects on nervous system and body.
A hint: the words used to teach meditation can lead to radically different measurable physiological outcomes depending on the context in which those words are spoken and the persistence of those effects is also very dependent on the context in which instructions are given, often leading to exactly the opposite effect on certain physiological measures:
You can't get more distinct than "reduced" vs 100% coherence across all leads simultaneously.
And thereby hangs the tale for explaining how and why different mental practices have different long-term, persistent changes in brain activity in favor of longevity: reduced EEG coherence => reduced resting; 100% implies that the brain is only resting; the longer you practice some forms of meditation, the less restful the brain becomes.
Always mindful vs always resting or moving back into resting mode asap given the chance.
This is something I think about quite a bit:
There are about 8 billion people on this earth. Of the 8 billion, I would argue only 1 in 10 (800 million) have their basic needs met and a decent education. This is the pool of people most of our innovations, business and scientific come from.
Imagine what would happen if we doubled or tripled that number.
How many more companies founded, inventions created, or if you care about art, new creations never imagined.
We really MUST do better, it is in all our best interests.
