Humanity Lacks Imagination to Solve Aging
I posted this poll on Twitter:
Flabbergasting.
I’m going through the reasons people give, and there’s a bunch—overpopulation, concentration of power, sclerotic society...
But what strikes me is simply a lack of imagination. People repeat stories they’ve heard—from Netflix shows, Soylent Green, religious texts...—completely unchallenged.
As we know, most science fiction is dystopian. This means most pieces that explore aging do so with a dark lens. The consequence is that people fear a world without aging, which means they’re not clamoring to end it—and to fund its research.
This leads me to think that we simply lack great, positive cultural representations of a world without aging.
Nick Bostrom’s Fable of the Dragon is nice and useful, but it is not mainstream, and it only addresses one point: the fact that we shouldn’t simply accept it. Other points, like overpopulation, concentration of power, boredom… I don’t know good, famous works of entertainment that convey a positive world for all of this.
Do you know any?
Do you know a group of entertainers / writers / screenwriters interested in creating such a work of entertainment?
I’ve considered putting bounties out to create content related to this this. DM me if you want to jam on this!
Read the Silmarillion and study the elves. In Tolkien’s world the immortality of elves makes them discount local pains immensely, they don’t care about making happy people, and their mistakes are very hard to correct and consequently they are especially risk adverse compared to mankind.
But the elves are musical, rarefied, intelligent, and take the arts seriously, including the art of crafting. They make things which a from a human perspective are magical.