There is no “must”, but some (most?) humans want to continue existing.
Forever? That sounds too abstract. But the next day? Yes.
But if every day has a next day, it effectively becomes a forever.
.
Another perspective: what is the alternative/opposite of humanity living forever?
It means that one day the last remaining human dies.
In general, the ways how to get there are:
one day, billions of humans will die, and there are no more left
humans gradually keep dying without new ones being born, involuntarily
humans gradually keep dying without new ones being born, voluntarily
The first one seems like a huge tragedy.
The second one also seems like a huge tragedy.
Perhaps the last one seems kinda okay. But it also seems very unlikely that billions of people would agree that they all prefer to be childless. I mean, the people who want to have kids, usually have more of their copies in the next generation. So even if they start as a minority, they can become a majority in a few generations. So if you tell me about a scenario where billions of people all voluntarily decided to die childless, I would expect that the story does not reflect reality, and that there most likely was at least a significant minority who disagreed, but they were not allowed to have kids (or were killed). Which again seems like a tragedy.
Yes, what I meant is exactly “there is no must, but only want”. But it feels like a “must” in some context that I am seeing, but I do not recall exactly where. And yeah true, there may be some survival bias.
I agree it is tragedy from human race’s perspective, but I think what I meant is from a non-human perspective to view this problem. For example, to an alien who is observing earth, human is just another species that rise up as a dominant species, as a thought experiment.
(On humans prefer to be childless—actually this already slowed down in many countries due to cost of raising a child etc, but yeah this is a digress on my part.)
There is no “must”, but some (most?) humans want to continue existing.
Forever? That sounds too abstract. But the next day? Yes.
But if every day has a next day, it effectively becomes a forever.
.
Another perspective: what is the alternative/opposite of humanity living forever?
It means that one day the last remaining human dies.
In general, the ways how to get there are:
one day, billions of humans will die, and there are no more left
humans gradually keep dying without new ones being born, involuntarily
humans gradually keep dying without new ones being born, voluntarily
The first one seems like a huge tragedy.
The second one also seems like a huge tragedy.
Perhaps the last one seems kinda okay. But it also seems very unlikely that billions of people would agree that they all prefer to be childless. I mean, the people who want to have kids, usually have more of their copies in the next generation. So even if they start as a minority, they can become a majority in a few generations. So if you tell me about a scenario where billions of people all voluntarily decided to die childless, I would expect that the story does not reflect reality, and that there most likely was at least a significant minority who disagreed, but they were not allowed to have kids (or were killed). Which again seems like a tragedy.
Yes, what I meant is exactly “there is no must, but only want”. But it feels like a “must” in some context that I am seeing, but I do not recall exactly where. And yeah true, there may be some survival bias.
I agree it is tragedy from human race’s perspective, but I think what I meant is from a non-human perspective to view this problem. For example, to an alien who is observing earth, human is just another species that rise up as a dominant species, as a thought experiment.
(On humans prefer to be childless—actually this already slowed down in many countries due to cost of raising a child etc, but yeah this is a digress on my part.)