...technically, doesn’t speeding up a negative singularity also save lives—the lives of those who would otherwise have been born and then killed but were instead never born and therefore couldn’t be killed? In fact, I think speeding up a negative singularity actually “saves” more lives than speeding up a positive one using this calculation—a quick Google search indicates ~250 people are born every minute and ~100 people die every minute.
In a fairly meaningful sense, no life has ever been saved before. Nobody has actually been prevented from dying yet. A positive singularity could change that.
...technically, doesn’t speeding up a negative singularity also save lives—the lives of those who would otherwise have been born and then killed but were instead never born and therefore couldn’t be killed? In fact, I think speeding up a negative singularity actually “saves” more lives than speeding up a positive one using this calculation—a quick Google search indicates ~250 people are born every minute and ~100 people die every minute.
Replace “save lives” with “extend lifespans.” All the math will suddenly start working out better.
Agreed, I retrospect I should have phrased the original question in terms of QALYs or some similar metric.
In a fairly meaningful sense, no life has ever been saved before. Nobody has actually been prevented from dying yet. A positive singularity could change that.