Our children will die. We will all die. What can we do to stop this carnage?
Nothing. Death seems to be pretty much inevitable.
Once we’ve taken care of Famine, Pestilence, and War, then we can make a go at Death.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Entropy is not the reason why humans die. We don’t get old and then croak because our bodies “wear down”. We’re booby trapped by nature. Our bodies are tuned by nature to self-destruct, as it turned out that there was some kind of evolutional advantage to having a fairly rapid turnover between the generations. Bloody unfair, if you ask me. What the hell do I care about what’s best for the species? Screw it. I want to live. Of course… even if that wasn’t the case, entropy probably *would *get us anyway.
Anyway, we might as well die. When all the stars burn out and the expansion of the universe has diluted all the matter in it into an unimaginably thin gas of elementary particles, life would probably be really boring.
It’s all a damn shame, in any case. The fact that I have to die makes me so depressed that I want to kill myself right now. The only thing that keeps me from doing so is that very comfort I get from having suicide as an option.
I"ve killed your OP in General Questions. Doesn’t really lend itself to a simple factual answer.
It has been resurrected in MPSIMS.
samclem General Questions Moderator
Well…without death, evolution itself wouldn’t work. We’d all be a race of immortal bacteria.
Without death, there would be no reason to procreate. Can you imagine a world without children?
(BTW this seems more like a Great Debate than MPSIMS, doesn’t it?)
Oh, great. Death is now officially Mundane and Pointless. You’d think it would have deserved at least a run in Great Debates. Oh well. 
Frequently. 
I didn’t contribute to the other immortality thread, but let’s think about this. As mentioned above, no children. If even a few immortals could have children, we’d soon overrun the planet even worse than now. Would there be sex? Well, maybe, but why should there be?
How on earth do we manage to keep interested in anything? For thousands and thousands of years?
Don’t have children. The tragedy will then be curtailed within a single generation.
Because evolution doesn’t care; from it’s “viewpoint”, we are expendable gene-carriers.
Only applies to closed systems, which we are not.
That assumes our present designed-to-die biology. For one alternate possibility, imagine instead a species that when they mate either produces offspring, or instead produces new living tissue for itself ( perhaps in the form of stem cells that migrate through the body to their proper spots ). For a species like that, individuals would evolve, instead of just species. Probably faster, since genetic alterations would occur with each mating, not just each breeding cycle.
We already live longer than we “should”. If you make a graph of body size vs lifespan for all the species on the planet, you get a pretty good linear correlation - large critters tend to live longer than small critters, and most species fall right on the line. Except for us. We live much longer than this relationship would predict.
Source: The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins.
Because, as the noted philosopher said, “you can’t always get what you want.”
Death and taxes… they’re both ripe for procrastination.
Sure you gotta die… but not today.
If we were in GD, somebody coulda witnessed to him about how to gain Eternal Life.
Speak for yourself: I’ve heard of a lot of old people who were quite ready – some even happy – to let go when the time came.
I can’t really answer question, but I can say with absolute certainty that you do not have to worry about this.
The Rapture is gonna happen any day now.
[[should i include a smiley to avoid getting ripped apart here?]]
So far it seems the best we can do is invent all sorts of fairy tales about humans’ lives continuing after death and hope that because of willful ignorance, utter fear, or both, otherwise intelligent adults will buy into the whole scam.
'Cause if that stops working then we’ve pretty much got a constant, worldwide riot on our hands.
Scientists and Poets are both working on this problem diligently. The real question is, who will solve it first?