"I find this point of view unsurprising as it reflects the greed and selfishness instilled in the population of the over indulgent western world today."
"Selfish" is more typically attached to those people who are okay with other people dying; not the people who are not okay with it.
Everything should be for sale, we should be able to have whatever we want, even though the consequences for the rest of humanity
I don't know of any person here who wants immortality only for themselves and says to hell with everyone else. I suggest you actually read up on the actual views of the people in this community rather than strawmanning and making caricatures out of them.
Death isn't a problem to be overcome it's the natural conclusion to life.
You're imbuing a moral quality to the word "natural" which isn't actually there. By the same argument earthquakes and tsunamis are also not problems to be overcome, they're the natural result of tectonic movement.
Nor is starvation a problem to be overcome, it's the natural conclusion to the lack of sufficient food. Nor is infant mortality a problem to be overcome -- after all women can make babies once every nine months, so it's natural for so many infants to perish.
All problems to be overcome are "natural". Until they're solved, at which point they're no longer natural, their solution is.
Selfish because if everyone on this planet chose to be immortal and continued to reproduce life on earth would be unsustainable unless major innovations in relation to problems such as the ones mentioned previously were realised. Even if they were the quality of life would inevitably be lower and eventually the human race would die out if the birth rate exceeded the death rate by such massive numbers. If reproduction was stopped it may be feasible but this would probably have to be controlled and enforced which I don't agree with due to the reasons stated ...
If you don't believe in an afterlife, then it seems you currently have two choices: cryonics or permanent death. Now, I don't believe that cryonics is pseudoscience, but it's still pretty poor odds (Robin Hanson uses an estimate of 5% here). Unfortunately, the alternative offers a chance of zero. I see five main concerns with current cryonic technology:
So I wonder if we can do better.
I recall reading of juvenile forms of amphibians in desert environments that could survive for decades of drought in a dormant form, reviving when water returned. One specimen had sat on a shelf in a research office for over a century (in Arizona, if I recall correctly) and was successfully revived. Note: no particular efforts were made to maintain this specimen: the dry local climate was sufficient. It was suggested at the time that this could make an alternative method of preserving organs. Now the advantages of this approach (which I refer to flippantly as "dryonics") is:
There is one big disadvantage of this approach, of course: no one knows how to do it (it's not entirely clear how the juvenile amphibians do it) or even if it would be possible in larger, more complex organisms. And, so far as I know, no one is working on it. But it would seem to offer a much better prospect than our current options, so I would suggest it worth investigating.
I am not a biologist, and I'm not sure where one would start developing such a technology. I frankly admit that I am sharing this in the hope that someone who does have an idea will run with it. If anyone knows of any work on these lines, or has an idea how to proceed, please send a comment or email. Or even if you have another alternative. Because right now, I don't consider our prospects good.
[Note: I am going on memory in this post; I really wish I could provide references, but there does not seem much activity along these lines that I can find. I'm not even sure what to call it: mummification? Probably too scary. Dehydration? Anyway feel free to add suggestions or link references.]