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TRIGGER WARNING. I want to talk about laws here, but I’m not going to say
which laws specifically right away, because if my review ends up in a blurb,
then it could get banned—or shadowbanned—for perpetuating harmful ideas. I
think I need a few extra words to be safe sooooooo, there we go. Suicide laws.
That’s what I mean. Back in the old days, when death meant the end of
everything, and there was no going back, it was illegal in many places to
attempt or commit suicide. Over time, these laws were changed to account for
people’s unique desires and needs. Suicide and assisted suicide became
necessary evils in certain situations, especially when a slow, painful death
was the only other option on the table. The funny thing is, over time after
that, these laws had to adapt again. Once they started sufficiently
treating, or even curing, certain previously life-threatening medical
conditions, the reasons for wanting to unalive yourself began to disappear at
about the same rate. People stopped having very good excuses for not wanting
to be alive anymore. Progress in mental health research, the proliferation of
advanced medical solutions, and the drive towards a post-scarcity economy,
among other factors, contributed to a healthier society overall. The
development of more extreme technologies, like maximal longevity treatments,
transhumanistic or cybernetic enhancements, and consciousness uploading and
transference made it practically impossible to justify ending your own life,
or anyone else’s, for that matter. Even the language of the relevant laws
shifted to phrases like “reckless self-destruction” or “consciousness back-up
endangerment”. Self-harm became illegal once again. Whereas before, dying
meant taking maybe only a hundred years from someone’s potential future, now
you’re potentially robbing you or someone else of the rest of eternity until
the heat death of the universe. That should be profoundly immoral and
unethical in anyone’s book. They’re even talking about making normal
biological humans illegal, with some arguing that letting yourself die after a
pitiful century is tantamount to suicide when framed as a negligible blip in
the full timeline of reality. I don’t know about that. What we’re talking
about is your body, your choice. Anything short of total freedom in
that regard is hypocritical when you really think about it. Castlebourne is a
Charter planet, which means that it doesn’t have to follow Core World Law.
They still do, for the most part, having modeled their legal system on what
came before, but they’re also free to make some changes, such as the
definitions of those phrases above, like reckless self-destruction. What does
reckless even mean? Does it mean jumping out of an airplane without a
parachute—a new extreme sport, which they call skydying? Adrenadome is
attempting to test the boundaries of what you’re allowed to do with your own
body. I’m not gonna just list the extreme sports that can be found here. You
can look them up. They’re all available, along with variants that forgo safety
measures entirely, and just let you die, knowing that your mind will wake up
in a back-up body moments later. Not everyone is gonna like it. I personally
don’t. I came here to study the concept, because I’m a scholar of law. But
it’s certainly interesting that these philosophical questions about the
meaning of life and death get to play out in the real world, and no longer
only on the lips, or the page.
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