Ask Slashdot: What Happens If We Perfect Age Reversing? 692
ourlovecanlastforeve writes: With biologists getting closer and closer to reversing the aging process in human cells, the reality of greatly extended life draws closer. This brings up a very important conundrum: You can't tell people not to reproduce and you can't kill people to preserve resources and space. Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone. Not enough food, not enough space, not enough medical care. If — no, when — age reversal becomes a reality, who gets to live? And if everyone gets to live, how will we provide for them?
Exodus (Score:5, Insightful)
Exodus from Earth. We need space ships to spread out in the galaxy!
Re:Exodus (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. Life extension will be required to colonize the galaxy, if we're forced to use slow, sub-light spacecraft that require decades to centuries to reach the next star.
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Someone didn't see Interstellar, heh.
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Best re-alignment of reality check: 2001: A Space Odyssey [imdb.com]
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If you don't mind dying from the radiation damage before we get out of the solar system... wait, that does help with the overpopulation problem....
Most radiation can be stopped with shielding--which won't be a big deal on a spacecraft big enough for humans to live in for decades or centuries--and humans with lifespans measured in centuries would require much better genetic repair mechanisms than we do.
And I'm sure I read an article recently about researchers increasing the radiation tolerance of cells by a factor of 1,000 or more by boosting the repair mechanisms.
Re:Exodus (Score:5, Informative)
As we leave the solar system radiation should decrease the further out we go.
Just no.
You are confusing Solar radiation with cosmic radiation... and they are largely very different things.
The "solar wind" is largely photons and other, relatively low-energy charged particles from the sun. (Note the word "relatively".) Which is GOOD for us here on Earth. Because cosmic radiation has a much larger component of HIGH energy particles. The solar wind interacts with Earth's magnetic fields in such a way as to shield it from the cosmic high-energy particles.
But it's the cosmic high-energy particles that penetrate far enough into the atmosphere to ionize particles of matter, which form nuclei around which clouds form. So... high sunspot activity generally means fewer clouds, which in turn means it gets hotter. When "solar storm" activity is low, more cosmic rays leak in, forming more clouds, cooling the weather.
Unfortunately, it is these high-energy particles which require the most shielding. And in general, cells are more prone to damage than radiation-hardened silicon chips.
Re:Exodus (Score:5, Informative)
When more cosmic rays leaked in, the climate didn't change. Richard Alley mentioned (at 42:00 in his 2009 AGU talk [agu.org]) that beryllium proxy data reveal a spike in cosmic ray intensity during the "Laschamp anomaly" [sciencedirect.com] ~40,000 years ago, but the corresponding oxygen isotope proxy for temperature didn't change unusually [ossfoundation.us] during that time period.
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If you don't mind dying from the radiation damage before we get out of the solar system... wait, that does help with the overpopulation problem....
My guess is that when/if we figure out how to "cure" aging we'll also be pretty far along the curve to cure cancer and radiation damage
as those are very interwoven domains and it would be very difficult to fully "cure" aging without also having the technology to control
cancer and random mutations caused by slightly too much radiation.
Re:Exodus (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. Rich people will find a decent sized island or islands, boot everyone off them, and live in relative comfort and let the ROW go to hell in a handbasket. They will have paid security [or rather, get some gov't to defend them from any attempts by the riff-raff to come ashore].
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On the flip side, you are saying that without Rich people, the poor will just utterly destroy the world as we know it. Interesting.
Re:Exodus (Score:4, Funny)
It took him years, but he's finally made it half-way through Atlas Shrugged.
Re: Exodus (Score:4, Insightful)
Other the 60 page soliloquy and an odd fixation on thin shiny people doing what she thought thin shiny people ought to do with one another, it's both prescient and alarming. Not as tedious as it could be.
She was no Neal Stephenson.
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No, as without rich people, there is no such thing as poor, as it's a relative term.
But the rich are happy with having the poor sort out for themselves who gets to live on to continue serving the rich.
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Maybe if you spent less time complaining about the things other people have, and more time improving your lot in life, you wouldn't be so poor?
Maybe... and maybe not. The relevant cartoon: https://imgur.com/gallery/h82v... [imgur.com]
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People need to cut the class warfare shit and focus on improving their own lives. What is so horrible about that, other than the fact that there is some work involved?
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Maybe if you spent less time complaining about the things other people have, and more time improving your lot in life, you wouldn't be so poor?
Maybe... and maybe not. The relevant cartoon:
https://imgur.com/gallery/h82v... [imgur.com]
While I also hate when people don't admit to the help they have been given by family and society, I still feel the advice to stop complaining and work hard to improve your lot in life is good advice.
IMHO people need to understand that social mobility is a multi-generational affair. My grandparents were poor / working class, but my mom's parents lived in a great school district and 4 out of 5 of their children had successful middle class careers. They all had careers that didn't really take off until their 4
Re:Exodus (Score:5, Insightful)
And at least part of the reason your mom's parents lived in the great school district that allowed that fortunate chain of success to happen was a government commitment to great school districts - and subsidized universities, etc. That commitment is less solid today, and wasn't universal even in their day. Had your mom's parents happened to be black (especially when they were coming up), things might not have turned out so rosy.
None of this is to justify poor people not trying. But fuck, can't you at least acknowledge that the deck is stacked? Maybe there are perverse incentives built into today's programs to help the poor. But don't blame that on the poor themselves - how about proposing better programs. And 'no programs' is not an option. You are by your own admission the product of several generations of programs that gave you the life you have today.
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Just wow. Have you thought that what you are mistaken for lazy, things like not asking for a raise of more hours has nothing at all to do with being lazy but everything to do with self confidence. What about those who just don't value money as much as you do? I know a few people that are far from lazy but they have chosen jobs that pay minimum because that's what they love doing. You are pretty arrogant to think that everyone making a shitty wage is inferior to you.
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yeah because the modern lifestyle of the rich is TOTALLY independent of the rest of the society like microchip producers and what have you(oh wait you mention some _outside_ government keeping the riff raff out for them - for what motivation? for what motivation would the others consider the "rich" folks bank statements to be worth anything other than numbers? how can they be rich?)
besides, the article is not about if only the rich get it or if the rich will move to gated communities or whatever.. it's jus
Space is the Place (Score:5, Interesting)
All those who sign-up to live and work in orbiting colonies get age-reversal therapy for free. The primary economy will to be build more and better colony ships to handle the influx of long lived people. Within a generation or two the entire Earth will be most emptied and the federation of human colonies will declare Earth a "National Park" available to visit on vacation - just pick your continent.
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The logistics of having an exodus making a significant difference are somewhat difficult though. Consider the current birth rate of 350K new humans per day and compare with the lack of orbital launch capacity. Then try to figure out how to reach the manufacturing capability to build hundreds of city sized starships per year. One of the variables is going to have to change in some way or spreading across the galaxy isn't going to do much to reduce earth population.
Well, maybe someone will find a couple of do
Re:Exodus (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Exodus (Score:5, Insightful)
Only the rich will be able to afford it. So you die with 75 and they with 300. They will feel like god like creatures.
Too Late (Score:4, Funny)
Judging by Dick Cheney's attitudes and continued existence, they already do.
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I think you'll find that if all the rich people in the world have joint problems, joint problems will quickly become a fixable (and profitable) problem.
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You obviously aren't understanding the science behind anti-aging. The whole idea is that your body stays youthful; all the mechanisms in it which repair things work optimally, all the time, instead of falling apart with age like they do now (go find some small kid and a middle aged person, cut them both the same way, and then see how they heal differently). Though teeth might need to be replaced with implants, but most westerners these days have artificial parts in their teeth starting at rather young age
One way ticket (Score:4, Funny)
Yea, just keep breeding here on Earth and shoot the occasional capsule full of people off into space.
Do you have any clue what it would take to keep up with a population increasing by billions of people? Do you want me to Godwin this thread?
Sure we can (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't tell people not to reproduce and you can't kill people to preserve resources and space.
Sure we can. It might be morally reprehensible to do but it hasn't stopped people in power in the past as well as the present.
Re:Sure we can (Score:5, Insightful)
What society considers morally reprehensible would probably change to fit the new reality.
Money class, breeder class (Score:5, Insightful)
If everybody gets to live a very long time, then we run out of resources
If we figure out how to curb over-population and only the really old live, then we run out of viable sperm and eggs in a few generations
We will need to have people living 'normal' lifespans, unless we figure out how to dodge the who reproduction via sperm and eggs thing
The economics of the situation would probably lead to a self-selected wealthy group occupying the long-life slots and the rest of us toiling away as normal with our lifespans slightly adjusted from what we expect today in order to fill the breeders slot
It would probably make things easier all around if the breeders did not suspect that they could enjoy a long and healthy life
One thing that could potentially change this entire equation would be extending the range in which humans can live, whether it be orbital habitats, terraformed planets or cozy lintel asteroids. A that point ti would be really handy to have extremely long-lived humans taking the not quite as fast as light trips to our nearest stellar neighbors
But then, I tend to be an optimist
Re:Money class, breeder class (Score:5, Insightful)
"If everybody gets to live a very long time, then we run out of resources"
And then not everybody would get to live very long. Nature can be postponed, but eventually she has her say.
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"Only the rich will be able to afford this. And by rich I mean on a global ranking"
Exactly that. It's only about the details. We -as of now, at least, live in a capitalist society. Left to its own, money will put things on their place.
How much it costs to produce that "immortality" is a first approach on who will get it. The way it is marketeed, will put a price -probably way above its cost, at least at the begining.
But it is stupid to say "most people in America and Europe and only the obscenely rich f
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Re:Sure we can (Score:5, Insightful)
kill people to preserve resources and space.
In the ancient times they called that war.
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No, no, it's a police action. Operation Enduring Prosperity, Happiness, and Puppies. We'll be welcomed as liberators, I promise!
Re:Sure we can (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, how about this: the drug/whatever that cures you of aging also makes you sterile. Or it could be a legal requirement - want to not die of old age? The price is X dollars and your ability to reproduce
That's fine. I've already had children, so I'll sign up for that immortality, now. Or am I unable to get the immortality serum if I've already had children? What if I lie about it and get the serum - do you make an anti-anti-aging serum for the circumstance? Or do you kill me because I acted for self-preservation? What if all my children die, then am I eligible again? What if I have no children, get the anti-aging serum, but am not affected by the sterility? What if I have no children I know about, but it's later discovered that I had a child from a one-night-stand? Does it matter if I didn't know when I get the serum, and how do you prove if I knew or not? Women can't claim they didn't know about pregnancy from a one-night-stand, so do we punish them for it with the no-serum-for-you death sentence, or do they get a pass? Or do we force them to get abortions to maintain immortal status? How does adoption fit in - if I adopt do I lose immortality? If I give my only child up for adoption do I regain immortality status? How do surrogate mothers count - is it the woman who gives birth, or the couple who contracted the birth who lose immortality status? Or both?
Now let's look at this again - are those laws going to be consistent across every single country? If not, you run into the situations where people move from place to place in order to match the laws to their immortality requirements ... and then what happens when someone later moves?
Simply put, anything like this is an absolute minefield of horrible choices, horrible consequences, and a horrible government forcing it upon the people.
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"Or it could be a legal requirement - want to not die of old age? The price is X dollars and your ability to reproduce."
That could work on a socialist society, no way in a capitalist/modern fascist one. The rich guy will always be able to take his cake and eat it too.
"People are still going to die (accidents, murder, suicide etc)."
If that "immortality pill" happens, the funny thing is that murder rates will increase among the wealthy.
Juvenal already advised wealthy parents about the risk of saying "One day
Yes, you can (Score:5, Insightful)
If it becomes necessary to tell people not to reproduce, the laws can be changed.
(More likely, though, it would be presented as a choice between being allowed to live indefinitely and being allowed to reproduce.)
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My guess: whether or not the treatment is difficult / expensive to administer, it will be made very expensive to purchase. Prohibitively expensive. So expensive that relatively few people will be able to get it.
There's a book by Jack Va
Re:Yes, you can (Score:4, Interesting)
Nah, more likely they'd make getting 50 years of education the new standard, and your children are your dependents until age 50. But you're perfectly free to reproduce if you really want to.
let the robots choose (Score:5, Funny)
The question is not what the people will do with all the extra people, but rather what the robots will do with all the people.
Who dies from old age? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who dies from old age? (Score:5, Interesting)
They are "age related diseases" because age seems to be one of the main factors. If the body (and mind) stays young and healthy, a lot of those things are going to have a drastic decline. For cancer, treatment and survival rates are improving all the time.
From a health care perspective, most of the cost comes from the elderly. If there aren't any more elderly, and they are instead working and contributing to society, universal health care actually becomes cheaper, medical technology improves faster (making those diseases even less of an issue), and so on.
And people don't usually die of "old age" but of things related to it. When the body gets older, the immune system gets weaker, your bones and muscles decay, your brain gets messed up, and a lot of deaths are in reality just a mix of a bunch of factors that just result in the body kind of shutting down. None of that will happen anymore.
Not enough room? Not enough food? (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation, Please.
We grow plenty of food. The problem isn't the quantity of food. It's distribution. We have plenty of space, as well. We just need to change our (American) notion of what "space" is.
But I would whole-heartedly support a "stop making fucking babies" measure.
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"The problem isn't the quantity of food. It's distribution."
In other words, lots of people don't have enough food. And if this were the Star Trek universe, they wouldn't be starving.
Re:Not enough room? Not enough food? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not enough room? Not enough food? (Score:4, Funny)
Please our women wear far too much clothing.
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It's worse. At least the Ferengi didn't detonate thermal nuclear warheads within their atmosphere or knowingly cause harm to their body for pleasure.
Cause the Ferengi are wimps!
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Re:Not enough room? Not enough food? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, lots of people don't have enough food.
No, in other words, lots of people have more government corruption than they need.
Lots of food aid gets delivered to famine nations in Africa, and it either rots on the docks (what the corrupt government doesn't use itself or give to its soldiers), or the surplus that would otherwise go to people who are not corrupt government or soldiers gets sold off to other nations in order to raise money to buy weapons for the soldiers.
In other words, exactly as the GP said: a distribution problem, but one unrelated to the mechanics of distribution, rather the politics of distribution.
Re:Not enough room? Not enough food? (Score:5, Interesting)
But I would whole-heartedly support a "stop making fucking babies" measure.
I actually wonder if society will ever get around to regulating reproduction.
We regulate whether you're allowed to drive a car, but we don't regulate whether you're allowed to have a kid. I submit that you can do a LOT more damage with the latter than the former.
I think we really need a better social contract. We need to take better care of those who are alive, and do more to ensure that those who are born are more likely to be able to take care of themselves. If it takes a lot of work to be allowed to have a kid, you'll probably see parents invest a lot more in their kids. When somebody is born with autism or whatever, society can step in and lend a LOT more support. However, you won't just have masses of kids forced to take care of themselves because their parents were irresponsible.
There is no reason that cradle-to-grave can't be financially viable, as long as you exercise control over the cradle part.
Cry however you want over reproductive rights. I don't see how preventing somebody from trivially deciding to have kids is a greater injustice than much of what goes on as a result of humoring that urge.
As far as who gets to reproduce goes, I don't think it has to be that difficult. At the very least, mandate education and some general weed-out steps so that those who aren't reasonably committed don't bother. Then you can screen for stuff like serious genetic disorders (by all means allow surrogacy and adoption instead). At that point you have to earn some kind of right to reproduce (that might be trivial or difficult depending on demand for reproduction vs slots available). The wealthy might be able to pay into a trust fund to simply buy the right (it costs society money to clean up after your messes, so you can prepay if you want). Otherwise, it might be a bit like applying for a scholarship - what have you done to give back to society, etc. Then for the sake of diversity you could have a lottery for x% of the slots where everybody has an equal chance of being able to reproduce regardless of merit.
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SO yes this is true. The biggest waste of resources is animal production for food. A single cow uses approx 2000 gallons of water for every pound of meat produced. The same pound of beans takes approx 100 gallons. The amount of beans grown per acre far exceeds the amount of space for cattle. Factory farming while evil has decreased prices so more people can eat meat but it is not sustainable. If we change the average diet to a plant based one and then taught all countrys that are starving how to grow it we
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SO yes this is true. The biggest waste of resources is animal production for food. A single cow uses approx 2000 gallons of water for every pound of meat produced. The same pound of beans takes approx 100 gallons.
Who cares?
Build more nuclear plants, and use the power to operate the desalination plants you also build.
BONUS! By removing sea water from the oceans for the purpose of desalination, you mitigate the ocean level rise due to global warming!
DOUBLE BONUS! By building nuclear plants, you mitigate the production of greenhouse gasses, reducing global warming!
TRIPLE BONUS! By having an excess of water, you can grow more cattle and crops and increase the planets carrying capacity!
QUADRUPLE BONUS! Excess fresh wat
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1. You're talking billions of gallons of sea water, far more than we could put a dent in, even with thousands of desalination plants. Furthermore the water would just find its way back to the ocean anyway, because the Earth is a closed ecosystem.
2. It may reduce *future* global warming, but there is still the problem of all the carbon currently in the atmosphere, as well as seawater acidification.
3. The cost to desalinate 2000 gallons of water is far more than the average person would be willing to pay for
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"2000 gallons of water for 1 pound" is an exaggeration of a worst-case scenario; even feedlots don't use this much water, and most cattle spend most of their lives on pasture.
I raise some dairy animals on grass, so I can help with a rough calculation based on real life.
I get a calf.
Calf walks around eating grass.
Every day I put out 10 gallons of fresh water, of which the steer drinks 5-7
20 months later, I get about a quarter ton of meat, a square yard or two of leather, and a lot of good fertilizer and dog
Plus Ça Change.... (Score:2)
If — no, when — age reversal becomes a reality, who gets to live? And if everyone gets to live, how will we provide for them?
We'll just do as we've always done:
Eat the rich.
(P.S. What's the emoji for 'deadpan'?)
Putting the cart before the horse much? (Score:4, Insightful)
equilibrium (Score:2)
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But something tells me you won't need to tell people to stop reproducing.
And if we actually did optimize how we use our resources we would likely never run out... :)
Seriously, if we in the first world really did want to fix poverty and was willing to spend as much (in relative terms) as we did on say the second world war, hunger would end rather suddenly
Same thing for resource usage. We could probably engineer our way out of that too. Through recycling, process optimization and renewable energy sources.
But we focus on optimizing profit, rather than pulling people out of pove
Age Reversing Does Not Equal No Death (Score:3)
Sorry, what problem was that again? (Score:2, Informative)
We're already starting to see population growth top out as more nations join the developed world. In Europe, we're below replacement rate. In Japan, it's stoking fears of a labor crisis. India and China are falling to near replacement levels in the urban areas, and rural will likely follow as prosperity is extended there.
We don't need to make this choice. Continue with the education of women, liberalization of labor laws, and growing market economies. People will naturally produce fewer children if a)
We become more efficient. (Score:2, Interesting)
The percentage of starving people in the world has halved over the last two decades, despite the increase in population. The idea that we're running out of resources is false. Our species is driven by economics. The more demand there is for something, past a certain threshold, the more that something gets produced. In the case of food and water, we have a convenience economy based mostly on luxury across the majority of the world. If we have to, we'd switch to a survival economy, in which only the most effi
The rich and powerful (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's say an age cure is released tomorrow. It will be priced specifically for a certain percentage to afford. It probably won't even be publicly available, and instead be invite-only like certain cars already are. I honestly can't imagine the wealthy and elite opting to release that kind of cure to the general public, although it's a safe bet to assume politicians will grant themselves (and family) access.
I could easily see such a scenario causing mass riots and civil wars, however. And on the off chance that it did become something that just gets dumped in the public water system for the benefit of mankind, we'd just have more wars. Longer life spans would mean "reevaluating" things like term limits for politicians, prison sentence lengths, retirement, and pensions. I don't think food would even be on the radar for possible issues. I'd be way more worried about every day things that our societies are based on suddenly being rendered obsolete.
Even social changes would be pure chaos. Imagine your 90 year old grandmother suddenly regressing in age a bit, with a restored mental and physical agility. She may not be ready for SEAL training, but you can bet she wouldn't be happy sitting in the nursing home all day. How does she train for a job? Can she afford to stay "retired" for another 30 years when her savings were built with 10 in mind? And how would the rest of the family react to grandma Joanne becoming an equal again, rather than an elder?
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Why not go back to school and pursue the career you never had because you were busy raising children? I think many people would gravitate to something they really care about if they had a second chance.
Re:The rich and powerful (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine your 90 year old grandmother suddenly regressing in age a bit, with a restored mental and physical agility.
Frankly, that would be awesome. I can think of few things that would make me happier.
"who gets to live" -- the rich. (Score:2)
It's always how it's been, longevity/immortality won't change that.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Funny)
You can't tell people not to reproduce and you can't kill people to preserve resources and space.
Well, with that kind of negative-nancy thinking, of course nothing's going to get done.
Well at least I'd have one thing on my bucket list (Score:4, Funny)
Item number one on on my bucket list
When I'm 59 I'll hunt you down and kill you. Fair enough?
Availability (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think this magical treatment (which doesn't exist, and may never exist) will be available to everyone? Life extension/immortality would easily become the most valuable thing on earth. It would sell for a fortune, be used for political and financial gain, and generally be restricted to the super rich.
There won't be a population problem because the majority would be allowed to die.
Re:Availability (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think this magical treatment (which doesn't exist, and may never exist) will be available to everyone?
Because it's cheaper to have an immortal serf class than it is to have to train up larval serfs for 20 years at a net negative value before they're useful?
Young people are generally a resource sink with no return on investment for a couple decades.
Re:Availability (Score:4, Interesting)
A more likely scenario would be a progression of incremental anti-aging treatments that would be released to the general public for profit reasons. The miracle cure seems unlikely.
Why have children? (Score:4, Insightful)
The assumption that people will reproduce if given the opportunity to live indefinitely is flawed.
For many people, the urge to reproduce is strongly motivated by the idea that we want something of ourselves to leave behind when we are gone: we want someone to care for us in our old age; someone to carry on our memory. For people in developing countries, having children is a way of having extra labor. If, however, we do not regard death as inevitable, then the motivation for reproduction is also reduced. The need for extra labor is also reduced, in that there will be more healthy adults of working age in the population.
That is not to say that nobody would choose to have children. There may be a period of adjustment where people would still have lots of kids out of habit and out of a desire to hedge one's bets, so to speak, but once people start hitting ages around 150 without signs of slowing down, most will quite likely start to realize they would be better off not reproducing.
But there's always the idea that the only way you can live forever is if you agree to not have children...I'd say there is no shortage of people who would take up that offer.
Re:Why have children? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think also that there would be no small number of kids born simply because... well... accidents happen, and the parents do not want to simply terminate a pregnancy on the grounds that having it amounts to what is just a large inconvenience for them.
I would suspect that there is a very sizable percentage of the world's population that would not exist if people only ever had children when they intended to.,
Plenty to go around (Score:4, Insightful)
There is more than enough food to feed everyone. The problem is mostly just politics such as feeding a SUV enough corn to feed a family of 10 for a day to simply drive to the mall and back or letting relief supplies get resold on the black market.
space? Are you kidding me? Huge sections of the earth are completely barren, with existing technology the USA could easily accommodate a thousand or even a million times its population and not run out. Maybe some tiny countries have issues but not the world in general. We aren't even building floating cities yet.
medicine mostly has the same issue as food and the complex relationship between patents and rights and patients who need the medicine. Some is genuinely expensive and difficult to produce. But even today street bums get better medical care than kings just 300 years ago. It will only improve.
All the earth needs to support far far more humans is cheap clean energy and automation. Nuclear fusion, cheap solar and similar technologies will likely be a reality before humans living forever. Same with completely autonomous and self contained manufacturing. Combine the two and you could create hydroponic fields thousands of layers deep tended by robots and powered by light from a fusion reactor. You could build complex mega cities capable of housing a billion people.
Re:Plenty to go around (Score:5, Insightful)
with existing technology the USA could easily accommodate a thousand or even a million times its population and not run out.
I'm going to need evidence for this one. The USA can "easily" accommodate 320 trillion people with "existing technology"? More than the number of ants on Earth???
Put another way, 1 million times as many people means the entire population of Canada in a single square kilometer. Or 33 people per square metre. I get that you want to build vertically, but we categorically do not have this technology to do this.
Autoduel (Score:3)
We would have to legalize the blood sport known as the Autoduel [sjgames.com].
survival of the fittest? (Score:2)
Following is a test. Is this argument outrageous? Yes / No
Here in southern California (where else?), we were home to what was often called the 'Nobel Sperm Bank' (actually called the Repository for Germinal Choice). It's founder, Robert Graham liked to broadcast his motto "The more intelligent you are, the more children you should have."
This kind of thinking bothers some people. The concept of 'survival of the fittest' shouldn't apply to humans, some say. We should spare no expense to keep even vegetative
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And if this is done by lottery, a lucky winner might well sell his ticket if the price is right... and would we even want to try and stop such transactions, like we prohibit people from sellin
Yes you can (Score:3, Insightful)
>"You can't tell people not to reproduce "
Actually, yes you can. You can make it a requirement to have only X children or less if you want age extension... make it a choice. It is already illogical for people to think they have the "right" to make as many children as they want.
Exactly how many dozens of billions of people does this planet need?
War is the answer. (Score:3)
Obviously, we will fight to the death over limited resources, until resources are no longer limited.
Or we could stop being afraid of death. (Score:5, Insightful)
For thousands of years humanity has had a pretty comfortable relationship with death (even two hundred years ago there were 'wakes' held in the family home for several days in many developed nations). Historically, attempting immortality has tended to go hand in hand with delusion, disconnection from reality, and/or mental illness. It is only recently (in historic terms) that death has become stigmatised rather than accepted as inevitable, and even welcomed as a natural and positive progression.
Even presuming that age reversal techniques will one day do more than allow us to be decrepit old people for longer, I will choose to die in my natural course and leave the earth to my descendants. Death doesn't have to be scary, it can be a positive choice to improve the world by my eventual absence. I will live on through the ripples of all my actions in nurturing the new generations. Attempts at immortality are still for the delusional, disconnected, and mentally ill.
Re:Or we could stop being afraid of death. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could cure aging like the disease it is. Then if you still want to die, at least you don't get a crappy decades-long decline.
It's hard not to see this argument as religious (Score:3)
Is it new youth or longer old age. (Score:3)
If we can truly rejuvenate brain cells to the point where one could learn new skills like languages and instruments while remembering earlier life, then it's a wonderful concept and I have no doubt we'll find ways to adapt with improved food resources and economic energy consumption. We could harvest asteroids a la Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson for space housing and interplanetary colonization.
If it's a way for the old to stay in power without any youthful change, then the development of the technology must be stopped. I'm speaking as someone in his forties who knows in my sixties that it will be time to let someone else drive the car.
Not aging =/= not dying (Score:3)
People will still die even if everyone gets the treatment. They'll die from war, accidents, and diseases. They'll still have heart attacks and get cancer. I suspect even if you completely "cured" aging at the cellular level the average life span would only go up by a few decades.
Consider cancer. The human body has multiple overlapping systems to detect cells that have gone bad. It doesn't cure them, though. It kills them. One of the reasons cancer normally (not always, but normally) strikes in old age is likely the systems which detect and kill cancer cells have been shot full of holes by... the systems that detect and kill cancer cells. That's not going to stop. Your odds of being a cancer victim (albeit more youthful looking) in your sixties and seventies probably won't change very much.
There are other problems that youthful cells won't help with. The heavy drinkers and drug users are still going to drop dead by age 50 or so. Women will probably become infertile about the same age they do today. Morbidly obese people might live a few extra years, but probably not as long as thin people today (statistically).
Actually extending human lifespan appreciably is going to require far, far more than addressing cell aging. So fear not! You're still all gonna die.
Re: (Score:3)
Too much of any good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Too much of any good thing soon stops being a good thing.
I really enjoyed the fantasy novels of Anne Rice (e.g. "Interview with the Vampire") as she explored the topic of immortality in her characters to a philosophical degree. Vampires going out of their minds with the "burden" of immortality and looking for a way to die.
I believe what makes life special and precious is that it's finite.
You don't know how much you have in the bank and the happiest people you'll encounter are those who savour every moment they have like it was their last.
Turn that on it's head and life becomes valueless if you following my reasoning.
Reversing a few aging effects is not eternal life (Score:5, Insightful)
Complex systems, such as human bodies, often have a "bathtub curve" of failure probabilities. Numerous potential flaws are most likely at the start of the system's existence, which is why infant mortality and miscarriage remain noticeable even with the most advanced medical support. And as bodies age, more and more smaller flaws accumulate to cause more and more profound system problems. These range from vascular problems, likely to cause strokes and aneurysms, to the wear and tear on joints causing motion problems, to accumulated heavy metal poisoning and debris in the lungs, to the ongoing risk of cancers.
Until complete prevention or cures exist for all of those issues, it seems nonsensical to discuss the population issues of eternal life. Population _growth_ from people living even a decade longer is a much more real and noticeable issue in our economy and resources. So is the cost of medical care for those older people. We're already seeing problems with Medicare funding and elderly care being real economic and political problems in the USA. This is partly because, as we reach the far end of that "bathtub" curve for human beings, addressing one factor that might have killed people far earlier, such as very successful heart surgery and antibiotics for infections that used to kill older people easily, end when more complex and difficult problems finally occur.
I am, myself, old enough to feel these effects. They do accumulate.
Good news, bad news (Score:4, Funny)
Doctor to patient, after having given the injection: "I have good news and bad news for you:"
Patient: "The good news first please!"
Doctor: "After this injection, you're going to live for another 800 years."
Patient: 'Great! And the bad one!"
Doctor: "You'll have to stay at your shitty job for another 780 years"
It'll be counter intuitive. (Score:3)
Malthus Will Sort It Out! (Score:4, Insightful)
Trying to force more people to live in the absence of resources? You're basically still killing people, you're simply distancing yourselves from the act and washing your hands of the responsibility. Maybe the person who dies will not be the one who can afford longevity treatments; more likely it will be some poor bastard with a different skin color and hat in some distant foreign land. This doesn't seem to worry the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
On the whole, it would probably be more humane to just have everyone in the world play Russian Roulette once a year and thin the herd by 1/6th annually. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
Better yet, don't kill anyone, and incentivize population control. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
Maybe the best strategy is not to play the game (i.e. let people die naturally)? Even now we can prolong life medically for people that are effectively invalids and/or in chronic pain, but to what advantage? Many of them would be happy to be allowed to pass away. When medical care rises to the level that these people actually want to continue living, then maybe we can talk about longevity.
Death is not a bad option, really.
Re: (Score:3)
Death is not a bad option, really.
Good to see that someone else is talking sense. The concept of human immortality is silly, and not well thought out.
Certainly the religious who believe in a second life after death would be deprived of meeting their maker, and would cosider immortality as cheating their maker from his justice on the newly immortal.
But even so, after the first thousand years or so, it would have to get pretty boring.
I listened to a TED talk the past weekend about this immortality. These people were crazier than shitho
It's already a problem (Score:3)
So many of our modern problems come down to the fact that we mitigate our expanding ability to provide food and other resources by reproducing at faster and faster rates. Solving world hunger would be trivial at this point, if we could slow the growth of our population. You see declining birth rates in developed countries, but it's not even close to enough.
We also actively exacerbate these problems with aid. The standard of living in parts of Africa has been an ongoing tragedy, but rather than finding a sustainable way to provide resources for a population that is stabilized, we just keep putting more and more bandaids on the problem that, in the end, just make the situation worse. This is another area where we've made some progress, with better charities popping up, but it's not even close to enough.
Humans just have this sense of entitlement when it comes to breeding and the consumption of resources. It's a primal urge that we just don't seem to be able to manage/overcome. Add in longer lifespans and, oh my god...age reversal...and you have a recipe for disaster. We need our social norms to start catching up with the technology we have.
One SF take on the issue: Niven's Known Space (Score:3)
Earth has perfected organ transplant technology, so someone with access to transplants can live for centuries. The transplants are provided by disassembling criminals, because almost every crime is capital, and execution is by disassembly for transplant stock. Because every citizen considers himself or herself law-abiding, they believe they benefit from more transplant material... and would never become transplant material themselves. They think, "I'll never murder, or embezzle, or repeatedly violate traffic laws, so make 'em all capital crimes. Get rid of the undesirables, and a longer life for me."
Earth has a unified government and a world paramilitary police force: the ARM.
The ARM has three major duties: "mother hunts" (enforcing mandatory parenthood licensing, designed so that each normal adult is allowed to be the parent of two children only -- replacement rate reproduction only), suppressing dangerous technologies (in the hands of anyone but the ARM), and combating organlegging -- black market transplant providers who source their material by kidnapping and murder.
So, the presumption that you can't deny reproductive rights is just silly. You have reproductive rights, but if you're hunted down and killed for attempting to exercise them outside the constraints of a violently enforced law, what good are they?
Oddly, 22nd Century Earth of Niven's milieu isn't generally portrayed internally as a dystopia, because humanity has been conditioned into obedience and pacifism anyway. Most Earth citizens consider the status quo wonderful.
Re: (Score:2)
How about we do that for ACs who don't have the balls to post their garbage as anything but what they are... anonymous cowards.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It will be expensive -- BY DESIGN. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It will be expensive -- BY DESIGN. (Score:4, Funny)
Or possibly, this already happened a long time ago, and that 1% is currently living in this manner, subject to some physical limitations, with the details of the longevity treatment coaxed into mythology to preserve the secret of its existence.
Two different longevity treatments were discovered independently and used by two different groups. The two groups are unaware of each other, and when presented with evidence, go so far as to vehemently deny the possibility of the other group's existence.
They were affected in physiologically similar ways; one notable exception was that one group cannot stand the sunlight, and members of the other sparkle when exposed to it.