In the context that mankind could live forever and not succumb to disease or old age and with good nutrition their organs would function in perpetuity.
So how soon would it be before the powerful would start killing the less powerful. Decades or much less time. Reason being lack of resources to share with more people, fear of over crowding and plain paranoia.
Sounds like a question better suited for the IMHO board than General Questions. This forum is for questions with factual answers; IMHO is for opinions.
23 years, 5 months, 13 days.
We talk about over crowding now, but look how many people they pack in large cities. There are lots of rural areas in the US (yes, I know this is stated as mankind not just a US thing).
There is a whole host of different things that would likely change in such a situation.
people living effectively forever, would also have to work forever. There would be no such thing as retirement or SS, because no pension or savings could reasonably support you indefinitely.
assuming that you lived forever, your genetics would likely allow you to put off having children and if you knew there was a possible situation of overcrowding, possibly choose not to as there is no legacy for them to carry on, you carry your own legacy indefinitely. Also, countries would probably institute some policy to reduce children.
since you do have to work forever, but all things are consumable, that would end up having more people dedicated to producing food, clothes, etc, because of all the needs going forward.
certain decisions are made now because we have a reasonably short window for child bearing (20-40ish), a slightly longer work window (18-70ish) and then a short retirement window (70-85ish). If you lived forever and only died via accident or some such means, and the window for having children opened because you would not be “old” when they graduated HS, you would probably put that off. You probably would not just work to make it a few years of life, retire and then die, you might shift careers more often (after all changing careers at 65 would not be considered odd since you would not be retiring soon anyway)
But then with all this, the question comes up, would you want to live forever? Sure it sounds all great. But working with no end in sight, no hope for a real retirement. After a while, you would have done it all, seen it all, and at some point, boredom would set in.
Part of what makes life precious is that you know some day it will end, and you have to enjoy it all while you can.
Since this is a non-factual question, let’s move it to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Could we just take turns working for a few years and then not working for a few years?
Or just working a couple days per week? A couple hours a day?
We’re close enough now we could probably start making more real estate in space if we had to, couldn’t we? Floating cities on the oceans?
Civilization would gradually become ultra-conservative. People would object to cultural changes. You think the cranky old guy on his front porch is fussy today, imagine if he represented a very strong majority of the populace!
If you think safety regulations are strict today, imagine how they’d be in a world where people stood to lose so much more from an accident. I don’t mind risky behavior, like riding a motorcycle, because I was never promised more than eighty years of life. But if I were responsible to myself for thousands of years – motorcycles would be banned by law.
And…yes, the elderly majority would find ways to stymie population growth. Chinese-style mandatory abortions would be only the least of these intrusions.
pfffft. I read Riverworld.
13 days.
Depends, I guess.
What happens without good nutrition?
Also, do we keep reproducing? Is death by physical destruction of the body possible?
Professional assassins would be rolling in cash - people who really want to die, but can’t bring themselves to do the killing.
$10,000 and you’ll never know when or how. Just that it will be instant oblivion.
Before that, I suspect, resources will become scarce enough that the wealthy will build compounds, hire cheap killers and start moving food by armed convoy.
And, just to even things out - since we are taking the stuff that the peasants need to survive, we just kill all we see as we head back to the compound/fortress.
OR - 50 years until dead peasant become peasant food.
200 years before killers see a huge uptick in business. That “immortality” crap will take a while to get distasteful - for the first 200, the novelty will make it seem “kinda neat”.
Boredom is for teenagers. The older I get, the more interesting the world gets.
Suppose you set out to visit every tourist destination on the planet, starting at the north pole and working your way to the south pole. By the time you finished with Johannesburg, Stockholm would have some new stuff in it. You will never be able to move fast enough to see it all. There would always be one more place to visit, one more person to meet, one more book to read.
As for “no hope for a real retirement”, that assumes that you hate your job. If you were immortal, you could work a bad job for a few years, go to night school, and get a degree in a field which you enjoy, and a job from which you don’t want to retire.
I sort of agree with Trinopus’ notion that society would become conservative. If people are never too sick to work, and never too old to start over, the slackers will run out of excuses.
I think the major reason old people tend to be conservative and cranky is that they’re old - by which I mean physically old, with old bodies and little to look forward to except more pain and death. If they all had permanent 25-.year-old bodies and a future ahead of them they’d be a lot more cheerful and open minded.
I don’t have time to run the numbers again, but I once explored this idea myself. Something I believe I found based off of CDC death rates from non-natural causes (accidents, homicides, suicides etc) the average person wouldn’t live a crazy long time even in this scenario. I want to say even hitting 200 would be a tad bit lucky, and while it’s not inconceivable someone who lives in a fortress of solitude, never leaving home, never taking any serious risks, could maybe live to be ancient, most people wouldn’t live like that.
So I think overpopulation would not be that bad, especially since historically you’ve seen population growth rates in many places drop (to below replacement level) given good economic conditions, that combined with government policies that would probably encourage not having too many children and/or might even incent vasectomies and etc for the willing (and perhaps the unwilling in less free countries) I think we’d manage.
One more being in the Universe to insult. In alphabetical order.
Oh, crap. I thought it said** immoral.** I was wondering what you thought it was before.
To quote Steven Wright: “Every place is within walking distance, if you have enough time.”
Yeah, I think people would work for a few years, then take off maybe to have families, then go back to work again. Also, my own WAG is that when we gain this sort of technology it won’t be in a vacuum. Instead, it will be but one break through among many, that will most likely have a fundamental change on what ‘work’ even means or why we do it. You can kind of see that already happening in fact.
As for resource, I think there are pretty much unlimited resources in the solar system to support any realistic number of humans, and those will be available around the same time we become immortal. I also don’t think the population is likely to sharply go up just because people don’t get old anymore…my WAG on that is that when we can afford to actually distribute such a thing on a world wide scale we won’t be worrying about population explosions or limited resources or the rich having to kill off the poor (who will outnumber the rich by orders of magnitude in this sort of dystonian projection).
The slaughter begins, soon.
Not just rich vs poor, either.
Utter chaos, and right damn quick, too!
I remember seeing something in the 80’s or 90’s about how, if we became biologically immortal, meaning zero deaths from disease and other physical body issues, at the then-current accident rates, the average person would live somewhere around 600 years before something got them. At most you might live 900-1000 years and only the few rare lucky outliers would live for several millennia.
Of course, the very first thing we’d do would then be to make our world as safe as we could, to bring that accident rate down.
And also, a great many people wouldn’t want to live for centuries, and would choose to end their lives earlier.
If you think ‘high risk’ and ‘death defying’ activities are popular now, imagine what they’d be like if you never had to worry about dying of cancer or some other disease.