The main downside of your usual hypothetical ultra-longevity is that it is normally proposed, by philosophising teenagers, as something that only one person has (“would you like to be immortal?”.) This means that all your friends and family die out and you’d either have to keep making friends, only to watch them die every 60 years, or keep very much to yourself.
This though, having it available to the masses, would be great. I’d like to be witness to more than just 80-100 years of life on this earth. I wonder if people would take a more long term view on things such as the environment we live in and the resources we use.
Man, if I thought I was going to live forever, I’d kill myself right now.
Yes, that’s a Futurama paraphrase, but in my case it’s also true. I don’t want to live forever. The seventy-odd years I’m “guaranteed” now are too much. At least now life has a defined rate, with a pre-set endpoint and stages of development that I can handle. I don’t have the personal ability to handle a free-form life. (Also, do I really want to work for someone else for 4000 years? Forty is too many.)
On the macro-scale, I guess I couldn’t stop you all from choosing to live forever, but I do think it’s a selfish option. Do you really think that we’ll have all this neat scientific stuff and this awesome future if everyone lives forever and almost no new children are born (which is how it would have to be)? Ideas are borne out of new perspectives, not the same six billion people thinking the same thoughts over and over. Without fresh blood, there’s no new ideas.
Think about it: what if the population granted immortality (and then cut off from reproduction) were the people of the Middle Ages? Or the cavemen? Even given thousands of years, they would not have progressed to the level of technology we are at now, because they were stuck in a cultural rut. And we’re the exact same. Even geniuses are short-sighted; Einstein was unable to accept certain concepts that were introduced shortly before his death, even though those concepts were proven true. Take a genius from the remote past like Galileo or Aristotle and see how they do with our new scientific concepts. They would never accept quantum mechanics or even Newtonian physics. And that’s what we’d be dealing with if we were all immortal (or nearly so). A bunch of old codgers spinning our wheels, doing the same thing over and over again. What’s the definition of insanity again?
Also, there would be no more evolution. Are we really that perfect, so much that we can say “this is the ultimate human, there is no room for improvement”? I’m still dragging this useless appendix around, and what’s the deal with our pathetic excuse for a sense of smell?
You stated it as a fact. "Because if the sort of aging cures actually do come about, they are going to be ridiculously expensive and available to only a few. "
Because there will be great demand for it.
Major reconstructive surgery is very expensive because A) there are very few doctors who perform it, B) it is complicated, requires much hospitalization and after-surgery care, and C) because it really only appeals to the rich in the first place. It’s elective surgery.
Why would you choose that as your model for pricing, and not, say, having your wisdom teeth removed? Or getting a flu shot? Or having your tonsils out? Or having a baby? What do these things have in common? They are mandatory treatments that the masses need. None of them are horrendously expensive.
What we don’t know is what the treatment will look like. If the treatment requires a dedicated surgical team, extensive post-op care, and a specialized type of surgery that very few can perform, then yes, it will be very expensive. On the other hand, if it involves a few injections and other simple treatments, it will be dirt cheap before you can blink, because the high demand will stimulate huge competition and within a few years, a huge supply of professionals who can perform the service.
And that’s not true either. Most people CAN afford the ‘true cost’ of health care. What’s the per-capita annual spending on health care now in the U.S.? $5500? Most people spend that much on their cars. What people can’t afford is catastrophic health problems that they are not insured for. That’s a completely different thing.
Anyway, all it would take is for the government to say “We’ll pay for your longevity treatment, if you promise to sign this form that says you’ll waive social security for 20 years.” After all, if you’re healthy and vigorous, you can work. Who wouldn’t take that deal?
Hell, the government might offer the treatment for free, just to save Medicare costs.
Indeed, it almost certainly will. de Grey addresses this on his website.
Possibly, but also addressed on the website.
Well, people might move around a lot. Then again, they might not. They might very well be able to do as they wished, throughout their lifetime, including staying in the same place, if they like it.
As for friends, I foresee all of us knowing each other much better, having so much more time to do so. The implications for accountability for our past actions would become all the more important. We might behave better toward each other, knowing that we might meet up with and need the help of someone we screwed over 500 years ago.
Oh, yeah! Can you imagine the quality of sex with a partner you’ve been doing it with for hundreds of years? Ecstatic! We will certainly become better lovers.
Marriage will become extinct, as we will no longer have to pretend to “commit” to just one other “‘til death do us part.” As a result of our own longevity, the marriage industry will die, and that will be a death that we can all celebrate.
As for child-rearing, we’ll be needing to have far fewer, but spending far more time on raising each one with great care.
Sorry, but I just can’t see a downside to any of this.
Of course you’d give it a shot! And, of course, if you wanted to bail at some point, you’d have that option. Same as we do today, and always have.
Okay. Ending it all at any time remains your option, no matter how long you can live. And, once again, we are NOT talking about immortality here. If 70 years is all you feel you can handle, then 70 years it is. Same for everyone.
But as you lay there with the shotgun to your head, and realize that, for a reasonable price, well within your means, you could go on for another 10 years in good health, would you pull the trigger? Would you?
Selfish? As in more selfish than any decision any human being makes for him or herself? We, and all other living creatures, are inherently selfish. This is our glory, as far as I’m concerned. If we would all just openly acknowledge to each other that we are inherently selfish, we would be all the more motivated to behave with decency and cooperation toward each other to increase our own selfish wishes for ourselves. There is no such thing as altruism, but there is cooperation!
And my point is that we would continue to learn throughout our extended lifetimes. Well, maybe we wouldn’t, but we might! “New blood” is shit compared to experience. Would you deny yourself, or anyone else, the possibility of learning for as long as they can? And in good health?
Very, very interesting points, and tribute to you, davenportavenger. However, you suppose that if we were living extended lifespans as cavemen, or at any other point, we would stagnate right there. This is not necessarily the case. We just don’t know, and who would deny us the opportunity to find out?
The appendix has a function, and an important one. It squirts a little antiseptic onto your shit as it heads to the exit. Why? I don’t know. It just does. Those who have their appendix removed are never again in as good health as when they still had it.
As for our sense of smell, we humans do have a bad deal, there, comparatively speaking. But brains! We have great, big brains with an enormous area of cerebral cortex! We are very gifted in this regard.
I mean, of course, assuming that the individual hasen’t fucked up their own health enough to suffer an appendix that requires removing. Then, if it’s not removed, they die. Not a good thing, I think.
Most people would put “extending the human lifespan past anything known or natural” into the elective category. Are insurance companies going to pay for it?
I agree. We don’t know what it will be like. I just very much expect that it will be more like the former than the latter. Why? Because aging and death are not a single unitary condition: they happen because of many many different balances and causes in the body, and you have to be able to treat them all that once. So what we are almost certainly looking at is lots and lots more health care spending per person to get the effect of a much much longer lifespan.
I’d have to strongly suggest that women be encouraged (through tax breaks and whatnot) to have a child before the age of thirty. Pro-choice that I am, I recall a whimsical but relevant sci-fi short story (though not the title - I’ll try to find it) about life after an age-freezing process became commonplace. It turned out that after a few decades, women (though they might look young) lost the ability to reproduce. I’d hate to to see the human race reduced to a dwindling supply of sterile accident-prone immortals. If each woman has one child (or enters into an arrangement with another woman who has two children), and half the children are female, the human population will gradually shrink but we should always have a large number of pre-treatment fertile females to act as a breeding pool. Coupled with this should be ovum and sperm donations from pre-treatment donors (just in case we discover down the road that the treatment itself has effects on reproduction), so we’ll have no shortage of genetic material from which we can make new humans, if necessary.
Overpopulation is a valid concern, but eventual underpopulation could be worse.
Well, if you insist… I use “topic” in a more limited sense than you have, referring to this specific thread. It might have been more interesting, if we hadn’t had at least ten threads already on the “would you take immortality if offered” question, but whatever charm this iteration might have had has been swamped by your pointless, groundless and apparently compulsive hostility and condescension.
If it is not worth the effort, simply go to another thread. The OP has already been cautioned on his snide remarks, so further commentary is superfluous.
Well yes, women have a finite supply of eggs and lose one each month, so they will become infertile in the same way they do at present. Unless the “remain in good health” of the OP includes somehow supplying women with eggs they will have to have children before about fifty or not at all.
I guess it depends precisely on how the idea is implemented. If it involves genetic engineering (and I expect it’d have to), it’s be a shame if we found out too late that the children of those who’ve undergone the procedure were prone to some heart defect or other problem. It’d be important to track who’s had the procedure and maintain a “clean” breeding pool, and at this point it unfortunately starts to get really really creepy.
We would need to have children with younger women, or make it so women could bear children later in life by the “test tube” method. Or something else? In any case, keeping the population supplied would not be an issue.
So… Cancer treatment is elective surgery? How about organ transplants? Open heart surgery? Pacemakers?
We’ve been ‘extending the human lifespan past anything known or natural’ for decades. I don’t see people yawning and saying, “Nature wanted my heart to fail. I think I’ll just let myself die.”
The minute it becomes possible to extend our lifespans significantly, there will be huge demand for it. No one will consider the treatment to be elective, when the alternative is a sure death in a relatively short period of time.
And you’d be surprised what you can afford when the alternative is death. Take out a second mortage on the house. Hell, sell the house and take out a 20 year loan. Anything is better than being dead to most people. Look how many bankrupt themselves for treatments for cancer or heart surgery. People do this who are already 60 or 70, and they’ll sell everything they have for a chance at maybe 5 or 10 more years of life.
Why stop at a 20 year loan Sam? May as well make it a 500 year loan, heck why not have the government pay for it and then you pay an extra 3% on your tax!