Who says you are going to live forever anyway? If we eliminate age as a cause of death, that still doesn’t eliminate all disease, and it certainly doesn’t eliminate accidental death, homicide, and war.
Without looking at actuary data, I’d guess that if we didn’t age at all, the average lifespan would still only be a couple of hundred years. Eventually, something will get you.
It’s interesting to speculate what kind of society we would turn into. For instance, would people become insanely risk-averse? If you knew that the most likely cause of your demise was going to be an accident, would you be a lot more careful?
But the biggest change would come from the fact that the very old would be immensely wealthy. Compound interest is a wonderful thing. Put away 5 bucks a day, and in a couple of hundred years you’ll be phenomenally wealthy. What happens to society when the elderly are all millionaires and billionaires, and the young have almost nothing? Do we become a gerontocracy? What kind of civil strife would that cause?
But the good far outweighs the bad. Our economy would go through the roof! Just think - today, you spend 20-30 years being unproductive and a burden on society as you are raised and educated. Then you get maybe 30-40 productive years, only the last ten or twenty of which result in significant income. Then it’s retirement, and you become a net drag on society again for maybe another 20 years.
So out of an entire lifetime of 80 years, only 20-40 years of it are spent contributing to the wealth of society. Now imagine living 200 years, 150 of which are peak productive years. We’d all be phenomenally wealthy.
How would we change? Well, Without the constant ticking of our biological clock, and with much more wealth, I think we’d become much less rushed. People would live at home longer, take more education, take longer holidays, go back to school regularly, etc. I’m almost 40 now, and I’m at the age where I would just love to go back to university and finish a Ph.D in physics and do research. And I’d be a much better student now than I was when I was 20.
I can see people going through ‘retirement’ cycles, where they work a career and save for 30 years, then quit that one, travel, go back to school, relax, maybe have a second family and raise them full time, whatever. Then, when the money runs a little low, it’s back to school or work, and start over again. That’d be great.
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