What if we could do it? Then what? Let’s say we’re living for hundreds/thousands of years. What are the implications?
The implications are Awesome.
-FrL-
Boredom.
Speak for yourself.
The boring are bored and the fascinated are fascinated no matter how long they live.
I’m fascinated. I want more of it.
Choices, choices, choices; Superbowl CMLXVII, or another Simpsons rerun?
Maybe I’ll clean the garage tonight instead.
Some of the implications I wonder about are:
How do you plan for a long retirement? Can you?
What sort of health are we in for the majority of this long life?
What does it do to economics?
Can we do it without a birthrate program that would upset most conservative religious groups?
Would progress end, as a much larger group of powerful people would be against change?
Would people treat the environment more seriously if they knew they would have to live with the problems caused now that only affect things a hundred years later?
What direction would society go?
Would everyone be eligible?
Would the new death sentence for crime, be the simple suspension of longevity treatments?
Would we be human anymore, or some new race?
Would the Dope still be around in 10,000 years? 
Would we live long enough to see the Cubs win a World Series? 
Jim
If by birthrate program you mean a limit on children per family, I think you’re going to upset more people than just religious conservatives.
Do you think that humans can live for 100,000 years without some very serious birth control?
Speaking of which, how would society treat children when they would have necessity have to become very rare? Would each child be a little pampered prince or princess with 10,000 doting Aunts, Uncles and Grandparents?
Jim
That’s my point. We’re not talking about gay marriage here-- society would have to change massively in ways that would probably upset and confuse almost everybody, at least initially. I’m not sure why you singled out religious conservatives.
I believe people without deep religious conviction against birth control and even abortion would be far more amendable to the new world where to live for an extremely long time, humanity would collectively have to have draconian birth control laws the like of which have never been seen before. Would not the Fundies, the RCC, many Orthodox Jewish Sects and most conservative Moslem sects be against such a change?
Could we bring about extended life for most without first doing away with extreme religions?
I am sorry this thread headed this way. You decided to react to only one of a dozen questions. Do you have no concerns over any of the other issues I raised?
Jim
Fair enough. Religion would be part of the equation of course; I just think you’re hammering on religion unfairly and that stuck out to me. We can agree to disagree and I won’t hijack any further. 
What about inheritance? Presumably the first people to undergo the longevity treatments would be the heads of wealthy families. How would their heirs react? Would the concept of a ‘wealthy family’ disappear as all wealth becomes individual and need never be shared?
I also wonder if high-risk activities like skydiving, space exploration, and war would become less popular as people’s attitudes shifted from “I’ve only got 70 years max anyway, might as well make the most of it” to “All I have to do is stay safe and I never have to die.”
I happily agree.
That is one I failed to think of. Would there be an increase in family murders before inheritance laws changed?
Would a renewed push for socialism occur? I am guessing there might be a larger demand to share the wealth. Universal Health Care might become the only major issue during the transition years.
I think there will still be Adrenalin junkies. It might even increase if the human race can become idly well off and have a lot of time on their hands.
I am guessing it would drastically change marriage conventions. To death, do us part, might start looking like a punishment after a few hundred years, never mind a few thousand. I truly believe in to death do us part, but I would guess that in the new time frame, changing partners, swinging, bisexuality and things I cannot imagine would come into play to fight off ennui.
Jim
Suppose we can download your personality into a computer, then you exist even though your body dies. You can then be immortal 9or until the program crashes). This would be a practical immortality.
Depends. How long do hamsters live?
Profound mental illness would be much more common.
Neurological illness/injury would be unavoidable over a period of centuries, & war/famine/plague/disaster would still create psychological trauma.
If A=Likelyhood of anygiven person going insane in a given year
and
G=# of years of life
and
A X G= Probability of Insanity
and
G= ∞
Then
A X G = 100%
You will go mad. Eventually.
I could imagine a sort of cyclical marriage scheme where every 100 years, the partners took a 10-year break from one another, then resumed another cycle. I think some form of long-term pairing woulf remain prominent though, especially as each person’s pool of potential new partners started to dry up.
These are certainly some of the questions that need to be asked in advance. We can’t know all the answers in advance, but we must anticipate. Massive human life extension is bound to happen eventually, assuming that we ourselves or some other natural phenomena don’t destroy it all first.
Aubrey de Grey addresses a number of these issues on his www.sens.org website. I can try to summarize, and provide my own impressions, an effort that is almost bound to result in several subsequent posts beginning with “Wrong.”, or even “Wrong!”
de Grey (as well as others before him) proposes the idea of periodic retirement througout the lifespan, a time in which the individual can learn something new to do to generate income and contribute to the world and, generally speaking, to become more knowledgeable. Then, there could be another retirement, if desired, and so on.
Absolutely necessary to the whole idea of extended human life is good health. What de Grey proposes are methods of engineered repair of the kinds of damage that take place as a natural result of metabolism. He terms this general effort as “Freeing us from the yoke of nature,” and I love that concept.
There’s much more detail on the website.
Not easy to know in advance, but with so many people in good health, and so fewer (if any) in poor health, the enormous economic drain of the expense of healthcare could be considered money that might be put to more productive ends, rather than merely staving off the (currently) inevitable progress of disease towards death.
So much will have to change. But the issue of religious beliefs seems pretty simple to address thusly: If anyone (let’s say it’s Jerry Falwell) is lying on his deathbed and someone offers him 10 more years of healthy life, even under the stipulation that he may have to refrain from having children (by whatever means of birth control), is he going to say “No.”? If he does refuse, there would be no laws against him letting himself die. But there would also be no laws against him choosing to continue to live. The prospect of further, healthy life will alter the tendency for people to believe in their own bullshit to such a degree. Religious beliefs will change, as they will have to, and have now and then throughout history in response to various changes in human knowledge and conditions.
I don’t think that there is any immediate reason to think that progress would end, but the circumstances under which progress occurs would certainly change. We’ve always tended to be curious, exploratory, and busy creatures.
I should think so, and this would please me no end. I believe that we already know how to inhabit this planet, with plenty of comforts, without destroying our own sustenances in the ways that we currently do. Generally speaking, we all would be more concerned and accountable for our actions, because we’d be around so much longer.
Biiiiiiiig question. No way know for sure. Lots of good theorizing to go on here. But we do tend to adjust at least adequately to changing circumstances.
Absolutely, and of necessity. de Grey proposes (perhaps with an excess of optimism) that once these treatments become available, people will be loath to keep them to themselves due to the backlash from those they would be denying an extended lifespan. This makes sense to me, but might not seem so sensible to some. There will be some struggle over this, I’m pretty sure, but it won’t last long.
Interesting prospect. However, as I alluded to above, I think that we would also start behaving a lot better toward each other. I think that violent crime, at any rate, would decrease to the point of virtual non-existence. Then again, Cain slew Abel (or so ‘tis said) at a time when human life must’ve been considered at a premium, and he did so out of pure envy. And so on the next question…
Hard to say. With what we are eventually going to be able to do, my guess is that, yes, humanity will change dramatically. We’re going to be changing how we turn out in many more ways than extending our lives, and that most certainly will involve forms of genetic engineering, a prospect given such a bad rap by the Nazis, and others. I simply say that, given the possibility, there is no way that we aren’t going to try, even if it only might be to humanity’s benefit.
If it were, it would be so much better.
The Cubs are difficult. There is something to be said in choosing a team name that implies some kind of excitement, dominance, and threat. So, yer Cubs, yer Saints, and yer Cavaliers have never done much.
But seriously, many of the sports that we commonly play are not only dangerous and ultimately damaging to human health, but also almost devoid of any practical use (besides some kind of “entertainment”) in a technologically advanced society.
I would propose that what we regard as “insane” behavior is a function of our current lifespan. We exist much of our lives in a frantic fear of death, and that can drive some people to insane acts, figuring that everyone is going to end up dead, anyway.
Oh like you would remember some horrific experience 2000 years ago. You’d have plenty of time to get over it.
The problem is, we would have to figure out a way to actually download a person onto a computer without just copying them.
It’s conceivable that one could make an exact mental and physical of copy of a person while they were still alive, but in that case you would still be you… even though your doppelganger would also claim to be you. (which would obviously be a pretty hairy situation.)
If the backup copy was resurrected after you were dead it would be just as real as your previous self to other people, but it’s still not “you.”