You’re more optimistic on this subject than I am. Look at Stalin, as an example. Once he established himself in power, he was never really challenged. Why assume that would have changed? The same can be said about Mao or Kim or Castro or Ho or Franco or Khomeini. All of them stayed in power until old age and death removed them.
Have you ever read Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series? Lord Ruthven is one of the supporting characters in the series. One of the running themes in the books is Ruthven’s involvement in British politics. He’s a vampire (vampirism is open in the series) so he never gets old. He gets elected Prime Minister and then gets voted out of office. But then he just waits. A generation or so later, whatever his previous issues were get forgotten and people want an experienced leader. So he gets voted back into office. In the series, Ruthven is Prime Minister in the 1890’s, during World War I and World War II, in the 1960’s, and in the 1990’s.
There would no longer be a concept of retirement if there was no more expected natural end of your lifetime. Retirement now means “saving enough money to get by until I die, but hopefully while still healthy enough to get some period of pleasure from the remaining years.” If there would be no predictable timeframe for the end of your life, then you would need to simply continue working. Or–possibly–save up for a decade or three of “vacation”, use that up, go back to work for several more decades and start saving all over again. (Of course, Social Security would be an even more unstable Ponzi scheme than it is today.)
I was thinking less in terms of dictators than in terms of some of history’s epic greedheads. Consider one of our local assholes:Henry Clay Frick. He wasn’t even the worst of his ilk, yet when I imagine him with centuries to continue amassing wealth and keeping the rabble as scrod as possible, it is not pretty. Now, bunches of assholes like him? AND their kids who will also live for centuries? I do not see a dystopic world as avoidable.
I didn’t watch the video but I feel extending human life span to extremes is bad for society as a whole. One of the reasons society progresses is people who hold bad, old ideas eventually disappear. If those people last for centuries society doesn’t progress as fast which is bad for everyone.
Lots of really great responses so far…thanks guys. I’ll be bolting out of town tonight, but wanted to address a few things while I can.
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You’re more optimistic on this subject than I am. Look at Stalin, as an example. Once he established himself in power, he was never really challenged. Why assume that would have changed? The same can be said about Mao or Kim or Castro or Ho or Franco or Khomeini. All of them stayed in power until old age and death removed them.
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Let me ask you a counter question. Do you think the Soviet Union collapsed because Stalin died? Or, to put it a different way, do you feel that the Soviet Union would have continued on, perhaps growing stronger, with Stalin at the helm? Same goes for Mao…do you think that China, on the course it was on with Mao at the helm, was optimal and sustainable, while post-Mao with it’s more radical change is sub-optimal? As yourself the same things about the others.
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Are there any countries operating a modern economy where most people expect to be unable to work meaningfully by age 27, and dead by 35? That would be a better comparison.
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Why wouldn’t a similar type of adoption happen with the new changes too? I suppose you could say that it’s a cart and horse scenario or chicken and egg I suppose…was it the changes in medicine that allowed for the changes to society and work in a modern economy or vice versa. I obviously believe that a similar adaptation would happen with what I’m proposing in the OP as well.
Oh, I agree…I’m basically saying the converse is also true. And offering a historical example of how it DIDN’t in fact disrupt things.
There are a ton of things I’d like to add but I’m out of time. I hope the discussion continues to progress by the time I get back. Again, thanks for all the response.
I think there would be two waves of concerns. Firstly, the immediate implications of the possibility, and then later on, the implications of the results.
Implications from just having the possibility:
socio-economic issues: I already know I have no social security coming. If the government knows that people can just stay “young” indefinitely, are we going to be expected to WORK indefinitely? I like my job, but I don’t like my job 50 years worth, let alone 500 or 5000. How will I continue to support my infinitely-lived self into the future?
social issues: people have an expected script for life: go to school for as long or as little as you are able, work, marry/partner/, procreate, work a lot, get old, retire, die surrounded by descendants. With individual flavors and exceptions noted, that’s the script that most people follow. As soon as the “get old” bit is taken off the table, not to mention retirement and dying, that’s going to cause a lot of trauma and un-ease and difficulty for people who don’t know what script to follow now. There will be a lot of social upheaval as people try and discard and experiment with new scripts and we work out new social contracts.
medical isues. As a period-haver, am I going to have a period every freaking month for 1000 years? Fuck that noise. What about people living with chronic conditions or disabilities? What about cancers that boast of their 5-year “survival” rates? That’s bullshit time if our new scale is centuries. There will be a huge push to fix things that people are just expected to live with now. Likewise, if nothing else has changed except this miracle pill, shortages of organs will become even more untenable.
Long term issues from not losing people:
life becomes either very precious or very boring - probably both in different contexts. The “potential” of a life becomes nearly unfathomable with so much time, so someone who is a drug addict or a criminal will likely be hugely socially shamed for “wasting” their potential. Suicide could also be seen as even more taboo than it is now, or perhaps like it is in Japan where it’s very taboo, but also people totally understand why the people do it - they just never ever talk about it. On the flip side, if you’ve got millennia, then why is it so important to go to high school (or college, or grad school, or work, or trade school, or an apprenticeship) NOW, rather than later? After all, there is soo much later to go around!
procreation. This is one of those scripts we’ll need to re-establish. In a lot of Western European and Eastern countries, people are NOT having kids at a fast enough pace to keep the population stable. The new scripts of dual-income families, available birth control, and not enough of a support network are keeping women from having the 3+ kids that are needed to keep a population growing at a stable rate. Well, in this scenario we don’t need ANY kids to keep the population relatively stable, so even civic pride isn’t an incentive. I don’t think we’ll have to worry about overpopulation in countries like America, I think we’ll have to worry about how many women are opting out entirely from the baby-making game, and how we encourage a healthy variety of people to procreate regularly.
religion. This is going to become either way LESS powerful or way MORE powerful in people’s lives. C&E style “socially religious” people will probably just slip entirely away from their religions and replace them with different hobbies (so much more scope for hobbies) while existing infrastructures of religion for those who are devout will become more stratified and more strict. The Pope is going to be the Pope forever now? Your local bishop or priest will be there… forever? Imagine if your local fucked-up cult leader (Warren Jeffs, anyone?) never got older than 30-something? Yeesh. What about Scientology? Imagine if they could update the Sea Org with a contract that someone work exclusively for them for 100 or 200 or 500 years?
I’m sure there’s tons more, but those are the ones that immediately spring to mind.
I have no opinion on Stalin, specifically, but I do think that history has shown over and over and over organizations (and by that, I can mean anything from a business to an empire) built up by one or a few visionaries or strong personalities that completely fall apart soon after their death. (Or as I like to put it, things that are built by giants are torn down by dwarves.)
Dictators would have more time to consolidate their power. Rebels would have more time to plot revolution. I think it would even out.
Overpopulation might be an issue. However, most high-tech countries have birthrates below replacement level already. I think this would be a manageable problem.
If you are never too sick to work, and never too old to start over, then you have endless second chances. Economic crash or hurricane wipes out your life savings? Fine. Work a bad job for a few years, save up a college fund, then get a degree in a field you enjoy. A world where workers have endless time to improve their skill-sets is a workers’ paradise. Only slackers would have reason to fear such a world.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is one of my favorite, not because it is necessarily an accurate depiction but that it shows that just because we develop cheap ‘god-like’ immortality doesn’t make us any less of being petty, grubby monkeys.
Although the o.p. is posing a hypothetical, from a practical sense this is absolutely true. Even the people who survive the illnesses of childhood, avoid cancer, and don’t suffer from any of the catastrophic lifestyle illnesses of modern civilization (stress- and diet-induced coronary dysfunction, Type 2 diabetes due to high carbohydrate diets, smoking and pollution induced COPD, et cetera) still eventually die by systematic failure of repair and energy production mechanisms, and despite many advances in molecular biology and cellular function, we still don’t really understand why, other than that it appears to be built into certain types of cells. The leading hypothesis is that it is a side effect of deliberate constraints within the cell to prevent runaway growth (since many cancerous cells can basically reproduce forever) but there are good reasons to question this hypothesis.
From the sociological side, it would probably take a while for the impact to change society, but it would essentially mean an end to the notion of retirement as an expected phase of life, or at least, as we currently understand it. We’d also expect long term planning and anticipation of future problems to become more comprehensive, but again, people are still going to be the same short-sighted monkeys that we’ve always been, and it seems unlikely that the people who refuse to acknowledge global climate change today are going to care more even if they will live to experience serious effects decades or centuries into the future.
Any specific predictions would have to account for other effects and technologies. Can the human mind remain resilient and have a workable memory with decades or centuries of experience? There is no reason that it should not, given concurrent rejuvenation of neural structures, but recalling centuries of memories is vastly beyond our experience. Do we have the means to provide a basic industrial lifestyle, or is their going to be the problem of immortal “have-nots”? I don’t think you can make any kind of useful speculation without the context in which such an innovation would be applied.
I’m not sure that this would be as big a deal as you claim. Just because you’ve been alive for 500 years doesn’t mean that you have 500 years of experience. I think it likely that you would forget a whole lot. Unless you have kept using the skills how much of what you learned 20 years ago do you still remember, how about 40 years, 60 years. I doubt that a woker with 500 years of experience would really be that much better than one with 20 years worth.
But that is only because people are dying. If your sink is plugged even a slow trickle will eventually fill it up.
Culture would stagnate if you believe the old saying about progress happening one funeral at a time.
Or science may flourish as there’s enough time for people to drill down into one field for hundreds of years, or dabble in multiple fields and make new connections that weren’t obvious to people who only lived only a couple decades.
When I say I don’t want to live forever, I assume that means I’d be watching everyone I love die. Remove that negative, and immortality suddenly becomes a lot less depressing a thought.
Retirement, and work: Manditory retirement would HAVE to go. Period. That has huge implications on the financial markets, as so huge a proprtion of it is locked up in reterment investing. People would continue locking up wealth until there was so much wealth locked up that it becomes essentially meaningless; The cost of a meal is the cost of a meal. No matter how much money you theoretically have locked up, that won’t change - the prices will change to reflect the real values; With an extended lifetime to accumulate wealth, outrageous inflation is highly probable. At least for a while. Meanwhile, with all the time (literally) in the world to learn and gain skills, education won’t be as urgent, and career shifting common. Work until you grow tired of what you’re doing, goof off on accumulated wealth for a while, then start a new career doing something else.
Fertility would NEED to change, and soon, or we’d drown in our own filth in VERY short order as populations skyrocket like bacterial infection. If we didn’t strip the planet down to bedrock and starve first. Indeed, greatly reduced fertility would probably need to be part of the life extention package.
Planned obsolescence would need to be rethought. Long-lived people will likely want REALLY durable goods.
Mr Money Moustache claims you only need about 25 years worth of assets to live indefinitely on your savings. I have no idea how true that is.
Also along with radical life extension various other techs are coming like widespread automation which will likely eventually lead to universal basic income.
So the financial aspect is not that big a deal.
The main drawback is social progress requires the older generation to die off so younger minds can form a majority of the political and social atmosphere. People born in 1870 are going to be far more hostile to gay marriage than people born in 2000 for example. People’s opinions are shaped by the culture they grew up in, and you will have people running around whose minds were formed when society was far more regressive, oppressive and backwards compared to the future. Imagine how race relations would be if people who were alive during slavery were still around and they voted.
Not in a world with lots biologically immortal humans. The return on capital vs the price of labour will change to make a ‘work for X years to save up enough to live forever’ plan just not work.
Unless automation does everything, a society can only support a certain percentage of its population not producing anything (based on tech level, living standards, etc). So living indefinitely off of one’s investments can’t work for everyone at once.
In my opinion, yes. I don’t think the Soviet regime would have lasted forever but I think it would have lasted longer if Stalin had stayed alive and in power. The Soviet Union collapsed because Stalin’s successors were weaker than he was when it came to holding on to power. (Which is not meant to imply that the ability to hold on to power is an admirable trait or that the ongoing existence of the Soviet Union would be desirable. An immortal Stalin would be a very bad thing.) I think if Stalin had been immortal, the Soviet Union would still be around and he’d still be in charge of it.
Mao’s a little harder to call. Stalin clearly demonstrated the ability to hold power. Mao, on the other hand, showed the ability to take power but his record of holding power was a lot more ambiguous. He might have been overthrown even if he had been immortal.
I think it’s more a case of things that are built by giants also require the maintenance of a giant. When the giant dies, it’s not that the dwarves that follow him are necessarily tearing things down. They just lack the giant’s strength and can’t keep thing up even if they’re trying.
The elves, on the other hand, are just being dicks.
I don’t see a real problem with life extension up to about 150 years, if we could keep people healthy, and prevent dementia and Alzheimers.
I see a huge problem with radical life extension, say up to 1,000 years. Even up to 500, the phenomenon I’m going to discuss would probably kick in.
As you grow older, your perception of time compresses. You have fewer novel experiences, and fewer truly special experiences. A day was a lot of time when you were a child. A weekend was still a great deal of time when you were a teenager. By the time you are 50, if something isn’t going to last at least a week, it barely seems worth pursuing (unless you are doing it with and for a child, whose ability to pace events for you can make a short time seem worthwhile). But haven’t you put a lot of effort into something for a child that seemed very fleeting for you, and thought it wasn’t really worth the work? Well, it was for the child, who experienced is an much longer than you did.
No scale that up to living 500 years. Imagine haw jaded you will feel about the holidays coming around for the 500th time in your life. All those day start to blend together; something in your memory happened when you were five or fifteen, so it happened “when you were a child.” it’s all the same to you. Even if you have no dementia, keeping the personal memories of a life that went of for centuries would be difficult at best.
Now imagine living a thousand years. You would have great-great … grandchildren. Who knows what they’d call you? Would you care about their births? Would you care about anything? the days would go by in the blink of an eye. You would ahve to adapt to a lot of change. Someone who lived 1,000 years ago, would have to adapt to printing, globalization of the market, the discovery of the other half of the world, the germ theory, medicine that actually worked, a movement away heliocentrism, feminism, all kinds of moderl
I don’t agree with the “only the rich will have access to this technology” idea. This is the fear people often have about technologies, but the economics rarely play out like that.
A bigger fear is just that people in positions of power or authority will be even more entrenched than they are now.
I hope that technology for changing our appearance follows closely behind anti-ageing. Right now, the advantage you get from being handsome or pretty is huge, and goes far beyond just dating prospects to all kinds of social situations. But for most people declines with age.
In a hypothetical world where we don’t age, but we also cannot easily change a person’s facial appearance, then people who are pretty will have a *tremendous *advantage that they can sit back and reap for centuries.
I’ll be bolting out of town tonight, but wanted to address a few things while I can.