I recall reading once that if you took out all the age-related decline reasons for mortality, you’d be left with an average lifespan of about 400 years based only on accident and violence. I would expect a wide range there though. Immortality means that the cumulative effects of small behavioural changes snowball. Teenagers would still die in stupid accidents and pull down the average, while that careful would average far longer.
And such snowballing also has other effects… people who like having and raising children could manage maybe two hundred. Or more. Presumably a large fraction of said children would want large families of their own… Slow breeders would be genetically drowned within their new lifetimes.
Scientific progress would be slowed to a crawl. There is a saying that when an established and respected scientist says something is impossible , it is about to be accomplished.
Remember Thomas Piketty? Did a massive work showing that the earnings from capital exceeds those of labour, so wealth tends to concentrate in smaller and smaller groups over time.
Different societies would respond in different ways. However, it seems that this would be a radical change, requiring a large amount of adaptation. In general, adaption counter to the interests of people holding the wealth. I suspect many nations wouldn’t make it and would come crashing down, generating refugee crisis unlike anything we’ve seen.
I suspect we’d see “out-of-time” villages, people settling down with their temporal brethren, and maintaining a life like the days when they were young.
The subject is interesting. Could you point me in the direction of a few of these reasons?
I question the notion that people would have “hundreds” of children if they live to 1,000. A woman is born with a very limited number of eggs, and reproduction for women is pretty much done by 50 whether those women live to 60 or 100. Unless there’s some way around that bottleneck women might still have to do their reproducing prior to age 60 even if they themselves live to 1,000.
Yes, time compresses as you get older, but I disagree, based on personal experience, with **RivkahChayai’s ** assertion that “By the time you are 50, if something isn’t going to last at least a week, it barely seems worth pursuing”. Whether that will still hold true at 850 we have no way of knowing but for this mid-50’s person there’s plenty of times I’m happy something only lasts 1/2 a day. For that matter, I’m happy to see a movie that only lasts 1.5 hours. This may, of course, be a your mileage may vary thing.
I think we would see some entrenchment of the powerful.
I also think we’d see some people pursuing different professions over time. Want to be a jazz pianist AND doctor AND something else? Now you have time to do all of them!
Of course, there would still be accidental deaths, and suicides, and a certain number of people who just don’t want to live so long.
I don’t know a whole lot about the subject except where it touches my professional life, and that is people with Down Syndrome. The enzyme that constrains growth is on the 21st chromosome, so people with Down Syndrome have too much of it, which might be the underlying cause of the disorder. Anyway, experiments with is as a treatment for cancer were being conducted about four years ago. I don’t know where they are now.
But the point is that this enzyme exists. It’s what tells your body to stop growing when you are done with puberty, and what tells your body proportions what to be during fetal development.
There’s actually a case of a kid who has a transposed segment of his 21st chromosome, and is extraordinarily tall.
Anyway, I don’t know what the implications are for this regarding cell death and death of the whole organism. But it does appear that we are programmed to live for, at the very most, about 110 years. After that, the cells just quit. Almost everyone dies of something else first, and there certainly have been a handful of people who lived longer-- notably Jeanne Calumet, who made it to 122, in apparent good health almost to the very end.
Now, what is notable, for me at any rate, is that it used to be thought that people with DS had a life expectancy of about 40 years. But that was when nearly all of them lived in institutions. When they live at home, they appear to have the same life expectancy as anyone-- about 72. However, they develop Alzheimer’s at alarming rates, and often die prematurely from accidents as a result.
This is IIRC. If you want to look up more, you can start with growth information on the 21st chromosome, and find the name of the enzyme, though, which is eluding me right now. I’m typing in spurts which getting the boychik ready for his last day of school, so, no time to Google.
Conversely, that enemy whose funeral you’ve been awaiting will not have the decency of croaking.
A problem with many strongmen is that often, and either themselves or the people a couple of levels down the hierarchy, they stifle growth. We go from “Le Roi Soleil” to “Louis who?”
I’m gonna have to call “cite?” for this–there is almost never a single gene “for” a specific complex trait. Can you tell me which of these genes it is?
Those changes in life expectancy (which I personally don’t think are near as dramatic as what you are proposing) happened over time, and not suddenly, as in this scenario.
Context now is massively different. It wasn’t that long ago (if we’re talking multi-hundred-year lifespans) that populations were lower (by a factor of 10), and participation in a capitalist economy was local and limited at most (and I’m just looking at America). I think that we are so deep into our current system, and it is so massive, that we are not equipped to deal with sudden (as in, on the order of short decades) change, and it will all come crashing down.
Which isn’t to say that we’d all be doomed or anything like that, but that this scenario would spell the end of our capitalist, work- and growth-based economy/social system, and that end would be ugly. I expect many governments would fall.
Most people I know that don’t want to live forever think that they will get bored.
I feel the opposite way. I am always disappointed that in my fleeting lifespan, there is a very small slice of the available knowledge in the universe for me to ponder. With an indefinite life span, I can have an indefinite number of new discoveries.
I don’t think I would get bored until the heat death of the universe, and I have some idea on how to spice that up too.
As far as population growth, I don’t know that that will be a huge problem, especially if we start getting out into space. People have children because they don’t want to die without leaving a legacy behind, and children are the easiest way to leave your mark on the next generation. If you aren’t going to die any time soon, then the need to reproduce takes a much lower priority.
If we have space colonization by the time that the earth fills up, you can essentially heavily restrict reproduction on earth, but let those who wish to reproduce move into the always growing space colonies. Without FTL, we will start running out of room to put people in a few tens of millions of years, but that’s far enough off that we can worry about it then.
Retirement would be obsolete. Currently, it is not just that you have worked for 50 years and need a break, it is also that your body is getting worn down, and cannot handle the stress of working as well as it used to. The idea of working into your 70’s or 80’s sucks, not because it’s working for a long time, but that your body will not be in great shape at that point, and work is much more work than for someone younger. Get rid of the effects of aging, and you may be in your 100’s, but your body is still the way it was in your 20’s (or at a better time, if you prefer).
I also assume that manual labor would be obsolete, or relegated to a hobby, so it is not like you are going to be ditches for hundreds of years either. The costs of maintaining a decent and dignified lifestyle should be cheap enough that it can be provided by the automated processes, so most people would only “work” if they wanted to, while most used their time to accommodate personal desires. If you wanted to take a century off and try your hand at painting or musical composition, or reading the wheel of time novels (though the latter may need a bit more than a century to accomplish), you can. Spend the next century or two working on FTL or time travel, you probably won’t make any breakthroughs, but if you enjoy the process, and maybe contribute a bit to humanity’s knowledge, then it’s worth it.
The only question I have is how well the brain will cope with such lifespans, but that is something that can probably be addressed as it comes due. As I know many people in their 90’s who still have very sharp intellects and memories, age does not necessarily mean a decline in mental function, but extreme age, if your brain is literally full of memories and cannot make more, may make it more complicated.
Depends on the culture you live in. Some choose only 1 or 2, some choose to pump out as many as possible. (I’ll just link to the google search for this since so many of the hits are worth reading.)
I don’t see that this particularly detracts from my point.
Birth rates are dropping worldwide while life expectancy increases. In the developed world it’s vanishingly rare for a family to shoot for as many children as they’re physically able to have.
If you’re concerned that a movement like quiverfull will eventually outnumber us and overrun the earth, well, what’s stopping that from happening now?
I’m not “concerned” about it–just pointing out that it happens, and that specific subcultures place a high value on mass production. If those people who believe in popping one out every couple of years gained eternal youth, do you think they would settle for just 25 years or so of clown-carring, or would they continue to do it for hundreds?
(Book recommendation time: The World Inside by Robert Silverberg. Doesn’t touch on immortality but presages quiverfulls nicely.)
No I wouldn’t use it ! I have no interest in seeing what is going to happen to the earth 50 years from now. I would be 120 yo ! :smack: That is way too long for me to live . I think this is an insane idea ! What happen if there is a serious drought ?
People lost their water for few days in a city about 50 miles from my city and they had drive to my city to buy bottled water and this just about wiped out the supply for people in my city . I think will fight over water more than anything else.
I feel one implication of radical life extension would be a major upswing in environmental concerns. People would become a lot less cavalier about long-term environmental damage in they knew they would be living in that long-term future.
A key factor would be, is medical science going to continue to make advancements at a fast enough pace? Because people will continue to accumulate damage. Okay, you have eternally youthful bodies so your joints won’t wear out (no more arthritis!) and your retinas won’t die.
But what about all the minor damage and major damage you acquire from accidents and such? Loss of limbs, spinal cord accidents, blindings, and the like? When people mostly only live for 70 years it’s a problem society can handle. But 800 years after this breakthrough, are we going to have a population where the majority of people have lost two limbs, are blind, deaf, and paralyzed?
Since we basically had to stop having children to avoid drastic overpopulation, we aren’t going to have the needed battalions of healthy young people to assist with caring for them. (Better put lots of research into personal care robots, I guess.)
On a lighter note: Man, are people going to have REALLY faded and blurry tattoos as the centuries pass!