You’ve done it. Well done! You’ve come up with a way to extend the average human life. Impacting nothing else in human life - childhood is still roughly 15-20 years, senescence is another 10-15 years - you’ve managed to extend the average lifespan from 70 to 350 years. It simply extends a human’s maturity for several hundred years. People stay looking between 35 and 55 for several hundred years. Nobel prizes await you! Go you!
But…
What is the impact of doing so? The process costs money. Not so much that a middle class first-world person can’t afford it…but it’s not cheap and certainly not free.
Is it better to release this into the world or bury your discovery? What will the impact be, socially and in other ways, to humans, society and the world in general of humans lasting much longer? Is it ethically right to allow this to go forward or is it better to deny it by destroying your notes and hiding in a cave someplace?
If you do release the process, what’s the best way to go about it? Thinking…thinking…
You sit there, with The Washington Post on speeddial, pondering your options…
Whatever the process, it would be fabulously expensive. The super rich/elite would, for all practical purposes, become a separate and very privileged race. The hoi polloi would continue to age normally and die because they simply wouldn’t be able to afford the astronomically high cost of an extended life span. We see that principle in action now with “regular” health care. So many world wide die because they can’t afford the medicine necessary to treat them.
Release it into the world. The secret will get out, or someone else will discover it, so it’s best to get it out there.
Here’s how I’d do it (at least if I take a grand total of 5 minutes to think about it):
Record every little bit of the process so there are no secrets (let’s presume it’s some combination of drugs, nutrients, engineered viruses, etc.). Convince other experts in the field that this is proven to work. Arrange for a press conference with numerous science reporters at several reputable news sources. Explain it to them and release ALL the data to the public. The idea is to make sure that everyone at least has access to the information of this process, even if some of the steps/drugs/etc. are not easy to acquire. The free market will probably make these drugs/etc. much cheaper over time so everyone can get them.
Obviously there could be some negatives to this – overpopulation being the main risk. But I think this would explode interest in all the technologies that could alleviate overpopulation, including settling space and other planets/moons, which would suddenly become much more achievable if we all have lifespans of hundreds of years.
I have thought about this for some time (also with a variant where one gets a infant body and has to regrow, relearn how to use the body, but with full cognition, knowledge and memories). But for the full life extension one I see people becoming increasingly indebted, basically taking out a mortgage on themselves for the next treatment. In that scenario, a retreatment is needed maybe every 20 years or so, or the person will age normally and irreversible till their next treatment.
As for morally, one can look at the Bible, Gen 6, which these long lives caused people to only think of evil all the time. I think this has to do with oppressive rulers who will not be leaving through death anytime soon, who place their people in positions of power to support that leadership. The people are oppressed and truth and information is controlled for the leaders advantage. This is what I believe God saw it good to limit human life to about current limits.
Nuh-uh. I specifically laid out that the process is affordable for middle-class, first-world people. So it won’t be limited to the billionaire class unless you choose to set up the system in such a way as to do so.
I release it, understanding that availability of a good that fundamentally unfair to ration will catalyze the end of pretending “supply and demand” is a fair way to decide what contributions to society deserve the most pay.
Governments are paralyzed by their ties to wealth, but “Fellowships” of more egalitarian people arise, sharing their collective wealth more fairly among their members and “voting with their dollars” to reshape many corporations.
That brings up a really interesting point, and maybe an opportunity – Social Security and other retirement plans shouldn’t apply to those who get these treatments, at least not until they’re ~300 years old (or more, depending on what their new lifespan is). That could probably help the economy a whole lot – no more worries about a retirement/elderly-care crisis, as now people are working for centuries, with that much longer for retirement accounts and such to build up.
Unleashed on today’s world, this process would be cause ruin. We’re already hurtling towards climate disasters that will cause a refugee crisis on a level never seen before. Add in a lack of aging and we’ll soon overpopulate this poor old planet.
We would need mandatory birth control. This will not go over well. I see most futures with the wonder drug leading to major class warfare.
This is it. There will be way too may people to find jobs for. There will be limited openings for the young, probably having to wait until there 30s or 40s to get a real position, and most will be maxed out in their earning potential by what we now call retirement age, they won’t be getting incremental raises for hundreds of years. We’ll have millions of people over the age of 65 trying desperately to hold on to their jobs knowing they can easily by replaced by someone making less. A situation we have now multiplied many times over. Those who can afford to grow extra old will resort to anything to maintain their status.
OTOH, I don’t want to live hundreds of years. If I could restore some youth right now that would be great for a few more years, but I’m getting pretty bored and fed up with life anyway. One thing for sure, the societal hindrances to safe effective suicide will disappear even if only to keep the corpses from piling up on the streets.
There is not a fixed number of jobs, and more fit, mentally acute and image-conscious people means more demand for pretty much every product and service.
Agree with this; incremental earnings will more or less stop being a thing fairly fast.
Disagree. IME many jobs now are highly skilled to the point that you continue improving throughout your career and your previous knowledge and experience is still valued (this is the justification for incremental earnings now). So I’d say it’s the other way round; it may be hard for certain people to get into particular roles when many people in that industry already have 100+ years experience.
In terms of my individual life, yeah after a while working, socializing, sexing etc gets tiresome. But if I could live a few centuries, I would, because I want to see more of what we learn about the universe and what we can achieve.
Certainly it will have impacts. But if the process is affordable to the middle class (or even if it’s not, initially, but if by adding scale it is projected the costs will come down) then I’d say absolutely it should be released to the public (after testing of course). Basically, I don’t see the utility in burying it, unless it’s such a difficult and off the wall process that, literally, no one else would or could ever replicate it. Because if you bury it, someone else will discover it. If it CAN be done, it will be, so there is no point trying to hide that.
Myself, I think most of the issues will work themselves out organically. Things like retirement are going to be seriously impacted, as is our concept of a working life. I don’t think we would be in for a massive overpopulation issue, as folks would still die…they just would age slower. We’ve kind of been through this already, as a species, for the last few hundred years, so this would be an extension of that. Global climate change is going to still be THE elephant in the room, as will resource depletion, so we are going to really start having to push our space exploration and exploitation time tables, as well as our energy production methods.
It’s funny, but this one is less science fiction than it is a matter of ‘coming soon, just not here yet’. I think that extending human (and other animals) lifespans is only a matter of time, especially the rather modest extensions the OP is talking about. If you REALLY want a mind blowing discussion, I’d suggest looking into what changes would happen if fusion ever becomes a reality. :eek:
At any rate, I think this is something that we’ve already been through as a species (i.e. extending human life) and as a society we’ve already seen how it will change our perceptions and our civilization. Look at how birth levels as well as education and wealth have all changed with the simple expedient of better healthcare and nutrition, especially for children. In the past, people had huge families because, frankly, they knew and expected that several of their children wouldn’t make it past 2 years old, and even if they did several more wouldn’t make it into their teens…and several of those might be carried off even after that. If we could, potentially, live to 350 (and live well), that would certainly shift our society, our goals and our civilization. Instead of looking, as I am, to retiring soon, I’d probably be looking at the possibility of taking maybe 10 years off to do other things, and maybe rebooting my career to something completely different (I’ve been doing IT for over 35 years now, so it’s a bit old). I think that would be the norm…people probably spending their 20’s and 30’s ‘finding themselves’ or going to school, then working for 20-30 years, then taking a break, then maybe going through that cycle again, perhaps traveling or just doing something different, then probably back to work for another 20-30 years, then rinse and repeat.
Assuming we get through the next century fairly unscathed with climate change, I think we will be in a pretty good place. Our technology is finally getting to the point where we COULD actually support a technological civilization of folks who live into their hundreds, and probably even move much of the population and industry off the planet, reverting large parts of it back to ‘natural’ (i.e. looks natural but really crafted by humans, which pretty much is what we have today) states
Good thoughts, XT! Becoming a doctor, or a lawyer, might become a hobby like woodwork or gardening is now. I might join and serve a few tours in every branch of the military, just to see what it’s like.
I have to rethink the jobs issue. Besides your point, there are a lot of other competing factors, such as how much the population will grow after considering people who can’t afford a longer life or don’t want one.
Yes, complete biological stability just as now. There may be an issue with women’s ova running out but I haven’t done the research.
I pulled most of this from two authors, Larry Niven and Jack McDevitt (though there’s others). Niven postulates a future where people live hundreds of years and some of them grow bored and take ever greater risks for thrills to stave off boredom until killed by misadventure. McDevitt shows a world - non-human - where death has actually been defeated completely and the ensuing civilization becomes very conservative and risk averse leading to stagnation and even technological regression.
I’d be in favor of eliminating prison life sentences and instead having them on a term-by-term basis (where everyone prisoner is eligible for parole review every year or few years) because it would be truly inhumane to lock someone up for 300 years for a crime.
:dubious: Can you show your math? Basically, today, something like 50 million people die each year. Most of them older, but not all. I put that at 160 years to produce another 8 billion, and this doesn’t even factor in that just because you COULD live to 300 doesn’t mean you will. Also, people who can afford the process (presumably ‘middle class’, whatever that means in terms of buying power) aren’t going to be having hordes of children…in fact, I’d guess just the opposite. The current trend, across the world and across the board is fewer children per woman, and I see no reason that would change except for even more downward pressure on having even fewer children.
We are currently set to peak at around 11 billion people by the end of this century, and then it will be an increasing decline. Some countries are already having major population crunches in fact, and if folks lived longer I think it would simply balance that inevitable decline out.
So people are just going to stop fucking, is that what you’re saying? Sex is a basic biological need, that’s not going to stop, and a lot of that will result in pregnancies. Plus you’ve got these people who think a vagina is a clown car, just push out as many babies as you can. Population will continue to grow, people living past 300 will push that number up exponentially. Even if my estimation of 10-20 years is off, that’s still over population on a massive scale in too short a time.