Thomas Malthus called and he says to get off his grass. Seriously, you are spouting the same old same old we’ve been hearing for centuries, and, it’s just wrong. People haven’t stopped fucking NOW, yet populations are going down. It’s not widely known to the public, but there is this new thing called ‘birth control’, and it’s available even outside of the US I hear.
Even if everyone lives who currently dies right now, today, and even if birthrates stay the same…both of which are ridiculous assumptions that have no basis in fact…it will STILL take more than 2 decades to double the current population. They are, right now, projecting the population will peak at 11 billion around 2100. Do the math yourself with respect to 50 million people who die a year (again, this is a ridiculous assumption but just to show you the math doesn’t work even then) and figure out how long it would be to get to 16 billion.
Except it does. 50 million people die a year. It takes 160 years for that figure to accumulate 8 billion. And this assumes that NO ONE DIES DURING THAT TIME. Now, obviously, population also increases…so you have to factor that in too. That figure is 130 million. So, make that 180 million…current population increase plus no one dies. That is 61 years. The obvious flaw with this calculation is it assumes no one dies. But it ALSO shows that your 2 decades are just wrong.
And, of course, the reality is population rates are already in decline. The number of children per woman is already lowering. If you factor that in, I doubt we will ever get to 16 billion, certainly not in 20 or even 100 years. The reality is that the same dynamic that is driving down population (i.e. just the basic fact that people don’t need to have 8 kids to ensure 4 survive to work the farm) will accelerate when people are living longer. Prosperity too is what’s driving down those figures.
Like I said, your thinking on this is just old and outdated. The real reason we have even the increase today is really due to the gap between when technologies became wide spread for healthcare, especially those affecting infant mortality, and when the realization of that started to impact people’s expectations on how many kinds they needed or should have. Once they figured out they didn’t need as many kids, they basically stopped having so many, especially since they can in fact choose. All we have now is momentum and a few countries that still haven’t caught up to the norm…and even that is declining as prosperity and availability of contraceptives increase.
This is very complicated - more than I’d figured - but some back-of-the-envelope spreadsheet work shows a human population of, as XT says, about 11B by 20 based on a leveling off of current trends.
Existing trends, and discounting deaths by age -and affiliated causes brought on by age such as dementia and other such thing (which I admit introduces a LOT of noise in the signal) shows extending lifespan leading to a human population of about 17B by 2054. That assumes current growth rates maintain (roughly a 1.018% growth per year as currently shown).
So that’s something. It’s not that the rate of birth would decline. It’s that the rate of death would decline significantly.
I’m not sure many people would even want to extend their years beyond a certain number - i.e., 100 - unless somehow quality and happiness of life soared to such a high level that you just never got tired of living, and society were a much happier place.
Already, at age 60-80, you have so many elderly people in this world saying they are jaded and weary of living. If this hypothetical science-fiction world were as bad as ours, the years of life from 90-300 wouldn’t be much fun at all.
No, it wont. Do you seriously think that we are going to let that many peopie in with the current migrant crisis, and postulating that its going to get worse
Its marketing, we give them the birth control and tell em its the longevity drug. Let the usual suspects steal the IP and have them sell it for pennies on the dollar.
On the flip side, most people like some variety. I think it would be incredibly common to have 6-12 careers (as we think of them now) in largely-unrelated fields.
In addition, I think that some, maybe a lot, of people would go back to college every 30 or 40 years to get another degree.
Agreed.
I was mostly just arguing against the point that older people would find it hard to find work.
People 50+ right now often find it hard to change jobs because potential employers think they may have health or fitness problems, might in some cases be slow to learn new skills and, depending on the company pension scheme, might be a financial liability for much longer than they actually worked for.
But in the OP, all of this is more or less blown away, because the OP said such people would keep the physical and mental faculties of someone in their roughly 40s for their extended lifespan. In that scenario, there’s not really a downside to employing someone who is 150 say, but their additional experience is definitely an upside.
The reason women run out of eggs is that the eggs age. If your elixir of vitality or whatever stops that, women would still have plenty of ova.
You could stipulate that menopause is kind of a secondary adolescence for women, so your elixir doesn’t affect it (which would significantly reduce the proportion of women’s lives when they can get pregnant without wanting to do so); but you’d still have to contend with freezing eggs. Even today, it’s not uncommon for women to want to “keep their options open.” I think harvesting and freezing some of a woman’s eggs at puberty (maybe even at birth) would become almost routine. Better yet, get them all - more selection later and effective birth control right now.
Sex does not inevitably lead to babies. The majority of sex acts performed in this world are for entertainment, not procreation. Granted, if a woman was fertile for 250 years there is more opportunity for birth control failures, but that still means conception will be rare compared to episodes of sex.
Actually, freezing embryos seems to work better than freezing eggs. They do have the added complication that now you have another person involved with the potential kid. Also, whether frozen eggs or frozen sperm or frozen embryos, freezing does not eternally preserve them. Right now the viability of the above notably drops off over decades. If you remove a baby girl’s ovaries at birth (and that’s leaving aside the enormous ethical concerns of consent, surgical risks, long term effects of removing a major source of hormones, and so forth which are not trivial) then she might only have until her late 20’s/early 30’s to use them before they become non-viable… so, what would be the point? Even if you waited until puberty (and still ignored the ethical questions in mandatory spaying of every female human being, never mind the hormonal consequences) that still would limit her procreating options to just a few decades at best.
And why is it always the WOMEN who get surgically sterilized in these scenarios? It is MUCH easier and less risky to freeze sperm long term, and MUCH easier and less risky to remove a man’s testicles than a woman’s ovaries. There are cosmetic implants to remedy the cosmetic changes, and male hormones are just as easily replaced as female ones. So why does no one ever suggest doing this to the men, hmmm?:dubious:
In this hypothetical reality, I suspect very few people would continue to have child after child like the Quiverfull people. People have already been limiting the number of children they have for decades. You didn’t mention whether or not this process also gives amazing regenerative abilities, so I will assume it doesn’t. Aging doesn’t happen, but damage to the body can and does accumulate over time. In which case, repeated pregnancies mean the potential for fertility-limiting damage is still there and will render a portion of women sterile over time.
We might also see a rise in both sexes seeking surgical sterilization either after they have a couple kids or even without kids if, after decades, they decide they don’t want to reproduce.
All of which leads to several other medical questions: does this just “stop aging” at the point the person gets the treatment, or is there some sort of regeneration involved? If you give this treatment to someone already 70 does it just “freeze” them at that point, or does it regenerate them back to what they were at 20?
Does this treatment cause regeneration? If one of the long-lived loses a finger will they regrow it, or is it a permanent loss? Because if there’s no regeneration then surgical sterilization is forever and women are going to lose their fertility by their mid-50’s at the very, very best (oldest natural conception with no medical involvement was at 56 if I recall correctly) even if their bodies keep menstruating simply because they will no longer have fertile ova.
Since you didn’t mention any sort of regeneration I’m going to assume that physical damage will still accumulate over time. Even if arthritis due to aging is no longer a thing arthritis due to injury and illness would still exist, as an example. People will still have accidents leading to amputations. People will still suffer broken backs and broken necks. They’ll get burns requiring skin grafts, disfiguring injuries requiring plastic surgery. They’ll still have autoimmune diseases so there will be lupus and type 1 diabetics, kidney disease and cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease.
What about cancer? Factors involved with cancer include damage over time - your long-lived folks are going to have to worry about skin cancer sooner or later if they spend any time in the sun at all. OK, human lifespans are now 300-350… how common will cancer be around age 280 with all the chemical, radiation, and other sources of damage accumulating over time? No doubt it will vary - some people are more prone to cancer than others, and in the few animal species that can live 200+ years (giant tortoises, and possibly great whales) the very old don’t seem cancer riddled. Of course, it could be the members of those species prone to cancer die young so we just don’t see them in their elderly.
And it seems your long-lived people will still get sick - so some will die of the flu, or ebola, or staph or strep or listeria from bad deli meat or* E. coli *from romaine lettuce or other outbreaks or flesh-eating bacteria or MRSA.
Then there are problems like criminal assault where you might be shot or stabbed. Which sort of comes under injury, but that’s not exactly an accident. War and terrorist attacks, too.
As previously mentioned, we’d probably see a certain number of suicides in people who tire of living.
Even if lifespans reach 350 that doesn’t mean everyone is going to live that long. In fact, very few might between accidents, disease, and other calamities. It would be a potential to live that long, not a guarantee.
I look forward to huge lifespan increases and massive overpopulation with attendant pollution, resource depletion, and general environmental fuckoverness. That may incite humanity to leave Earth before the next mass extinction event here, and conquer the galaxy. A clean, self-sustaining, nicely-populated planet is a sitting duck for asteroids.
I agree, but I totally didn’t expect to get an objection to birth control. (That’s one of the things I like about the SDMB. It keeps you guessing.)
Anyway, I know you meant this as a rhetorical question, but there is a (non “Men are pigs”) answer in this case. The OP said that people will still be able to procreate but also said women might run out of eggs, so it wasn’t clear to me whether that meant people will still be able to procreate because women will continue to ovulate or if people will still be able to procreate because reproductive technology will continue to improve. For the paragraph in question, I assume the latter - in which case, eggs are the limiting factor. We don’t really have to worry about sperm because men typically make them all day every day almost all their lives. (And by the way, if women continue to ovulate all their lives, freezing eggs will decline in popularity.)
However, I am going to back down a little. I don’t think taking all of a woman’s eggs will ever be popular (not unless science figures out a way to give women the benefits of estrogen without the inconvenience of menstruation), but some eggs even at birth definitely. And I think “routine” was probably too strong a word; I don’t mean to suggest it would be mandatory or even universal, but I would expect it to be fully as popular as IVF.
I’d guess that by the time we have extended lifespans, then fertility and procreation will be managed as well. Most humans might even be born in artificial wombs, or as the result of invitro fertilisation; I’d be quite happy to see male pregnancies as well, although that’s not a condition of the OP.
Maintaining a comfortable level of population would then be a matter of choice. I like to think that we could do that with relative ease, since there would be no hurry to have children, and some people would put it off indefinitely. But some people might instead attempt to max out the number of descendants they produce, and in due course these would start to affect the demographic makeup of the population.
I’ve been thinking a lot about a similar SF scenario and have some thoughts. And yes, I know some of these are fighting the hypothetical.
First, how do you know that your treatment will extend life by that much? You’ve done tests on lab animals, but those are never certain to work the same in humans. Assuming you’ve given it to humans, the best you can say is that it seems to prevent aging in humans and you guess it may extend life that much.
So you release it anyway and people set up clinics to administer it. Despite your claim that its cost is not outrageous, those clinics are going to charge outrageous fees anyway. You can’t stop them. Take a look at all the drugs nowadays that don’t cost that much to produce, but have outrageous prices. And that’s for medicines that may only extend lives by a few years.
And then of course there’s the requirement for this treatment ot get approval from various agencies, i.e. the FDA and equivalents in other countries. I suspect it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get it. I don’t think the FDA even has protocols for testing such treatments. So these clinics will likely be set up in countries that don’t have such difficult bureaucratic hinderance. That’s going to be a real drag to their reputations. And of course, some clinics will be faudulent, which will further degrade their reps.
So the combination of high prices, poor rep, and remote location of clinics will mean that relatively few people will actually get the treatment.
BTW, this scenario reminds me of a real life thing going on right now. Someone came up with a treatment that will extend the telomeres in DNA. It seems to reverse signs of aging in mice but has not been tested in humans. They’re setting up a test on humans in Colombia (thus avoiding the FDA) and charging the subjects of the test $1 million to participate. link
