If an immortality drug was discovered tomorrow, what would happen?
The drug has the following properties.
[ul]
[li]Cures and immunises the patient against all physical diseases[/li][li]Makes the patient immune to poisons and three times as tolerant of alcohol.[/li][li]Allows the patient to heal from injury at ten times the normal rate.[/li][li]Makes the average person as resistant to injury as the toughest today.[/li][li]Reduces pain from permanent conditions.[/li][li]Slows the aging process to 5% of what’s normal today.[/li][li]Changes the brain to make people more scared of things that are a threat to their life, and less likely to kill themselves.[/li][/ul][
**
Long lasting
/U]**
Scenario 1: The drug is easy to produce, a dose lasts a lifetime, and is unpatented.
Scenario 2: The drug has a 50 year patent internationally held by GlaxoSmithKline, lasts a lifetime and is easy to produce.
Scenario 3: The drug has a 50 year patent internationally held by GlaxoSmithKline, a dose lasts a lifetime, and is difficult to produce from superrare ingredients. (A few thousand doses a year at max capacity).
Scenario 3: The drug has a 50 year patent internationally held by GlaxoSmithKline, a dose lasts a lifetime, and is extremelydifficult to produce from superrare ingredients. (A dozen doses a year at max capacity).
Short lasting.
Scenario 1: The drug is easy to produce, a dose lasts a month, and is unpatented.
Scenario 2: The drug has a 50 year patent internationally held by GlaxoSmithKline, lasts a month and is easy to produce.
Scenario 3: The drug has a 50 year patent internationally held by GlaxoSmithKline, a dose lasts a month, and is difficult to produce from superrare ingredients. (A few million doses a year at max capacity).
Extreme fascism as a tiny group uses the drug and prevents anyone other than key allies to get access to it. A slave class and an immortal class and a facilitator class that hopes to be let in. Basically all the worst things about humanity today amped up the charts.
–Many institutions (the Catholic Church, prominently) endure disliked leaders with the assurance that they’ll eventually die and be replaced with someone more palatable.
–Many people count on an eventual inheritance as their financial stake. Heh, won’t they be disappointed.
–The Supreme Court will be stuck with increasingly ancient judges making binding interpretations of law.
–How many of us are really planning for a long retirement?
–There are too many people whose graves I’m looking forward do dancing on, and I don’t have it in me to shoot them myself.
The “immortal class” wouldn’t be invincible, though. They could still be killed with firearms or explosives, and I imagine there would be quite a lot of that happening if they tried to hoard all of the stuff for themselves.
Social Security would actually become unsustainable and a truly socialist program. I.e.: critics of soc. sec. are not complete crackpots in your fantasy universe.
Also, over-population as people infringed the patents.
Anyhoo, SS would be disbanded. Why would healthy people retire unless they had enough money to support themselves?
Why would people have such a desire to have kids? They wouldn’t need them to support them in their old age. They don’t have to have them within a certain time period as they do now, so there is no reason to make the choice until they want to (and can afford to as there would be no reason for the rest of us to pay for public schools anymore).
The last century of medical advances made acute conditions survivable–and cancer or Alzheimer’s inevitable. This would certainly have even worse consequences undreamt of.
The Saudi royals aren’t invincible either but I don’t see them showing up in the obituaries with violent deaths… Hierarchy is all the bullet proofing one needs in humanity.
Well, many Catholic priests, monks and nuns have sacrificed many potential worldly pleasures because they believed in paradise after death. I doubt the pope or many other clergy would take it, especially if it isn’t availible to all.
I fear you might be right.
Maybe sterilisation will become compulsary for those treated the permanent drug, and multi-year contraceptive implants/injections should be mandatory for people on the monthly drug.
People might be more motivated to kill a tyrant, if they knew violence was the only reliable way to remove them. King Abdullah is 87 years old, his brother’s died at a younger age than he did, it’s likely he only has a few years left in him… now think about what if he had another 90 years in him, half the dissatisfied people in the country would be gunning for him, shesh, Prince Nayef would try to kill him.
the family is a perpetual supply of tyrants, like any royal line, if people are waiting for old age to end it they’re even dumber than I think they are.
In case the drug is easily available: Over population, fall in the study of medical sciences as more and more people would skip the idea of becoming a doctor or any such profession which complements the same, rise in prices (which comes with over population), scarcity of food, housing shortage, reduction in pension years for older people (rise in prices would push them to earn for themselves).
I would think there would be an increase in geratric nurses in the short term, as old people would take over 20X longer to die.
In the mid term, there will be far less children, as people aren’t as worried about passing on their genes and sterilisation might be compulsary. The elderly and infirm would make up a huge proportion of society.
In the long term, the old folk would die off, leaving a world of the young.
The costs of becoming a doctor/surgeon would be a lot lower, as right now, you need to spend a good proportion of your life in training to be a doctor, but when you have many centuries, a decade is nothing. They’ll still be needed for keeping people in top form, rehabilitating the injured, and giving surgery.
You are right about the greater workforce participation of the old, inflation will make being a pensioner a poor poor existance.
One important aspect would be how the drug would affect fertility. Would you be able to choose to have a child at 300? Would you have to do it before you started the treatment? The answers to this would be important to figuring out if it would even be possible for everyone to become immortal without everyone starving.
Sudden availability of immortality (as opposed to life expectancy gradually increasing) would lead to huge social unrest unless we had a huge frontier for expansion. If everyone stopped aging today, no one in power would ever need to retire. Today’s twenty year-olds would be in entry level positions for decades, if not centuries. Eventually, we would find new norms as people would move from career to career over the course of their lives, but there would be a lot of inertia at the top.
I once read something that predicted that if we did not age or get sick, the average life span would be about 1600 years. Just consider how that would change you life planning.
The consequences of an immortality Rx would be overpopulation, and then a search for pan-mortality. And then we would outlaw the immortality drug, much like we’re trying to do with the atomic bomb. (/nuclear weaponry)
This might happen over the course of many thousands of years, assuming we never used atomic weapons to overheat the atmosphere and force a mass exodus to Kepler-22, first.
