What would happen if scientists found a way really to make people immortal–socially, politically, demographically, etc.? Would it bring worldwide revolution? Would world governments get together to ban the technology? Just idly wondering, but I thought this might be fodder for a GD.
I have no idea what would happen, but in a fictional book called Tuck Everlasting, a small group of people finds a way to become immortal. Unfortunately I do not remember who the author was, but you might try reading it if you find at your library.
Unless we start colonizing other planets, Earth would start overpopulating real quick.
State sanctioned birth control (ala China) would have to be
implemented on a global basis, and some of the existing population would have to be culled to make room for the
allowed births.
Criminals, the infirm, ANYBODY deemed a burden to society
would be eliminated.
A bleak life in a harsh world…would you want it to go on
forever?
If I can, Yes.
Of course, some would call me a Masochist.
Interesting question. My knee-jerk response would be that homo sapiens would screw up the whole immortality thing because at this point in our evolution, we’re not equipped to deal with the implications of being immortal. We have nothing in our social, economic, political, or psychological infrastructure to help us figure out how to make an immortal life meaningful and productive.
It’s not just about the fact that Earth’s population will grow beyond the planet’s ability to support us, although that certainly is a valid concern. I think what concerns me more are the psycho-social implications of immortality. Just think about it. If you suddenly find out that you have all the time in the world, just how much productive work would you get accomplished in a reasonable time frame? How would we define “a reasonable time frame?” If humans are immortal, there would be no need for doctors or researchers to find cures for diseases, and of course this bodes ill for our current pharmaceutical-infested economy. What will doctors and researchers do then? Since we’d have power over disease and death, what would be the thing that would challenge us? What would we have to strive for? For those folks who believe in god as this omnipotent and omniscient entity, how do they reconcile their own newfound power to subvert death with religious notions of god and heaven? In politics how do we decide on who will govern us and for how long? How long should a marriage or a jail sentence last? If people can’t die, how do we decide who wins a war? If we’re immortal, what do we do with the high rates of depression, neurosis, and psychosis that will inevitably arise because the old structures we’ve used to define our mortal existence don’t apply anymore. The more I think about this, the more questions it raises. [shudder] I imagine we could find new challenges and new psycho-social paradigms, but it will be REALLY chaotic in the transition period trying to find them.
For some really interesting fictional treatments of this topic, check out Kate Wilhelm’s Welcome Chaos and Sharon Webb’s Earth Song and Ram Song. Sharon Webb’s books are targeted more at a young adult audience, but are still interesting reads. I’m sure that there are plenty more fictionalized treatments of immortality, but they escape me at the moment.
Also look up Robert Sheckley’s book Immortality Delivered (AKA Immortality, Inc.. This was made into an amzingly bad movie called Freejack with Mick Jagger (!) and Anthony Hopkins(!) that actually has nothing to do with the book.
(The catch – achieving immortality requires a lot of effort or a lot of money.)
I vaguely recall reading something in Popular Science that said that according to a survey, something like 30-40% of people would choose to live forever if they could. (I don’t remember the actual number.)
Also, remember that being immune to the effects of aging and disease won’t help at all if you get run over, shot, stabbed, burned, etc.
I’m sort of thinking that to discover immortality at this point in human history might actually end the human race. I think if we were to achieve it now, we are so unprepared for it, and so immature as a species that it might be the catalyst that brings all of our houses of cards down around us (war, political injustices, poverty, xenophobia, etc.)
The way I see it, if discovered now, it would probably be available only to the super-rich and powerful (we are far too stuck in elitist mentalities to do anything else with it). Knowing that the people that we subconsciously blame for all our problems now have this incredible gift that we’re not getting might be the final straw for the teeming billions.
If it were available for every human on Earth, I think it would still be such an upheaval that our current fragile systems would not survive it, either.
I read an interesting SF story (One Million Tomorrows by Bob Shaw) where immortality was discovered, but it affected the genders in different ways:
Women became healthy virile amazons
Men became sterile and somewhat docile.
In the book, this was posited to be due to some fundamental law of nature (boistatic compounds are inimical to androgens or some such).
Of course I realise it’s fiction.
They would abolish retirement and I would be stuck in my job forever… see, Hell, definitions of.
The likelihood of an event happening to any given person can be expressed as a probability; i.e.–What % likelihood of an event over X number of years.
But what most people overlook, is that if you increase X number of years to X+N number of years the probability of a given event goes up.
Even if that event happens to you.
Bad things do happen to good people.
So, if you have X probability of mental illness, or disfigurement, or imprisonment, or betrayal by your most dearly loved friend, or other personal tragedy over the length of one normal human lifespan, the odds of these things happening to you over an immortal (infinite) lifespan…
X is then defined as 100%.
Do you really want that kind of nightmare in your life?
Because, all of those things will happen to you, eventually.
Can you cope with that kind of nightmare?
Wouldn’t the converse hold true as well? You would win the lottery jackpot, you would lay the celebrity of your choice, etc.? Seems to me the ups and downs balance out anway; extending your lifetime indefinitely just means the extremes will get a little more extreme.
As for the OP, I think hell on earth would ensue. But after a while it’d level out. Hopefully before the nukes get set off.
And TJ, Natalie Babbitt wrote “Tuck Everlasting.”
-ellis
I also read a sci-fi story on the subject, of which I can remember neither the title nor the author. But it appeared in OMNI magazine some twenty years ago.
In it, Louis Pasteur developed the elixer of life, and tested it on his son (age 8, IIRC, at any rate, prepubescent). The effect was to make him deathless by stopping his aging process. Of course he also never developed to physical maturity. The world embraced the new drug, and everyone on the planet was soon frozen in time at their current age. It was a time of unprecedeted peace and prosperity. The physical body could still be killed, of course, so everyone became risk-averse, to the point that no one was interested in putting a potentially endless life on the line for the sake of someone else’s political goals. But exploration ceased, as well. No space program. People with all the time in the world became unhurried about starting families. Menstruation continued, however and the primary oocytes in all the women’s ovaries, being finite in supply, ran out. So the birthrate declined to zero. People eventually became so jaded with existence that they would commit suicide just to break up the monotony of immortality. After several thousand years of this, the day came when Pasteur’s son was the only living human left. And he even turned down the aliens when they offered him a flying saucer ride out of there.
But the whole reason to want to win the lottery in the first place is so you can pay someone to do all your chores, so you could concentrate on doing the things that you like doing, isn’t it? And if everyone on the planet is a lottery winner, the going rate for that job is going to be prohibitive even for lottery winners. Anyway, even if we weren’t all winners at the same time, the money would eventually run out (unless you checked the box on your play slip that says “Pay jackpot in increments for 50,000 years” 
).
It seems to me that unless the children born to these people were sterile, the population growth would continue pretty much like it is today (sexually mature people have a baby, the baby becomes sexually mature, it has a baby, and so on). Am I missing something here?
Darn! How could I forget one of the first and best treatments of the problems of immortality in sf?
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – the section on the struldbrugs. Immortality is a bitch, because even if you manage to avoid senility everyone you know dies (only a very few are immortal), the fashions and styles and subjects for discussion change, and eventually the language changes so much that you can’t even talk with people any more.If you can’t change yourself, you become a living fossil.
Figure out a way to move people to other planets fast enough to make a dent in our CURRENT birth-rate, first. Even with orbital elevators and fast, cheap interplanetary travel sending thousands of emigrants elsewhere a day, it wouldn’t help. Colonizing space is a good idea, but not because it will help overpopulation - it’s just a good idea to not have your entire population sharing the same life support system.
Coincidentally, I spent some time last weekend speaking with a man who has spent his career studying the aging process and humans’ attempts to reverse or halt that process. He and his partner have just published a book titled “The Quest for Immortality” which I haven’t read yet, but received from Amazon last week.
Since I just spent some time thinking about this subject, it occurs to me that we sort of need to define “immortality.” Does it simply mean we can live forever with our continually failing bodies? Or does it mean we find a way to stop the aging process so that thost bodies don’t fail? I think only the latter has any potential benefits. Living forever with hardened arteries, no cartilage in you knees, and a constant loss of muscle mass and bone weakening doesn’t sound like a GOOD thing to me.
The fact is, the human body was only designed to last into grandparenthood, for which there are evolutionary benefits. After that point, the faulty human body is simply used up. The only real “immortality” would have to involve a re-designing of that body. The man I spoke with last weekend had created a blueprint of what such a human would look like: re-worked knee joints to replace our crappy ones, larger ears to gather more sound as we lose our hearing, a slightly tilted, forward-leaning posture to help ease the effects of gravity on our spines and organs, the male urethra on the OUTSIDE of the prostate where it belongs. All in all, not a very attractive creature. But maybe the only true immortal that could exist.
Consequently, if you want to live forever, simply walk into your local GNC and ask them if they have anything that will “reverse the aging process.” They will gladly sell you hundreds of dollars of products claiming to do exactly that.
-L
I don’t know about that. I was thinking more along the lines of this: what if scientists learn to “trick” the body into constantly renewing itself? I have heard something about a particular kind of gene called telomeres, which apparently shorten each time that a cell divides and thus provide a built-in biological clock. Question #1: Is it conceivable that such genetic mechanisms could be reconfigured such that a person’s body keeps on operating as if it were twenty years old? A person could still be killed, of course, but barring violence or accidental death, she or she could presumably keep going on forever.
Question #2: OK, so imagine that such a therapy were available, but only at a price. Maybe only 10% of Americans could afford it at the very beginning, but gradually the therapy takes hold throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. Meanwhile, people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa keep on dying. What then?
well, in about 300 billion years, after most stars have gone supernova, i guess a bunch of us would be floating in the great void of space.