Because they didn’t want to pursue something that jeopardized their current success: film, film cameras, and film services.
Their mistake was allowing someone else to advance the digital photography state of the art. If they had chosen to mature their own innovation, or had found a way to throttle digital photography in its cradle, they would still be raking in top dollar selling film and processing services.
The question is whether this is strictly relevant to personal immortality. The main way I can see it is if being really old means being really powerful and really ruthless, sufficiently so to stifle innovation that theatens the immortal’s lucrative status quo.
I’m not really sure. The real immortals are corporations (at least, compared to humans), and they already are pretty powerful and ruthless, but the dinosaurs still eventually get overthrown by the hungry sharp-toothed little mammals.
Or might people become ultra-risk averse? The SciFi show “Lexx” touched upon this in the episode “Brigadoom”, which depicted the society of the Brunnen-G as having utterly ossified except for the fewer than a dozen young people on an entire planet.
Yeah, I’m not so much worried about old rich people taking over everything, as we already know how to solve that should it become necessary (Guillotines, and the like).
It’s other things that make me wonder. For the first generation of people with this treatment, they’ll probably behave much like us - get married in their early 20s, have kids, yadda yadda yadda. But what about those kids? They’ll grow up in world where people don’t expect to get old and die. They won’t have that “biological clock” ticking feeling that “I better have kids while I’m young!” We’re already seeing people put off kids longer and longer, and this will just keep getting longer.
What would it be like to grow up in world where you’re one of just a few kids around?
And this gets into the “serial retirement” thing as well. Imagine if almost everyone puts off having kids until they’ve got enough money saved that they can take 20 years off to raise the kids. No kids live in poverty, every kid has stay-at home parents. That might be good, but it might also be very weird.
And thinking about that first generation of kids: they’ll be the first generation in history to know that their parents will never just get old and die, eventually. What does that do to the kids? You thought “Okay, Boomer” was bad? These kids will be Gen Z on steroids.
Not that I particularly think this would happen, but if it did, I’d imagine we’d have “kid communities” rather like the over 55 communities now. Fewer neighborhoods with schools, playgrounds, etc. and people having kids move there, so they still socialize with their peers. Maybe there would be even more societal focus a child’s entire childhood revolving around them and the parents (sadly, especially moms) being expected to prioritize “what’s best for the child” above all else, and have or fulfill no wants of their own for 20 years and be judged very harshly for anything anyone finds a misstep. Or thirty years - really don’t know what to expect in terms of prolonged adolescence. I mean, if you can’t identify actual 25 year olds from 85 year olds visually.
Actually, do you think the general societal deference to elders (where it exists or is strong) would remain, and if so, for how long. I don’t just mean in the more extreme cases where you are supposed to always treat an elder as though they are correct even when they aren’t (a friend in high school who would not disagree with an adult who said brain transplants were then-possible jumps to my mind), but so many of the smaller courtesies that are deemed appropriate (even if people don’t actually do them). Some of those are based on supposed frailty, but other just on seniority. Obviously, too, we have the flipside of age-discrimination against elders (particularly in the job market), but I see that fading within a couple decades.
This is or would be by far the highest-in-demand drug/treatment ever invented. The demand from all corners of humanity - all races, ages, religious, men and women, rich or poor - would be utterly off the charts.
There’s no way it could be kept isolated. No matter how expensive it was, people would find a way to make it cheap. Such a drug or treatment would be in such extreme demand that copyrights or patents would be irrelevant, the secret would be leaked via bribes, death threats, torture or whatnot, you’d have 1,000 different pharmaceutical companies each competing ruthlessly to drive the price down in order to get customers. National governments would get in on the act - there’s no way a nation like China, Russia, etc. doesn’t make getting ahold of this the highest of their national-security aims. You might even see China forcefully applying such treatment to elderly Chinese grannies, granddads against their will in order to make them young 20-year olds again and help out the nation demographically. Every country’s intelligence agencies would be furiously trying to crack the secret if it were still one.
A true Fountain-of-Youth thing would be disseminated globally within a decade or so, IMHO, no matter how much the elites wanted it to be reserved for the few.
The elephant in the room, that doesn’t seem to be discussed much, is the unsustainability of virtual human immortality on the planet. The quality of life of everyone will diminish in the short term. The viability of the biosphere will diminish in the long term.
If people continue to have babies, and those babies live many times a normal lifespan, there’s going to be a major problem with over-population that will go from bad, to worse, to worst case scenario in the not-too-distant future.
There will, of course, be homeostatic effects that come into play to reduce the population as its deleterious effects accumulate to dangerous levels, but the homeostatic effects will be much worse than any perceived benefits mankind gains from extended lifespans. And worse, the homeostatic adjustment may be too little, too late.
Either we quickly get off planet Earth and expand outward, or we stop having babies, or else there’s going to be major problems resulting from human immortality. Unlike an over-population of, for example, rabbits in a habitat with few natural bunny enemies, an overpopulation of humans, with our climate-changing ways, will cascade into a planetary death spiral we can’t recover from—and we’re going to take other [innocent] species down with us.
I anticipate an extinction event that rivals that of the Permian–Triassic extinction. That’s not something to look forward to.
OK, assume it works: it makes your body young again. What about your brain? Eternal onset dementia anyone? I can think of some people I would wish that.
But the pitchforks and guillotines and hanging from streetlamps perspective sounds interesting too. I see a market for cyborg bodies, well armed, fire resistant, bullet proof. Might be cheaper, easier to achieve, and to mantain than the rejuvenated option.
Totally agree. The population would explode as people stopped dying. Then, because of severely diminished resources, a crippled environment, disease, starvation, social strife and, eventually, full scale warfare, people would die in huge droves. Nature always finds a balance.
Then the acquisition of that ingredient would rapidly become the number one focus of human endeavour.
Shit, if you could make me truly 20 years old in every cell of my body again, I’d pay everything I currently have. Why not? I can build it all over again. But then everyone else would want the same. It’d break society as we understand it.
Sure, but that isn’t going to magically make whatever it is … rhinoceros tears or unobtainium … any less rare and expensive. I’m not talking about something where you can just ramp up production or dedicate more farmland to it. I’m talking about something really rare.
It certainly would revolutionize the human condition, to an even greater extent than the Industrial Revolution or the invention of modern medicine. It’s one of four “singularity” technologies I once pointed out that science fiction has at times predicted:
If no one ever grew old or died of old age.
If fast easy matter replication made material wealth almost limitless.
If total automation made work unnecessary except for top-level design and planning.
If people could be physically and mentally engineered to any desired specification.
I like the Babylon 5 (fictional) take on this question: what if an essential ingredient was itself only available by killing and harvesting it from another living human being?
Well, then, how much of the essential product can be produced by harvesting a single individual? If it’s 1-to-1 or less, this is probably a bad deal. If it were 7 billion-to-1, I’m pretty sure we could sort that out.
And hey, would a clone grown without a brain produce the mystery substance? Asking for a friend.
Not to veer off into cafe society, but I have memories of a Sci Fi book bouncing around in my head from a long time ago and I’m not having much luck googling it.
Plot points.
-Rejuvenation technology is available from the government. It costs some large amount of money ($10,000,000 or something).
-You are not allowed to keep any of your assets from one “lifetime” to the next. You have to start from scratch to build up your assets before your next life.
-People of course cheat and hide away assets from one lifetime to the next just in case
-Some other group has recreated the rejuvenation technology, but they don’t have the drugs that make you forget the incredibly traumatizing process
In the story, the inventor of the immortality treatment is a fugitive war criminal scientist. Think Josf Mengele except actually brilliant and escaped capture after his world lost a genocidal conquert war against numerous other worlds.
She’s eventually captured and as a bargaining chip to avoid justice, she offers up her Opus Magnum: immortality.
It’s a poisoned gift:
In the context of the original question, consider this an extreme edge case of factors affecting the availability of immortality.
That’s the sort of bold assertion that scientists love blowing out of the water. With immortality as the stakes, the investment in research to synthesize this stuff would be off the charts. Just because they took the lazy genocidal way out doesn’t mean we’d have to do the same.