I’ve been batting this idea for a short story around in my head for a couple of days. The premise is that scientists create a drug which completely halts the aging process. For every day you take the medicine, you don’t age. If you decide you do want to age, you can just stop taking the drug. But the drug can’t reverse the aging process. Every day you don’t take the drug is a day you don’t get back. The drug is made from chemicals which are abundant, but these chemicals can only be refined via an extremely expensive and technical process. To make things more straightforward, let’s specify that the drug is not physically addictive, doesn’t have any unpleasant side effects, and the body doesn’t build an immunity to its effects, so there’s never any need to increase the dosage.
If such a drug were to be invented, do you think it would be a blessing or a curse? What do you think would be the social and economic ramifications of such a substance?
I have thought about this before, especially when I read stories that include life extending drugs (like the Honor Harrington series or Larry Niven’s Known Space). I would guess that it would be socially catastrophic, at least in the short term. If it is so expensive that only a minority have access, then you would have a permanent upper class with no turn over and no attrition. The only way to affect social change would be through revolution. Can you picture the world today if the elites from the 1800s were still in charge?
Even if it became universally available, it would lead to chaos in the short term. You would either have to enforce breeding restrictions or have huge population problems within a generation. And again, no one ages, no one needs to retire. Henry Ford would still be in charge of Ford, Stalin would still be in charge of the USSR (and it would still be the USSR, IMHO). Everyone would be pretty much frozen at the job level they have as no one would ever leave the top spots. Eventually society would adapt and find a balance. People would change carreers every half century or so and children would be as rare as hen’s teeth.
The transition to immortality would be much smoother if either a)there was a large scale, long term, war going on or b)humanity had near unlimited room to expand (FTL travel and terraforming technologies available).
The drug is relatively inexpensive because the raw materials used in its manufacture are abundant, so market forces would keep the price reasonably low. On the other hand, the process by which the drug is created is very technical, so it can only be brewed by people with the right equipment and the right expertise. These two factors mean that the drug doesn’t get manufactured on the black market. Of course, that doesn’t preclude profiteers selling placebo’s as though they were the real thing.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that the drug is inexpensive enough that someone on a lower middle class income could afford to buy it every day without giving up too much. I know that’s a bit vague, but I’m deliberately avoiding specifics so as not to strangle discussion.
I consider the human (well, at least this human) lifespan to be way too short. I would take the drug. How many centuries I would take it might change, but I would like to be around several lifetimes. I could give up expensive coffee for this.
It depends; do I get to pick to whom it is offered, or it is out there for everyone?
The first scenario would be perfect. I can’t think of any possible downside to it. If you got bored with life, you could just stop taking the drug. And you wouldn’t be “lonely at the top”, either, since you could always offer it to someone else. I would trade centuries of life in service for a chance to have this drug.
Now on the other hand, if just anyone could take the drug, there would be massive social upheaval, and the entire social and economic system would have to be uprooted and replaced. For one thing, birth control would have to be extremely strictly enforced to keep the population from killing itself.
It would be like the secret of transmuting lead into gold*: A blessing to the one who holds it, if and only if it is kept secret from the world. If it ever gets out, though . . . :eek:
*I mean, of course, profitably; it can be done today through nuclear bombardment, but the process is too expensive to be worthwhile.
In Bruce Sterling’s SF collection Globalhead, there’s a short story called “The Moral Bullet,” set in a future where the invention and distribution of an immortality drug has disrupted society to the point where the average life expectancy is less than 25 years.
Your drug only prevents aging and disease. Some years ago, in some GQ thread, it was established, based on current statistics, that with such a drug, the average lifespan would be some centuries long, IIRC (might have been 300 years, or 1000 years, I don’t remember), since people die from other causes (accidents, murders, suicides, …).
I’ve mused on hypotheticals like this and it seems to me a logical and necessary step would be to require that a woman who wants the drug have at least one child first (and see that child through the nursing process before starting the medication) or agree to sterilization afterward, and men make donations to sperm banks. It’d be a real shame if everybody started popping the pills when they turn 19 (theoretically at the peak of their health and youth) and we find out a few hundred years from now that the medication causes genetic damage and users can’t have healthy children at all. We’d need to have at all times a viable population that has never taken the drug, just in case we discover long-dormant side-effects.
Anyway, if many woman have one child and many have none, the population shouldn’t grow out of control.
Of course, I have no illusions that it’ll be possible to impose these kinds of controls.
You will still have people dieing from sickness and disease (I see nothing saying it will keep you from getting sick), as well as accidents and murders.
I would take it. I would work for 50 years or so, save up money, and retire for 20 years or whatever I can afford. Then go back to work, and start it over.
Another option is to work pretty steddy, but without having to worry about saving up to retire in old age, you may be able to work less hours. Where I work now, I can work 32 hours a week, and keep my health care. I could have 3 days off a week. Make enough to live and put some away for buying bigger items, and not worry about saving for old age.
Retirement might not exist anymore. It’s based on the premises that you’re too old to work, that you’ll die of old age before too much longer, and that the ratio of retirees to working people remains small enough. Perpetual youth would abolish all that. Living on investments would be the exclusive privilege of an upper class.
I wonder just how nasty some people would become, given centuries of personality decline.