I think everyone would eventually get bored with life and stop taking the drug, probably 99% would stop within 500 years. A handful of outliers would persist for a millenia or more, but once you’ve mastered every human endeavor what more could you do? If I learn fifty languages, a dozen musical instruments, learn how to paint really really well, become great at writing and all forms of mathematics, visited every country on earth, there’d be nothing left for me.
At a certain point I’d have produced enough paintings and written enough novels to feel that I’ve served my purpose, and I’d want to peacefully bow out.
I’m not so sure about that. With a drug like that, even bored people could be enticed to start over again by going to remote stars, to start civilization from scratch.
What would really become interesting is when enough people earn enough money that they can live off the interest alone the entire notion of a stock market where you can sit back and perpetually collect dividends would neccesarily have to collapse, and there would no longer be any meaningful distinction between “Capitol” and “Labor.”
My personal theory for why old people are so cantankerous is that they know they’re going to die pretty soon, their bodies are falling apart, and a new generation is taking over. Immortals won’t embody the current cliché of the old man shouting “Get off my lawn!” to youngsters.
If retirement ceases to exist, it would also remove the government’s excuse to take your money so they can give it back when you retire. So you’d have more money, which you could invest yourself. And even if permanent retirement became a privilege limited to the upper class, people could still retire for 20 years on end (or however long it takes for their nest egg to run out), retrain and reenter the workforce.
I’ve thought about this. If I don’t use something for ten years I forget it, so I could re-learn things indefinitely. In terms of traveling, things always change so visiting a place every twenty years or so would kind of be a new experience.
With an extremely long lifespan, returns on investments would be in all likelihood very low. If 20 years appears to be a short time, interest rates for a loan that long will probably be low. You’re paid interests basically for accepting the pain of not being able to spend it soon.
As for learning two dozens of languages, 5 different trades, etc… I’d guess that by the end, you wouldn’t remember how to play this instrument you haven’t used in the last 200 years or what this country you visited when you were a 100 yo youngster looked like.
Anyway, I don’t think you can exhaust all interesting human endeavours, even in 2 000 years. But I suspect that at some point one might not be interested in discovering new things any more.
Once they combine immortality with holodecks and servant androids, you can kiss humanity goodbye. Unless it is only for the rich. Which it probably will be.
That’s not immortality; sheer entropy will do you in eventually. Missed days, accidents, or outright suicide. Assuming the transition of society to an indefinite life span goes smoothly then I suspect most people will enjoy having the average life expectancy measured in centuries rather than years.
Now real immortality where you survive the sun expanding and consuming the earth, floating in the void for the life span of planets while you wait to run into something interesting, experiencing an infinitely long spaghettification within the event horizon of a black hole, or just waiting out the heat death of the universe people might find less pleasant though adjustments would be made. A person can get used to anything after all.
I don’t know if it would be good or bad for the people doing it but it would be bad for society. Society changes mostly because new generations grow up in different conditions and are imprinted differently. Dying is the best service people do in order to favor progress and evolution of society.
Imagine people who were 200 years old today. What would they think of women and blacks having equal rights? The best thing they did was die off and let newer generations take over. Isuues which are contentious today will be normal in a couple of generations. We just need to wait for the older people to die and for younger people to take charge.
Yeah, but I’ll bet you Italy 500 years from now will be quite radically different than it is today, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you find new interests going back to places decades or centuries later?
For me, observation of change is what would keep me interested. Though, if no one is aging, then maybe there will be a lot less change. Who knows.
Yeah, if you want money in an immortal society you have to roll up your sleeves and actually earn it. Sitting back and collecting dividend checks in perpetuity simply couldn’t be a viable option if large percentages of people were doing that as a primary source of income.
We’d have to fundamentally change how we look at the idea of “wealth” in general. In our mortal society, at least in theory a poor person can climb his way to the top, Horatio Alger style. But if the owners of the means of production lived forever, they’d sit on their wealth forever. We’d need some sort of wealth tax to counteract this, or upward mobility would be impossible.
Tricky. Doesn’t Italy go to some effort to preserve its historical image? In fact, aren’t they likely to go to increasingly complicated and expensive steps to maintain that image so tourist don’t show up and say “Hey, this isn’t Italy!” because it doesn’t conform to the romantic stereotypical Italian image they had in mind?
Seems to me any tourist destination has an interest in not changing, even if it means preserving a mere facade of what tourist think the destination should be like. Rather like artists who can’t change their styles because if they vary too wildly from their earlier work, they lose all their fans who keep insisting the artist replay his successes.
I wouldn’t hesitate to take the frug. I’ve no interest in growing older, and even less in dying. My opinion on the matter may change in a few hundred, or few thousand years, but then I could honestly say I’ve experienced everything I wanted to experience, and leave life willingly, rather than have it taken from me without my permission.
As for social effects… The only way to do it right is to enforce sterilization or mandate limits on childbirth(with stiff, even draconian, penalties for violations). Anything else, and we would see a population boom dwarfing by orders of magnitude anything seen in the past. This would lead to massive overpopulation problems, massive resource problems, and ultimately, massive wars for the scant resources left over from the human locust swarms. To say nothing of the social issues arising from 100,000 years of social evolution suddenly vanishing, as the single most important aspect of society, people dying reliably, is erased. Well, not so much death, but the turnover of new people, something that affects us all at a fundamental level.
Soo… Yeah. An immortality drug would be spectacular for the individual, but in the short/medium term, absolutely disastrous for humanity. There would be a horridly unpleasant period of growing pains before humanity matured enough to accept the new way of life.
