The piece is very concerned with the individual effects of immortality, or extreme longevity, but the first thought that scared me was the cultural effects on our species. I'm already worried about the number of very old people that predominantly govern our countries, but a congress full of 500 year old boomers, now that's material for a horror novel.
For me immortality seems like a recipe for stagnation and inequality rather than dynamism and renewal. Unless individuals suddenly learn to change, to adapt and to give up their old ways (in which case what's really the point of thinking of yourself as immortal or a continuous entity), I think there's a very obvious upside to birth and death.
I think a lot of that come from slowing down and being afraid of change and learning. Presumably if you could live to 500, your cognitive function would be 'peak' for much, much longer. It's unlikely we would do a good job of predicting what that would do to humans and human culture.
SciFi author Ian Banks 's culture series explores a future civilization where people is potentially immortal but in that society it happens that lots of people lives 150 / 200 or 300 years an then they choose self termination.
Another interesting treatment of "immortality" in fiction is the Chasm City/Glitter Band/Yellowstone society from Alastair Reynolds' novels.
Rather than achieving true immortality through some one-off miracle pill a la Golden Age pulps, "immortality" is a sequence of stopgaps - one life-extension therapy gives an individual enough time for science to advance to the point where it comes up with another extension. Rinse and repeat for eternity (or until your nanotech goes crazy and melts you from the inside out, whoops).
The sociological consequences of a system like this, where maintaining your immortality through the pursuit of enough wealth, prestige and tech to get your hands on the hottest new therapies becomes practically a raison d'etre in and of itself, are an interesting contrast to Banks' utopianism. I'd love for us to go Culture, but I'm not holding my breath. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised to see some variation of the therapy-chain thing during my natural lifespan.
There is also the Niven take on cheap immortality where people just become incredibly BORED with life after a few hundreds years, reinventions, and "mid-life" crises. Inevitably they turn to increasingly extreme pursuits as they age and run out of lifestyles to try and an average life expectancy develops organically.
It's interesting to note that he also wrote some about the style of immortality described by Alastair Reynold's and the cheap immortality of his "Known Universe/Ringworld" novels is after that time period in which longevity has become cheap, commoditized, and easily affordable by all.
There was a reddit conversation years ago where some actuaries discussed all-causes mortality for an immortal. If you factored out death by natural causes (cancer, heart, ...) you still ended up with a mean time to death of ~3100 years. That is, all of the possible accidents in life pile up & kill you. For instance, live long enough and you will be struck by lightning — the survivability of which is very low!
Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein. Main character lives over 3000 years and is kept from suiciding by his descendants. He grew bored and tired with life. The love story at the center of the book made me cry.
Eh I assume medical science will be an exponential curve where this chain would only be a thing for the oldest generation that goes through it. I mean 100ish years ago cocaine was a cure all and now we have a protein that can individually identify and replace genes.
Immortal as in reproductively, intellectually and physically functional, or sitting in a nursing home at huge social expense for 50 years immortal?
I think people are more interested in having working joints, no wrinkles, youthful energy and libido, and a full head of hair for an additional 20 years than immortality.
I know some people who have lived past 80 without regretting it, but they invariably share a few basic features: their lives are filled with constructive things to do (even if those things are not always enjoyable), they have an internal purpose or direction, and they take time to enjoy whatever spare moments they can grab.
In particular, I know of one octogenarian who works part-time in the IT field as a mid-level support tech in a large company. He’s the one who sets up systems, replaces broken mice and monitors, and gives printers a good whack upside the chassis when they misbehave. It’s light enough work for him to keep up with the field, but important enough that he feels valued.
And the company loves him. To everyone there he’s their “Opa”, and that’s what makes him jump out of bed every morning.
This article begins with a fallacy based on "life expectancy", which is the expected age at death across all individuals. By far the highest mortality, historically, was under five mortality; life expectancy went up in the 20th century primarily because infants are now less likely to die. If you consider mortality after age 20 there has only been a ~10 year increase in life expectancy.
But then you'll die of hunger or thrust, which isn't a good situation to be in but, it happens now as well. People get trapped in remote, abandoned places only to die of circumstances other than natural causes.
I suppose that the biological immortality that author has talked about, the kind that our future generations will see, will still require all the necessary resources like we do. They'll still get sick and will need medical care sometimes, environment will still affect them, the only thing that will change is the deterioration that our body goes through as we age. I don't know much about the concept but I think it is pretty easy to picture it.
But seriously they aren't aware of death they just act based on evolutionary impulses that in the past made their ancestors not die. A prey creature has zero cognition of its own death.
">they just act based on evolutionary impulses that in the past made their ancestors not die."
That's exactly what we do also.
"> A prey creature has zero cognition of its own death. "
Well, they look scared to me, the simplest explanation is that they feel the same way that us. Why to add anything else to the simplest explanation? In order we can feel superior to them? Sounds like chauvinism to me. Or in order we don't feel guilty when we kill them? Sounds like cowardice to me.
Or put it another way, why I can't say the same thing about you? Maybe you are not aware of your own death, you just act based on evolutionary impulses that in the past made their your ancestors not to die.
...neuroscience? Are you implying that rabbits have the ability to understand the metaphysical concept of death like humans? If so where is your supporting evidence? Death is much more complex than simple things like language or long term planning and rabbits can barely do either.
Humanity is always seeking to define an arbitrary demarcation point between man and animal. The goal posts were moved (again) after we discovered orangutans using prepared tools to fish for termites.
I am baffled as to why people are saying that we are about to allow people to become immortal when we have zero evidence that we cam extend the natural lifespan at all. Today, there is not a single medicine that people can take because it extends lifespans.
I am obviously not counting regular medicine like vaccines and antibiotics etc, they increase our likelihood of reaching the natural lifespan limit but do not extend the limit.
When they can show that some treatment extends the limit from around 120 to something like 150, then come back and talk about immortality. Although even then, there is a big difference between immortality and adding a mere 30 years! Oh, and those extra years had better not be as a bed bound senile in a nursing home. They can better be quality years, otherwise there is no point in bothering.
> Today, there is not a single medicine that people can take because it extends lifespans.
Metformin. Originally used to treat diabetes, we’ve slowly begun to realize that the users of it tend to live longer than non-users. There are some studies running now to determine if it’s effective, but there are already people taking it daily to try and live longer.
You have to completely solve the population explosion issue before anyone who is likely to write about it, will be immortal.
Since that issue seems likely to exist for the next 50 years, I doubt anyone alive today will be immortal, or if they are it'll be maybe limited to zuckerberg - I can't think of anyone else young enough and rich enough to benefit from it.
Thing is its not like most medical procedures stay inaccessible for that long once they're proven to work. Maybe zuck would be fortuitous if he was on his deathbed and something came out, but give anything a few years and it'll be available to the masses. And that hopefully will become more true with time.
In order to be truly immortal one needs to be indestructible. The chance to die in an accident essentially limits the average human life span to around 200 years.
(Ironically, indestructibility, on the other hand, can lead to situations that are worse than death.)
For me immortality seems like a recipe for stagnation and inequality rather than dynamism and renewal. Unless individuals suddenly learn to change, to adapt and to give up their old ways (in which case what's really the point of thinking of yourself as immortal or a continuous entity), I think there's a very obvious upside to birth and death.