I hope his optimism is unwarranted. While I certainly would have a hard time turning down the opportunity to live longer, I don't think greatly extending peoples lives will be good for the individuals, society or the planet. Life and death is a beautiful cycle; not something to be defeated due an overwhelming fear of death.
You'll have to explain a little harder how the great suffering currently afflicting hundreds of millions of people due to aging is both beautiful and good for them.
Or the hundred thousand people who died from aging in the past 24 hours: was it good for them as individuals? How about their families and companions?
In short, I don't think you've thought your position through particularly carefully.
Children only come into their own after their parents have left the picture, however it is that happens.
Can you imagine being a part of the younger generation when immortality is discovered or extended longevity? Would jobs ever open up, or promotions be available? Nobody will retire at the top, so there will be extremely little turnover. How can the young hope to surpass the old if the old hold all the keys and never let go?
Sure, aging is scary, but have you really thought through all the implications of curing it? Heck, have you even thought about why it exists in the first place? There are many cancer lines that never age, so why haven't organisms evolved that never get old? If you have an answer, I'd love to hear it.
Interesting articles, sure, but I wish you'd addressed societal and generational impact (you can skip overpopulation concerns).
Sure, we age because the world changes, but in case you haven't noticed, the rate of change in the human world is accelerating. It strikes me as a bad idea to bet on trends that are on a collision course by their very nature. Maybe there is a way to reconcile extreme longevity with human society, but if there is, I sure haven't heard it or found it on that website.
Put it this way, I'd like to see human mortality conquered, but I don't want to be alive when it happens. If you think class warfare is a problem now, wait until only the so-called "rich" get to live forever. The others will tear the world apart.
Why would only rich people get to live longer? Advanced technology has tended to get cheaper over time, often dramatically. I'm not saying that things wouldn't be scary and tumultuous for a while, but the alternative is to slowly sicken and decay into oblivion before you've had even a single century of life. This should not be a tough decision!
Advanced technology has tended to get cheaper over
time, often dramatically
That's because as far as technology in the software industry goes, the bottleneck has been our own knowledge.
That's why space travel to inhabitable planets is nothing more than an utopia right now, because for achieving the speed of light we need efficient fuel that can power a space-ship for several years. As far as this problem goes, our knowledge of the universe is not the only bottleneck -- building such a ship will also be freaking expensive in terms of material resources consumed.
You really shouldn't confuse technological advancements in silicon chips manufacturing with anything else. Moore's law is severely limited to a niche ;-)
the alternative is to slowly sicken and decay into
oblivion before you've had even a single century of
life. This should not be a tough decision!
Advocates of immortality are completely oblivious to the social challenges this will bring.
First of all -- nobody will be able to have children anymore, since that will over-populate the planet. It's already happening since humans don't have natural enemies and we live in times of peace.
Yet as a species we feel the need to have children. Personally I would give my life just so my 1 year-old boy could live a happy life. And while it saddens me that one day he too will be dead, I don't want to rob him of one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling purposes in life -- that of raising children of his own.
Of course, this is a problem of humanity in general -- we tend to be selfish mother-fuckers.
Personally I think fixing death problems is only a matter of technological progress.
And in general technological problems are much easier than social ones as social problems sometimes do not admit technological fixes ;)
With the problem I outlined above, modifying humans to not feel the need for children would make us much less human than replacing our body parts with pieces made from silicon.
It is easy imagining living a 1000 happy years, but would you experience happiness at all if you were less human? And I am aware that happiness could be faked, but then what incentive would you have for living a good life and accomplishing stuff instead of living like a vegetable, as many drug addicts are doing?
And if you can't be happy, since that's the ultimate goal of everybody, than what's the point to all this?
In my humble opinion, cheating death is the easy part.
modifying humans to not feel the need for children would make us much less human than replacing our body parts with pieces made from silicon.
It is easy imagining living a 1000 happy years, but would you experience happiness at all if you were less human?
When you rephrase that to: "150,000 people die every day, and you want that to continue because changing the definition of 'human' feels a bit weird" it starts to look like less of a compelling argument.
There are lots of reasons why developing life extension technologies will cause social and economic upheavals and potentially huge ripples, but fear of possible problems is not enough to make me say "well, I'm glad people died to avoid those problems".
And I am aware that happiness could be faked, but then what incentive would you have for living a good life and accomplishing stuff instead of living like a vegetable, as many drug addicts are doing?
Am I a drug addict today? Why would I be more likely to be a drug addict in 100 years?
And if you can't be happy, since that's the ultimate goal of everybody, than what's the point to all this?
Because we can (maybe) and because if we can, it's worse if we don't.
But there are upsides to death -- yes, lots of people die everyday, but death is fair since everybody dies at some point and death also produces renewal, changing the world for the better.
And I'm not saying that we shouldn't fix it. Heck, it may even make us less selfish; we may end up for example actually caring about our planet.
But in order to do that, there are more hard problems to solve first -- tyrants will be the first to achieve longer lives, capitalism will not work anymore, we need won't be able to have children, yes we do sex for fun but we also feel the need to reproduce so doing sex will be a lot less common, we'll have to work for all of our lives as wealth will become static, there will be no more entrepreneurs, whatever brain we'll have will have limited capacity so we'll forget meaningless details like our childhood (the happiest period of life for many people).
Even seemingly simple problems are actually big -- for example, right now death is fair, but what will happen after living 1000 years with your loved one until one day when she'll get hit by a bus? Then it won't be fair anymore and you'll most likely go mad.
And the biggest problem I'm seeing -- once the genie gets out of the bottle, it stays out. People need to at least make an attempt to fix these side-effects before solving death, not after. We cannot then say -- oops, this is was a bad idea, we'll just revert.
I've had family members die. It's painful, but at least you can live with it. And if the problems that I'm thinking about won't get solved first, I'm pretty sure that fixing death is a bad idea.
Yeah, it gets cheaper over time, but there will probably be at least a few years during which the technology will be more like private space travel.
Imagine if the few people who've been able to book passage to the ISS were instead the only ones who could afford immortality. Those are not going to be fun years.
Death can never be defeated - besides accidents and catastrophes, there's always entropy - but life can have some interesting twists if your life extends longer and your mind extends further.
However, I think even a few small changes to mental capacity or an extension of life expectancy beyond 2-3x will make the recipients something other than human. Our brains have many quirks that limit our ability to reason, understand, or act rationally, but those quirks are essential to our humanity and our ability to love. I think for this reason alone, few will elect to have very drastic changes made to their minds or their lives.
