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The Ethics of Life Extension
buggieboy writes "The President's Council on Bioethics
met this month to discuss Age-Retardation: Scientific Possibilities and moral challenges. The consensus was that "aging is a natural part of the life cycle, not a disease." Think Social Security was discussed?" Bruce Sterling's book Holy Fire is a good look at this issue if you find it interesting.
You will have an average lifespan until proven rich...
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Good God, what dumbasses. Overpopulation isn't a problem in any western developed country. They're the ones who would use this.
Besides, if it ever got to that point, child limitation would be a better option than life limitation.
Lots of things are natural. Doesn't mean they're any good. Anybody who wants to live natural can ditch agriculture and go back to hunting and scavenging.
I saw a good lecture on this once with multiple sides of the argument being presented. The best question a critic presented, IHMO, was how long is long enough? Twice the current life span? Three times? At what point would you be willing to say you've lived long enough? If you look at the elderly how many seem overwelmed by the speed the world makes changes? I've got a grandmother who uses a little e-mail but no matter how many times I explain it to her and show it to her she never really understands it, she just memorizes the mechanics. If human learning and the capacity to retain new concepts has a finite limit how could you reasonably expect to have any quality of life once the world has left you decades or centuries behind?
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
Sure, life extension is unnatural. So is insulin, open heart surgery, cooked food, anti-stroke drugs, central heating/cooling, canned foods, automobiles, plumbing, farming, herding, manufacturing...
In short, look around you. Its all unnatural. Unless you are a pre-fire hunter gatherer that does not wear clothing or use tools, your life in altered by technology.
As for overpopulation, yep, technology already caused that. Guess how many pre-fire non-tool using hunter gatherers the world can support? Nowhere near six billion.
In short, these are idiots, nothing more.
Every animal in the animal kingdom generally gets killed occasionally. Take a mouse. A mouse is small and crunchy to cats. Cats predate mice, so the chances of a mouse surviving say, a year and half is low.
Therefore from the mouse genes point of view is it better to spend most of the energy of a nut it just ate on repair or reproduction?
Clearly if chances are the mouse is dead anyway after a year and half anyway, and so won't reproduce after that time, then it is better to use most of the nut on reproduction. So mice reproduce fairly rapidly and die young.
In contrast, tortoises which are very well protected live for centuries. Birds, for their size, are also very long lived- this appears to be because they can escape most danger by flying away. Incidentally, flying squirrels live much longer than normal squirrels, elephants live a long while, cats live much longer than dogs etc. etc.
Now humans have sort of outgrown all this stuff- we are really, really good at protecting ourselves- even risks as low as 1 in million upset lots of people- "my kid just ate an Alar infested apple- he could die!"; and currently if it weren't for old age we would all live to be about 400 years old; until we had a car accident or died of flu or something.
Our genes just simply haven't had a chance to adapt yet. So we die 'early'.
If nothing is done then the longer lived members of our society- those that look better ('younger') for longer will have more children, because they have more time to do it; and their genes will eventually spread through the human population; and life expectency will go up. But this will take hundreds or thousands of generations.
I say we should help nature along; the current situation sucks.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Don't be so quick to call people idiots just because you fail to grasp the fundimentals of the arguement.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
I think the most ethical way of handling this is to allow research into expanding lifespans of people, but to also not force that "extra life" onto people if they do not desire to have it.
I believe that if a person honestly believes that they don't want to continue this temporal existance, then it is their decision. (Of course, this excludes people who do it on a whim or have serious psychological problems.)
~ kjrose
If people live longer, approaching forever, they will be MORE worried about the various things that can snuff out life. Crime rates will drop dramatically due to longer lived criminals (imagine spending "life" in jail when that means 500+ years!) and a stronger stance by the governments on stopping violent crime. Overcrowding, if it is really possible to overcrowd the Earth, will just give people a REASON to go and explore space. Signifigantly longer life is a very very good thing for humanity in the long run.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Wow, they really jump to some strange conclusions. For example the report states that longer lives will delay new generations rising to leadership, and therefore delay new ideas and will slow innovation. As if old people can't have new ideas...
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Human aging is almost certainly such a problem.
An adult human is composed of roughly ten trillion cells. A self repairing organism (one in which cells replace themselves) running around in an environment full of mutagenic agents, is in constant danger that one of those cells will be damaged in such a way that it just keeps dividing. In principle, nearly all of those ten trillion cells can initiate a deadly tumor at any moment.
The most probable reason that cancer is so terribly rare in the young is that the great bulk of our cells have a failsafe mechanism built in. They can only divide a finite number of times before they "arrest" and stop dividing. Runaway cell lines only get so big before they stop growing. There is no reason that cell division needs to be limited other than as a tumor failsafe. Its an evolutionary adaptation. A long lived, highly complex, self repairing, ten trillion cell organism would not be possible without it. But it limits the amount of repair you can do in a lifetime. That's why we age.
further, it is becoming clear that natural selection has balanced tumor risks, with repair concerns and extended our maximum longevity as much as we can hope for. You can cure cancer, if you are willing to age at a high rate. You can cure aging, and degenerate into a mass of tumors. But the idea that we are going to have to worry about the social implications of doubling human lifespans is laughably premature.
Want to know more. Check out this paper on the subject. Or visit Telomere.org
In my opinion this is the most serious problem with life extension.
In physics it is generally termed "to stop working hard". When an old physicist stops being productive, reading up on all the current research, and starts talking about history, what should be done, what should be more funded, etc. If you've hung out at physics departments for any length of time you will find such people. They never retire, never leave, are always going to the talks, sharing knowledge of ancient unsolved problems (no progress in 30 years LOL).
Sure, it is great to have them around, but imagine if we lived to 300 years, but everyone stopped working hard around 60. Right now we work hard for 40 years and relax for the last 10-30, thus the majority still work hard. If we lived to 300, virtually all the faculty would be in the old, relaxed, historical stage. Remember you can't fire them they have tenure.
It is a full time job keeping up with new papers and discoveries in physics. Sure some older people do it. Paul Erdos (perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of all time) did it until the day he died...but he also took stimulents see his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. Exceptional in many ways, asking everyone to be Erods is not going to work on many levels.
Now in private industry, you can fire them and I think this would motivate people to keep up their skills, but honestly, what job could you do for, say 200 years without getting in a rut, ceasing to learn, and pining for the days when you used to program an IBM 360? Know any older programmers?
We already have a problem with discrimination against people who are 50. (Know any programmers in their 50's looking for work? Even at the height of the tech boom? I do and I did - very difficult for them). Think how far worse the problem would be at 300.
You might counter, but with new (drugs/gene theropy/ whatever) people will feel young, they will be physically healther, but I know physicists who are physically fine, but unable to keep up with all the burdons of research for even the 40 year career required of them now. To think of, say 140 or 240 year careers in physics seems outside the relm of possibility. What are these people going to do? Retire and burdon a tiny working class? Work and suppress the ideas of the younger people? This is already a serious problem.
Perhaps programming is not as intense as physics research (I think they are probably equally challenging) so more people can do good work for longer times, but how many? And how long? I'm sure the general youth and libretarian bent of the slashdot community will think they can hack forever. Perhaps you can. I don't know tons of hackers - in fact old hackers must be kind of rare. Perhaps hackers are so well compensated that they won't worry about money but in physics we are not well compensated. I know tons of physicists. Very few are productive past the age of 50 and most have very few new ideas after about 30.
In many fields technology changes quite rapidly and people have a hard time changing the way things are done. Imagine having to teach UNIX shell basics to someone who has been using windows for, not just 5 years but 50 or 100 years?
Such longevity is a recipe for stagnation.
Sure, America has plenty of resources. We could support people working 30 hour weeks or retiring at 50, but right now we have trouble tossing some food to starving people - I think we are a long ways from the kind of society needed to handle that level of stagnation.
And this gets to the central issue. Aging technology, if adopted, would destroy any retirement system such as social security or my retirement plan which pays out forever. And if a vast number of people have great difficulty working past a certain age (which is my contention) they will have to retire, take worse jobs, or stop taking the medication and simply die. Unless we become some kind of ultra socialist contry - which we are no where near doing. An
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?