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OpEd Piece on Extended Life Expectancy
daksis writes "CNN has posted an OpEd piece from the New York Times that raises some interesting issues. With the current advances in biology, we as a society are facing the real possibility that "immortality" could some day be the norm. What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?"
and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement?
No one... that's why they're not going to retire for 240 years, but work for at least 200.
Imagine the type of skilled labor you could obtain over 200 years... More and more people will become highly (and i mean highly) trained specialists in whatever they do. This would allow for ever-increasing advanced in science, medecine, and technology which would appear to "boom" in the first century of this kind of "immortality".
I, for one, would love to see this kind of thing happen.
Perpetual Copyrights. Life of the Artist/Author plus 969 years, once the Methuselah Copyright Extension Act is passed.
Imagine the type of skilled labor you could obtain over 200 years... More and more people will become highly (and i mean highly) trained specialists in whatever they do.
There's the optimist! And here I am worried that my specializations won't be relevant five years from now... =)
Looking at the posts that come before my own, it seems that there is a basic assumption that there would be a 'forever young' situation: no aging and always in your 20s or 30s. Is this necessarily the case?
Look at those -now- that have lived to be over 100. Their quality of life is piss poor. As a matter of fact, most people's quality of life past 70 is pretty bad compared to their half century younger versions of themselves or quarter century younger versions, for that matter. That's just their physical health. Then shall we, the /. community, start discussing how many seniors begin losing their minds to alzheimers, senility, etc.?
If it means living forever, but being an invalid the whole time, um, forgive me, but count me out. The winter of my life will hopefully be blessedly short and my mind intact through it all as it stands. If they come up with UberYoung Disney Magic Drug(tm), then, maybe, if they have the comparable medical regeneration, we'll talk about immortality.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
"Would one dare do anything so risky as carouse, drive a car, hit the ski slopes, if three hundred years of life would be thereby imperiled?
Or better yet, would anyone wage war? Would anyone commit terrorist acts?
If you think about it, the people who take the most big risks are usually teenagers. The people with the most life ahead of them. This isn't a big deal, I don't think.
no thanks
As I have matured, I have found that I have developed greater wisdom than I had before. I know I'll be in my 50's before I have developed the finesse that is necessary for some situations.
Imagine if you had people with many decades of practical experience who were also energetic and very healthy. Society would continue to benefit from their experience for a much longer time. People sometimes think of the elderly as being a burden or drain on society, because their health fades, limiting their "usefulness". Imagine if the elderly had the health of 30 year olds, could continue to contribute massively to society, and even had the time in their lives to have more than one 40-year career.
And wouldn't you like to be 60 years old and retired and still have "your whole life ahead of you"? You could go back to college and do something entirely new. And although you won't be QUITE as mentally agile as you were when you were thirty, the medical technology necessary to keep you alive for 300 years would likely make you mentally fit for most of that lifespan.
On the other hand:
It is often the case that certain social, cultural, or scientific advancements are made only when the those who held to the old ideas had died off. That is to say, it took a generation for the transition to be made.
Relativity, Quantum Electrodynamics, Evolutionary Theory, voting for women and minorities, acceptance of homosexuals, many things that we now consider to be basic civil rights, etc. All of these things required that one (or more) generation pass on so that the next generation, unencumbered by preconceived notions, could continue to advance.
Since we are young, we are ingrained with certain ideas that we find difficult to let go of later in life. I'm only 29, and yet I am finding it difficult to unlearn many habits I learned from my family which I now disagree with. Certain things are hard to change, even when we want them to.
Furthermore, the wisdom one learns earlier in one's life may apply to things about the world which have since changed. For instance, a person who did well in business in the 1950's may fail miserably trying to apply the same ideas to business in the 21st century. Sometimes, it's hard to change your entire way of thinking.
Worst case, we could have people who are 200+ years old holding back scientific and cultural improvements, because they don't like the new ideas of the younger people. If 50% of your population is over 150, then you'll have a lot of political pressure to maintain ideas and norms which are 150 years out of date.
All this being said, I personally would like to live as long as possible. Why? Because I hate the idea of not knowing what happens after I'm gone. I wouldn't care as much how long I live if I could learn what society and technology will be like 1 million years from now. I'm incredibly curious.
Before considering the future, let's have a look at the past.
TIME 100: 1900 vs. Now
In the USA, life expectancy increased 60% from 1900 to 2000. In Italy, 80%. In Japan, 80%. In Mexico, 120%.
We are already living in an age of radical life extension compared to previous generations. A much higher percentage of the population lives to 60, 80, or 100 than used to. And I don't see a lot of people clamoring to roll back life extancy from 75+ years to 45.
75 is a lot better than 45. 120 will be better than 75. And 200 will be better than 120.
- First of all, the birthrate would have to be chopped. Deathrate would have to be equal to the birthrate. The population growth formula cannot stand to have the death factor nulled out. A population that has large growth with little death is a cancer, a danger to the ecosystem.
- As a practical matter, turnover in people is essential to clean out the social arteries. I've grown accustomed to the idea that I should die so that someone younger and less conservative can take over and shake things up.
- A large population of old, conservative property owners will smother the young, who can never catch up with the accumulated wisdom and wealth of people decades or even centuries older than they.
- Space colonization would be essential. Not the piddly planets, but O'Neill structures that can really give the race some room to flex while the whole property/wealth problems rage on Earth.
- Wealth inequities will inevitably create a class of wealthy near-immortals in the short term. Wealth will buy better anti-aging treatments; poverty, nearly none. If you think the not-wealthy can be cranky now, wait until they see the wealthy stay alive indefinitely, while they die. As Heinlein said so long ago in Metheuselah's Children, Death is the Great Democrat, treating all alike. If class or wealth grant exemptions from the Equalizer, there will be hell to pay.
- How's memory going to work, when accumulated experience overwhelms the brains ability to cross-reference it all?
- How will an immortal make a living? They can't be retired. It's financially impossible.
- Will an immortal ever get any respect from the young? I mean, a 35 year old scientist or techie is washed up, according to conventional wisdom. Will the very young be the only people looked to for cultural stimulation, or technical breakthroughs? What will the oldsters do, watch TV for 200 years?
- You'd eventually wind up with a world full of very old people, with a small number of young being born to balance out a very low deathrate. "Conservative" isn't the word for the social atmosphere of such a world. Change would be very, very slow in coming.
- OTOH, If the oldsters can stay biologically young, how will the "really" young (in years) compete with the infinitely smarter pseudoyoung competition?
Just some ideas to throw around.
"Overpopulation" doesn't refer to merely land area. Tho Asimov did some simple calculations once, and showed that every square foot of the Earth would be covered in humans in less than 3000 years. The entire universe, and every atom in it, would be converted at the same present growth rate in humans in about 6000 years, if it were possible to absorb everything, everywhere.
"Overpopulation" is what happens when problems start overwhelming solutions. Problems: disease, starvation, malutrition, species elimination, overgrazing, desertification, water shortages, political panic against the have-nots, atmospheric damage, atmospheric warming, garbage accumulation (HUGE problem), education underfunding, oceanic destruction... All of these problems inevitably trigger wars as people struggle to find a way out that doesn't involve changing their habits, such as using too much oil, too much water, or worst of all, having too many babies. Men on Horseback inevitably convince people that they merely have to attack [insert enemy here] and all will be well.
Nothing expands forever. Cancers try, and they fail. There is always a limit. At the very least, there are always consequences. Best case scenario in the short term is turning the entire planet into a Trantor, just to service the people already living.
The problem is simple arithmetic. Humans hate arithmetic applied to their babies, but it is so anyway. The human race is doubling in size every 35 years or so. This simply cannot happen indefinitely. Let's break it down:
2003 : 6.5 billion.
2038 : 13 billion.
2073 : 26 billion.
2108 : 52 billion.
2143 : 104 billion.
2178 : 208 billion.
2213 : 416 billion.
2248 : 832 billion.
2283 : 1,664 TRILLION.
Keep running the expansion. It soon goes into the quadrillions, then quintillions. In less than 3000 years, give or take a millenium, the sum of all the mass of the human race exceeds the mas of the entire planet. In a few dozen more generation, the mass of the universe is exceeded.
No matter how much you throw tech at the problem, at some point the system will go unstable. The human race cannot keep increasing at the present rate, or even a fraction thereof, without utter breakdown.
I would think that the fundementalist belief that the world will end soon is the crux of people's indifference to the problems we face. A majority of the world believes that God will end the world soon. So why bother?
I'm not kidding. Major long term planning by political leaders, especially in the U.S. is being conducted by men and women who are banking on God ending the world.
For two downloadable examples, check out this moving short story about a week in the life of an immortal. Note how we can still empathize with the losses immortals must have. (And note that unlike this story, immortality is usually just background in Egan's stories (just like contemporary writing doesn't focus on how our average age is 70).) Or for a great read, download or buy Cory Doctorow's novel 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.' Day to day struggles of people who just happen to be in the starting centuries of immortality.
But what really interests me are the motivations of people who hate the idea of immortality or longevity. Now, if these people were like the Amish ("go on ahead with your tech, but we're going to hang out here for a while") that'd be one thing. But George Bush's chief bioethicist is one of them. Geoge Bush's decisions will be made^hhhInfluenced by someone who has been said to think:
Or, as he has been quoted as saying "The finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not."I think that given the opportunity for longevity treatments (antibiotics, heart transplants) he'd take them, saying that the particular treatment isn't terrible (like Bennett on gambling). But meanwhile he causes lots of damage, because as treatments are introduced, you cannot easily separate longevity treatments from quality of life treatments. If Kass thinks one of these (longevity /immortality) is ultimately evil, then he might well be willing to sacrifice the other (q of l) in order to prevent the former. To stop reproductive cloning (because delayed twinning is evil, you know?) we also have to stop theraputic cloning, for example.
Me, I want both longevity and quality of life. Of course I'd like to try for 160, just like a person who could only expect to make 40 would love to try for 80. But if not, I'd love to have a much better time in my last decades. I don't see the necessity or beauty of strokes, dementia, arthritis... I don't see this virtue of suffering that Kass sees, and I doubt that he voluntarily skips anti-suffering treatments as they become available. However, I think he will work hard to delay when they become available. That's scary.
As a thought experiment, imagine a world where all arts- books, symphonies, photos, movies, plays, scuptures- had an average lifespan of 70 years, then they start to crumble away, 99% gone by 100, all gone by 120 years. So all we knew about Murasaki Shikibu, Michelangelo, W. Shakespeare, and Beethoven were that they existed; and jazz fans were already losing Louis Armstrong's works. Imagine people in that world saying "Its great we lose these works: unless they disappear no new works will be created. It is unethical to try to extend these creations to survive to 140 or 500 years..." Humanity survived our average lifespan going from 25 to 40 and 40 to 75: I think we're perfectly capable of working out the logistics of 120 or 160 or 300.