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?"

Comments

population

[mjmalone]

"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?"

I think this is a stupid comment, why would anybody be less likely to risk their life just because of their potential logevity? Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?

I think the more interesting point, and one the article failed to mention, is where are all these people going to live, what are they going to eat, and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement? With the population of earth already increasing rapidly extending lifespans to three times their current level would have a huge impact.

Oh yea! And what's going to happen when we run out of IPs for them all!?

Re:population

[s20451]

Maybe not three hundred. But what if the number were a millon? An immortal being (i.e., one for whom there was no such thing as a natural cause of death) would probably be very risk-averse. Some have claimed that this is the answer to the Fermi paradox, which wonders why evidence of extra-terrestrial life is not everywhere. If alien civilizations discovered immortality first, then why would they risk life and limb in something as reckless as space travel?

Re:population

[Ominous Coward]

Well, I think people would retire later, but also, I think that the actual life expectancy wouldn't grow as much, because health advances will only go so far as to offset the more dangerous things we do to ourselves.

Though fiction, I think Futurama and Transmetropolitan both show pretty well how people will act in the future. Still violent, still stupid, but soon people can be even more careless with their health. Why stop smoking when you can just have the anti-cancer trait?

Transplants might extend our lives a bunch, but brain damage will be the limiting factor. Replacing the brain-cell will do no good, because it won't have the memories of what it replaced. Now if we can do computer back-ups of brains, then we're going somewhere.

Re:population

[realdpk]

Rather than continuing to promote specialization over those 200 years, I'd like to see people branch out in to new fields.

Specialization is one of the top problems with jobs here - we have people who are on unemployment who complain about not being able to find a job in their field, who don't even look outside their field. Unions are also a problem here - they seem to work under the idea that people will have the same jobs their entire lives. 30-40 years is already a long time - 200 years is approaching insanity.

Re:population

[QuantumFTL]

I think this is a stupid comment, why would anybody be less likely to risk their life just because of their potential logevity? Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?

Actually I think it's a valid psychological point. A lot of individuals rationalize their dangerous behaviors in that they are going to "die sometime" anyways. The more you have to lose, the less likely you are to take a risk.

I think the more interesting point, and one the article failed to mention, is where are all these people going to live, what are they going to eat, and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement? With the population of earth already increasing rapidly extending lifespans to three times their current level would have a huge impact.

Those are indeed interesting questions. First of all, the assumption that people would continue to retire in their sixties if their lifespan extended is rather silly. People used to have a life expectancy of 40 years, but we certainly don't stop working at 40 now. Provided the quality of life is high ehough for them to be useful, I know plenty of elderly individuals who'd love to be productive again. Medical technology should allow them to be much more fit, robust, etc by then anyways.

As for where everyone is going to live, have you ever been to Wyoming? There's literally *TONS* of space, we haven't even come close to saturating earth spatially, not to mention skyscrapers will continue to be larger/taller.

As for what they are going to eat... underground farming is a possibility, and it's quite possible with the help of organic synthasizing implants the food intake required by a human could be drastically reduced. Between that and organic recycling technology, there's no reason a household could not eventually be a closed loop system that only required energy input (recycling water/organics). It's what astronauts do already!

As for the growth rate... A lot of developed countries have populations that are barely growing, or are shrinking even. As technology becomes more and more inexpensive and pervasive, developing countries will be able to catch up. Between this and advanced technology (much of which is coming from the space program, of which I am a part) I think a lot of these problems are solvable.

The biggest issue (which you didn't mention) is where are we going to get the energy for all of these people? I mean, there's theoretical power sources that could handle it, but will they be around in time? Controlled fusion perhaps, or maybe giant solar collectors in space... I predict that between biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics and computer science, in a hundred years the only real commodities left will be energy and information (from which anything else can be derived).

Yes there's plenty of interesting problems we will face as we head into the later part of the 21st century, however I am confident there will be equally interesting solutions. 10+ billion people have a way of overcoming difficulties. That is, if we don't kill ourselves first.

Oh yea! And what's going to happen when we run out of IPs for them all!? I'll sell mine on eBay for a ton of money, and stop wasting my time on slashdot ;)

Re:population

[Transcendent]

Rather than continuing to promote specialization over those 200 years, I'd like to see people branch out in to new fields.

That's the way to go for the working class, but what about the scientists or that make the discoveries that form the back-bone of tomorrows technology in which the engineers design and take to it's limit?

Take specialists from multiple fields with 150+ years of research behind them, have them work together and share ideas freely... just imagine the type of genious that would be it's output.

I myself wouldn't want to be stuck in the same job for over 200+ years. My passion is knowledge and would naturally span over as many different type of work and study as I could find.

Another possibility that would arise from that kind of lifespan would be to colonize other planets in our solar system or beyond. I'd gladly spend 50 years on a ship (not those little capsules... I gotta live there, ya know) to help out in setteling around a neighboring star.

Re:population

[peretzpup]

You know, this sort of life extension might actually significantly retard scientific progress. The dying off of the 'old guard' is often a precondition for the widespread propagation of genuinely new ideas.

Sci Fi covered it first?

[umrgregg]

There are some great SciFi books/series that deal with extended life-spans and the societal issues that arise from such an issue. The first that come to mind are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series (humans use genetic massaging to prolong their lifespan; initially for the rich) and Larry Niven's Ringworld series (an alien race in the series has extremely long life spans and therefore everything is built for caution). Aside from being excellent books, they offer some insight to the topics in the article, and some ways we should avoid (Robinson) handling or handle (Niven) if the situation arises.

yeah... not?

[digitalsushi]

if you could pop a pill that would make you never die from something biological, the *average* age you would live to be is about 600, after you calculate in train wrecks, falling down stairs, car crashes, and well, anywhere you can kill yourself mechanically or chemically. Given that's the average, that means some lucky 10 percent would be seeing more like 6000 years, and some unlucky folks getting their 60, or worse, 6! I really wish I had a source for that number, but if it is indeed roughly corect, then someone can just do whatever math is required to decide for themselves. Sorry I dont have a link...

Not quite forever...

[useosx]

I read somewhere that statistically the maxiumum you can live is around 500 years. Eventually, no matter how hard you try, you will get hit by a train. On a side note, a friend of mine once stayed at a clinic somewhere for some tests, and the only rooms they had left were suicide-proof. He said there were no edges anywhere and other weird stuff. So maybe if you lived in one of those, buried in the ground somewhere, you could make it to 600 years.

suicide parlours

[macho]

the kurt vonnegut story "welcome to the monkey house" dealt with this. five generations were living in the same house waiting for each other to die so they could have their own room. the government offered free "voluntary suicide services" on every street corner where you could get a lethal injection from a pretty lady. worth checking out.

Longevity and Responsibility

[under_score]

Living to a very old age has serious economic consequences. Just as an example... People could live long enough to amass extraordinarily large fortunes even with extremely conservative investment strategies. The rich who will be able to afford this sort of longevity will become much richer.

There are also serious social or moral consequences. How many generations distant does an offspring need to be before it is "okay" to procreate? Normally, grand parents are too old (decrepit) for this to even be an issue. When great-grandparents are still physically vigorous, is a descendant who only shares 1/8 genetic material "removed" enough for this to be okay?

If lots of people start living to a very much extended age, then population growth will become a very serious problem!

Of course, there are substantial potential benefits: the ability to pursue projects of extremely long duration becomes easier (for example space exploration, long-term experiments, businesses with very long-term returns, mastering vast bodies of knowledge, etc). Less obvious is the possibility of improved social integration of humanity since people will travel much more in a given lifetime, and since life will become more "valuable".

Personally, I think it would be cool to live much longer than my currently expected life-span of 70 or 80 years. However, once everyone is living to 600 years, it won't be "cool" anymore. What will we wish for then?

We won't be around in 2100...or will we?

[jstultz]

"Our life expectancy will be in the region of 5,000 years" in rich countries in the year 2100, predicts Aubrey de Grey, a scholar at Cambridge University. (This is, of course, a great prediction to make because none of us will be around in 2100 to mock him if he's wrong.)

Not necessarily...if one assumes that life expectancy will continually increase, for those of us living *now*, our *actual* life span will be longer than our current projected life span. Say you were born in 1970, and the current life expectancy is 80 years old...theoretically you'll live until 2050. But then in 2040, say the life expectancy has changed to, say, 120 years...it might not mean that you would then necessarily live until 2090, but since it changed, you would at least live longer.

So maybe, just maybe, we WILL be around in 2100 to see if he's right. And then, all of this begs the question, what happens when life expenctancy starts to increase at a faster rate than time passes? That is, life expectancy increases consistently each year by more than 1 year. Wouldn't it be then, in fact, that immortality is achieved? When the rate of change of life expectancy is >1, not when the actual life expectancy is infinite?

Then there's the problem of overpopulation....where do we put all of these people that refuse to die? Hopefully we will have established colonies off-earth by then.

Hopefully at least some of this has been partially understandable.

Exposes the need to index the retirement age...

[GPS Pilot]

Back when FDR first instituted Social Security, average life expectancy was approximately 58. The retirement age, of course, was 65 -- or 112% of average life expectancy. Think about it... the average worker didn't live long enough to collect a dime of SS retirement benefits. No wonder the SS payroll tax was low then, and SS appeared to be a sustainable system, not a pyramid scheme.

If a retirement age 112% of life expectancy was fair then, why wouldn't it be fair today? If that were true today, we'd have no fears of the system becoming insolvent when the baby boomers retire. And I think society would be a lot better off if there was an expectation that people would continue to be productive past the average life expectancy.

Yeah, the retirement age was recently raised to 68... big whoop. That's much too little too late to address the root cause of the problem. Hope to God the government doesn't get its mitts on my IRA ad 401k, or I'll really be screwed!

Emotional impact?

[delcielo]

I wonder about the emotional effects of this "truth". If you remove deaths from things biological, that means every death will be the result of some tragedy. All would know that their death will be violent, or at least sudden (relatively anyhow, rather than expecting it for the ten years leading up to it.)

Also, it's hard enough to lose a loved one after 30/40/50/60 years, what will be the emotional impact of losing your wife of 200 years, or of losing your brother at age 500.

Will we even want to live that long? I'm not sure I would. I'm already dreaming of retirement, and I'm only 34. I'd imagine that I'd get tired of the daily grind at some point and just shoot myself, wrecking my wife of 300 years.

If these changes happened slowly (and I mean at an evolutionary pace) we might be able to deal with it; but I'm not sure we'd find longevity to be all it's cracked up to be if it was just handed to us.

Re:The Death of Science

[thasmudyan]

Immortality can be counted on bringing about the stagnation of most aspects of society. I mean now, things change as those who are invested in the way things are die off, but when they can't be counted on dying off, progress must happen rather more slowly.

I think thats just plain wrong. What you are talking about is applicable to evolutionary processes, which are beyond the scope of human history anyway.

No. Imagine everyone gets really much more time to study, to learn, to invent new things. Would that be the age of stagnation?

Today, you have a down time of ~20 years before a human being can contribute to society. That's because that time has to be spent to learn even the *basics* required for most of the things we would call contribution to society.

After that follows a period of 30-40 years in which "contribution" is constantly declining due to health degradation, after that time you typically just idly wait to die.

Doesn't sound very efficient anyway, even discounting the emotional bias I have because I don't want to end my existence just yet.

We're at a point in our development were our world is so sophisticated, it is mostly not driven forth by sheer random creativity (the only domain where the young dominate, because they don't have learned proper error correction yet) instead its hard work, study, knowledge and self-improvement that drives us to achieve.

Remember that saying, about that just when you finally figured out life, it's too late to actually live? That's because the development of our mind is now seperated from the purely evolutionary processes, instead of advancing numbers or genes we now strive to advance ourselves individually. And the saying is true because 30-40 active years are not enough to fulfill our desire to live.

I think with "immortality", even casting aside the assumption of improved progress that I described, you have a concept that dominates the dreams of most people in some or the other way. Religion, if you think about it, is the ultimate denial of mortality! Most of us just want to have more time to figure it all out!

There is no progress gained by dying. Dying is essential for genetic evolution, not for human progress. If you actually would die now, nothing would be gained - but unspeakably valuable things would be lost forever.