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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?"
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
NMG
without even reading the friendly article, I can already accurately predict (based on my education, which is mostly from slashdot):
Sounds like a blast to me.
Oh, wait, forgot... we can argue about BSD dying unto eternity as well (and perhaps Apple too).
Cheers,
Justin
Should we all become immortal, I suspect a lot more people will be using a lot more Viagra.
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
It just gives me more time to subjugate all humans and rule the earth with an iron fist.
Now I have time to watch some TV first.
Best Windows Freeware
Queens University in Belfast did a studying linking your major in college with your life expectancy. Scientists and Engineers live the longest next to pre-med. Sweet.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
But I am planning to insult every person in the Universe.
Assuming that the individual is in decent health and not a 200 year old husk of skin kept alive by machines - I think I know what I would do with immortality:
1. Finally finish Xenogears (which, after over 6 months of playing, I'm still working on. How long is this game, anyway?)
2. Try every possible combination of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans. (Hm - Mint Pineapple Peanut Butter - yup, that sucks. Check off the list. Now lets try Vanilla Chocolate Pepper! No...)
3. Recreate the movie Gone with the Wind frame for frame using my specially trained gerbels. (Once I figure out how little Rett is going to carry Scarlet up the little mouse stairs.)
4. See Sakura Taisen finally ported to English, or barring that, have the universal translator chip implanted into my brain.
5. Watch Neon Genesis Evangelion and have the final episodes of the TV series plus the two movies actually make some sense.
Wahahahaha! Oh, I'm kidding - EVA make sense. My bad.
6. Finally shoot Pac-Man: The Movie.
7. Go to space. With my wife. Close the hatch for some privacy. Get our space freak on to the music of "Thus Spoke Zarathrusta" (the 2001 music) for our own "docking manuevers".
Just some ideas off the top of my head to do with immortaility.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Perpetual Copyrights. Life of the Artist/Author plus 969 years, once the Methuselah Copyright Extension Act is passed.
Because sitting in one place for a million years is really, really boring?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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... =)
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.
I soon predict that the first thing to happen is that people will start avoiding farmer's markets completely.
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
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
Karma: NaN
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?
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Ah yes...as if it's not already hard enough for me to find a new job...
Programmer Wanted. Must have 100+ years experience in object-oriented programming, 50+ years as Senior Developer.
I wonder if they'll start coming up with new levels of experience? Senior Programmer...Guru Programmer...UBER Programmer...God-like Programmer. As if programmers egos weren't big enough...
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.
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.
That's actually been shown to be false, although it used to be believed. Neurons are born throughout life, particularly in certain parts of the brain- there are stem cells in the human brain.
Indeed, indications are that depression is caused by insufficient neurons being produced; antidepressants seems to increase survival of the new nerve cells, as well as raising serotonin levels.
What are you going to do with all those years? Can you seriously imagine what it would be like to work for 200 years, as opposed to 65? That's more tha 3 times the current retirement age!
Well, if you can save up enough money you can live off the interest indefinitely. About a million bucks is in the ballpark.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The first red flag went up when you have this guy saying that inside of a century you'll have people able to live 5,000 years. This article already has the faint odor of that cult that supposedly cloned a human.
Second red flag: Assuming that if you can extend the life of roundworms by six times you can do the same for humans. Bzzzzt.
Third red flag: Sure, our organs may give out. But scientists are now breeding special kinds of pigs that may be able to grow replacement hearts and lungs What, are we cars now? When an organ starts acting flaky we go down to the corner store, buy a new one, open the hood and drop it in? So in order to live however ungodly amount of years they say, we have to piece ourselves together when something goes out? And that's just organs, what about stuff like bones? Something tells me that if you lived 600 years by these guys' terms, it'd be such a hellish existance you would WANT to die.
Here's another Quote of the Day: Consider dogs. DNA tests show that all modern dogs evolved from wolves and were initially bred by cavemen who knew nothing about the genome. Yet the dogs were rapidly transformed into everything from toy poodles to Great Danes. If we begin to reshape our own genetic code, we could presumably achieve even greater variation among our human descendants.
I'm sorry. Homo Sapiens didn't appear until around 130,000 years ago. The first dog species appeared 40 million years ago. Modern dogs as we know them are evolved from a species that appeared 7 million years ago. I'm afraid diversification of dogs happened long before man appeared. Certain traits of dogs were exaggerated by selective breeding, but mankind certainly wasn't responsible for creating everything from rat dogs to St. Bernards in the short space they have walked the earth. Evolution takes time. Lots of time. Try again.
-R
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.
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.
Here's an interesting and much less fluffy interview with the guy quoted at the top of the piece.
QED
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!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
- 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.
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.
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.