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Do You Want to Live Forever?
Jamie McCarthy writes "In 1918, Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Daly inspired his weary men to attack by yelling, 'come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?' But how would the world change if we could? This month's Technology Review introduces us to the computer scientist, and self-taught biologist, Aubrey de Grey, who thinks immortality could be within our grasp by 2030. Thinking like an engineer, he's broken aging down into seven specific problems, like cell atrophy and mitochondrial mutation, which he believes can all, in principle, be solved. And he has good reason to think those seven are the only 'bugs' standing in the way of a thousand-year lifespan. De Grey is clearly both a genius and a little nuts, but I'm not sure in what proportion..."
The problem isn't that life expectancy could be raised to 1000 years or more.
The problem is that it would only be available to relatively few people. People who could afford multimillion dollar fees (which might exist solely to keep out the riffraff) or people with key political connections.
Working slaves can forget about it. Banks can always repossess a multimillion dollar house, but what do you do here when somebody declares bankruptcy after treatment?
The bottom line is that assets and power will quickly become (even more) concentrated in the top 1% or so of the population. Imagine what the average working person could do with a second lifetime where they own their own home from the beginning -- but they would start with much more real world experience and street smarts. Now imagine the same thing with people will millions of dollars in assets and dozens of lifetimes of experience.
The result would not be unlike the Go'uld in Stargate. The "immortals" might even put on the cloak of divinity. A few hundred years ago monarchs claimed they ruled by divine right, but they died just like us. How hard would it be for people with a centuries-long lifetime to manipulate society so the emphemerals believe that the immortals are graced by god. How long would it take for the emphemerals to forget that these medical treatments even forget or that everyone naturally dies within a century or so.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Wouldn't happen.
We don't *need* to work as much as we do; even hunter-gatherers generally only "work" what would be less than half time by a modern standpoint. But we do it anyways.
Why? Because want "stuff". We want to give our friends and family "stuff". We want to go "places" and go to see "things". To fill our wants, we work.
What if everyone was content to live in a little hut with almost no posessions, and focus our technological efforts purely on what was needed to keep agricultural production and basic medicine going and the tech base needed to support it? Our work hours would be tiny on average. But we don't want that life. We want the "you work, and you get stuff" life. And so it would be if we were immortal.
Sure, people would take a lot more long leaves. And a lot more career changes. But 20 years? They'd miss all the neat "stuff" they could have gotten.
Jesus: "Son of a
Even leaving that aside, though, people are changing too. In my opinion, people growing up in first-world countries today (in the last 20 years, really) will be less susceptible to that particular symptom of aging than their ancestors because they're used to things changing all the time. The rate of change will continue to increase if you believe Vernor Vinge, but "things are changing faster than they did when I was young" is a different kettle of fish than "things were about the same when I was 15 and when I was 5, so why can't they stay that way forever?"
You can choose to greet change by cowering in fear and retreating into a hole or meeting it head-on and treating it as an opportunity. I believe today's kids are more likely to do the latter than previous generations were.
And even leaving that aside, you can bet that the perspective of a 70-year-old who hasn't even reached the average age of the population yet will be a bit different than one who's reaching the tail end of the actuarial tables.
Daly was arguably the greatest marine of all time and the man behind the famous quote.
I have no argument with that, provided you mean the greatest US marine. The greatest marine of all time was the guy who licked the Carthaginians at Ecnomus.
The quote is famous but not original. I don't know when this exhortation was first made; no doubt the Romans were saying this in their day and for all I know the ancient Sumerians were too.
However, I do know how Frederick Hohenzollern ("The Great") addressed his men after the breakdown of his attack at Kolin: "You rogues! Would you live forever?" According to tradition, the reply called out from the ranks was "we thought for thirteen pennies a day we had done enough."
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."