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What Happens When the Average Lifespan is 150 Years?
First time accepted submitter Macgrrl writes "It was reported today in The Age newspaper that scientists believe they will have a drug within the next 5-10 years that will extend the average human lifespan to 150 years. Given the retirement age is 65, that would give you an extra 85 years, meaning you would probably have to extend the average working life to 100 or 120 years to prevent the economy becoming totally unbalanced and pensions running out. That assumes that the life extension is all 'good years', and not a prolonged period of dementia and physical decline. Would you want to live to 150? What do you see as being the most likely issues and what do you think you would do with all the extra years?"
The wear and tear on the body is such that even if you can increase the lifespan to a theoretical 150 years you wouldnt be very healthy for the last 90 or so years. You also need something that adresses the wear on the body. Our hearts arent made for 150 years of use and we build up various plaques and toxins in our bodies as time goes by. Even if we all lived under controlled and ideal circumstances the last seven decades would be pretty much seven decades of being eighty.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
You call it wasting and procrastinating.
I call it living.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
The main thing is quality of life. Extra years of infirmity, dementia and living in some kind of care facility would be no advantage.
Extra years of good health would be. Not just to the individual, but to society. Training someone in a lot of professions is expensive. The decades of experience leave on retirement and have to be replaced.
Stagnation won't be a big problem, IMHO. Though you'll have people around for longer, new people will be coming into a given workplace, just at a slower rate. New ideas will still be around, and frankly, most people aren't doing research science, but things that are existing skill based rather than innovation based. Slashdot is a bit of an anomaly compared to the rest of the world as it has a high prevelance of knowledge workers.
Expect various pundits to say it's horrible and that no one should want to live that long. Of course, when they'd make the decision for themselves I suspect a lot would take the anti-aging drugs and then rationalize it somehow.
As far as impact on population, it'd be some, but not as big as you'd think. If you don't have a low enough reproductive rate, you'll still overpopulate even with current life spans.
Who's going to want to work at Foxcomm for a hundred years? We've got to kill off predatory politics and economics first.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I would do my best to stay healthy and hope for medicine and robotics to improve so any organ that fails can be replaced.
Then 100 years from now, in the year 2111 someone will come up with a way to get our lifespan up to 250.
Why die at all when we can continue to live in a robot-body that for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from our current body ?
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
step into the Kevorkian machine
You first... See how that works?
oh and what a douche... I would say you are semi young right now (probably in your early 20s?). Looking at all those 'old' people having all the cool things you cant have right now (because you probably dont have much). You feel you are more entitled to those things (for whatever reason). Well so are they.
Well just wait about 10 years you will start to think different. In 20 your going to be 'wtf just happened'. That 'let them commit suicide' idea will be stupid. If in 20 years you still think the same way I would be rather shocked.
Honestly a larger lifespan will not be that big of a deal. Comparatively to say full scale automation. Think of factories that do not need workers. Think of fast food places that need no one to work for them. Think of roads that do not need anyone to dig the ditch or run the paint machine. Think of industrial equipment that is not run by mere humans (because we cause error and fatalities). Nursing facilities that have robots doing everything. Think of a world where no one can work because there are no jobs. We are heading this way now. A medical pill that will make us last longer. While interesting gains us very little. We will for the similar reasons need to rethink our whole society and how material wealth is distributed and earned.
Maybe you should spend it practicing spelling.
Maybe you should spend it realizing that this is a global board. In the UK they spell it with an 's.'
You are stuck thinking about 150 year average life span in a 75 year average life span society.
If the lifespan increases dramatically, so will the population, and this would mean more economic opportunities, not less.
There will be more demand for food and energy and shelter and entertainment and robots and computers and phones and pills and cars and travel and vacation and prostitutes etc.etc.etc., there will be more demand, not less.
When society increases it creates more opportunity to satisfy all sorts of various demands, and if finally the governments are put into their right place - they should know their place and be hit on the head repeatedly until they occupy their niche, the economy will grow, not shrink.
A longer time to wait for an opening at company? What a slave mentality thinking. Start your own goddamn company catering to all this new demands and come up with your own solutions and sell that into the ever increasing markets.
People don't understand that individuals are not liability, they are assets and resources and markets.
You can't handle the truth.
When there is surplus employees, the pay should go down, which in turn leads to increased economic growth and thus less unemployment. So it will balance itself out, eventually.
That's the theory anyway.
And it doesn't work like that in practice, because aggregate demand has got to come from somewhere. When pay goes down, people have less disposable income, so they spend less, so economic growth decreases. Of course this process doesn't necessarily go on forever, but the fact remains that "equilibria" can exist at almost any rate of unemployment. Market forces alone do not lead to full employment - the ideologists who would tell you otherwise conveniently ignore the effect of income on spending.
It's amazing how the majority of economists seem to be entirely oblivious (whether out of ignorance or willfully, I don't know) to the fact that in the end, the economy is a giant life support machine that produces things for consumers. Yes, investment plays an important role in the bowels of the beast, but investment only makes sense when there are potential customers with disposable income. Aggregate demand is what it's all about in the end.
Perhaps start their own companies and hire some of their contemporaries? Maybe if we stopped assuming that companies existed to provide jobs for people and that a "living wage" was everyone's right (HINT: It isn't.) and indoctrinating our youth with Socialism and instead training them to be entrepreneurs, capitalists and business owners on their own then maybe the lack of jobs wouldn't be an issue.
Also, maybe if people weren't summarily kicked out the door at 65 due to mandatory retirement policies (to comply with SS legal requirements) we would be able to retain much of the experience that these people have gained and be able to use them to apprentice the newer people, passing along that knowledge and working to have a deeper and more solid earnings base rather than constantly chasing the next "flash in the pan" to keep the stock prices climbing.
The point is: The Welfare State, for all of it's good intentions, has ultimately become a burden upon us that must be lifted if we are to continue in anything resembling a modern, western society. If we persist in our current path, economic and social collapse, followed by anarchy, tyranny, poverty, and finally the slow starvation death of humanity will follow.
Don't believe it can happen? Look at first Greece, and then North Korea for two examples of our future if we do not change course NOW.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Actually, life insurance will be cheaper for most people because you'll be paying in longer.
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