Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I'd spend all my time hitting those 80 year old cheerleaders!
Well, you can't have such a sysyem without legalized euthanasia. Or you need a lot of homeless shelter.
I think I would spend the next 165 years practising addition
Spend all my medicare on pvp games and frag the bejesus out of everyone for the next 90 years.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
When the average age is 150 the average speed limit will be 15mph.
The weather channel will become a 3D channel on cable and out perform the major networks.
Dick Clark will be hosting New Year shows still.
Starbucks will be sold to a bingo-chain.
No one will ever be able to walk on anyone elses lawn ever again.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
... Ask me again in 300 years.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
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.
Only the Rich would have access to the drug at first. And that invites all sorts of pessimistic thoughts. Their money will be hoarded for longer, not benefiting the system. They'll probably try to argue the average life expectancy is up therefore we should cut everyone's social security benefits... RIAA/MPAA and ilk will argue we now need longer copyright terms -- patent holders will do the same...
But there is no reason to think all those extra years of potential labor is needed. We already have more people than we need to do the available work.
you would probably have to extend the average working life to 100 or 120 years to prevent the economy becoming totally unbalanced
I hate to break it to you, but having 65 as a retirement age has ALREADY made the economy totally unbalanced.
Remember that the 65 retirement age was designed for a time when most people only lived to 50! If you made it to 65 you deserved a reward for actually surviving that long. Now almost everyone makes it to 65 and our Social support systems are taking up 50% (or more, depending on your country) of our GDP. Our economy all over the globe is in shambles trying to support a number of people the various welfare states were never designed to handle.
Frankly we need to raise the retirement age to 80 NOW. Make the boomers work for another 25 years or retire on their own money. But us Gen X and down shouldn't be paying for it. When people start living to 150 (or longer) you can bump it to first 100, then 125.
Assuming we haven't decided by then that the government just isn't properly equipped to take care of people in that manner and cancelled all the welfare programs. Or have slipped into a global social collapse and fallen back to 50 year lifespans and steam technology.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
A guy like Steve Jobs probably accomplished the most when he felt his time was severely limited. Stephen Hawking seems to have a similar motivation. I even find it hard to really put everything into a project when the deadline is still far away. If people think they are going to live twice as long, they'll probably just procrastinate 4x as much.
Get out there and breed if you want to make a difference.
You're obviously new here.
While life expectancy has been consistently increasing in the modern era from 30 to almost 70 now, maximum life span has really not changed at all and stays at about 120 years. This true both for humans and laboratory rats, scientist are having difficulty increasing the maximum life span.
We are going to need a medical break-through in order to push 150 years, but it is a good thought experiment, I just don't see it changing dramatically this century.
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.
The news will start with "I remember when... ".
The good old days will be 140 years ago, instead of just 60. Btw, people were much friendlier in the good old days, and also worked a lot harder.
Sherry sales will explode, and sherry will outsell beer.
Helping grannies cross the street becomes a full-time job.
What about lack of upward mobility? All my life I've been told I'm being held back because of the huge cohort of baby boomers who will eventually retire and then my generation gets to shine. Its finally starting to happen, slowly. What happens socially when the retirement age goes from 60 to 120, meaning I/we have to sit thru another 60 excruciatingly boring years?
Another problem is if you thought income inequality was bad, wait until you see balance sheet inequality. So a college degree used to mean an extra average of $25/yr income (used to, now it just means unemployment plus student loans instead of just unemployment, and the receptionist and your realtor are now required to have English degrees or MBAs). Over 40 working years that delta adds up to lets say a million bucks. Over 100 years, it adds up to 2.5 million bucks. So I'd expect the education bubble to explode upwards even more.
Another problem is no nation has more criminals than the USA. Do they get treatment? Should a 20 year old murder who got life meaning a 60 year sentence be released at 80, or not medicated so he dies at 80, or held until he's 120 or ? Another problem is the goal of the prison industrial complex is to make, say, 3% of the population felons per decade. If people only live as adults for maybe 50 years, that means 15% of the population dies after being imprisoned and they never work inside the legit economy again. What happens when people live to 150, that means 45% of the population gets felonized.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The sheer number of people would be an issue with current resources, but people living long enough to deal with the consequences of their wasteful lifestyles might not be a bad thing. It's one thing to ruin the planet for your great-grandchildren, it's another entirely when you realise you'll still only be middle aged by the time they go to college.
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
I would spend all my extra years working on mind uploading technology. I want to live for a very long time, uploaded into a spaceship exploring the universe. When your mind is software you can just alter your perception of time and fast forward through all the boring parts.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
lots of people don't get life even half figured out by 50.
Or ever.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Can you imagine humans living longer and the birth rate of longer lived humans? What kind of impact would our planet experience from this?
Female fertility will still end at the same age... Once the eggs gone, its gone, game over. Male fertility never really ends, although it declines some. So there will be 150 year old rich guys marrying women born when he was 130.
Child rearing will be weird. In some American racial subcultures breeding begins below 15, others wait until 40+, with huge impact, some cultural groups its "normal" to be a grannie by 30, others its "normal" for grandparents to be dead of old age when the grandkids are very young. Imagine "everybody loves raymond" sitcom but with, perhaps, ten generations living across the street instead of just 1. On the other hand, with 3 to 15 complete living generations, possibly/probably local, that's going to destroy commercial day care operations. Maybe even destroy lower grades of public schooling, if every family is big enough to have a related "teacher".
Currently young people take half a decade or so off from "work" to go to university and drink beer etc. Possibly, "young" people would live at home with parents and not start work until their cohort's females are post menopausal. In a way it makes sense, go to high school, start breeding, and when your kids are all in grade school, you start university, and when the kids are roughly in middle school hit the job market and start making money to pay to raise your own kids and soon grandkids. So you'd start work at age 50. Some people will insist on starting work at age 15, which is going to be weird.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You know who will get this treatment first and best - the "1%." This will lead pretty directly to some really old CEOs - imagine a 150 year old Rupert Murdoch, still running Fox in 2081, or Steve Ballmer still running Microsoft in 2106
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.
I suspect that there will be a HUGE spread of inequality between the old and the young. First of all, the increased retirement age will mean it takes a lot longer for positions to open up. Young people will be stuck waiting for their turn to be a teacher or urban planner or whatever. Second, inheritances won't come at a time when they're particularly useful. Currently in western society you get an inheritance (if there is one) anywhere from the time when you're getting married to the time when your last children are going to university. The years between these two events are the years where you have some of your biggest capital expenses (wedding, buying a house, cost of having children, sending kids to uni, etc.) and inheritances tend to help with at least one of these things and reduce the financial strain on the family. Now people will get them at the age of 110 instead, which means they're going to buy a boat instead of earlier times when it would reduce financial strain. Third: compound interest. People who make sound investments at the age of 25 will be absolutely loaded by the age of 150. This in turn increases the lobbying power of old people. The AARP is already a huge lobbying force in the United States. What happens when enough old people are gazillionaires that they basically set policy (answer: I doubt it will be to the benefit of the young).
Currently, a lot of people need to continue working until age 71 in order to receive their full Social Security. That includes most Boomers who are hitting sixty right about now. You can retire with diminished benefits starting at 62. You can begin manipulating and using your 401.k at age 58.
As for me, I'd like to get to hold a grandchild or two, and then I'd be happy to move along. I was widowed (suddenly and too young) this past summer. It's gotten an interesting reaction from neighbors who are here from China to study. They're absolutely incensed that I didn't leave off working immediately and move in with one or the other of my two grown sons. Apparently my daughters in law are supposed to be taking care of me in addition to working at their regular jobs. The fact that I still have a meaningful job that brings in an income is incomprehensible to them. It's been a fascinating cultural discussion.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
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.'
I can now get my legal copy of Photoshop 4! and run it on my legal copy of windows NT 4!
What do you mean those are like baby toys! Dag Nabbit when I was your age, we had to pay thousands of dollars (I know it doesn't sound like a lot now, but back then it was a Lot of money) for this software. This software work on the newest equipment that had CPU that performed millions of calculations per second. And we can do things like adding a lens flair to a picture and it only took 10 seconds! You kids and your auto-artistic implants where everything you see is automatically shown in you head as perfectly beautiful. Let me tell you something the world is an ugly place and we had to ware garlic on our belts at it was the style of the time and I went to the candy store operated by Joe and asked for 2 candy bars for a green back... You see back in my time money was printed on paper and was green so we called them green backs....
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I imagine if there were a mandatory Kevorkian law in place, people who were not self-sufficient, but sufficiently loved, admired, despised (in a good way), or otherwise valued by their friends and neighbors, would be sponsored by those people to keep them around. The hard thing will be when resources are stretched too thin and you have to decide who to sponsor.
People would also have to learn how to accept when someone doesn't want sponsorship because life is actually painful for them.
^^ A hundred and fifty years of this. *Sigh*
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Life expectancy can be calculated retrospectively for those who were born about 120 years ago, if there are reliable data on childbirth and mortality (it's already a big if, but the answer can be given in developed countries with some statistical accuracy).
But how could life expectancy be calculated for those born recently? It's possible to make lots and lots of assumptions about mortality factors, hidden variables etc., but it is not fundamentally different from predicting the level of the S&P index 100 years from now. A lot of medical advancements may take place over the next decades, and there is the threat of designer viri (as a tool of bioligical warfare or a sloppy experiment). Who is to say that these effects cancel one another out?
What's the methodology behind life expectancy calculations for anyone who is not already in a terminal condition?
45, thrown out more cool stuff than I care to posses at the moment, and I tried to join my local occupy event but they didn't get it together until after I had to be at work.
There is an excellent book by Cory Doctorow, of course a scientific fiction book, about a society where people simply doesn't die out.
Two small quotes from it:
"I lived enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages [...] to see the death of the workplace and of work"
and
"... the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejug an economy thad had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death ..."
In the end, if people get living more and more, we'll have sometime to abandon most concepts that are tied to a (finite, short) lifespan. How it'll be done, for now, is the work of fiction. I recommend this book to anyone that could be interested in a radically different view on the society where no people die unless they choose to.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about a situation similar to this in his first novel.
I don't think this miracle drug would change the world all that much. If you think of "death by old age" as the finishing line in the game of life, few people actually reach it. Most seem to die of causes that will probably not be affected by this drug, i. e. cancer, heart diseases, accidents, suicides...
Especially the later could seem rather attractive once you had to bury your spouse and your children.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
One of the problems with the economy is that there is plenty of production without having everybody employed.
Having more people that want to work is just going to make that effect stronger.
It will be interesting to see if political force or technology ends up solving the problem (it is at least possible to imagine a level of technology where a philanthropist can choose to displace arbitrary parts of the economy; maybe the availability of energy puts a limit on that, I haven't even tried to come up with a napkin level estimate there).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Pretty sure that wasn't Def Leppard - they were quoting someone else. Try a decade earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Hey,_My_My_(Into_the_Black)
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
There are relatively new paving machines (actually a few machines that follow each other like a train) that do everything, chew up the old road right down to the bed, lay the new bed, compress it and lay the new road to be followed by rollers. They can completely rebuild a road at rates never before seen with fewer workers than ever needed before.
Today, workers are laying cones, directing traffic and driving the trucks and babysitting the machines. Almost no one has a shovel anymore, unless the operator screws up and leaves a slight hole.
Or the brick laying machines that weave the pattern of bricks and lay the driveway or road as fast as you can deliver bricks to the machine. They creep along and deposit the road like laying carpet. Tiger-stone makes one for brick, and fast-lane makes one for concrete. They require just one person to deliver bricks, and maybe two people scrambling to set the pattern. No bending over, no knee pads, and you're done with a driveway after just a few hours, as opposed to multiple days.
I assume this trend will continue, and our extended lifetimes will allow those of us of a like mind to research more ways to get off this rock so we can explore the final frontier and stretch our legs. At least, that's what I would do. Think about it, you grow, have kids, work to raise those kids, and it seems you're never really free to radically change your career or experiment because you're worried about retirement just around the corner. If I knew I could live to 150, I would certainly go back to school in 20 or 30 years and focus on physics for another 20 years, researching and experimenting, start a new firm to develop technology, things like that. Things I don't feel I'm free to do right now.
But in a bad economy, that's horrible news for the young. Older workers will hold onto jobs to try to fund their new lifespan (and remember, can't fire them once they're over 40 without some serious lawsuit risk). Younger workers won't be able to compete with their experience (and older workers can take paycuts if that's what it takes to keep the young person frozen out).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
On the bright side, if artists are living 150 years and producing for most of them, the copyright laws will finally seem sane again.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I believe the "Angry White People Crowd" are at the "tea party" meeting down the street. Those people seem obsessed with a value system that seems to contradict itself after every sentence. But one thing is definite with the tea party, and that is death to everyone. I have seen to much death to agree with the tea party. And the logistics of living to be over 100, and maintain our population growth, is to go to a space faring culture.
Yea, because a value system that demands that the world owes you a living doesn't contradict itself at all. Neither does demanding accountability from someone else then refusing to clean up your own mess.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Why don't they just speak normal English in the UK?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.