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Ask Slashdot: What Happens If We Perfect Age Reversing?
ourlovecanlastforeve writes: With biologists getting closer and closer to reversing the aging process in human cells, the reality of greatly extended life draws closer. This brings up a very important conundrum: You can't tell people not to reproduce and you can't kill people to preserve resources and space. Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone. Not enough food, not enough space, not enough medical care. If — no, when — age reversal becomes a reality, who gets to live? And if everyone gets to live, how will we provide for them?
Exodus from Earth. We need space ships to spread out in the galaxy!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You can't tell people not to reproduce and you can't kill people to preserve resources and space.
Sure we can. It might be morally reprehensible to do but it hasn't stopped people in power in the past as well as the present.
If it becomes necessary to tell people not to reproduce, the laws can be changed.
(More likely, though, it would be presented as a choice between being allowed to live indefinitely and being allowed to reproduce.)
It seems like before we worry about the implications of reversing aging we should see how age reversal even effects mortality. Cancers, dementia, and many other age related diseases might not even significantly change from their current rates.
Citation, Please.
We grow plenty of food. The problem isn't the quantity of food. It's distribution. We have plenty of space, as well. We just need to change our (American) notion of what "space" is.
But I would whole-heartedly support a "stop making fucking babies" measure.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
If everybody gets to live a very long time, then we run out of resources
If we figure out how to curb over-population and only the really old live, then we run out of viable sperm and eggs in a few generations
We will need to have people living 'normal' lifespans, unless we figure out how to dodge the who reproduction via sperm and eggs thing
The economics of the situation would probably lead to a self-selected wealthy group occupying the long-life slots and the rest of us toiling away as normal with our lifespans slightly adjusted from what we expect today in order to fill the breeders slot
It would probably make things easier all around if the breeders did not suspect that they could enjoy a long and healthy life
One thing that could potentially change this entire equation would be extending the range in which humans can live, whether it be orbital habitats, terraformed planets or cozy lintel asteroids. A that point ti would be really handy to have extremely long-lived humans taking the not quite as fast as light trips to our nearest stellar neighbors
But then, I tend to be an optimist
Wherever You Go, There You Are
It is the Star Trek universe. What you're missing is that this is not Earth. It is Ferenginar.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I would think also that there would be no small number of kids born simply because... well... accidents happen, and the parents do not want to simply terminate a pregnancy on the grounds that having it amounts to what is just a large inconvenience for them.
I would suspect that there is a very sizable percentage of the world's population that would not exist if people only ever had children when they intended to.,
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
For thousands of years humanity has had a pretty comfortable relationship with death (even two hundred years ago there were 'wakes' held in the family home for several days in many developed nations). Historically, attempting immortality has tended to go hand in hand with delusion, disconnection from reality, and/or mental illness. It is only recently (in historic terms) that death has become stigmatised rather than accepted as inevitable, and even welcomed as a natural and positive progression.
Even presuming that age reversal techniques will one day do more than allow us to be decrepit old people for longer, I will choose to die in my natural course and leave the earth to my descendants. Death doesn't have to be scary, it can be a positive choice to improve the world by my eventual absence. I will live on through the ripples of all my actions in nurturing the new generations. Attempts at immortality are still for the delusional, disconnected, and mentally ill.
In other words, lots of people don't have enough food.
No, in other words, lots of people have more government corruption than they need.
Lots of food aid gets delivered to famine nations in Africa, and it either rots on the docks (what the corrupt government doesn't use itself or give to its soldiers), or the surplus that would otherwise go to people who are not corrupt government or soldiers gets sold off to other nations in order to raise money to buy weapons for the soldiers.
In other words, exactly as the GP said: a distribution problem, but one unrelated to the mechanics of distribution, rather the politics of distribution.
What makes you think this magical treatment (which doesn't exist, and may never exist) will be available to everyone?
Because it's cheaper to have an immortal serf class than it is to have to train up larval serfs for 20 years at a net negative value before they're useful?
Young people are generally a resource sink with no return on investment for a couple decades.
Imagine your 90 year old grandmother suddenly regressing in age a bit, with a restored mental and physical agility.
Frankly, that would be awesome. I can think of few things that would make me happier.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
with existing technology the USA could easily accommodate a thousand or even a million times its population and not run out.
I'm going to need evidence for this one. The USA can "easily" accommodate 320 trillion people with "existing technology"? More than the number of ants on Earth???
Put another way, 1 million times as many people means the entire population of Canada in a single square kilometer. Or 33 people per square metre. I get that you want to build vertically, but we categorically do not have this technology to do this.
Too much of any good thing soon stops being a good thing.
I really enjoyed the fantasy novels of Anne Rice (e.g. "Interview with the Vampire") as she explored the topic of immortality in her characters to a philosophical degree. Vampires going out of their minds with the "burden" of immortality and looking for a way to die.
I believe what makes life special and precious is that it's finite.
You don't know how much you have in the bank and the happiest people you'll encounter are those who savour every moment they have like it was their last.
Turn that on it's head and life becomes valueless if you following my reasoning.
Complex systems, such as human bodies, often have a "bathtub curve" of failure probabilities. Numerous potential flaws are most likely at the start of the system's existence, which is why infant mortality and miscarriage remain noticeable even with the most advanced medical support. And as bodies age, more and more smaller flaws accumulate to cause more and more profound system problems. These range from vascular problems, likely to cause strokes and aneurysms, to the wear and tear on joints causing motion problems, to accumulated heavy metal poisoning and debris in the lungs, to the ongoing risk of cancers.
Until complete prevention or cures exist for all of those issues, it seems nonsensical to discuss the population issues of eternal life. Population _growth_ from people living even a decade longer is a much more real and noticeable issue in our economy and resources. So is the cost of medical care for those older people. We're already seeing problems with Medicare funding and elderly care being real economic and political problems in the USA. This is partly because, as we reach the far end of that "bathtub" curve for human beings, addressing one factor that might have killed people far earlier, such as very successful heart surgery and antibiotics for infections that used to kill older people easily, end when more complex and difficult problems finally occur.
I am, myself, old enough to feel these effects. They do accumulate.