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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.)
The question is not what the people will do with all the extra people, but rather what the robots will do with all the people.
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
Relax.
We will all find new and innovative ways to kill each other.
If — no, when — age reversal becomes a reality, who gets to live? And if everyone gets to live, how will we provide for them?
We'll just do as we've always done:
Eat the rich.
(P.S. What's the emoji for 'deadpan'?)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
"The problem isn't the quantity of food. It's distribution."
In other words, lots of people don't have enough food. And if this were the Star Trek universe, they wouldn't be starving.
It's not a matter of space. The planet can only dissipate so much heat.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I sincerely believe that is one bridge that is best to cross when you actually get to it... worrying about something like this is liable to only keep you from enjoying the life that you have, here and now.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
One way or another some kind of balance has to be struck. Dwindling resources are likely to make the cost of living expensive. If things get bad enough, population control of the Chinese variety isn't too far fetched. But something tells me you won't need to tell people to stop reproducing. Given the situation in Japan and other places that are experiencing negative population growth, It is more likely than not that the problem a modern society will face is going to be the complete opposite.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
When age reversing does happen (5-10 years), I promise you people will continue to die! Mother nature is very creative.
We're already starting to see population growth top out as more nations join the developed world. In Europe, we're below replacement rate. In Japan, it's stoking fears of a labor crisis. India and China are falling to near replacement levels in the urban areas, and rural will likely follow as prosperity is extended there.
We don't need to make this choice. Continue with the education of women, liberalization of labor laws, and growing market economies. People will naturally produce fewer children if a) they know the ones they produce will likely survive to adulthood and b) their own welfare increases based on the fewer number they bring to adulthood. Hell, tie Basic Income amounts to having a set number of kids -- you have 3, well you just had 25% of your UBI revoked. Sorry buddy.
The percentage of starving people in the world has halved over the last two decades, despite the increase in population. The idea that we're running out of resources is false. Our species is driven by economics. The more demand there is for something, past a certain threshold, the more that something gets produced. In the case of food and water, we have a convenience economy based mostly on luxury across the majority of the world. If we have to, we'd switch to a survival economy, in which only the most efficient and necessary crops are grown. We'll just go to treated sewage, GMO supercrops, and other things that cause people to turn up their noses.
You could comfortably house the entire population of the world in the state of Florida. You could use the state of Georgia to grow rice, soy, corn, and wheat to provide for the macronutrients needed. Then you could easily supplement the rest of the vitamins and minerals needed in a daily diet, through genetically modified yeast strains. The physical resources are there. The necessity is not.
The only reason there is starvation in the world is because efficiency is distasteful and unnecessary for the majority of the population. Charity, in the meantime, has dropped the overall number of people enduring starvation, according to a recent UN report.
Malthusian catastrophes rarely take into account Moore's law. Efficiency in population planning increases with the available computational resources.
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."
All those who sign-up to live and work in orbiting colonies get age-reversal therapy for free. The primary economy will to be build more and better colony ships to handle the influx of long lived people. Within a generation or two the entire Earth will be most emptied and the federation of human colonies will declare Earth a "National Park" available to visit on vacation - just pick your continent.
Let's say an age cure is released tomorrow. It will be priced specifically for a certain percentage to afford. It probably won't even be publicly available, and instead be invite-only like certain cars already are. I honestly can't imagine the wealthy and elite opting to release that kind of cure to the general public, although it's a safe bet to assume politicians will grant themselves (and family) access.
I could easily see such a scenario causing mass riots and civil wars, however. And on the off chance that it did become something that just gets dumped in the public water system for the benefit of mankind, we'd just have more wars. Longer life spans would mean "reevaluating" things like term limits for politicians, prison sentence lengths, retirement, and pensions. I don't think food would even be on the radar for possible issues. I'd be way more worried about every day things that our societies are based on suddenly being rendered obsolete.
Even social changes would be pure chaos. Imagine your 90 year old grandmother suddenly regressing in age a bit, with a restored mental and physical agility. She may not be ready for SEAL training, but you can bet she wouldn't be happy sitting in the nursing home all day. How does she train for a job? Can she afford to stay "retired" for another 30 years when her savings were built with 10 in mind? And how would the rest of the family react to grandma Joanne becoming an equal again, rather than an elder?
It's always how it's been, longevity/immortality won't change that.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
How about we do that for ACs who don't have the balls to post their garbage as anything but what they are... anonymous cowards.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
You can't tell people not to reproduce and you can't kill people to preserve resources and space.
Well, with that kind of negative-nancy thinking, of course nothing's going to get done.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
But I would whole-heartedly support a "stop making fucking babies" measure.
I actually wonder if society will ever get around to regulating reproduction.
We regulate whether you're allowed to drive a car, but we don't regulate whether you're allowed to have a kid. I submit that you can do a LOT more damage with the latter than the former.
I think we really need a better social contract. We need to take better care of those who are alive, and do more to ensure that those who are born are more likely to be able to take care of themselves. If it takes a lot of work to be allowed to have a kid, you'll probably see parents invest a lot more in their kids. When somebody is born with autism or whatever, society can step in and lend a LOT more support. However, you won't just have masses of kids forced to take care of themselves because their parents were irresponsible.
There is no reason that cradle-to-grave can't be financially viable, as long as you exercise control over the cradle part.
Cry however you want over reproductive rights. I don't see how preventing somebody from trivially deciding to have kids is a greater injustice than much of what goes on as a result of humoring that urge.
As far as who gets to reproduce goes, I don't think it has to be that difficult. At the very least, mandate education and some general weed-out steps so that those who aren't reasonably committed don't bother. Then you can screen for stuff like serious genetic disorders (by all means allow surrogacy and adoption instead). At that point you have to earn some kind of right to reproduce (that might be trivial or difficult depending on demand for reproduction vs slots available). The wealthy might be able to pay into a trust fund to simply buy the right (it costs society money to clean up after your messes, so you can prepay if you want). Otherwise, it might be a bit like applying for a scholarship - what have you done to give back to society, etc. Then for the sake of diversity you could have a lottery for x% of the slots where everybody has an equal chance of being able to reproduce regardless of merit.
I agree!
Oh, wait...
What makes you think this magical treatment (which doesn't exist, and may never exist) will be available to everyone? Life extension/immortality would easily become the most valuable thing on earth. It would sell for a fortune, be used for political and financial gain, and generally be restricted to the super rich.
There won't be a population problem because the majority would be allowed to die.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
if aging becomes obsolescent, all bets are off. you can't assume "we can't tell them not to reproduce".
the best policy would be that you can EITHER reproduce or never get old and die of old age. not both. and that would be a wonderfully balanced system.
It's worse. At least the Ferengi didn't detonate thermal nuclear warheads within their atmosphere or knowingly cause harm to their body for pleasure.
Cause the Ferengi are wimps!
The assumption that people will reproduce if given the opportunity to live indefinitely is flawed.
For many people, the urge to reproduce is strongly motivated by the idea that we want something of ourselves to leave behind when we are gone: we want someone to care for us in our old age; someone to carry on our memory. For people in developing countries, having children is a way of having extra labor. If, however, we do not regard death as inevitable, then the motivation for reproduction is also reduced. The need for extra labor is also reduced, in that there will be more healthy adults of working age in the population.
That is not to say that nobody would choose to have children. There may be a period of adjustment where people would still have lots of kids out of habit and out of a desire to hedge one's bets, so to speak, but once people start hitting ages around 150 without signs of slowing down, most will quite likely start to realize they would be better off not reproducing.
But there's always the idea that the only way you can live forever is if you agree to not have children...I'd say there is no shortage of people who would take up that offer.
The whole premise is bull.
There is more than enough food to feed everyone. The problem is mostly just politics such as feeding a SUV enough corn to feed a family of 10 for a day to simply drive to the mall and back or letting relief supplies get resold on the black market.
space? Are you kidding me? Huge sections of the earth are completely barren, with existing technology the USA could easily accommodate a thousand or even a million times its population and not run out. Maybe some tiny countries have issues but not the world in general. We aren't even building floating cities yet.
medicine mostly has the same issue as food and the complex relationship between patents and rights and patients who need the medicine. Some is genuinely expensive and difficult to produce. But even today street bums get better medical care than kings just 300 years ago. It will only improve.
All the earth needs to support far far more humans is cheap clean energy and automation. Nuclear fusion, cheap solar and similar technologies will likely be a reality before humans living forever. Same with completely autonomous and self contained manufacturing. Combine the two and you could create hydroponic fields thousands of layers deep tended by robots and powered by light from a fusion reactor. You could build complex mega cities capable of housing a billion people.
We would have to legalize the blood sport known as the Autoduel.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Following is a test. Is this argument outrageous? Yes / No
Here in southern California (where else?), we were home to what was often called the 'Nobel Sperm Bank' (actually called the Repository for Germinal Choice). It's founder, Robert Graham liked to broadcast his motto "The more intelligent you are, the more children you should have."
This kind of thinking bothers some people. The concept of 'survival of the fittest' shouldn't apply to humans, some say. We should spare no expense to keep even vegetative humans living ... We have always been driven by fear and superstition, but we are slowly evolving toward a more rational viewpoint.
So now the potential for very long lives confronts us in an already crowded world. When the quality of life drops even lower for the masses of humanity and hunger & disease take millions of lives daily, someone will have to decide. Who should live? Who should die? Will money decide? Will intelligence? Will it be those who best serve the predominant power structure? Will it be decided by our robot overlords? If logic prevails over emotion, we will reinstate survival of the fittest and offer a respectful goodbye to the rest.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Life expectancy would be about 650 years as the non-disease death rate would then be the limit.
We need pre-natal IQ testing and mandatory abortions for those who fail to meet the required level of potential intelligence. Its not your right to procreate hap-haphazardly while uber-babies get fewer resources than they deserve.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook... It's a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. story. Essentially, to get a license to reproduce somebody had to go in a suicide booth for you.
No. When.
>"You can't tell people not to reproduce "
Actually, yes you can. You can make it a requirement to have only X children or less if you want age extension... make it a choice. It is already illogical for people to think they have the "right" to make as many children as they want.
Exactly how many dozens of billions of people does this planet need?
Rich people will live even longer
Obviously, we will fight to the death over limited resources, until resources are no longer limited.
Please our women wear far too much clothing.
So where are all the naked bitches at?
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.
SO yes this is true. The biggest waste of resources is animal production for food. A single cow uses approx 2000 gallons of water for every pound of meat produced. The same pound of beans takes approx 100 gallons. The amount of beans grown per acre far exceeds the amount of space for cattle. Factory farming while evil has decreased prices so more people can eat meat but it is not sustainable. If we change the average diet to a plant based one and then taught all countrys that are starving how to grow it we would have more than enough food.
As far as space , sure one day it would get quite crowded. But I live in California. There is so much open land that could be used for people instead of grazing cattle. Of course we are limited by water but most of our country is unused land. and there are plenty of local resources. We just need to change our way of life from city based to more rural. It will be a thousand years before this planet has elbow to elbow people. By then I am sure we will have colonied Mars and the moon. perhaps even farther than that. If they can make is virtually immortal I would take the treatment. I would love to be like Lazerus Long and live to be 4000 yrs old. Maybe someday we all will.
The world has more than enough food, even if a particular person doesn't.
Learn to love Alaska
We should lock up white people in a hellish nightmare prison where they can be tortured and punished forever for their crimes against the human race.
But I don't want to live in Detroit
Item number one on on my bucket list
When I'm 59 I'll hunt you down and kill you. Fair enough?
It's very simple: The rich, who are funding this research, will make goddamned sure that it's as expensive as possible, to make it unavailable to everyone except the rich themselves. Naturally people in positions of power will have access, too. The you and I and the rest of the commoners will be denied it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
Certain other physiological limitations might end up overriding those concerns.
SO yes this is true. The biggest waste of resources is animal production for food. A single cow uses approx 2000 gallons of water for every pound of meat produced. The same pound of beans takes approx 100 gallons.
Who cares?
Build more nuclear plants, and use the power to operate the desalination plants you also build.
BONUS! By removing sea water from the oceans for the purpose of desalination, you mitigate the ocean level rise due to global warming!
DOUBLE BONUS! By building nuclear plants, you mitigate the production of greenhouse gasses, reducing global warming!
TRIPLE BONUS! By having an excess of water, you can grow more cattle and crops and increase the planets carrying capacity!
QUADRUPLE BONUS! Excess fresh water allows you to address ongoing desertification!
Ching ching ching ching ching ... -- human net prosperity slot machine paying out
If we can truly rejuvenate brain cells to the point where one could learn new skills like languages and instruments while remembering earlier life, then it's a wonderful concept and I have no doubt we'll find ways to adapt with improved food resources and economic energy consumption. We could harvest asteroids a la Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson for space housing and interplanetary colonization.
If it's a way for the old to stay in power without any youthful change, then the development of the technology must be stopped. I'm speaking as someone in his forties who knows in my sixties that it will be time to let someone else drive the car.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
The logistics of trying to hava a mandatory vasagel procedure on every single male that reaches puberty is so outside of the realm of what is practicable that you should not need to consider it for more than a moment to realize that it would not be effective.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When you're dealing with some obstreperous functionary who is leaning on status and authority rather than knowledge or competence, it will no longer be possible to think to yourself:
With the loss of life's great equalizer, about the first thing to happen is that the entire population goes into legacy mode.
It'll be like all those crappy ISA cards with jumper blocks in the back of your ugliest junk drawer that you never get rid of because, technically, they still work perfectly fine.
Only it will be the humans with ugly jumper blocks (slavery, racism, sexism, elitism, ageism, gated-community-ism) that live to be 10,000 years old and never "get with the times" because "the times" themselves have shuffled off their mortal coil.
Now that you bring it up I don't think reversing aging is possible since they got old in the Star Trek period....
love is just extroverted narcissism
1933 called, and it wants it's shitty eugenics back.
As an interim measure, some of the critters can get repurposed as food for the other critters.
At the bottom of the
People will still die even if everyone gets the treatment. They'll die from war, accidents, and diseases. They'll still have heart attacks and get cancer. I suspect even if you completely "cured" aging at the cellular level the average life span would only go up by a few decades.
Consider cancer. The human body has multiple overlapping systems to detect cells that have gone bad. It doesn't cure them, though. It kills them. One of the reasons cancer normally (not always, but normally) strikes in old age is likely the systems which detect and kill cancer cells have been shot full of holes by... the systems that detect and kill cancer cells. That's not going to stop. Your odds of being a cancer victim (albeit more youthful looking) in your sixties and seventies probably won't change very much.
There are other problems that youthful cells won't help with. The heavy drinkers and drug users are still going to drop dead by age 50 or so. Women will probably become infertile about the same age they do today. Morbidly obese people might live a few extra years, but probably not as long as thin people today (statistically).
Actually extending human lifespan appreciably is going to require far, far more than addressing cell aging. So fear not! You're still all gonna die.
Unlikely.
Even if they become functionally immortal, they can still be killed, and they *will* be killed eventually. It's just a matter of time and probabilities. Give it enough time, and even freak accidents start becoming near certainties.
Of course, they could very well last an unprecedented amount of time, if they were careful and very, very forward looking.
Not really.
I think you can. On occasion, this has actually happened.
Why? I thought doctors and nurses started out as people, so if you have more people you have more raw material for making doctors & nurses.
The entire article is built on sand.
At the bottom of the
You guys don't need to worry about the over population problem
The IS / Al Queda is going to solve that problem for human kind
They have perfected their solutions ( plural ) and have demonstrated and videotaped and uploaded the solutions online for all of us to see --- including pushing people off a tall building, head cutting, mass executions, burning people alive, and so on
And they are sending their population control specialists to all corners of the world to spread their campaign in reducing the number of human beings on this planet - starting with Europe, then Africa, then America, then Asia ...
Allahu Akbar!
You can't tell people not to reproduce
You can
you can't kill people to preserve resources and space. Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone.
You can kill people for lots more reasons than that. And you can preserve resources and space in more ways than killing people.
Not enough food, not enough space, not enough medical care.
With more people, you will potentially have more doctors.
If — no, when — age reversal becomes a reality, who gets to live? And if everyone gets to live, how will we provide for them?
1. When age reversal becomes a reality, there is a good chance we will also no longer be limited to the natural resources found on our home planet.
2. Even before age reversal becomes a reality, we are going to run into the problem of lack of sufficient accessible resources, if we don't become more efficient in our use of resources. All we need is for the rate of increasing efficiency (i.e. decreasing per capita consumption) to exceed the rate of growth. It's not like efficiency can increase forever, but it can probably keep increasing for quite a while given how much we waste. In fact, our efficiency is what will probably be the single thing that most determines our carrying capacity of our planet and any future worlds we colonize.
3. Once we are able to reverse aging, we will have drastically increased our efficiency in terms of resources spent on training experts (i.e. the people who are best able to increase efficiency. Imagine no longer constantly losing our society's most intelligent people. Imagine what we could accomplish if we still had minds like Euler, Keppler, Einstein, Gauss, Newton, Laplace, Bohr, Feynmann, Faraday, Pauli, Tesla (and many many more) with modern knowledge.
4. If we reverse aging, decreasing resources per person, is only a problem as long as we retain our mortal (soon to be immortal) biological meat vehicles provided to us by evolution. Once we are able to comprehensively capture, and safely store our mental states, we will have not only true immortality, but we will have drastically lower resource requirements to exist.
Death is a great wealth re-distributor and without death inequity will accelerate, unless we cap the amount of wealth a person can have.
People will probably live on average to be over 1000, maybe 10,000 because people will only die from accidents. Science will advance at a faster rate because we don't have to spend the first 25 years or so of life on primary education. The next problem will be that without new generations, human evolution will be at a standstill. But, perhaps not totally. If we can direct our own evolution using simulation and very limited reproduction, say with the average age of a parent being about 1000 years or more, then perhaps we can still find ways to advance as a species. We might be able to grow new bodies and perhaps even new brains for ourselves. When we want to alter our DNA, we could somehow become chimeras for a period of time until the old DNA is completely replaced by the new upgraded DNA. In this way, our species gets all the evolutionary benefits of death without actually having to die.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
We will have to make sure that anyone has a crystal installed in their palm.... and when you turn 30 .... you have to go to carousel.... and float up and pop.
We will also have to create a police force to track down resistance members (aka runners) and eliminate them....
Sci-fi books like to play around with issues like this as sci-fi is often a mirror held up to let us see ourself, and it does indeed show plenty of potential trouble at the very least during a transition period.
This is the vampire stories. This is the life costs $$$ stories.
Do you have enough $$$ to continue living? What happens to wealth when inheritance changes? What happens to power when people can hold on to it forever?
Putin and Mugabe, emperors for a millennium - how does that sound?
The rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer - sounds like a case of when, not if, the riots break out as you will have one constant target for the despair and anger.
Then there is the "problem" that women, from birth, only have so many eggs that can be fertilized. We have to have another discovery in biotech to be able to engineer eggs after menopause.
Then there is the fact that fewer and fewer men today get to reproduce (women staying ~constant) and how this would change if women are not "in a hurry" and you mix that up with "rich getting richer". There is a potential army of disgruntled young (erm... well not so young anymore perhaps in this setting) men who is not getting any thanks to the New Order. These will be in no way what you might think of as losers today - you can envision a 90/10 society of non-breeders and breeders - and they might have ideas about what _their_ New New World Order should look like.
And we have civil wars all over the place. Much more probable with sudden changes, not so much when they happen slowly. And no, I don't have much faith in my fellow Man (I look in the mirror every day).
death draft.... that or doo-doo-dicks
... born full grown and aging in reverse [just like all Orkans]
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but it isn't really wisdom so much as the ultimate in sour grapes.
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.
I'm not sure if this is utter nonsense, or if you may have a point insofar as the Enlightenment was "historically recent" and has eaten away at some traditional sources of solace.
Attempts at immortality are still for the delusional, disconnected, and mentally ill.
Only if they are flawed attempts. If we eventually get some stuff that actually works, then (ignoring for a moment the larger social upheavals and eventual overpopulation issues--let's say we get plausible long term space travel, too) your choice to die at an arbitrary age of 80 or 90 becomes no different from a choice to die at 30. It is ultimately (and should always be) your choice, but it is not "mentally ill" for not wanting to check out on a timetable based solely on biology.
And as it has been said before: "The world has enough food only for 3 000 000 000 people."
Only with current practices/technology/sources. There are many, many things that can be done to increase that amount even with current technologies. For example, insects can give much higher food rates than mammals and poultry - we just don't typically knowingly eat bugs. Hydroponics, urban gardening (rooftops, etc.), are extant now but underutilized. Advancing technology will provide even better options in the coming century as well, via both improvements in underlying technologies to make gardening/farming more efficient, and biologically engineered foods. There's also the vast untapped possibilities of the oceans.
Living longer won't mean you have more kids. So far the trend has if anything been the reverse.
And "reverse aging" != "live forever". There's still plenty of non-age-related things that can, and eventually will, kill you. In fact, if "reversing aging" does not include "cure cancer" the overall effect on average lifespans will not be particularly large at all.
I suspect this is a complete non-problem.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
Age reversal won't happen to everyone right away... you know who gets it first right... you betcha... the $$$ crowd. So think about it, you've amassed this giant fortune, and NOW you get to enjoy it forever and ever and ever.... meanwhile, all those who slaved to created that wealth, well... they just get to wither and die, leaving a dwidling population to be slaves to the ultra wealthy.
If this weren't conspiracy theory kind of stuff it would be downright scary!
Soylent green is the answer
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The believers continue to think they live an eternal life. After their physical bodies die, their "souls" continue. They produce more offspring than their non-believing rivals, passing on believing genes. At the same time their levels of depression is lower than their poor (lacking resources to eternal lives) atheist rivals, driving athesist almost extinct. In the end, there will be two groups: 98% of true believers and 2% of true elites living (almost) eternal lives. Science won't exist in the form we know it today: it will be "Christian"/(place your religion here) Math/Biology/Geography etc. "Real science" will be replaced with stories in order to smudge the nasty future of the individuals.
‘Cecil Rhodes founded the De Beers Mining Company, owned the British South Africa Company, and had his name given to what became the state of Rhodesia. ... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets".’ (Wikipedia)
He liked to "paint the map British red" and declared, "all of these stars
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Seriously. We're doing this in a lab environment right? To bits of tissue or mice?
That's still a LONG way away from doing:
A) To a human
B) Affecting their entire body
C) In a clinical/outpatient setting
D) Without side effects
E) In a controlled manner
A) Being able to rejuvenate a mouse spleen helps Joe Everyguy out not at all.
B) Rejuvenating someone in a piecemeal fashion can be pointless or even dangerous.
C) There's a HUGE difference between a lab procedure and actually mass producing this so that anyone (with sufficient money) could come in and receive a treatment (or series of treatments).
D) What happens if you run rejuvenation on precancerous or cancerous tissue? What happens to the older tissues? And what sort of effect does that have on the body's mechanisms for cleaning itself up?
E) How do you control how MUCH you're rejuvenating someone? Or is it "catch as catch can"? Sure, it'd be nice to revert to a 20-something. What if Person A reverts only into something equivalent to their mid 30's? While person B reverts to something approximating prepubesence?
This doesn't even get into the social ethics and bioethics of the situation.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Earth is not overpopulated. The distribution of goods and services is what's broken. We could feed house and take care of everyone if we applied our current knowledge instead of using the market system, which hinders progress, is wasteful, and inherently corrupt. And you can stop people from giving birth, you need good education. Responsible parents never have more children than they can properly take care of.
Zardoz, anyone?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Not a fantastic piece of movie, and neither totally bad. At least they thought through the misery of living forever. With all its consequences that we don't foresee when we ponder 'eternal life' naively.
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.
Declaration of Independence allows it, with no repercussions.
"2000 gallons of water for 1 pound" is an exaggeration of a worst-case scenario; even feedlots don't use this much water, and most cattle spend most of their lives on pasture.
I raise some dairy animals on grass, so I can help with a rough calculation based on real life.
I get a calf.
Calf walks around eating grass.
Every day I put out 10 gallons of fresh water, of which the steer drinks 5-7
20 months later, I get about a quarter ton of meat, a square yard or two of leather, and a lot of good fertilizer and dog treats.
So about 6000 gallons of water for 500 pounds of meat, roughly 12 gallons a pound.
Then there's the matter of the unused 3-5 gallons of water that I dump out when I clean the bucket each day, and the cow's urine...none of that water is 'gone,' it's feeding the pasture plants that feed the steer. And even the crappiest McDonald's beef probably spent most of its life on pasture; the feedlots are only for jacking up weight (with water mostly) at the end.
1. You're talking billions of gallons of sea water, far more than we could put a dent in, even with thousands of desalination plants. Furthermore the water would just find its way back to the ocean anyway, because the Earth is a closed ecosystem. ...or was this post meant to be funny?
2. It may reduce *future* global warming, but there is still the problem of all the carbon currently in the atmosphere, as well as seawater acidification.
3. The cost to desalinate 2000 gallons of water is far more than the average person would be willing to pay for a bound of beef.
4. There will be no excess fresh water. Because of the costs, every gallon produced will already be owned by someone. Even if all that desalinated water was used to combat desertification, it's still not even in the ballpark of what would be required.
Doctor to patient, after having given the injection: "I have good news and bad news for you:"
Patient: "The good news first please!"
Doctor: "After this injection, you're going to live for another 800 years."
Patient: 'Great! And the bad one!"
Doctor: "You'll have to stay at your shitty job for another 780 years"
"Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone. Not enough food, not enough space, not enough medical care. If â" no, when â" age reversal becomes a reality, who gets to live? And if everyone gets to live, how will we provide for them?"
This is all based on a false politically correct premise of scarcity.
The reality is we already do produce plenty of food for everyone. The primary food problem is bad guys (warlords) who use food for power and intercept the food stopping it from getting to people who need it. A secondary problem in the first world is people voluntarily wasting good food because they're too picky or the government is too picky.
We have plenty of space. Total non-issue.
Medical care will get better, not worse with more people because there will be more doctors and care givers. Besides, along with living longer is living more healthily so less care is needed due to advancements in science.
Our planet has the capacity to sustainably support 50 BILLION people while still setting aside 25% of the land area for wildlife. Then there is outer space. We desperately need to get off this rock and populate space as habitats and other planets & moons before this planet Earth plays billiard balls again. Long term issue that could happen any time, small probability, huge consequence.
We've reccently radically extended human life span 2.5x what it was for all human history and the result has actually been population decline due to falling birth rate in the parts of the world that people live longer. Countries like Japan and Germany were first to having aging and shrinking populations and the rest of the world is playing catch up. So I think we need to see evidence this is going to cause a population problem because so far the outcome has been counter intuitive. If we can eventually stall and reverse aging, we may have the problem of not enough babies and declining human population. Immortality will be upon us before we know it and before we've had a chance to debate the ethical issues. Like a lot of technological achievement it is a long chain of small advances that pass quietly until we are at that level. Quite simply when the pace of progress out paces the rate at which we age, we can live long enough to receive the next ever better treatment. Long term the politics of immortality self-reinfocing because people who aren't supportive of it will tend to die out. It'll be the best thing to happen to humanity. But we'll sure miss children.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
2. But there are some real effects. Social Security will vanish - no more quitting your job merely because you are old.
3. The real question is what to do with criminals - should we let someone with a life sentence in prison get life extension drugs? What if they are rich? What about long sentences like 70 years? What about people that get out of prison after 10 or 20 years - do we ever wipe their criminal record - what if they've been good for 60 years, should they suffer another 100 years of no job prospects merely because they made one mistake before they were 80
And then there are the mentally disadvantaged. Not just crazy people, but down's syndrome and severely autistic and similarly impaired people. If their parents are dead, will anyone take care of them? Must we give them life extension just to institutionalize them for centuries?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Ohh no, not this fallacious argument again.....please read this comment of mine and explain why is it better to have 20 billion fungi eaters on earth rather than 3 billion meat eaters.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
and also read this http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and tell me why do you think there is not enough food NOW for all people [there actually is].
There will have to be some sort of enforced birthing policy. It's also obvious that the vast majority of people will not have access to the rejuvenation process, it will be priced out of their reach. We will have the most egregious caste system to have ever existed on this planet; the rich will live extended lives and have the 'right' to reproduce at will and the rest of us will live short meagre lives and fight for the right to bear offspring. This is a subject well covered in science fiction guys, it's not new ground. Throw in a little Gattaca and I think you just about have it.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
saved billions.
could it be?
Trying to force more people to live in the absence of resources? You're basically still killing people, you're simply distancing yourselves from the act and washing your hands of the responsibility. Maybe the person who dies will not be the one who can afford longevity treatments; more likely it will be some poor bastard with a different skin color and hat in some distant foreign land. This doesn't seem to worry the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
On the whole, it would probably be more humane to just have everyone in the world play Russian Roulette once a year and thin the herd by 1/6th annually. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
Better yet, don't kill anyone, and incentivize population control. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.
Maybe the best strategy is not to play the game (i.e. let people die naturally)? Even now we can prolong life medically for people that are effectively invalids and/or in chronic pain, but to what advantage? Many of them would be happy to be allowed to pass away. When medical care rises to the level that these people actually want to continue living, then maybe we can talk about longevity.
Death is not a bad option, really.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Sure you can mandate when people have to stop reproducing. If we get to the point that it's a real option to, "halt", father time, then we should put a hard limit on when you can actually reproduce, not have sex, just have babies. In a case where false immortality is an option, we'd have to look very seriously at something like this as.
Hu. no. Unless you are into CT, such a cure would be available to everybody at a price the market can bear. If the material energy and engineering cost is high, then only few will get it. but if it is an easy mass marketable product ? No it won't be available only for rich. Even if it was that way in the US, in Europe or any other county somebody would reproduce the "cure" and spread it. The only way to have the scenario above is have a conspiracy and have the cure maintained "secret". fat chance of that seeing msot doctor/biologist mindset.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Yea, just keep breeding here on Earth and shoot the occasional capsule full of people off into space.
Do you have any clue what it would take to keep up with a population increasing by billions of people? Do you want me to Godwin this thread?
...than we're using now. Examples? Oregon, US is inhabited by about 4-5 million people on the area of 80% of the area of Poland that has over 38 million people, and still Poland is not really densely populated. We're learning as a hummanity how to find them all the time. We get scared and indoctrinated so easily...
I remember this article from a few years ago showing how much food we can create on earth. For instance, this self sufficient bulding can make food for as much as 50 000 people : http://www.popsci.com/cliff-ku....
And there's no end on on much bulding you can create. With nano-technology advance, we'll build highter and highter and bigger and bigger until we run out of material (and then we'll get them from space). Of course it also mean we'll eventually wipe out all "untouched" nature on the process but if humanity survive, it'll come to that.
One of many quality of humanity is his ability to adapt. If we cure the greatest cause of mortality then the devellopped country that will benefit first from it will have to put regulation to place to ensure decent population that follow our devellopement. Also, by living "forever" the whole retirement process will need to be rethinked. On top of my head, something like "2 years education - 36 years work - 10 years retirement (1 children)" indefinite loop could be an idea so, at any time, there's 2 worker for 1 retired adult and an (more and more) insignifiant number of children.
Elok
... you can't kill people to preserve resources and space.
People have long ago figured out the kill part when it comes to resources. Not that the focus is on "preserve", but on "obtain". No need to preserve anything if it is of no use to anyone...
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I reject your premise that the world cannot support more people in a healthy way. Just look at history. The earth’s population has grown dramatically yet people live longer, healthier and freer lives today than ever before. People have predicted the world would fall into starvation war biological devastation and finally the zombie apocalypse. It just will not happen unless we get hit by an asteroid or some other cosmic random event. Not enough food - New tech - mechanized farming - fertilizer - genetic engineered food. Running out of energy - New tech Fracking - More oil and gas than we can use. Solar power on the verge of unsubsidized cost competitiveness. Clean Fission systems based on thorium, and even Fusion systems will be ready when we eventually need them. SpaceX is about to crack the Space cost problem with reusable rockets so soon we can build on the Moon and Mars and protect the Earth from that rock with our name on it. Other resources recycling and 3D printer technology gets better and faster eventually everything will be recyclable back into everything we need. Bioengineering gets better so diseases will continue to be more curable. The more I watch presentations like this TED talkhttps://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen#t-353233 The more I am convinced the Human race has a great future more like the world of Star Trek than Mad Max.
Judging by Dick Cheney's attitudes and continued existence, they already do.
This isn't true at all. We are very quickly destroying our ability to produce agricultural excess and that existing excess isn't really valuable. We can grow grains for everyone on earth. Not meat, seafood, and vegetables. Of course we're also depleting aquifers, losing top soil, and destroying ocean ecosystems at a rate that will manifest in serious issues within a couple generations. Not to mention that any real perturbation in fossil fuel costs or availability will severely hamper our ability to farm and distribute food.
"Simulated pedophilia"
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
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.
True, but medicine is about to evolve faster than our longevity. We we invent something that grant us 20% more live, than in those new years we may invent something that grant 10%, and in those 35% etc.
The three main cause of death are aging, disease and trauma. And I can imagine medecine capable of removing the first two in a century or two.
Elok
I think you forgot about the water for the food, which is the major input due to the inefficiency of converting grass to protein. You claim to be a professional in this area?
The ultrarich, of course. With income disparity what it is today, that's pretty much what's going on already. We work, they profit, and with the profits buy the drugs to keep themselves young. These drugs will end up being be so expensive that the ultrarich are the only ones who'll be able to afford them anyway.
If you want to be immortal, you have to be sterilized.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
If a person refuses the treatments to make them immortal, are they committing suicide?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's just Malthus 200 year old meme and alarmist policy as usual.
Claim doom and gloom is right around the corner if we don't stop this right now, if called out just claim "this time it's different! it's not like in the past because reasons!"
unless they find the cure to altiimers and cancer you would still be screwed even if they could make your body last longer. your brain brakes down after 100 years or so and in some cases sooner. so say the avg age is 60 they might be able to ad another 30 or so years.would be nice but not like we will suddenly have people living forever. you know early humans 40 was old age most would die off from something even as miner as a bad tooth or infection it was not until modern medicine 60+ became common.
Has no one seen the movie "In Time"?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt16...
The poor will get a "Life" clock and the rich will be able to "buy" extra years....
Young people telling you to get off their lawn.
Bark less. Wag more.
One premise that may need re-examination is that the earth doesn't have enough resources and space. A relatively small percentage of the earth is saturated with people, so there is lots of space to go around for the medium term of earth's future. What we are more constrained on are resources, and space does come into play there in terms of farm land, etc. But even there, the maximum potential of the earth to produce food is quite enormous. And while significant areas are currently unusable for food production (ex. the Sahara Desert), it's possible that in the future some of those areas may be transformed into productive areas. On the energy front, there is still quite a bit of uncertainty about the future. Will nuclear fusion be a big player? Will solar efficiencies and costs come way down? While I may be an optimist, my sense is that it is likely given the rapid advancement of technology that in the long term we will have much more energy available per capita than we do today. Given the huge surface area of the earth, and the incredible amount of energy that shines on the earth each day, it's hard for me to imagine an energy scarce long term future, even with a population far greater than we have today. To talk specifics, imagine a "fully automated" solar infrastructure where the factory that produces the panels is 100% automated, the installation of panels is fully automated, the process of receiving orders and scheduling them is fully automated, etc. And imagine that at massive scale. That possibility alone, even with 20% efficient panels, is quite significant. On the flip side, thinking about curing the aging process. I'm highly skeptical that any one "trick" is going to stop the aging process. Yes, a discovery could be made that suddenly increases life spans to an average of 200 years or 1000 years, but I find it unlikely that human life spans could be extended beyond 10,000 years any time soon. I think the most important point, though, is that it seems very unlikely for human life spans to be infinite. Even if they are 10,000 years, that is very different than infinite. Another thing to consider is that with very long (but finite) life spans, the birth rate still needs to be 2 births per couple in order for the population of the earth not to decrease. It just means that your child rearing years become an increasingly short period of your life. Yet another important factor here is that for a long time now people have had the ability to choose how many children they have. Routinely in developed countries men get "snipped" after a couple has 2-3 kids. If we lived in a world where the average life span was 10,000 years, I think the most important change would be added social responsibility to get "snipped" after having a second child. And if people chose to have additional children, there might need to be some kind of financial cost (etc) so that people are appropriately incentivised to act in altruistic ways when planning family sizes. Such possibilities aren't really "pretty", but they're not exactly distopian if you ask me. What is most likely? Here are my best guesses for the future: - In the next century - Life spans increase further towards 200 years - The developing world's GDP grows very significantly, including food production (net positive food production) - The global birth rate drops very significantly, partly due to wealthy people having fewer kids, partly because of "social responsibility" - Automation and intelligent systems for the most part handle increases in world population, etc. (ex. making solar power much cheaper) - Further out - Life spans increase beyond 200 years, but 10,000 years - Diminishing returns: Further advances in life expectancy take longer to be made - The earth provides abundant energy via solar (as it does now, just not harnessed) - The earths surface is highly utilized (as opposed to now) - Couples have on average about 2 children, and their child rearing years become a smaller and smaller percentage of their lives - Sign
"Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone. Not enough food,"
BS! There is plenty of food. What there isn't is a decent distribution system. More than enough to feed the starving is constantly being thrown away because it is too expensive to ship or it's genes are patented and stuff like that.
It's called "being married for more than 10 years".
Prose that could stun a water buffalo. One-dimensional characters that barely pass as cardboard cutouts representing their assigned idiom.
I tired to read Atlas Shrugged about 5 different times and just couldn't. Was given a copy of the audiobook narrated by Edward Herrmann that manage to make it possible to sit through (at least while we drove 18 hours cross-country and 18-hour back!) otherwise I still wouldn't have "read" it.
And that monologue--jeez lady, one or two pages of that would've been sufficient.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about just such an event in a short story in the book "Welcome to the Monkey House". In that story he suggested that families would be confined to living together in a single house, with pecking order dependent upon age ranking. The eldest got to pick what to watch, got to eat first, etc. In this story one of the family members decides to water down the elder's anti-aging medicine so he would age and die. It has a strange and interesting twist at the end so I won't spoil it.
It will be like LASIK or really good dental work - not deemed medically necessary and thus available only to those with the money to buy it. A few countries, with small, aging populations might toy with providing it to their citizens, but the majority won't have it available to them. Having lots of youthful adults would diminish the profits of the medical/insurance complex. It will be hard on some types of plastic surgery, but overall, you won't ever see it except on movie stars and billionaires.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
Dinosaur's didn't plan for an asteroid. Our ancestors are here because we are the natural expression of nature (recursion loop intended.)
The natural world is not a reserve or park. It just is.
What I always find funny on these conversations with the tech focused is how limited the vision can be. On some level most of us laugh at the laws for computer security that guard the door of a metaphorical building with no walls but we don't see to understand the paradox of the same treatment of those things we fear.
The world has no walls, no doors, and no protocols but physics and entropy. This will be no more the end of the world then when those of Rappa Nui died out because of their focus on their perceived world of warriors, gods and sacrifice, not ground cover and erosion. (Source: Collapse by Jared Diamond) We are already coming to understand, truly understand, that we are here for a blink of geologic time, let alone the cosmic time scale.
So what the matter if at the end of our epoch, since we westerners tend to focus on a false hierarchy of those better than the masses, a few live a bit longer before humanity ends, or transcends? Keep in mind western culture , 1st world, is only 30% of our population....
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
So many of our modern problems come down to the fact that we mitigate our expanding ability to provide food and other resources by reproducing at faster and faster rates. Solving world hunger would be trivial at this point, if we could slow the growth of our population. You see declining birth rates in developed countries, but it's not even close to enough.
We also actively exacerbate these problems with aid. The standard of living in parts of Africa has been an ongoing tragedy, but rather than finding a sustainable way to provide resources for a population that is stabilized, we just keep putting more and more bandaids on the problem that, in the end, just make the situation worse. This is another area where we've made some progress, with better charities popping up, but it's not even close to enough.
Humans just have this sense of entitlement when it comes to breeding and the consumption of resources. It's a primal urge that we just don't seem to be able to manage/overcome. Add in longer lifespans and, oh my god...age reversal...and you have a recipe for disaster. We need our social norms to start catching up with the technology we have.
You can tell people not to reproduce, the price of reversing the aging process should be mandatory sterilization.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Well for meat raised mostly on pasture it is unlikely that water would have been collected and used for anything else. If you are counting that rain water that the grass used to grow which the cow ate, then are you also figuring all the wasted rain water that flows into sewer drains and falls on lawns through out the country?
When it comes to the grain that is used to supplement you might have a point. But then again I grew up in an area where they grew lots of corn and I don't recall seeing farmers watering their corn fields.
The food is grass. So are you saying that we should count the volume of rain water that the grass absorbs? I wonder if he waters the field.
Earth has perfected organ transplant technology, so someone with access to transplants can live for centuries. The transplants are provided by disassembling criminals, because almost every crime is capital, and execution is by disassembly for transplant stock. Because every citizen considers himself or herself law-abiding, they believe they benefit from more transplant material... and would never become transplant material themselves. They think, "I'll never murder, or embezzle, or repeatedly violate traffic laws, so make 'em all capital crimes. Get rid of the undesirables, and a longer life for me."
Earth has a unified government and a world paramilitary police force: the ARM.
The ARM has three major duties: "mother hunts" (enforcing mandatory parenthood licensing, designed so that each normal adult is allowed to be the parent of two children only -- replacement rate reproduction only), suppressing dangerous technologies (in the hands of anyone but the ARM), and combating organlegging -- black market transplant providers who source their material by kidnapping and murder.
So, the presumption that you can't deny reproductive rights is just silly. You have reproductive rights, but if you're hunted down and killed for attempting to exercise them outside the constraints of a violently enforced law, what good are they?
Oddly, 22nd Century Earth of Niven's milieu isn't generally portrayed internally as a dystopia, because humanity has been conditioned into obedience and pacifism anyway. Most Earth citizens consider the status quo wonderful.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
You're not counting the rainwater that makes the grass grow that the bovine eats. It doesn't matter to you now, but if it quit raining (ask California about that) you'd find that you suddenly didn't have enough water to continue growing cattle.
Exactly.
Thats why the panic inducing pablum about how we are running out of food, and that we have to use their seeds and their chemicals to have another "green revolution"(even though that has caused our water supplies to be drawn down to dangerous levels, as well as chemical pollutions affecting our entire ecosystem)coming from the mouths of Monsanto and other Chemical-Industrial-Complex nutjobs is absolute bullshit.
End of run on sentence.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Then all of society will become twelve years old, instead of just politics.
No. When.
To.Hold.'Em.
(your turn)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The article seems a bit pessimistic.
More people = more farmers
More people = more builders
More people = more doctors
Hopefully: More people = more knowledge. The future is bright, don't be so glum.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
If you were to eliminate all medical causes of death in current society. I counted 100 deaths per 100,000 per year from Wikipeadia death rate entry.
Would society become more cautious to lengthen life? Would society become more reckless beacuse life is so abundant then? I think it would stay right in the middle as now.
Although I am a proponent of nuclear power (and wind and solar and geothermal etc), you'd have to be REALLY bad at math to believe that the amount of water pulled from the oceans for desalination would have any meaningful impact on ocean levels.
Earth can support 30+ billion people easyly. Three times the earths population would fit into the US, with room to spare and more than enough room for agriculture to feed them all. The problem - as usual - is management of society, of natural resources and wealth disparity. We are at a point where it is more feasible for all of us to hand out solar panels, food, transport and shelter to the poor for free rather than have them chop down the remainder of trees in order to burn them to cook and heat.
Imagine earth being managed / gouverned by a team of smart people, such as the exec teams of Google or Apple - that would be a totally different thing and we'd probably all be way better of than now.
As for the procreation: We'd have to start thinking outside of heritage and percieve all children as children of everyone. At the same time first world people are losing interest in having children. We need to spread wealth and education in such a way that the birth rate goes down. Combine that with the management mentioned above plus perhaps some unfied space travel efforts and we have a bright new utopia ahead of us. If we then manage to reach 50 billion and the place is getting crowded, we can than think about who gets to take the suicide pill.
Sadly, somehow I think this is not going to happen too soon. :-(
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Using Chernobyl (or Fukushima) as a reason not to build more reactors is the same logic as saying we shouldn't build boats because of the Titanic.
443 reactors provide 10% of the worlds power needs right now. Safely. citation. It would not be by any means an insurmountable endeavor to build 2500 additional reactors and get us completely off of coal/oil/gas.
Even better would be 1000 additional reactors, and supplement the remaining with hydro/solar/wind/etc.
It's simple, if you want the anti-aging you have to get snipped. As of whenever they create these laws, anyone alive is allowed 1 or 2 children before they get the anti-aging. If you have 3 more more (After the law is passed, so as not to exclude those that had them before such a thing existed) then you're out.
You trade immortality for your reproductive rights. It's as simple as that.
I'd question the assumption that there's really all that much scarcity first; given the lopsided distribution of wealth worldwide and the abundance of wide open spaces, the world is likely quite capable of supporting double or triple our current population with some serious changes in distribution. More people means more work means more stuff being made, as well. Also, once you feed and educate people they have a lot fewer kids just by the natural consequences of those things. Long story short, it's going to necessitate some major societal changes, but I see no reason for it not to be sustainable, especially if we factor in space :)
We'll go from being organisms to becoming orgasms ;-)
... I would love to be like Lazerus Long and live to be 4000 yrs old. Maybe someday we all will.
Wait, you want to go back in time and fall in love with your Mom and then travel back to the future where you can make two female clones of yourself and fall in love with them. I'd be posting as an AC also if I was you! LOL
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
You don't need offspring to care for you in your old age, you don't need their labor, you don't need to ensure your bloodline, so there's no pressure.
Is it then possible age reversal could reverse population growth?
We'll perfect Terminator robots before we perfect the fountain of youth, so the problem will be taken care of.
Evolution at this point isn't exactly trending in a positive direction. As more and more nations are lifted out of poverty those with natural advantages of intelligence will continue in those nations to slow their reproduction while the other half of humanity breeds like rabbits as they have always done. Stopping natural evolution at this point would be a very positive thing. The next step of course is designer babies and we're really already at the very early stages of that. I'm going to get a bioluminescent one so it will be harder to misplace.
Everyone is making a big deal out of a "problem" that is ridiculously simple to solve:
Every government on Earth says to its citizens: "You can either get this treatment that will make you live this much longer... OR you can have children... but you CANNOT have both." Have a police force charged with enforcing this rule, and nothing more. Make the penalty for disobeying EXTREMELY harsh... like forced abortion, or the child can live but both parents are put to death right after.
Sound harsh? Nope, it's a choice for every single person, nobody is forced into anything.
Think it won't work? It ABSOLUTELY will, and here's why: humans, the VAST majority, are at their core selfish beings. Given the choice between living hundreds of years, or maybe even indefinitely, or having children, MOST of them are going to choose the selfish option and say they'll give up having kids. Guaranteed.
Now, before you say it, this plan needs some tweaks to cover all the bases... for example, there's got to be some minimum age where this decision is made. Is is 18? 21? You want someone to be old enough to make a proper decision of course... but then, what do you do with anyone who has a kid BEFORE that age? I'd suggest maybe a stiff fine, stiff enough to dissuade MOST people from having a kid before the designated age, but you're still going to have some and we don't want to be killing teens, right? But, teen pregnancy has been on the decline anyway, so it seems that education works, so it's probably not a dealbreaker.
Do we perhaps make people have to undergo a procedure to render them unable to have children when they decide? Would certainly make he policing requirement less, but that might be a bit much... worth debating at least.
Of course, you still have to ensure enough people do procreate to keep the species genetically viable and not stagnate... maybe a lottery? Half the population gets to live forever, half have to procreate, and it's all random? Hmm, lots of chances for abuse of course, and that aside, it kinda hurts my "democracy" brain that says everyone should have an equal chance at the good life... maybe just limit it? Like, if you get picked to have kids you can only have one, and you only get to live an extra 200 years or something? That might seem like a good trade-off right now, but when the average lifespan is 1,000 years it's not going to seem like such a good deal.
So yeah, I'm not saying there aren't some holes that have to be plugged to make it all work right, but the point is if you simply give people the choice between children and a massive increase in their own lifespan, the basic problem is going to solve itself based on nothing but simple human nature, that's the bottom line.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
We'll need to put maximum age limits on political participation to prevent society from completely ossifying under the weight of the ancient rich.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
that it would be the end of all shopping networks and game shows as we know them. Also, there would likely be no more ducks in city parks, as they'll die out quite quickly as soon as there's no one around to feed them.
Immortality is only available to individuals who have been permanently sterilized before having children. Your choice - you can strive for immortality personally, or through your children, but not both.
Of course enforcement would be an issue...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"how will we provide for them?" "We" will not provide for them. They will provide for themselves. Anyone who is wealthy enough to pay for such god-like care would be able to take care of themselves. But, more to your point, if there are more consumers, they will still be competing for resources. It takes resources (energy) for a wealthy person to pay for (acquire) the powers of immortality. But, since they have the power to acquire, they also will have the power to out-compete everyone else for resources. So, don't think of the problem from a socialist perspective but from a capitalist or competitive/Darwinian perspective since social Darwinism will most likely always be a major factor.
An what do you suggest happens with accidental pregnancies? You would have to criminalize reproduction, and that would take a major revision to the Constitution.
Yes, use one accident cause mostly by inexperience with nuclear power than by any inherent danger in it as reasoning for why nuclear power is bad. Of course, you have to ignore all the damage cause not just by fossil fuel accidents like oil spills and coal mining accidents, but also the general damage caused by their emissions and extractions.
It would definitely be a pretty extreme measure but the alternative is rapid over population and all of the joys that would bring. I would go for permanent sterilization for everyone, probably irradiating ovaries and testes. You'd probably want to collect and store some samples first though. Someone has a kid outside of the approved means, they can pick to be exiled or stay and spend the rest of their unextended life basically on parole. I'm not sure you can reverse the sterilization caused by essentially microwaving your gonads, although I suppose in time we could clone new ones. It should be a pretty cheap procedure to accomplish, plenty of people get it for free because of poor safety standards.
I think a very shallow screening process would be appropriate. Maybe very basic means testing to ensure the kid doesn't starve or freeze to death. And maybe a basic psych evaluation to try and weed out physcopathic parents. I don't think education level testing would be necessary at all honestly, with everyone living hundreds of years and being of sound mind they should eventually all end up much smarter than most of us are now. We'd likely see most of the population eligible to have a child should they win the lottery. In fact I'd just let everyone who hadn't had a child yet be enrolled in the lottery, then once a person won they could choose to be tested and have their kid, or sell/barter their baby voucher to someone else.
Someone else already mentioned that an actuary already ran the math showing that even with the elimination of death from old age and related causes only rarely would anyone make it to 1k years old. So over anyone persons lifespan they are likely to have the chance to have a child should they so choose it'll just be at a much slower pace than today.
Not enough food? America alone could sustain more than half the planet, if not more.
Not enough space? For the 7 billion here? Bullshit.
The facts are plain and simple: No one is willing to donate time, money and resources to make it happen.
Its actually quite the opposite: they devote time, MONEY and resources to KEEP IT THIS WAY.
Open your eyes.
BONUS! By removing sea water from the oceans for the purpose of desalination, you mitigate the ocean level rise due to global warming!
uhhh....is that because the nuclear power plants will regularly explode and leave massive craters big enough to store all the excess water coming from melting glaciers? Cause surely you've realized that if you're going to siphon water out of the oceans to decrease their depth you'll have to store it somewhere...forever. To store all of Greenland's water you'd need a hole about 2 miles deep that's the size of Texas, Kansas, Florida combined! ....hmmm, perhaps there is an amicable solution after all....
Well, me... duh.
Claiming that social mobility is possible for your descendants is practically the same as what Elon Musk, the Mars Society and similar space colonization (or settlement for those hate the C word) groups are advocating. You really have no guarantee that "your" next generation will be better off or some political whacko or would-be despot isn't going to hijack their future and turn Earth or country into a war-zone or just slightly better a peaceful police state. Still multi-generational planning is a nice thought. I don't really blame the Libertarian survivalists and the space nut jobs for thinking even further ahead.
Please use a spell checker.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
...called death the gift of Men and he was right.
We can easily use technology and get enough seafood .. have you seen how big the ocean is? If we had the will we could set up massive netted farm areas .. it's already being done in some scale for blue fin tuna. For land meat .. we can grow meat via tissue culture in the extreme case. There's already project to gneetically engineer yeast to produce milk and milk proteins. In fact a lot of our caloric intake can come from plant and animal tissue culture. We could grow our calories and produce milk via yeast in large vats. We can have enough water through desalination. These can all be run on nuclear energy with no pollution.
...*always* solves overpopulation. Relax, do nothing, and let the natural process occur.
Surprised no one referred to this movie.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
This idea is hopelessly flawed. The human mind has not evolved for very long lifespans. We would all go mad by 150. Just sayin'. Careful what you wish for. Oh and for space travel, we either figure out how to hibernate for years at a time, or we find a better algorithm for folding space. My own theory suggest it's way too late for either to save us from the fate we have made for ourselves. Enjoy friends cause it's all downhill from here.
Cancer... thats what happens.
Being able to choose freely is within anyone's grasp, but to choose responsibly is a standard which is nearly never met.
Who deserves to live? Ideally the brilliant, well-bodied, distinct and talented, varied in craft in hobby and humor, wit, literacy, mathmeatics, etc. Who GETS to lives? Everyone. Once we do this (very certainly in the short future) we'll be able to travel to places like the moon, mars, etc. We'll be able to afford small colonies--once a person lives past the age of I don't know eighty? Helping one another and coexisting peacefully and with love will be EXTREMELY common-place: Even those psychopathic--that is, physiologically incapable of experiencing emotion, will in the beginning, either be paid a great deal of money, from a very early age, With their Consent, to act prosocially. Once this is a thing there will be no error in this function. The kepler exoplanets stand as a reality. Science will develop more quickly; everyone will be a published author, programmer, scientist, all-around great-person. And everyone will want to have sex with everyone and anyone. There will be planets made to look and feel like this new Mad Max movie-planets to look and feel like bioshock, the time traveler, water-world, hell in the new american bible, hell in the old chistian bibles in the Beinecke library, hell like in the TORAH! There will be worlds with big mushrooms like in the original Willy Wonka, and ones where plants are made of LSD. There is a whole lot out there--a whole f*cking lot. And I am DAMN WELL gonna be there for it. Hell, if chopping off my head and working on putting it to someone elses body doesn't work... I can always rely on my fellow human-beings :-)
If we all live forever, education costs would disappear. We'd also be able to never retire, so we wouldn't have working age people caring for kids and the elderly, as we'd all work. Life would be so much easier.
...They should destroy it. Either that, or see the world destroyed (with people dying as they are, the world can hardly support who is here now). If "Age Reversing" is just about superficial appearance, so be it. The ego desires it. But if people begin to live significantly longer, we'll need a second planet. 100 years ago, the world population was just under 1.7 billion humans. The planet now has 7.1 billion humans. (China alone has almost the number the whole world had a century ago).
Hurry, hurry, hurry - step right this way. We offer immortality. You'll NEVER die!
I guess there's no God after all. Turning life on earth into hell. Paint the town red.
Problem solved.
Also, when population pressures become too great, the next epidemic/war/zombie apocalypse will take care of the rest...
After that it will be a series of max mad type thunderdome type facilities, two men enter, one man leaves kind of population control...
What this means is: society will stagnate if the old generations aren't continually dying off to make way for new ideas. Especially considering the fact that age gives you a huge leg up in society - you have time to take advantage of compounding interest, you have seniority at the workplace, you have experience, you have an extensive network of successful and similarly well-connected people. As it currently stands, this is tempered by the fact that your body and mind deteriorate until you eventually must stop working, leaving room for less experienced people to take over the vacated roles.
Even as it is though, the fact that the boomers are living longer, and generally did a shitty job saving for retirement, means that they are sticking around in jobs far longer than they should have, which means promotions for newcomers are fewer and farther between because there's no room being made at the top.
To make progress as a society, to come up with new theories to extend relativity and quantum mechanics and lead the way forward, we need to allow old thinking to die and new thinking to take its place. When human mortality ends, so does human progress.
It is the Star Trek universe. What you're missing is that this is not Earth. It is Ferenginar.
You're absolutely right. What you see in our society resembles Star Trek's Ferengi society: Amoral, cash-based social Darwinism with those at the top, who often add no value to the system given the highest rewards and gifted with the greatest political influence and ability to do harm in the pursuit of their narrowly-defined interests. The really fun part about all this is how it warps our society and its attitudes, allowing us to say (fill-in-the-blank) is poor and lazy when we have allowed wages to deteriorate to the point where entry-level wages are not commensurate with a decent lifestyle while we glorify the financial sector and allow it to drain intellectual resources from other fields and bail it out, putting it on society's dole when the quest for more, more quickly, causes it to turn the financial sector into a casino with obvious results. Not good.
People will be renewed through Carrousel once they reach a specific age. 30 seems about right. If they refused then a new department of the government can send out "sandmen" to track them down and kill them.