Perhaps you're expecting me to propose a solution that society should and thus "obviously will" adopt. Actually I'm not. I have two answers that say nothing about what specific steps society will take, one concerning past precedent and one concerning human rights. Then I'll survey some of the issues concerning what solutions we might choose, and possibly allay some concerns, but don't forget that I'm not saying what I think society will actually do.
First let's look at past precedent. Put yourself in the position of someone powerful -- the prime minister of France, for example -- in, say, 1870 or so, when Pasteur was going around saying that hygiene could almost entirely prevent infant deaths from infections and death in childbirth. In your position, you have some influence over how quickly this knowledge gets out -- and, thus, how quickly lives start being saved. But you realise that the sooner people start adhering to these principles and washing their hands and so on, the sooner the population will start exploding on account of all those children not dying. What would you have done? -- got the information out as soon as possible, or held it back as best you could in order to delay the population crisis? I have yet to meet anyone who says they would have done the latter. With curing aging, there is no difference. None. So, specifically: sure, there may well be some sort of population explosion, just as there was following the elimination of all those deaths -- and we may respond by reducing birth rate as quickly as we did then, or we may take longer -- but the first priority is to end the slaughter. Everything else is detail.
Now for the "human rights" aspect. The Earth's population will probably grow quite rapidly in the period immediately after these treatments become available, and we'll be faced with a simple choice: either we use the treatments and live a long time and have very few children, or we carry on having children at the current rate and we avoid using the treatments, so that we carry on dying of old age just like now. I don't say that I know which choice society will make at that time. What I do say is that that era's population has the right to make that choice itself, and not to have it made for it by today's society. If we delay the development of rejuvenation therapies, we are condemning future society to die at the ages that we are dying at today, whether they like it or not. We have no right to do that; we have a duty to develop these therapies as fast as possible in order to give future society the choice. Just as parliament has no right (in the UK) to constrain the choices of subsequent parliaments, so society today has no right to constrain the choices of society in the future.
OK, now for some discussion of the concrete possibilities. There are four things to consider:
- worst-case rate of arrival of an overpopulation problem; - chance that the problem will never arrive at all; - options if and when it does; - whose choice it should be to decide between those options. (Yes, the last of these will be something of a repetition of what I've said above. I reckon it bears repeating.)
1) Worst-case rate of arrival -- three main points.
First, the maximal rate of growth (i.e. presuming we have fully effective rejuvenation therapies, universally available) is a big city per year. That's actually pretty good news -- it's not all that much more than what we have at present, because the global birth rate already exceeds the death rate by an enormous margin. So, we'll have really a rather long time to work out what to do about this issue before we have to do much at all. Other logistical problems, such as training enough medical personnel to provide the therapies, will hit us far sooner.
The second good thing is that even as and when overpopulation does get serious (if it ever does -- see below), it'll do so very gradually. We'll be able to experiment with
There's not the faintest chance of these therapies being restricted by ability to pay for more than a few years after they arrive. There are many reasons why I'm so sure of this. Here I'll give four of them.
The first reason is a slightly dark one. When a cure for aging is developed, people will want it really quite badly -- more than they want cures for other things that can only extend their lives by a few years. The problem with democracy is that it only works well for issues that a lot of people really really care about, enough to determine whom they vote for. Contemporary medicine just doesn't quite achieve that -- the economy always beats it. But that won't be true of a cure for aging. As soon as a real cure becomes widely anticipated -- let alone actually developed -- it will become impossible to get elected other than on a platform incorporating a Manhattan project to expedite a cure, both in terms of its development and in terms of its dissemination. Patents that seem in danger of slowing down the push towards universal access will simply be subject to compulsory purchase by governments (at a very hefty price, of course, but compulsory nonetheless). All the laws that we currently see impeding such progress will be torn up as quickly as turns out to be necessary. This will happen not only because of the democratic process (which works only at a national level) but also of the global political process. Since 9/11 there is a good understanding that making a lot of people very angry is a bad idea for everyone, and it will therefore be seen to be in the enlightened self-interest of the industrialised world to make rejuvenation therapies available to all (at a price they can pay, even if that means free) as fast as possible, After all, the point of buying rejuvenation therapies is to live a long time, not to get blown up by someone from the other side of the world who resents you and your compatriots because they can't afford those therapies.
The second reason is less threatening. There will be a lead-time of at least a decade, which I call the War On Aging, starting with the achievement of results in mice impressive enough to shake society out of its current fatalism and make people really want to cure aging as soon as possible. At that point, mayhem will ensue -- society will be turned upside-down in a million ways, by (e.g.) no one wanting to do risky jobs like the fire service any more -- but the big thing of relevance here is that (as noted above) it will become politically mandatory to throw serious money, taxpayers' money, at hastening the end of age-related death. The phrase "War On Aging" is appropriate, unlike "War On Cancer", because people will want to make sacrifices on the scale normally only seen in wartime in order to end the slaughter as soon as possible. The main such sacrifice will be in simple taxation, to pay for training of a staggering number of medical personnel, to deliver these therapies ASAP when they arrive, and also to provide much more thorough traditional medical care in the interim so as to give people as much chance as possible of still being in a reasonably healthy state at that time. That means that by the time rejuvenation therapies actually arrive, society will already have done what was necessary to ensure that they will be free at the point of delivery to all who are aged enough to need them.
The third reason is really a reinforcement of the second one, in that it is a way to help you see that the development I've just described is not at all utopian - in fact, it's completely certain to occur. It's a purely hypothetical scenario, whose consequences in terms of society's reaction are obvious and whose similarity in all relevant respects to the War on Aging is equally obvious. Here goes.
HIV is a virus that we still don't know how to eliminate from the body, nor to vaccinate against (i.e., prevent uninfected people from becoming infected). What we do now have drugs to do is suppress HIV thoroughly enough that it never proceeds to full-blown AIDS,
Quote
"Retirement at 85 until you can get SS benefits? No thank you"
Thats why you don't "work", you do something that you really enjoy doing and you don't work a day in your life. You have to find things you're pationate about and you won't mind working.
Slashdot Mirror
The best thing to do is to visit http://www.sens.org/concerns.htm
It will answer most all of these repeat questions I'm seeing posted here.
Answer to the questions that
Curing aging would cause terrible overpopulation
Perhaps you're expecting me to propose a solution that society should and thus "obviously will" adopt. Actually I'm not. I have two answers that say nothing about what specific steps society will take, one concerning past precedent and one concerning human rights. Then I'll survey some of the issues concerning what solutions we might choose, and possibly allay some concerns, but don't forget that I'm not saying what I think society will actually do.
First let's look at past precedent. Put yourself in the position of someone powerful -- the prime minister of France, for example -- in, say, 1870 or so, when Pasteur was going around saying that hygiene could almost entirely prevent infant deaths from infections and death in childbirth. In your position, you have some influence over how quickly this knowledge gets out -- and, thus, how quickly lives start being saved. But you realise that the sooner people start adhering to these principles and washing their hands and so on, the sooner the population will start exploding on account of all those children not dying. What would you have done? -- got the information out as soon as possible, or held it back as best you could in order to delay the population crisis? I have yet to meet anyone who says they would have done the latter. With curing aging, there is no difference. None. So, specifically: sure, there may well be some sort of population explosion, just as there was following the elimination of all those deaths -- and we may respond by reducing birth rate as quickly as we did then, or we may take longer -- but the first priority is to end the slaughter. Everything else is detail.
Now for the "human rights" aspect. The Earth's population will probably grow quite rapidly in the period immediately after these treatments become available, and we'll be faced with a simple choice: either we use the treatments and live a long time and have very few children, or we carry on having children at the current rate and we avoid using the treatments, so that we carry on dying of old age just like now. I don't say that I know which choice society will make at that time. What I do say is that that era's population has the right to make that choice itself, and not to have it made for it by today's society. If we delay the development of rejuvenation therapies, we are condemning future society to die at the ages that we are dying at today, whether they like it or not. We have no right to do that; we have a duty to develop these therapies as fast as possible in order to give future society the choice. Just as parliament has no right (in the UK) to constrain the choices of subsequent parliaments, so society today has no right to constrain the choices of society in the future.
OK, now for some discussion of the concrete possibilities. There are four things to consider:
- worst-case rate of arrival of an overpopulation problem;
- chance that the problem will never arrive at all;
- options if and when it does;
- whose choice it should be to decide between those options.
(Yes, the last of these will be something of a repetition of what I've said above. I reckon it bears repeating.)
1) Worst-case rate of arrival -- three main points.
First, the maximal rate of growth (i.e. presuming we have fully effective rejuvenation therapies, universally available) is a big city per year. That's actually pretty good news -- it's not all that much more than what we have at present, because the global birth rate already exceeds the death rate by an enormous margin. So, we'll have really a rather long time to work out what to do about this issue before we have to do much at all. Other logistical problems, such as training enough medical personnel to provide the therapies, will hit us far sooner.
The second good thing is that even as and when overpopulation does get serious (if it ever does -- see below), it'll do so very gradually. We'll be able to experiment with
There's not the faintest chance of these therapies being restricted by ability to pay for more than a few years after they arrive. There are many reasons why I'm so sure of this. Here I'll give four of them.
The first reason is a slightly dark one. When a cure for aging is developed, people will want it really quite badly -- more than they want cures for other things that can only extend their lives by a few years. The problem with democracy is that it only works well for issues that a lot of people really really care about, enough to determine whom they vote for. Contemporary medicine just doesn't quite achieve that -- the economy always beats it. But that won't be true of a cure for aging. As soon as a real cure becomes widely anticipated -- let alone actually developed -- it will become impossible to get elected other than on a platform incorporating a Manhattan project to expedite a cure, both in terms of its development and in terms of its dissemination. Patents that seem in danger of slowing down the push towards universal access will simply be subject to compulsory purchase by governments (at a very hefty price, of course, but compulsory nonetheless). All the laws that we currently see impeding such progress will be torn up as quickly as turns out to be necessary. This will happen not only because of the democratic process (which works only at a national level) but also of the global political process. Since 9/11 there is a good understanding that making a lot of people very angry is a bad idea for everyone, and it will therefore be seen to be in the enlightened self-interest of the industrialised world to make rejuvenation therapies available to all (at a price they can pay, even if that means free) as fast as possible, After all, the point of buying rejuvenation therapies is to live a long time, not to get blown up by someone from the other side of the world who resents you and your compatriots because they can't afford those therapies.
The second reason is less threatening. There will be a lead-time of at least a decade, which I call the War On Aging, starting with the achievement of results in mice impressive enough to shake society out of its current fatalism and make people really want to cure aging as soon as possible. At that point, mayhem will ensue -- society will be turned upside-down in a million ways, by (e.g.) no one wanting to do risky jobs like the fire service any more -- but the big thing of relevance here is that (as noted above) it will become politically mandatory to throw serious money, taxpayers' money, at hastening the end of age-related death. The phrase "War On Aging" is appropriate, unlike "War On Cancer", because people will want to make sacrifices on the scale normally only seen in wartime in order to end the slaughter as soon as possible. The main such sacrifice will be in simple taxation, to pay for training of a staggering number of medical personnel, to deliver these therapies ASAP when they arrive, and also to provide much more thorough traditional medical care in the interim so as to give people as much chance as possible of still being in a reasonably healthy state at that time. That means that by the time rejuvenation therapies actually arrive, society will already have done what was necessary to ensure that they will be free at the point of delivery to all who are aged enough to need them.
The third reason is really a reinforcement of the second one, in that it is a way to help you see that the development I've just described is not at all utopian - in fact, it's completely certain to occur. It's a purely hypothetical scenario, whose consequences in terms of society's reaction are obvious and whose similarity in all relevant respects to the War on Aging is equally obvious. Here goes.
HIV is a virus that we still don't know how to eliminate from the body, nor to vaccinate against (i.e., prevent uninfected people from becoming infected). What we do now have drugs to do is suppress HIV thoroughly enough that it never proceeds to full-blown AIDS,
Quote "Retirement at 85 until you can get SS benefits? No thank you" Thats why you don't "work", you do something that you really enjoy doing and you don't work a day in your life. You have to find things you're pationate about and you won't mind working.