1.1 Billion people to die...

[Heraclitus]

The difference between a common housecat and a Bengal tiger is largely a matter of degree, but the two are still very different animals. Quantitative differences are still differences, even if they're not as tidy as qualitative ones. And this is an enormous quantitative difference.

Yes but you make the counterintuitive point that curing stuff that aches and ails us is good and its more reasonable to first cure those things that more people suffer from or at least those things the wealthy suffer from [this is currently an implicit criteria in funding research] but its not ok to trend this forward and say "hey why don't we cure the single most common cause of death and suffering in the developed world".



Why isn't it then unethical to try and find a "cure" for cancer? A "cure" AIDS would have a similar proportional effect in africa as would a "cure" for aging have on the world today, is it unethical to fund such research?

[EPW]

Yes but lets say the vast majority of people born in 1950 thought in the 1970's that homosexuality was a disease. A majority of them are not dead today. And I'm pretty sure a majority of those still living don't consider homosexuality a disease anymore.

First of all, homosexuality isn't a good example because it simply isn't relevant to the vast majority of the population. I am talking about fundamental beliefs and behaviors, which are harder to change the older you get.

Second of all, you are wrong. Older people are more likely to oppose homosexuality than younger people. And if they didn't die, change would come much slower.

[Kitschum]

I don't understand why we waste all this money on "cures" for AIDS and cancer. Why don't we slay the dragon already... A "cure" for aging is what we should really be after I mean its the only disease we are 100% certain we shall all suffer from if only we live past our midlife.

A cure for aging if such a thing is even possible necessarily requires a cure for cancer.

[Elok]

Yes but you make the counterintuitive point that curing stuff that aches and ails us is good and its more reasonable to first cure those things that more people suffer from or at least those things the wealthy suffer from [this is currently an implicit criteria in funding research] but its not ok to trend this forward and say "hey why don't we cure the single most common cause of death and suffering in the developed world".

I'd have no problem with "curing" tobacco addiction, even though it often prevents people from acquiring the dreaded Geezer Virus. But I can't recall ever making this point you say I made.

Why isn't it then unethical to try and find a "cure" for cancer? A "cure" AIDS would have a similar proportional effect in africa as would a "cure" for aging have on the world today, is it unethical to fund such research?

Because all those things are ultimately sustainable. If old age is removed, and all diseases that come with it, you will have the human race competing with its own offspring more and more. There's no other planet waiting for us AFAIK, so we face either mass suffering from further overcrowding an already overcrowded planet or a world in which effectively no children are born and the human race stagnates. Both are poor choices, assuming the latter is even possible without China-like repression.

[Heraclitus]

You talk about stagnation, but what about the flip side? Longer lifespans mean you just might get people to plan policy for decades in advance or take things like global warming very seriously since it won't affect your grandkids but will affect you in a mere century!


The overpopulation problem is overblown.


-Birth rates in many European countries are already near 1.3 children (that is 1.3 children per two people, think about that). If you remove all incentives (free daycare, giving money to people who have kids, ect.) it would probably fall to below 1. You make my point yourself when you say developing countries don't stay underdeveloped. Are you really saying that in 300 years time (if there is no civilizational collapse) there will be parts of the world with a lover standard of living than todays Eastern Europe?

-Many women in their late 30's or early 40's pop out a kid just because they feel their biological clock ticking with no such motivation they will probably be content to procastinate with the messy business of making a family for centuries some of them even indefinitely.

-People won't continue to have children at the rate they are having now. Think about it, would you really want 30+ kids? (What do people today mean when they say: "I want 3 kids." Do they mean 3 kids in my entire life time or do they mean 3 kids in the next 40 years? Today this is basically a moot distinction but in a world of 1000 year life spans it wont be. I think most people would probably have 3 kids in their 800 years not 60. Also havent you noticed kids today leach off their parents untill their early 30's? What do you think will happen in a non-aging world? How many people want a century long commitment? )

- Religious people have more babies. If life sucks less there are less religious people. The prospect of living untill you are 1000 years old with the slim slim chance of living forever seems like sucking less to be frank. So life sucks less > less religious people > fewer babies

-The effect of new viruses and bacteria. They will crop up with the same frequency as they do today, but new humans won't due to the efects I mentioned earlier. Sure medical science will defeat them, but I don't think it will do so much faster than we defeat new strains today so outbreaks will happen. 50-100 million people dead (out of 500 million infected in a pop of 1.6 billion) due to a Spanish flue like outbreak don't ammount to much in todays world with an 137 million births a year (even if we accept that new outbreak would kill more people simply due to the fact that more people are around than in 1918- 200-400 million dead then) but maybe it would in a world of (lets assume a pop of 10 billion, with an average life span of 1000 years, and lets say everyone has 3 kids) 15 million births per year.

[Heraclitus]

A cure for aging if such a thing is even possible necessarily requires a cure for cancer.

True. But I commented our wilingness to spen money on a "cure for cancer" vs. our unwillingness to spend some on a "cure for ageing".

[Blaupanzer]

Hera, The problem with the people you quote and provide links for is the scale of their promises versus the tech shown. If a person offers 100 more productive years to folks under 20 based on tech he can show us, our ears will perk up. But promising in excess of 1000 more years sounds silly, and the tech is not there. At the moment the promise of "eternal life" that Ben's people offer has as much "tech" behind it as these "live 1200 years" guys. I agree we don't "have" to age, but I don't know how to turn it off. Neither do these people.

[Elok]

You talk about stagnation, but what about the flip side? Longer lifespans mean you just might get people to plan policy for decades in advance or take things like global warming very seriously since it won't affect your grandkids but will affect you in a mere century!

I don't care. I don't want the same greedy bastards hogging the planet for millennia. Move on and let your descendants have a crack at it. Also, I doubt a long life will affect planning significantly. We spent thirty years or more at the brink of global nuclear war--an existential threat not just to human civilization but to the human race--over ideological squabbles and national penis-measuring. We were more than aware that we could all die, or live on in a future worse than anything GW can threaten, but policy stayed the same.

-Birth rates in many European countries are already near 1.3 children (that is 1.3 children per two people, think about that). If you remove all incentives (free daycare, giving money to people who have kids, ect.) it would probably fall to below 1. You make my point yourself when you say developing countries don't stay underdeveloped. Are you really saying that in 300 years time (if there is no civilizational collapse) there will be parts of the world with a lover standard of living than todays Eastern Europe?

Are you really saying that you expect a future where every person in every city in the world thinks like a Parisian or a Berliner? Forever? Nobody wanting kids? We have a fine standard of living in America and we don't underbreed like that. The religion thing might be part of it, but also the lack of a gigantic welfare-state apparatus.

-Many women in their late 30's or early 40's pop out a kid just because they feel their biological clock ticking with no such motivation they will probably be content to procastinate with the messy business of making a family for centuries some of them even indefinitely.

You assume that lasting youth means lasting fertility without consequences. Dubious. A human ovary only has so many eggs, it gets rid of a few hundred every month IIRC (the vast majority dying to nourish one), and we don't know the long term effects of preventing ovulation. Not the physical health effects, not the mental ones. I'm extremely dubious that it's possible to "turn off" aging entirely with no consequences. The birth control we've had for most of the past half-century can cause health problems, and it's a lot less invasive than simply cutting off ovulation. And no, I don't think people are going to want to reproduce by cloning.

-People won't continue to have children at the rate they are having now. Think about it, would you really want 30+ kids? (What do people today mean when they say: "I want 3 kids." Do they mean 3 kids in my entire life time or do they mean 3 kids in the next 40 years? Today this is basically a moot distinction but in a world of 1000 year life spans it wont be. I think most people would probably have 3 kids in their 800 years not 60. Also havent you noticed kids today leach off their parents untill their early 30's? What do you think will happen in a non-aging world? How many people want a century long commitment? )

So, in effect, yes, you envision a few greedy bastards hogging the planet. No kids, no change, just a lot of old people in young bodies. Screw that.

- Religious people have more babies. If life sucks less there are less religious people. The prospect of living untill you are 1000 years old with the slim slim chance of living forever seems like sucking less to be frank. So life sucks less > less religious people > fewer babies

Aside from the simplicity of the correlation, you're assuming a utopia that never fades. The technology is likely to stay; the utopia, rather less likely, and very few people will choose to die, a la David Carradine. Well, no, even his was an accident, wasn't it? He just talked about being satisfied with his life and ready to die.

-The effect of new viruses and bacteria. They will crop up with the same frequency as they do today, but new humans won't due to the efects I mentioned earlier. Sure medical science will defeat them, but I don't think it will do so much faster than we defeat new strains today so outbreaks will happen. 50-100 million people dead (out of 500 million infected in a pop of 1.6 billion) due to a Spanish flue like outbreak don't ammount to much in todays world with an 137 million births a year (even if we accept that new outbreak would kill more people simply due to the fact that more people are around than in 1918- 200-400 million dead then) but maybe it would in a world of (lets assume a pop of 10 billion, with an average life span of 1000 years, and lets say everyone has 3 kids) 15 million births per year.

You don't think it will do so much faster than today? So we'll have the power to completely reinvent the human body, alter its hormones and such with impunity, while still relying on vaccines and antibiotics equivalent to today's? No nanobot virus-hunters or what-have-you? Actually, that barely matters. Disease's greatest enemy isn't medicine but sanitation and other preventative measures. As fewer and fewer people live with animals and drink feces with their water, diseases will have fewer breeding grounds to get started. Better nutrition will mean less malnourished kids to use as incubators. Your thinking is very shallow, it seems.

[Blaupanzer]

In future fighting between the haves and have-nots, the have-nots will have a real advantage if the haves are literally scared to death by the chance of being deprived of their new elongated lifetimes. This kind of fighting currently occurs mostly at the margins. You can bet suicide bombers will arrive among the ancient people occupying Europe and North America when they live 1000 years and the bombers have less than 40 years left in thir span of 70. The longer-lived societies will become more segregated, and their border systems will likely be developed toward automatic uberviolence. Not sure I'd want to live in a stagnant, isolated, super careful, strongly regulated society even if it was for an extra 500 to 1000 years.

[Elok]

Also, most diseases tend to hit the very young or the very old hardest. People in their prime of life (where everyone would supposedly stop) don't succumb as easily.

[Elok]

And while religion is correlated with suffering, one of its many roles is to explain death and what comes after. I tend to think that putting death off will make it more, rather than less, terrible. You can't spend centuries running from something and then expect to face it head on. Not that this will necessarily mean more children (the religion people of the future turn to may well be Buddhism), just felt like pointing out a fallacy.

[Heraclitus]

Hera, The problem with the people you quote and provide links for is the scale of their promises versus the tech shown. If a person offers 100 more productive years to folks under 20 based on tech he can show us, our ears will perk up. But promising in excess of 1000 more years sounds silly, and the tech is not there. At the moment the promise of "eternal life" that Ben's people offer has as much "tech" behind it as these "live 1200 years" guys. I agree we don't "have" to age, but I don't know how to turn it off. Neither do these people.

He isn't promising 1200 leat of productive life based on current tech. He's promising a 50% chance of 30 years of extra productive life with tech about 40 years in the future if we start working on it right now. What he is saying is that he is confident that in those 30 extra years other advances will be made to increase the lifespan for another 30 and the process may last long enough for people to live for thousands of years.

Its not nesecarily to belive him on a exponential or linear advance in tech after the first stage of SENS in order to support funding of a bet with a 50% chance of adding of 30 years of extra productive life in the next 40 years.


Currently we get 6 extra months of extra average lifespan per year. Its not hard to imagine we could do 1 year of extra average lifespan per year if we really put our minds to it.

He is saying that his approach will increase the maximum lifespan for a margin that will at least equal the rise of the average lifespan in developed countries in the last century

[Heraclitus]

Also, most diseases tend to hit the very young or the very old hardest. People in their prime of life (where everyone would supposedly stop) don't succumb as easily.

That is why I chose the example of the Spanish flue.

[Heraclitus]

In future fighting between the haves and have-nots, the have-nots will have a real advantage if the haves are literally scared to death by the chance of being deprived of their new elongated lifetimes. This kind of fighting currently occurs mostly at the margins. You can bet suicide bombers will arrive among the ancient people occupying Europe and North America when they live 1000 years and the bombers have less than 40 years left in thir span of 70. The longer-lived societies will become more segregated, and their border systems will likely be developed toward automatic uberviolence. Not sure I'd want to live in a stagnant, isolated, super careful, strongly regulated society even if it was for an extra 500 to 1000 years.

Your thinking is off by a bit. You see just because new therapies are developed, it dosen't mean old ones won't be improved or become cheaper (if only because of mass production).

Richer people will get the "Treatment A: +30 years" before decades before poorer people get them but they will eventually get the "Treatement A mk2: +25 years for a bit of less money". IF de Grey is right on longevity escape velocity that just means that the last generation to die of old age in the developing world will be younger for about 20 to 50 years than the last generation to die of old age in the West.


The people you say terrorism will be much more effective, but you are forgetting people will be less likley to blow themselves up if they have a shot at immortality. And the last generation that dosen't won't really see immoral westerners defying God by eating from the tree of life, they will just se Western Devils who will live 40 years longer than them instead of 10 (the first generation of SENS will be no profe whatsoever that the 1000 year dream is feasable). You think that will piss them off a lot more than they are pissed of now? Why dosen't it piss of Swazilanders who today have a lifespan of a mere 39.5 years (Japan 81 years)?


As to riots being more effective, I think this is a good thing. There is more inequality in todays world than is usefull for the entire society.


True violent crime will become much more scary, I really see no other social trend expect more control, but the question is aren't we going there anyway? Wouldn't longer lifespan just push us towards equilibrium a bit more quickly?

[Heraclitus]

And while religion is correlated with suffering, one of its many roles is to explain death and what comes after. I tend to think that putting death off will make it more, rather than less, terrible. You can't spend centuries running from something and then expect to face it head on. Not that this will necessarily mean more children (the religion people of the future turn to may well be Buddhism), just felt like pointing out a fallacy.

I'd like a citation that shows that religious Buddhists on average have less or about the same number of children than non-religious people. I think that almost any traditional religion has a postive effect on the number of people born and in todays world 75% of the total (not just religious) global population adhere to such religions. Sure Scientology and other antinatalist religions might become all the rage... but that is in my opinion a less likley scenario than traditional religions holding a grip on at least 50% of religious people.