Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
"In Vivo Amelioration of Age-Associated Hallmarks of Progeria by Partial Reprogramming" (my addition)
The paper primarily reports results that pertain to mice with a genetic defect that causes progeria. Mice with this defect have a shorter-than-normal lifespan.
Doxycycline has also been shown to greatly increase life expectancy! Of patients currently suffering from bacterial infection.
Makes me wonder how overhyped this whole "our children will live for hundreds of years" thing really is.
Its wonderful that we see these interesting reports every week, but as a non-specialist you never how it will impact human longevity, and when.
What I'd like to read is a well considered "state-of-longevity-science" report - by someone not Aubrey DeGray (give the man a medal) but equally cognizant, perhaps more conservative - that actually explains and weighs the torrent of advancements as they happen and gives them some context.
What is the likely impact of crispr, of rosveratrol, of telomere-foo, of gene-therapy, of blood cleansing, of stem-cells on logevity in 10 / 20 years ? Where and why should we rationally allocate research money ? What is likely to benefit Alzheimers patients in the 5 year term ?
Its the kind of state of play you need updated on a monthly basis, due to the pace of progress.
Does such a report already exist ?
While I am not qualified to put together a comprehensive report, I've been following this subject with some interest for a while, first as a skeptic, and now as someone who believes that not all of these people are completely full of hot air.
Even with my change of heart, I'd still bet against anything in your list other than crispr having any quantifiable impact on longevity in the next decade, and even then the first applications will be specific to particular age-related diseases.
Something resembling a more full "maintenance approach" to preventing aging and age-related disease may be within reach within 20 years, but I'd bet against that, too. Sticking my finger in the air and guessing, I'd say that such a complete overhaul of medicine is at least 50 years away. Although I should stipulate my guess is only that pessimistic because I'm biased towards thinking that such advances won't be made in my own lifetime because, hey, it rarely hurts to be a pessimist.
And human in vitro modification is taboo also wrapped in politics.
The short answer to your question is that the impact of everything viable that is not SENS is probably going to be about the same as exercise or calorie restriction in your life span if you are in the middle of life now. Which is to say +10 years if you pick the right things, and the people building those things do a good job. That would be, say, the combination of a couple of successes in things building upon mTOR or stem cell or telomerase therapies or etc. Not resveratrol, not 99% of the other pharmaceuticals, not 99% of the possible gene therapies, and not 99% of what people are trying to sell you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negl... gible_Senescence
Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence, here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negl...
Assume that the pieces are well researched and the journalists have domain expertise, paired with deep reading of primary texts.
Currently Springer's stranglehold is very tight.
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
Bad for society
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
Bad for individual
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
Man up, save your family, save yourself.
Disclaimer: I'm half way done with a book on this topic. Mail me if you're interested. Scivive on the most popular email service.
P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horribles comes true, even earlier.
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)
Like, I don't have the same chances to get to 70 and still feel alright as someone born today in Bangladesh, or Zambia.
The world is already very unfair, and the only solution to that is to make it more fair, not to avoid developing treatments that, if the world was fair, would benfit everyone.
This already happens. The more affluent a country becomes, with its better healthcare, better education, and greater career opportunity, the lower its birthrate. The big crisis in 50 years will be population decline.
I'm a bit reluctant to write this, but it made me worried, so here we go :
I had a chat with a taxi driver in Stockholm the other day, and we talked about the situation in Somalia and that he planned to move back there as it's getting better there.
He had 8 kids, but wanted another wife and 10 more kids when he became my age - 40.
I mentioned that I have been married before so I have 3 kids with 2 mothers and was quite happy with that number...
He actually laughed and looked at me and said - "man, you Swedish guys will disappear."
I don't know how representative this was but looking at some societies in Sweden, I'm guessing it's not unique. It would be nice with some research.
Anyway.I'm hoping that the Somalian women will get some say in the matter, because if they don't, looking at the demography and the socio-economic mechanisms, both Sweden and eastern Africa might end up in a spot of bother.
The horror, if you would adapt to this hellish circumstances, by speeding up the cycle, creating "specialists" for each cycle stage and survived through the hard times by reducing all that makes up human society. No arts, no compassion, no creation, no school, all of these are calories wasted, instead go full zombie and walk the earth till the cycle of strife ends.
PS: Before somebody yells racism. This behavior could be seen everywhere during world war 2. So one could claim that white racists are actually the pro-zombie equivalent found elsewhere.
This will no longer be the case, so there would be no rush for either gender to have kids. You can focus on your career for the first hundred years, and then have kids. At worst, there would be a minor uptick in population while people get accustomed to the new reality.
One child per couple means that the total population caps out at double the current population (a population of 32 would have 16 children, who'd have 8, who'd have 4, who'd 2, then 1 person who's SOL - 32+16+8+4+2+1=63). A single order of magnitude is an acceptable loss, and everyone gets a child of their own.
Note: Not as in "literally force people to have only one child", just make it frowned upon like smoking generally is - most people won't care enough to defy it, and in the long term it should be enough. Although IMO families like the Duggars[1] shouldn't be provided immortality unless they start using birth control.
Accidents and suicide could be handled too. Former by outlawing machines of murder (cars) and spare or artificial organs, latter by improving our understanding of neuroscience and psychology.
Death ensures adaptation. For example, climate change denying oil barons have done much damage to the world, but we can take some comfort in the knowledge that they will soon die (or at least retire) and that their successors will probably be a little more enlightened. It may be too late by then, but at least it will happen.
>Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)
One resource we are running out of is housing in economically productive areas, and it's not for lack of ingenuity, but by choice. The choice of the established, whose grip on power you propose to extend. Similarly, there is plenty of food to go around, just not enough value to trade for it in some parts of the world. What we're missing is not farming methods, but economic systems and power structures to implement then.
>You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear
The currently powerful, propertied generation is in a position to hold onto that power and property forever, via compound interest and seniority. If the current crop of 60-year-olds gets to be 600, the age of majority for voting will be 540 by the time they get there. And we will never outspend them on anything; even 20 years is a significant head start on saving and investing.
If they continue in their policies of environmental destruction and the monopolization of critical resources, like the underdevelopment of city land on aesthetic grounds, then we might not just be asking them to die, but going to war to claim those resources (and the helms of government, business, etc) for the young, to manage in different ways.
Not to get too bogged down in the specifics of particular issues, but age-related death does ensure a peaceful transition of power towards people more concerned with the present era's challenges and realities, rather than trying to, i.e., save the jobs of the last century or the sexual morality of the one before it.
Maybe age doesn't come to them soon enough to prevent the damage, but it does mitigate it.
The idea that the old have fixed bad ideas is mistaken. All ages of people can be persuaded.
The powerful, propertied generation dying and being replaced by people that look and do nearly the same hasn't cured any of the ills of which you speak so far. The rich have continued to get richer, and the poor richer at a much slower rate, death hasn't solved any of that, nor is it likely too. What you want is better marketing of good ideas, because that actually works. Wishing people dead for disagreeing with you is at least immoral.
But also: you can have people with literally double or more experience, working on your hard problems. You also have a government that will look out much further into the future, because they will see the outcomes themselves.
I think the world would look a lot more like it did 600 years ago. Perhaps more moral by some standards, but probably also unable to replicate a technological breakthrough like the eradication of aging.
Virtually every tech starts that way, though.
The societal upheaval of rich people getting smartphones a few years earlier is probably not something you can extrapolate to the societal upheaval from "you could live forever but you don't have enough money right now".
I'm not sure that would happen. Consider that they have an eternity to pay it back -- or really, a few hundred years given everyone will likely experience at a fatal accident on such a long timeline. What person couldn't pay back an exceedingly high price on an installment plan lasting a few hundred years?
Many countries are currently addicted to population growth. Their mentality hasn't adjusted to the rise of automation and the decline of demand for human labor. They still think we need to keep high birth rates to fund social security schemes.
What will happen in the next few decades is that fewer people will be needed to do anything really productive. More people will study and raise their kids. A smaller, richer population would be more sustainable when it comes to overfishing, overpolluting etc. We will turn the world into farms and hopefully plug all the holes that will result. Ecosystems will be much different with less variation, and humans will be trying to constantly keep the balance.
It is in this environment that we place advances in longevity.
Eternal life would be sort of cool but I dispute your proposition that more people automatically make more progress faster. More people increases competition which incentivizes some kinds of progress but arguably retards others - consider our lamentable record of environmental destruction.
I don't think your aspirations are morally wrong in any way but your thesis seems unproven and I could just as easily argue that your efforts are primarily motivated by your own fear of death. Having had far more near-death experiences than most people I've met. I'm broadly OK with it because my experiences suggest to me that there's a lot more to consciousness than the everyday world, and that if and insofar as life has a purpose, it may be to reach some higher level of knowledge within finite constraints. I sometimes consider that life-as-we-know-it might be like some elaborated version of a book a film or a game (similar to but not the same as Bostrom's simulation argument).
Would you enjoy a book or a movie that never ended? Obviously there's a market for such things based on the continued existence of daytime TV soap operas, but nobody seems to think those shows have much cultural value.
There are thousands of things I know I have never done, and likely never will. There are millions of things I don't know I have never done. Don't you have even the tiniest bit of regret of where your life has led you, and wondered if you did things differently, where you would be today? Wouldn't you want to find out?
It really comes down to whether you have more of a drive to be happy or to be right. On bad days I often wish I'd opted for the former, but I enjoy cultivating my inner garden and it gives me pleasure to see ideas grow over time.
I'm also not interested in the eventuality of the "treatment" being cheap and available to all. What, are we going to label people as suicidal and mentally ill if they refuse to take the treatment? The "pro-life" agenda would spiral out of control.
Taking a look at all the lives that could be affordably saved saved in Africa right now at low cost. Yet no "pro-life" agenda is currently spiraling out of control biting at that low cost. It is unlikely this more expensive and farther down the road longevity research would cause the hysteria you describe.
I reject that premise as overbroad and dismissive of historical examples of artificially limited supply (eg craft guilds) or other arbitrary constraints which nevertheless resulted in high output quality, and I could point to examples of that in nature too.
You're inborn desire to find equality is beaten by natures desire for fitness
This sounds like a very individualist approach to evolution though. I think there's good reasons to consider the idea of humans as eusocial animals that can operate as individuals but are biologically driven to group up, and that groups themselves are distributed organisms capable of collective thought.
It's not that I'm against individualism, but I'm saying that there may well be selection pressures that do favor altruistic behavior, and there's certainly research documenting its persistence in the wild. Finally, it's rather odd that you talk of an 'inborn' desire but then contrast it with 'nature.' I feel you view of this topic is a little simplistic.
Competition requires 3 things. 1. A win condition 2. A contest 3. Participants. Pretending that equality amongst creatures exists anywhere that an individual can be discerned from the masses is futile. Equality of outcome moves indirectly proportional to freedom or individuality, tautologically. Equality is the enemy of specialization. You can't win a football game with 11 quarterbacks on the field.
The group out performs the individual, its why we're multicellular. It's also why you have natural and other monopolies. Notice the diversity of organs in your body, each good at what they do and little else. Would not equality dictate perhaps you be filled with bladders for the heart has it too good?
Team good. Specialize good. Win competition good. Have fair game to not rob potential winners of chance, good. Force equality down throats so winners lose and losers win. Bad.
An interesting side effect could be that public figures would become more careful, because if you're sunk, you'd be done forever.
Plus the shift from old people retirement driven politics. Much bigger focus on handling employment.
Genius appears to decline with age. Prolonging life would not necessarily preserve genius, even if it preserves life.
I respectfully disagree. Also, the article in question, and my comment, are really pointing to prolonging life, not a cure for ageing--that may be very far off. In either case, it is not at all obvious why prolonging or curing the ageing process in life would necessarily maintain optimal neurological function.
There's also problem's outside the scientific challenge itself. One being that genius is almost always only genius after the fact, raising interesting hypothetical questions about who exactly is preserved in their genius state - a promising 20-something, or a proven 40-something?
I interpreted that as meaning that because, especially over a long period of time, preserving your life would decrease opportunity for other's to have a life.
I'm probably what you would describe as 'pro-death'. But I would never have made any of the arguments you listed.
I could just as easily frame your positions to suit my argument.
For example; 'More people make more progress faster.' (India has not made as large a contribution to modern technology as the USA)
Only if you take the statement as some immutable law and not the intended meaning as a description of a general trend.
A trip to Mars of three months in a lifetime of few hundred could be considered an interesting interlude.
Care to explain? I don't see why humans living on average a dozen years longer would inevitably lead to "wars and chaos" and a breakdown of social order. Indeed, we saw lifespans increase by two dozen in the last 80 or so years and nothing happened at all.
The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to apply to developed countries; if anything it's the opposite. So what's the big deal? And why do you assume that any negative externalities created by life extension technology are inherently unfixable?
Aging populations, coupled with low birth rates, are causing difficult political problems. In my country (UK) pensions are the biggest government expenditure next is healthcare, which the elderly use the most. This obviously has to be paid for so you have two options, raise taxes or increase immigration. Our government chose to increase immigration and a lot of people didn't like that so the government blamed the EU, this went on for a while and brexit was the eventual response.
So the chaos is already here, war might be hyperbole but a war caused by something is not unimaginable and ageing populations would be a contributing factor.
I feel there is an increasing level of bitterness directed towards the old. The government panders to them for easy votes which takes public spending from the young and my gut feeling is having policies that cater for the old is not healthy for the long term success of of a society.
Well, your government chose to increase immigration while also suppressing housing construction and wages. The result is that the government set the immigrants against the native-born citizens in a zero-sum economic contest for basic human needs, while the rich eat up all available economic gains that could have gone to young workers or old pensioners.
>So the chaos is already here, war might be hyperbole but a war caused by something is not unimaginable and ageing populations would be a contributing factor.
You need young people to staff the armies.
Raised pension age vs longer life, fairly obvious choice.
But finding trustworthy data about life expectancy at age X have been really hard every time I've tried to actually investigate claims regarding longer life expectancy, especially because ideally you'd want to exclude deaths by accidents and certain kinds of diseases (but not all!) to figure out at what rate actual longevity has been improved over the years. So I'm still a little agnostic about the whole thing.
Please define "nothing" in your sentence. Lots of countries have been dealing with welfare spending recently due to general aging in their population. If we live two dozen more years that means someone will have to pay for those retirements. I don't know where you live but most developed or developing nations have some sort of government-sponsored retirement/age pension system or welfare program they have to maintain (and is usually paid by the working force alive today).
> The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to > apply to developed countries; if anything it's the > opposite.
You gotta be kidding. Haven't you ever considered what would happen if a good chunk of the world population magically started to live by the wasteful and consumption driven standards most developed countries have, like the US or Japan (or even Russia)? We still have margin for more people in the planet but certainly not with the so called "developed countries" way of life (energy-wise, amount of garbage produced, pollution emissions etc).
You're assuming that we'd just extend life rather than slow or partially reverse ageing as the article describes. You would assume that people would work for longer if this was the case. You may even get a "better" (from an economics point of view) ratio of working life to retirement time.
If advances give us a healthier old age rather than merely a longer one, then they would alleviate rather than exacerbate the problem.
I bet the "cold war" mind set works the same way. You rarely see cold war brought up by much younger folks. It's always an old gen rehash.
What about a ruthless dictator like Kim Jong Un getting 12 extra years on earth?
Who says we can't solve that problem as well? We've already had a bunch of research into psychedelics and countless anecdotes about people who claim drugs like LSD completely changed their outlook on life. I could envision a future where people effectively live forever and continually renew their interest in life with drugs. Selective amnesia, personality-altering drugs -- a new person from the same body!
A decade more of time to earn more, build more, become more wealthy and pass that on to children who are then wealthier.
Damn, this would be a fantastic dystopian sci fi plot point.
We have been hearing that for a while though, when do you think "soon" will be ?
You could also pull out "make an omelet", but I'm partial to "more steps forward than steps back".
Also, the consequences of longer lifespan are not only imaginable, they're imagined (frequently) _and can be studied_, because it's _happened_. Even the (other) canonical problem situation - rich people live longer than poor people, by a lot - has occurred.
On the other hand, you are also correct that there an unimagined and unimaginable consequences. If people end up waiting until to have kids until they're older, will that be better for the kids (more stable / wise parents) or worse (further from similar experiences)?
If you get AI wrong you get the end of the world, possibly not just for humans.
It would be more like spice on Dune. Hmm... if I recall correctly, the fremens (who had unlimited access to it) were a bloody waring bunch.
They were, but not because they had spice. They had spice long before they became a bloody warring bunch. The interplanetary jihad was at the behest of Paul Muad'dib. The Spartan and militant culture that existed before Muad'dib was mostly out of self preservation in the face of a brutal Arrakis environment and colonial oppression.
Unless we manage to escape this rock, and find a nice Earth 2.0 out there, extending lifespans is pointless. It's driven by pure selfishness, and if ever comes to fruition, will create a subdivide of people who can afford to live longer and healthier and those that can't; Homo-Richus vs. Homo-Poorus.
But you've actually backed up my point, despite there actually being large chunks of land, no one actually wants to live there, so we continue to squeeze ourselves into small urban areas.
Just because lots of people want to live in NYC and can't afford to live there doesn't mean we are in any kind of crisis.
Humanity has changed so much in the last few generations and we are still catching up. Maybe we don't understand the consequences. We definitely have to figure out it soon because we'll either never make it to another planet or we'll just bring it all with us.
Interesting bits:
"In living mice they activated the four genes (known as “Yamanaka factors,” for researcher Shinya Yamanaka, the Nobelist who discovered their combined potential in 2006). This approach rejuvenated damaged muscles and the pancreas in a middle-aged mouse, ... "
"... These (other) approaches can reverse some aspects of aging, such as muscle degeneration—but aging returns when the treatment stops, he adds. With an approach like the one Belmonte lays out in the new study, theoretically “you could have one treatment and go back 10 or 20 years,” he says. If aging starts to catch up to you again, you simply get another treatment."
http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31664-6
Caveats:
1) Doing anything to the aging of cells in culture has next to nothing to do with what goes on inside aging tissues, or where it does that is heavily dependent on the details. The article doesn't tell you enough to decide, so you should look at the paper.
2) Doing anything that attenuates the effects of an accelerated aging phenotype, actually usually a DNA repair disorder, almost always has nothing to do with aging as it happens in normal individuals. You can hit mice with hammers, and then evaluate the effects of a hammer-blocking cage, but that doesn't tell you anything about aging - and for exactly the same reasons. This is generally true except when it is isn't, and that depends on the fine details. Again, go look at the paper.
3) The interesting experiment is the one in which pluripotency-inducing factors are upregulated in a normal mouse, but temporarily. This is the thing that people have looked at in the past and said, well, turning on widespread transformation of somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells sounds like a really bad idea. Cancer seems the likely outcome, and that has in fact been demonstrated in a couple of studies in mice, but there is also the point that your central nervous system rather relies upon maintaining the fine structure it has established in many cases, such as data stored in the brain. Running in and randomly reprogramming any CNS cells that take up the vector or the pluripotency signals seems like a bad idea on the face of it.
So on the whole it is fascinating that a good outcome was produced in the normal mice, analogous to the sort of thing that has been produced via stem cell transplants and telomerase gene therapies. But I'd still want to see what happens to the mice over the long term after that, and would expect cancer.
Still a ways off for human use but definitely interesting research.
And this quest is as old as civilization, maybe even older:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang
"He ruled until his death in 210 BC after a futile search for an elixir of immortality"
This is generally true of poor people as well.
What a world.
Edit: checked numbers. There are about 40 million Americans 65 or older, and Medicare spends about $600 billion/year, for average annual spending of $15K each.
Forget patents. This is the sort of thing that will flood the black market, and could conceivably be a target for eminent domain. In any case, it will make it out to the public in some manner if it becomes a reality, I'm sure of that.
Maybe wait and see if that Russian head transplant experiment is a success.
Much better than the second best, statins.
The only logically possible outcome of immortality is that sooner or later the entire biomass of the planet is consumed by immortals, at which point all growth must stop. Imagine being the last person born into such a world, doomed forever to be the youngest, least experienced, least powerful member of a static society where no one ever ages and no new people are ever born. Is that really a life you would want to lead?
This is not immortality, this is eternal youth, until you die for some reason (war, an accident, suicide, whatever) .
Thermal engines were a radical change in society, it let us do things that were impossible before, like flying. There will be new changes in the world, like nuclear fusion, DNA editing(with actual understanding of it not like we do today), symbiosis between man and machine with high bandwidth communication...
With nuclear fusion you could irrigate the Sahara dessert, you could irrigate Australia. Take Google Earth and look how big those places are. Those places are bigger than Europe and the USA.
With nuclear fusion you could LED grow plants without pesticides and almost without using water(you recycle it).
You can grow food or live in space, mine asteroids and planets like Saturn( do you know how big is Saturn?).
You seem to be using the word "immortal" in some kind of fantasy meaning of "it keeps living forever no matter what". That's very clearly impossible.
Revise your definition to state instead: "keeps living indefinitely unless prevented by accident or disease, or is killed on purpose". Now see how your conclusions change.
Preventing and/or reversing aging is definitely good. If too long a life becomes a problem for some reason and you feel burdened by it, that's easily dealt with, just get a piece of rope, find a tree, and solve your own "problem".
> Is that really a life you would want to lead?
Your reaction is typical for a surprisingly large number of people. It's just a strategy to deal with the uncomfortable outcome of your own death, nothing more. To be able to cope with that, many people end up believing all sorts of bizarre things, such as "death is part of life", or "you don't want to live in that kind of world". Bullshit. You're just brainwashing yourself because otherwise you'd find the prospect of mortality intolerable.
An attitude that's a lot more honest is to recognize that aging and death are things we ought to fight, even though as of right now we're losing that battle.
As someone who has suffered from suicidal depression and recovered from it, I am intimately familiar with the subjective sensations both of feeling like death would suck, and feeling like it would be desirable. Your subjective sensation that death sucks has nothing to do with the objective truth, it's just a reflection of the fact that genes that build brains that think that death sucks tend to reproduce better than genes that build brains that think that death is awesome. This does not change the empirical and theoretical fact that death is in fact an integral part of life.
When we say we are interested in immortality, people say that's because of the 'fear of our own death'.
Sorry, but it's wrong.
When something is inevitable (given our current technology, it is) there is no need to be afraid.
However, when it becomes evitable, then it is time to fear. People are are brainwashing themselves because they find the prospect of their own mortality intolerable make me think they know we we will eventually have the technology, so try to feel better for living in the wrong time and place.
Most advanced societies in the world are peaceful.
What about exploration or just plain old boredom? There might be more radical escapes (VR, brain upload), more extreme sports or more people leaving this planet in search of something else.
1000 years is a long time. Forever is a lot longer than that..
This universe does not allow for that (black holes, galaxy collisions, stars burn out, meteorite collisions, accidents, war, crime)
If you stay on earth you have 4 or 5 billion years.
Nevermind the human aspects: 1) having to eat soup forever (teeth won't last that long) 2) marriage is forever (no, not even until death anymore)
Risk of violent death is mainly an issue because it's not worth investing in - you're going to be die for sure before age 130 currently, why bother with the smidgen of a chance of death by comet when AGING is around? Remove aging-related death and people will put a whole lot more effort into preventing other things.
As for the human aspects:
Replacing teeth should be easy, since we can already do full implants (we just don't bother much, since most people die before their teeth fall out, if they brush/floss properly) and we'll have a long time to figure it out if we really want the normal type.
Marriage isn't forever currently, and I don't see how immortality would change that.
A system similar to that has historically been employed in lines of royal succession, where the number of thrones available places a hard limit on how many people can be kings. It has generally not ended well.
Growth is not a discontinuous function, it's continuous. Resources will become scarce, wars will be fought over them thus further slowing the decline, unless of course biomass growth is encouraged. Fortunately, this is quite simple.
We're already growing meat in labs far more efficiently than the natural process, and without the harmful environmental emissions that accompany raising cows.
Your scenario is fear-mongering, and not at all realistic IMO.
Absolutely, if the alternative was not existing at all. Unless I'm being eternally tortured for some reason.
Add onto that on many levels both wars were enhanced by scarcity... Germany want more in both, the assassination of the Archduke was encouraged on by a poor economy, Hitler couldn't have rose to power without a major economic crisis, there were so many failings in production and trade that might have prevented or mitigate either war.
Not aging and not dying will certainly be an economic boon. People can work longer, experts can more deeply master their fields and there will be less loss in passing knowledge down to successors. So economic production will rise and almost certainly faster than it does with aging and death.
Then the emotional factors in war and death... If people stop dying and live to see one war, they just might carry those lessons for the rest of lives.
To prevent that problem supply will be limited.
People will not be happy
Lets look at food for example: https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person/
Well that clearly isn't the case... Something subtle must be wrong with your clearly intuitive observation. I think the cost of educating and raising the next generation to the point where they are productive and having them to relearn the lessons of those that died early is simply more costly than what it takes to support an aging population.
Doubtful. It will also dramatically reduce the birthrate. After all, what's the rush to have kids when you have hundreds of fertile years ahead of you?
Babies make everyone around them happy.
Old people are racist and suffocatingly repetitive. They never have any new ideas and spend all their time in the past. They're the brakes on progress.
Life is all about novelty. Let's have new people in this world.
A cybernetically augmented human might gain an intelligence completely alien (and hostile) to us non-augments. And an immortal-except-for-catestrophic-accidents could amass an unseemly amount of wealth and control over non-immortals over their long lives - moreso than the elites of today could dream of.
My concern about those that metahumans will hold such disproportionate power and they'll quickly get bored. Idle hands are the devil's playthings after all, and they could really make life difficult for the rest of us.
I want to see what a many-hundreds of years healthy life will be like and live many lives, but I do not want to have implants or devices that warp my mind/memory. I want to stay human, just minus the frailties. I'm hoping that these evolving new technologies sort neatly into two buckets: those that enhance but still retain the essential (limited) human experience, and those that seek to obliterate and replace the human experience (so that I know which ones to avoid.)