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Comment by siavosh | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if proponents of 'immortality' do not fear a world where there are tremendous social (not to mention environmental) consequences to significantly extended life/health-spans?

If you are under a certain age in any country (say <30) do you not feel like you live in a world ruled by the conservatism and culture of an older generation? These prior generations have the head start to protect their status quo. Imagining every generation persisting on top of another, all sorts of strange and dark likelihoods fill my imagination.

Most peoples' formative life views develop in a certain brief segment of their lives, from which their subsequent experiences simply reinforce. It's sadly a rare few that continually adapt and evolve their views with an open mind. A population of 7 billion+ immortals where the vast majority are set in their ways is terrifying, and being born into such an oppressive world would fill me with dread.

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Suppose that you lived in a world where aging didn't exist, and people typically lived for hundreds of years. (There would still be deaths due to accidents, violence, and occasional disease). And suppose it had exactly the problems you're imagining, where 800 year old oligarchs had accumulated lots of money and power and were preventing changes that younger generations wanted. Would your proposed solution be to release a virus that would gradually cripple everyone's bodies and minds over several decades before eventually killing them?

> Suppose that you lived in a world where aging didn't exist, and people typically lived for hundreds of years. (There would still be deaths due to accidents, violence, and occasional disease).

I'm sure Sci-Fi novels have explored this topic in detail, but when I read this I don't worry about older conservative generations - I worry that everyone will become paralysed by conservatism, including young people.

Taking drugs, partying all night, riding a motorcycle, leaving your home at all. Why would you risk centuries of your lifetime just for a little thrill? Wouldn't it be safer to stay at home browsing the web? You can still have fun next century, no need to rush it...

Still, I don't have a good answer to your question.

> Why would you risk centuries of your lifetime just for a little thrill?

Why would you risk decades of your lifetime just for a little thrill?

I don't some people do for some reasons that are completely beyond my understanding.

Isaac Asimov explored this in his Foundation novels ... particularly with the Solarians. It's interesting to see where he went with the idea.

Just because they have a desire to protect the status quo does not actually mean that they can protect the status quo.

A population of 7 billion+ immortals where the vast majority are set in their ways is terrifying, and being born into such an oppressive world would fill me with dread.

As opposed to having humans who can't remember the past because the experience of the old generation passed away?

Those who don't remember the lesson of history are doomed to repeat it?

Yes, the world will be confronted with new problems that we don't have to deal with before. We may have to seriously consider population control and other measures.

But does anybody seriously want to go to the old status quo where old people are given serious diseases like cancers, Alzheimer and heart attacks, where they are forced to suffer until they finally die, often not of their own choice?

Some thoughts:

- I can also imagine a world where the 0.01% continue to accumulate wealth, they will certainly have a growing ability to protect their position. The world has finite resources, when "immortality" is discovered will certainly have an effect on wealth and power distributions.

- I would argue many people today forget what happens to them/society within years well within their lifetimes.

- "Population control / other measures" -- hence my dread.

- I think improving quality of life is very different than extending it into multi-generational periods.

If you improve health, you improve lifespan.

And if you cure all diseases, you'll get multi-generational lifespan.

There is no escaping that kind of logic.

Unless your solution is to embed a suicide switch into all humans when they reach the cutting-off age, say at 100, or 150 or 200.

How would anybody convince me that people deserves to die for the next generation of human beings to be born is a good thing beyond me.

Either we rise up to the challenge or condemn future humanity to this kind of fate.

I don't think wealth accumulation is an issue. However, heritage is what heavily contributes to wealth accumulation. With aging gone, and subsequently, heritage heavily delayed, wealth distribution gap will become smaller, not larger.

Life expectancy increases tend to decrease birth rate. And with Elon Musk currently working on colonizing Mars, and seasteading making some progress, there will likely be a lot of place to live in by the time we work out aging. Actually, if both fail, there is a place for 6 billion more people on Earth.

You're afraid of your own prejudices about something that isn't even here yet. And I don't understand your use of word "immortality": it is aging we are discussing here, a condition that causes people to die, often in misery and pain over long periods of time. I think it is a very humane, global, noble cause, and I honestly don't understand how you can be so cynical about it.

For as so long we have a positive birthrate, we'll reach the point of using all the energy that our local sun and technology can provide.

We'll have to consider population control.

There are multiple issues with this idea. First, I just don't think you can really tell that from this perspective. That's just thinking too far into the future. This sort of argument is likely to look like a Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 [1] to our descendants.

[1]: http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-...

Have you actually considered how many people it would take to use all energy that sun and future tech can provide? I'm sure no human being can give you even a rough estimate.

It's not like solving aging will break markets. There's a balance between supply & demand, which will indirectly regulate birth rate due to parenting costs.

Universe is really vast, if not infinite. And when we have more people, alive, and doing meaningful things while automation takes over menial tasks, it's really going to make us tackle other problems faster, like transportation.

Have you actually considered how many people it would take to use all energy that sun and future tech can provide? I'm sure no human being can give you even a rough estimate.

It's an unimaginably large number of humans. Seven billion human beings is a drop in the bucket as far as I am concerned.

There's only so much matters and so many stars in the universe. Granted, they can last a stupendous long time, especially red dwarf stars.

Future technologies aren't something that can't be predicted entirely, but we can only consider the laws of physics as we know of to constrain our prediction.

Last time I check, there is no way to produce unlimited energy for eternity, no way to defeat entropy. Until that happen, we'll have to consider population control unless our numbers are stable or in decline.

Before you get too worried about this overpopulation, go take a good look at the birth rates in developed countries.

It'll be fine.

Probably the opposite will happen, actually. Just liked caged animals that don't breed, our habitat will so far be removed from our natural one, our species may die out from lack of ability to form natural male-female relationships anymore.

> Those who don't remember the lesson of history are doomed to repeat it

This maxim is hardly a law of nature; it's sometimes true and sometimes false.

Also, we have managed to escape this problem many times in history: by studying history. Human knowledge accumulates and is refined throughout the generations. Sure, more information has been lost than retained, but repeating mistakes is not inevitable.

Even so, given the option to live forever, I wouldn't forgo it so that you could avoid said dread.

Regardless, I don't think that your reasoning about people being set in their ways is valid given significantly longer life or healthspans. A lot of existing conservatism is from people with families (don't rock the boat so I can focus on raising my young!) and people who are suffering the ill effects of aging (don't rock the boat so that I can retire in peace!).

The first group will likely diminish if we have longer healthspans (or else we'll run up against the barriers of overpopulation). Even if not, longer healthspans mean a longer period where people are neither raising families nor mainly preoccupied with living with advanced aging. As a result, I don't think the effect you're describing will be a significant one.

>A population of 7 billion+ immortals where the vast majority are set in their ways is terrifying.

Maybe. But not as terrifying as actually dying.

Frankly, I'm willing to deal with any problems arising from longer and/or indefinite lifespans, more than I'm willing to deal with the impermanence of life.

Yes, immortality would have to be accompanied by neuroplasticity drugs. The biggest benefit of neuroplasticity drugs, btw, would not be that users would acquire new knowledge, but that they would forget outdated knowledge.

As I get older (and I'm still relatively young) I observe that I keep remembering things that are wrong and sometimes I even base decisions on that outdated knowledge.

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