Imagine life with no kids and the joy they bring, a stagnation in all societal structures, no turnover of ideas (loosely quoting "agendas don't die; people die").
I'm sure such a civilization would be very stable, but won't have any extreme sports.
I’m still unclear on the point of life, but I’m not convinced it’s that kind of optimization exercise.
It may be quite reasonable for someone to prefer a more dynamic society and social structures caused by an average life span of 50 years, while at the same time preferring themselves and their loved ones to live for 100+ years on average. The question of "do you want to live much longer" is not the same as "do you want everyone to live much longer"; accepting that death and "forced turnover" has some positive role in how societies function (e.g. that you can't have eternal dictators because, in the worst case, eventually they die of old age) is compatible with still wanting death to be something that happens only to someone else whom you don't know or don't like. It's hypocritical but realistic - there's no reason to assume that longevity advances will be distributed to be evenly available.
This is spot on, and exactly what is going at the genetic level.
The reason we have sexual reproduction as opposed to mere cloning ourselves is the fact that environment that the initial set of genes worked well changes over time and the genes have to continuously innovate and experiment to have a chance in adapting to the new environment. Sexual reproduction introduces this variability to build these A/B/C... tests in the form of mini niches we are constructing.
Granted, humans don't only reproduce genetically but also memetically, to borrow from Dawkins. And the memetic transmission is complicated, on one hand technology makes it trivial for ideas to spread, on the other hand 1-1 care of grandparents and parents still matter a lot for example in child development. But at the genetic level, wishing to extend life means essentially "cloning" one's genes more and more into the future.
Humans that live for extended periods of time would be able to make progress and keep knowledge alive for longer periods of time facilitating an acceleration of progress made -> repeat.
You are also assuming that we fix aging but we make no progress in other domains. Would you really care how old you were if you could "download" yourself in a new replica at will? ie technology was so advanced that we would maintain our biological form only because we would like to experience things our ancestors did, not because it would be necessary.
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Also, when people say longevity there are at least 2 things that are mingled together. One is: living longer but the other one is just improving the quality of life. So whenever you are afraid of this new future, picture people living 20% longer only, but their life quality into their 80s and 90s would be the same as a person today in their 40s.
Who would not want to have a better quality of life and instead of spending their last decades watching as their body fails and things get worse and worse?
People will still be able to have kids. In fact in many cases people will be able to have as many kids as they normally would. As long as the fertility rate is less than 2 children/woman, the total population will still converge even if no one dies. Places like South Korean have a fertility rate of 1 c/w, which would produce a mere doubling of the total population.
Converge to what? How?
Σ (generation_n)
always converges to some finite number when generation_(n+1) = k * generation_n has k < 1, which is equivalent to <2 immortal children per woman.
I don’t think that’s a good model, as people who want more offspring will out-reproduce those who don’t, but that’s an argument for another time.
This argument assumes the offspring behaves in the same way as their parents. I don't see that necessarily being true. Even if that is the case, there are legislative solutions.
That aside, we could populate the solar system just as well with people who live a healthy century.
It only takes a few months to get to Mars with the current technology.
Will you join me in making this dream come true?
Although I'd assume that we have left our biological bodies behind before that.
I would actually suggest that anyone reading this is likely to be too old to benefit. Thinking otherwise is completely fine, but we must acknowledge that the temptation towards motivated reasoning is unusually strong in this case.
I would also like the breakthroughs to be many centuries in the past, with all the biological and societal bugs worked out before I arrive :)
I didn’t like extreme sports when I was young, but maybe if I was 10,000 years old, I’d think screw it and have a go at BASE jumping...
Enhancing health basically means you live longer. If you don't want to live longer then don't be healthy.
Would I want to live in a world where people don’t have kids, where people can take as much time as they want because time is infinite, a world where you wouldn’t even go out on the street for the chance something would happen to you and deprive you of eternal existence? I’m not sure, and in any case, it will be a vastly different future.
Imagine Mark Zuckerberg running his empire for 900 years straight.
I want to live 900 years and explore every discipline under the sun. I want to travel the world twenty times, read every book, see a hundred thousand sunsets.
Don't tell me I or anyone else doesn't deserve that. Evolution left us with bodies that don't permit it, but we'll escape that limit someday.
With kids around, there’s just something biologically soothing that tells you “you’ve done your part. You can leave this world at peace”.
I know it’s not the same for everyone but on a humankind level, that’s exactly how it works.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Humans excel at surviving as a group, which is a very different - sometimes contrasting - thing.
The problem with this is, personal harm it causes aside, if all adults wanted to be infinite children, it wouldn't leave space to (at least compete with) the incoming, actual children. It would cause great intergenerational conflict. Not leaving resources for the next generation also means endangering the continuity of species altogether.
If we take a step back, one might even argue that this is already what is going on today.
If I could add 10 years on to my 30s I would. But adding 10 years into my 80s doesn’t seem worthwhile.
"Death is very likely the best single invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." - Steve Jobs
I know my life is accreting old biases and obstacles. Today and for years to come (I hope) I have more to do, but some day I will become an agent of stagnation instead of advancement.
Nobody wants to die. But in the big picture, the alternative is worse.
Steve Jobs also talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything." But I can't be a beginner again and again and again: some day my biases/old-dreams and stale-ideas/past-successes will dominate. Nobody has an endless capacity for creating the new.
Surely you can be a beginner again. Pick something you've never done before, and do that. As fledgling as humanity is, humans already have millions of different traditions and areas of study. Just pick one (or many).
You run out of those things shortly after birth. The vast majority of the aspects of everything that you attempt are familiar, and you have already developed habitual approaches to them. Having "never done something before" is shorthand for some experience having some aspect that you have never experienced before, not complete novelty. I'm going to build the strategies of flying a spaceship on the strategies I built learning to drive a car, which were built on the strategies I built learning to walk, which were built on the strategies I built learning to crawl, to manipulate my parents by crying, to identify distinct objects using my eyes, etc...
Eventually, the actually novel part of any new experience becomes vanishingly small. If anything, the ability to enjoy novelty, or to even see things as novel, is increased with our ability to forget. Maybe for a society, the ability to innovate relies on the ability to leave behind a bunch of brains whose plasticity has long been lost due to a lack of mental exercise.
Only difference is that in the last few centuries, there had been technological and scientific changes.
What changes? it's certainly isn't that old men die faster so that we embrace newer ideas faster. The old guards probably lived longer on average thanks to medicine.
As I grow older, I can see how my thinking is affected by my past. Someone with an unencumbered perspective will do the new thing, when I cannot.
There's a lot of possibilities that will open up as our tech advances. Say, wiping all memories of your field so you can learn it again with a fresh mind. Spawning short-lived digital clones of your mind with the mental 'temperature' turned up, in whatever way that's possible- maybe just dose them up with synthetic lsd in different doses- and observe the results. Lots of ways to get novel ideas without having to rely on wastefully growing billions of brains (and the attached bodies!) before throwing them, and most of the information in them, away to rot.
Now our problem is even having the ability to assimilate enough established knowledge during a lifetime to have a chance of making any novel contribution. The obvious endgame to AI is a dream of being able to assimilate information and innovate indefinitely.
I love driving my motorcycle, and I'm well aware of the risks involved.
Now let's imagine a world where they cure aging. When dying in an accident, you could lose a whole lot more than now.
I'm pretty sure we would quickly evolve to a society where we minimize the risk to die to almost 0. I do not want to live in such a oversafely world.
Besides, I'm very happy with 70 or so years here, and try to enjoy all of it. The next generations will inherit it all.