If it works and it's expensive, it will create a class division if "Haves and Have-Nots" more awful enough to create civil unrest on an incredible scale.
I hope it works, but if it does it's hard to see an implementation path that ends well.
What I'm trying to say is that just from an economic point of view, it's more beneficial to rejuvenate people enough that they don't have any age-related conditions than to treat those conditions. Even if the cost of whatever the rejuvenation intervention is is high. So, IMO, it's very unlikely that we'll see a class division, especially in countries with universal healthcare.
> this would make you ageless until one day you drop dead
No, that's not how this works. How would a person die of an old chronological age if their biological age is, as far as their body is concerned, still 25 years? It's not like there's a time bomb that goes boom after a certain number of years regardless of what you do.
Even without aging, humans aren't immortal. There's a probability of dying from something other than medical issues. Eventually that adds up.
I think the people willing to give up travel at greater-than-walking-speed, sports, hiking, etc in order to live longer is small enough that they won't be a burden. I'm not sure I would really call that "living" myself, but it's their choice.
Totally not reliable, but I once heard an estimate that if aging was cured, the average lifespan would be about 600 years due to various forms of non age related death-- accidents etc.
It’s a group survival thing. It’s helpful to have some reckless members because they discover solutions that others would never explore. In particular, young males have been prewired by evolution to generally be the most reckless members of a group because they are the most expendable. The number of young females determines a group’s reproductive rate and older members tend to have critical skills, knowledge, and wisdom. I speak as a former young male who explored more than his share of possible solutions for the group.
Presumably though even if biological aging were somehow paused at the level of young adulthood, I would think cognitive development would still proceed, so young males would still outgrow that reckless period.
If we can possibly keep the immune and cardiovascular system young indefinitely, thus staving off heart disase and cancers, what is going to break down next? Possibly something within the brain.
Even countries with universal healthcare have it to a lesser extent when, depending on the country, the wealthy can still pay out of pocket for the highest quality private doctors. Or travel to another country like the US that will give you the highest level of care that you're willing to pay for.
As for rejuvenation vs elderly care, that only gets around the problems I mention if rejuvenated people still love about the same amount of time, just with a higher quality of life. Any treatment that increases life span will either cause a a massive population boom, or class-differentiated civil unrest.
I’m not sure what you mean by “make us grow more mature”, but there could conceivably be some major technological advancement that would give us enough time to deal with the sociological effects of increased longevity. For example, electric cars are taking over, CRISPR gene editing exists, fusion is moving forward with the ITER project and various start-ups, space rockets are now reusable, etc.
I would say we have more objective reasons to be optimistic about our future prospects than not. Things are getting better, and it might just be that train wrecks and car crashes are more interesting to focus on. No one writes stories about the days that someone gets home on time safely.
Either way, a widespread treatment becoming available over a relatively short period of time would not give society time to adjust in this way. There would be a crisis, perhaps even imposed limits on having children in many places. Assuming we got through it, things might settle down.
The hard upheaval to deal with is if it was available only to the wealthy. Class warfare would be taken to a whole new level.
If we expect a longer lifespan and higher odds of survival for potential children, our instinct is to delay reproduction and have fewer children in order to increase resources available per child.
This instinct developed over a very long period of time, but our technological advances have created a degree of safety and abundance that our instinct was never “trained” on and thus I suspect it is over-suppressing fertility. A longevity breakthrough will appeal to this instinct even more strongly than living in one of today’s highly developed countries. Consequently, I think our instinct will then suppress fertility even further.
Do people in America with one or two children really not have more because they think this is maximizing the expected number of grandchildren? This doesn't seem realistic to me. I think in American even the working poor commonly have children (often more than the wealthy).
It was meant to. My intent was to stimulate thought, not to conclusively prove. There’s great disagreement among researchers studying fertility, income, life expectancy, and such. These are merely my conclusions, which differ from those of many others.
> Do people in America with one or two children really not have more because they think this is maximizing the expected number of grandchildren?
Yes, but my argument is that this is more instinctive than it is conscious thought. For example, women are increasingly having their first child after 30 because they know it is possible to do so successfully and it gives them more time to establish a career and find the best mate. This increases expected resources available per child and expected genetic fitness. In essence, they are instinctively trying to maximize their probability of having children that successfully reproduce, but it tends to lead to fewer children than optimal because our instinct is poorly calibrated to today’s environment.
> I think in American even the working poor commonly have children (often more than the wealthy).
Correct. They also have shorter life expectancy than the wealthy.
Right now about 80% of men in the US live to 65. If you slow aging by 1/10 so someone at 650 would theoretically be as healthy as a current 65 year old only ~(0.8) ^ 10 or 10.7% of men live that long.
Push it to say 1/100th and accidents are basically going to kill everyone while their healthy, in theory only about 7% of men would live to the equivalent of 30.
The individualist myopia with all things life-extension is staggering.
Let’s push things to a 1,000,000,000 years theoretical lifespan. At that point freak accidents are extremely deadly. Essentially your arguing people will 1:1 become more cautious as lifespan increases. Further, that caution will make a difference, you can play it safe that’s not going to prevent terrorist bombings etc on those timescales.
However, even if you take the most beneficial version where the odds of a heath issue killing someone by age X is the equivalent of dying from a health issue by 1/10th your age that doesn’t stop accidents. If your risk of car accident at age 30 is X the slowing aging by 1/10th still rolls that dice 10 times by the equivalent of 31. As such people’s odds of reaching the equivalent of 65 still drop as you slow aging.
On top of this stuff like smoking cares more about the number of years you smoked than your age. A 50 year old with 30 years of smoking isn’t that likely to die before 51. However, someone that started at 200 and tries to smoke for 300 years isn’t going to make it to 500.
The thing that comes to mind is that it overcomes or breaks various “policy levers” that rely on an expected course of life. Some examples: 99-year leases, defined benefit pension plans and life insurance policies.
I also wonder how many mainframe systems assume a maximum possible age of 2^7 years.
Yep, a whole new Y2K when people live 2000 years. And then many years later, "sorry boss it's gonna crash in a few months. The was written in ancient times and only supports 32bit ages."
Also thinking a bit bigger picture, even if people didn't die of old age at all, couples could still have approximately 1.1 children each on average without the population increasing beyond ~1.5x its initial level. Of course, even that level of restriction seems far-fetched (but then, so does a cure to aging), but it's not like people would need to stop having children entirely.
why would that be a problem? the healthier the older population gets, the more they can work and produce more (instead of "retiring"), and this production includes making more infrastructure (directly, or indirectly via taxation).
If it became widely available, the second that happened it would be a race to invest in infrastructure and especially higher yield food production-- investments that would need to be measured in large fractions of the world's GDP.
And it wouldn't even add to the viable workforce for a while: this is life extension, not rejuvenation. We're stuck with the working population we have now: People past 65 aren't going to be able to get out there and build infrastructure. Plenty of them wouldn't want to either if they were otherwise near retirement or actually retired: It would require uprooting their entire lives to change tracks.
I'm not saying it's theoretically impossible, just that I see no likely way it would actually happen given the state the world is in right now.
There are precisely zero nations on this planet whose citizens would accept death should a true cure become available. Governments would be faced with either total destruction or producing the cure themselves.
Longevity doesn't help with any of that.