But then maybe my thinking is influenced by having watched Altered Carbon [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series)
A lot of the suffering inherent to human life is caused by moral compromises made for the sake of future generations' well-being. Instead, if the norm was living long enough to have to face the long-term consequences of your actions first hand, maybe old people could not afford to be so rigid. They would not be able to "wash their hands" by dying (and possibly leaving any wealth amassed through immoral means to their innocent heirs.)
Personally, what I'm looking forward is augmenting human cognition over long periods of time. I do worry that the result would not necessarily be any more agreeable, or even comprehensible, from our current standpoint, than (post-)modernity would be comprehensible to a caveman; but what I fear is something else entirely: I fear that people would occupy their expended lifespans with centuries of technologically augmented personal drama and sociopolitical "4D chess" - an advancement in complexity of our fundamental primate nature, but otherwise not different from what we do now.
I already find it disappointing that the most valuable thing most people have going on is their "personal" life. And an extension of this principle towards (comparative) eternity would be supremely so.
You've probably read it already, but Frans de Waal's _Chimpanzee Politics_ ends with the (thoroughly demonstrated by that point) claim that politics is older than humankind.
Hadn't read that book but I'll check it out, thanks!
It isn't pessimistic about us transcending chimp-ness either. The point is that when it comes to politics, we very definitely are not there yet. Not even close. We've done a better job of transcending our chimp-ness in just about every other field of human endeavor than we have in politics.
You mean the opposite? Isn't the theme of the day how hard it is to get the entire world to not swipe the ecological credit card of future optimism?
* Officials accepting bribes to approve unsustainable (and sometimes directly deadly) projects, so that they can fund their kids' education
* Regular folks not speaking up against injustice because "they've got a family to feed"
* The "think of the children" card (a.k.a. "we've forcibly cultivated a set of behaviors in our offspring in order to ensure ourselves a comfortable old age, and your radical novelty threatens to disrupt that, dammit")
* Genghis Khan propagating his genome through the reprehensible acts of rape and military conquest. (Although that's not really a "compromise" but the actual essence of a kind of "warrior ethos" that some contemporary populists derive their tripe from)
Point being, it's a sort of norm to excuse acts that negatively affect the well-being of our peers by saying we're doing them in the name of the well-being of our successors. (Not like anyone's asking the successors, who might not even be born at that point. It's just "how life is".)
Barring a "Chinese brain" interpretation, the "entire world" is not a coherent decision-making entity; the majority of human beings living at any point in time have had very little say in "how the world is". World-changing economic decisions are made by a minority - who probably don't have the diabolical motives that conspiracy theories ascribe to them, but are most likely just working in the interest of their children, too (consequences to everyone else's children be damned - which is a possible symbolic meaning of the popular "paedophile cult" conspiracy theory, presuming "lizard folk" symbolize disillusionment with representative democracy, etc.)
From an evolutionary standpoint, they absolutely are. The whole idea of life is to produce a variety of mutations in the hopes that at least some of them will be able to overcome hostilities that their predecessors couldn't win against.
>A lot of the suffering inherent to human life is caused by moral compromises made for the sake of future generations' well-being
Well, future generations' well-being is exactly the goal of life and evolution. Any species that fail at ensuring future generations' well-being get wiped out. Whether they like it or not.
Life is hard.
Preserving the status quo is the valuable piece. To me this is an evolutionary behavior. If you’re old, the status quo has likely been good to you and your offspring. Change risks that. When you’re young, your fear of death is non-existent and you’ve had fewer life scars (whether literal or figurative). If you add protection against death, you’re just increasing the risk-averse population whereas traditionally we’ve used death to weed that out over the long-term. In other words humans are naturally biased towards balancing generating change (youth) and resisting change (aging) since change often has risks or harm and you’re less able to weather it well and adapt in old age (at a minimum your brain’s elasticity helps you significantly while you’re young). Keeping people alive will distort that balance.
The question will be whether society can adapt fast enough relative to how quickly life extends. On its face a medical breakthrough that radically shifts aging for everyone would be pretty bad. A similar breakthrough that shifts it for wealthy people would also be bad on any number of fronts. Our legal and tax systems are designed around existing mortality and as you can see, at least in the US, it can take a long time for any changes in reality to be reflected there nor do those changes typically risk upsetting current power and wealth balances.
But being immune to aging does give the human race other options where a 100 year trip might now be impossible if you can reach a age of 1000 a 100 year stellar trip might actually be acceptable.
Does makes me wonder how many memories can the brain actually store and not degrade. when you go into your 4th century will you forget your 2nd century slowly.
To remember the sweet and good things I did, said, and experienced as a teenager, with that same sharpness seems like the most desirable gift of all.
These are problems we can work towards solving. They are not a reason to abandon longevity research that can and will quite literally save billions of lives.
But in all seriousness, I agree that being able to prevent aging and mortality likely would not lead to paradise. Probably access to this technology would not be distributed equitably, and we would see an elite few living forever, with mere mortals resigned to a disposable under-class.
Also you have the problem of where you put this growing population of immortals? It seems that you would have to solve the problem of interplanetary colonization before we'd be ready to solve death.
These things may actually be tangled together. Interplanetary travel is likely to cause some radiation damage to the bodies of the astronauts. Radiation damage manifests a lot like premature aging; these two may have something in common.
In that case, colonizing planets and trying to treat aging will have to develop together, much like development of airplanes and weather forecasting did.
Unless you can prevent people from traveling overseas to receive anti-aging treatments, clinics will spring up from Costa Rica to Indonesia. The US, even if it wanted to protect the IP of the few very hard, will have to weigh it against the risk that a systemic competitor like China will provide treatments for artificially low price just out of spite and to gain some sympathy points.
Look at the Cold War. During the conflict with the Communist Bloc, inequality in the West actually went down. In presence of ideological competitors, Western governments learnt to mitigate the worst excesses of their own systems.
I don't think that's a given. Many people flat out don't believe in human-caused global warming, at least in America. A lot of people would also interpret it as an act of God-- perhaps judgement day coming- over the scientific consensus. Of course some people also hate to take responsibility, and we all know at least one person who avoids taking responsibility of their own life to the point of ruin.
I don't think society as a whole thinks as similarly as many assume they would. I also don't think humans are as rational with their decision making as we think. Once people acquire habits and addictions, they themselves have a hard time leaving them. I don't believe humans were designed to live forever,and all too common selfishness and ignorance proves that
I hope along with extending life we would also learn how to restore neuroplasticity to help reduce old people that are to set in their ways. Then maybe there would be less of a difference between young and old.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious the usual conflation of capitalism with democracy the US influenced West has been doing is wrong.