Just because you can’t age doesn’t mean you can’t die, so we aren’t talking about immortality.
Let’s imagine this:
People can still die in accidents, murders, wars, wild animals, stupid stunts, etc.
If our body can biologically not age and technically live forever, then it would be imperative to keep it safe. The only way to die would be from an external cause. The body is still a very fragile thing, you can trip on a sidewalk crack and break your neck. If 200 years from now it’s commonplace for people to be in their hundreds, while still having a 30 year old body and the possibility of hundreds of more years, cutting that kind of life short would be a tragedy. Think of how safety conscious we are now, what would it need to be in the future. Would people even try anything risky? If you no longer have to fear growing old and sick and in pain; just playing it safe… and playing video games in your basement might be the way to live forever.
If you want to age and die, I support your right to do so. Personally, I’d like a choice in the matter.
And I’m goddamn pissed off by you fascist scumbags who feel entitled to make decisions about the lives and bodies of others.
If we do end aging forever, and most people’s lives are significantly extended, population control and resource management are going to become much more pressing problems.
@Papasan’s living forever right now!
(couldn’t resist)
Authoritarian, yes. Fascist, no
I’m fine with people being able to choose to live forever, as long as it is affordable and available to everyone. Immortality that is only available to the 0.1% will end with the immortals finding out that they are still vulnerable to the methods that were used to take down previous elites.
Absolutely. But I guess we would need population control. So we’d have some really weird dynamics.
-
people don’t die from old age anymore, but from lots of others reasons. Especially if we’d get rid of sickness, we‘ll have to deal with far more sudden deaths which are more surprising. Right now I know that some relatives will very likely be dead in ten years or so. In an unaging world, we don“t get to gradually accept that our parents will die - it will be a random event and may happen decades our kids die.
-
Kids. Population control is a must and thus the vast majority of humans will be adults, perhaps in their physical prime. Designing our cities for kids would be an afterthought, for a tiny majority. Perhaps we’d see special cities, where people to have chiildren and raise them and who’ll move out when they do.
No, and I think we should be able to opt out when we’re done.
I like your game with the addition that everyone who enters more than 150 is immediately put to death.
One wonders if the end of aging would be a matter of “immortality tempered by assassination”; as with certain not-otherwise-responsive governments.
I have two children. If I didn’t know that age-related ailments were likely to do me in some day then I’d be facing a two-out-of-three chance of living to see at least one of them die and a one-out-of-three chance that I’d live to see both of them die.
That prospect does not sound remotely appealing to me.
All eliminating aging does is shift the cause of death to accident - we might get as few hundred more years out of it on average, but at some point your car crashes or you become the victim of violence or such. Some ultra-cautious people may make it a very long time, but most of us are idiots and will eventually make that one mistake and get eaten by a bear.
Personally, I intend on living long enough to live forever. Naturally, I’m assuming that if we have reached the point where unlimited life extension is an option, I’m as certain as I am human that we will also have been planning how to alter our bodies for space travel, or to be able to thrive in the many environments that we will be exploring in the future
I imagine a species with as much drive to know truth, create art, love for it’s own sake, and above all, survive, will not just roll over, given the chance to truly know this existence we are experiencing, and then finally, to evolve enough to meet the others that so many are aware of in the furthest edges of our periphery, and maybe, just maybe, a chance to jump Universes, and try our own hand at creation.
I also assume that problems like food shortages, war, ignorance and hate will also be stuck firmly in the past, as the more hindsight we have as a species, the more foresight we will have and use.
I think that all the stories about how terrible it would be to be immortal were written by those who so desperately feared death and desired eternal life, that they needed to make it sound like a bad idea, just so they could sleep at night.
As for all the nay sayers, you are right. The future has no room for those lacking imagination, or for those that are ever bored. You will truly be remembered for eternity, as the ones who said “no thank-you, evolution is not for me.”
I’m going to say no because only rich fucks will have access to the technology. But once we get rid of their evil on the planet then it’s a big yes.
If anything death is one of the ways our society is able to let go of terrible or outdated ideas.
As a nation we’re still struggling to move past the Civil War. Imagine how much harder it would be to put that kind of hatred behind us if millions of American citizens alive in 2017 had literally fought to preserve slavery.
Best of luck to you, but I find it an interesting psychological phenomenon that folks who make bold predictions about either a coming age of immortality OR a coming apocalypse always seem to think that it’s definitely going to occur within their lifetimes, rather than, say, 20 years after they’re dead. Ray Kurzweil being a prime example. He still thinks he’s going to make it long enough to live forever despite having a family history of heart failure and having already suffered some heart issues of his own.
Correction: Scientists are exactly as close as they ever have been to ending aging forever, which is not the least bit close at all.
No.
As a general thought, life expectancy and lifespan are two different things. And I see stopping aging, increasing lifespan, and immortality as three different things. My thoughts on this topic are assuming a natural human lifespan of somewhere around 120 years and focusing on just stopping aging during that time so that people are healthier during that time and less likely to die halfway through.
Population control might take care of itself. People with greater life expectancies in wealthier more developed nations have substantially fewer children, currently near replenishment level or below in some nations. That’s without any laws to enforce it or even cultural expectations.
Removing aging from the equation would also free up a lot of resources that are currently being used to deal with aging, elder care, health care, etc. But resources might become problematic in other ways.
If you can save up enough by 60 to live for the rest of your life off of that retirement fund, and you have a lifespan of 120, that means you have half your life (plus childhood) during which you don’t have to work. Nice! (But if everyone does it, then we will need a very different economy than our current “work everyone to death but let 'em have a few years at the end if they’re lucky” economy.)
On the other hand, you still have a healthy strong body, you could work 90 years instead of 45. If people didn’t need to retire so young, they wouldn’t need to be able to save up a retirement fund in 45 years… We could cut wages in half!
More likely we’d get a mix of people who work less than half their lives and people who have to work for a century just to survive. That would be a pretty big class division within the working class.
