Only if we abolish capitalism. Until then, any attempt to extend our lives will make the powerful more so. Even though I personally dread death I’d rather die if it means the super rich have to meet the same fate as me. It’s the ultimate equalizer.
We have to move out last year’s models to make way for new inventory. Reaching beyond 150 is my cutoff for counterproductive greediness. Got to winnow those people out to devote resources to the rest of the herd.
Yeah, no. Death and reproduction are some of the best re-distributive forces we have right now, the idea that rich people can stay rich, and poor people can just kill themselves if they’re tired of hundreds of years of impoverishment sounds like a bad movie.
Wait, it already was a bad mediocre movie:
From Dorian Grey to Lestat to Doctor Who to Wolverine, fictional characters have always illustrated why immortality is a bad idea.
I’m pretty sure this is the phenomenon know as “Sour Grapes”; if humans were naturally unaging, most of our media would loudly proclaim the advantages of living forever (or simply take it for granted), instead of saying “Cheer up! Immortality’s a mug’s game anyway!”.
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The last guy who came at me with that argument already had all his comments eaten; and I’m not willing to regurgitate a deleted discussion.
Good day.
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That was a really good article and it expressed my reservations about this particular fantasy scenario so much better than I could even begin to articulate.
It always blows my mind how little forethought most people give to such grandiose ideas like immortality and space colonization, maybe because they really, truly believe that ‘human nature’ is so much better than it actually is.
These quotes in particular resonated:
We’d all like to think we’d reinvent ourselves, re-assimilate, learn and grow along a constantly regenerative learning curve. But most of us wouldn’t. We’re just not cognitively wired for it. We crave stasis, because our lizard brains crave safety and security.
… the law of averages is the law of averages, and people are people, and the vast majority of we humans formed our core values in our adolescences, locked our social and political opinions in our early 20’s. Grudges dig deep.
Imagine it… A functional lifespan of, say 200 years. Working with people who owned slaves. Trying to negotiate international trade treaties to deal with global warming by reconciling voters who watched their brother’s head get spun into a fine red mist by a Boston infantryman or a Georgian cavalryman. Getting funding for stem cell research from voters who grew up believing not only were black people a genetically inferior race, but other versions of white people were, too.
Also from the comments:
I remember being in a sociology class years ago, and the question came up about a hypothetical drug that would essentially enable immortality, and should it be put in the water? Virtually the entire class looked at me like I was insane when I mentioned that it would be a bad thing.
People like to forget that folk/fairy-tales weren’t feel-good entertainment. They were warnings. They were dark and bloody for a reason. People didn’t so much as leave gifts for the fae as make payments in a protection racket.
People can dismissively call it ‘sour grapes’ all they like; I call it being realistic about humanity’s inherent bias and physical limitations, rather than just playing to our unfortunate Dunning-Kreuger tendencies.
There’s nothing wrong with striving to improve the quality of life in general, but maybe a better place to start is by eradicating societal woes like disease, poverty, needless violence and mass starvation…
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That was me in the comments. Thanks. 
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Didn’t even dawn on me; but welcies!
I’ve known dozens of peeps online with some version of the handle ‘Pixie’, including one in my cyber-family.
Your comment reflected exactly how I just felt having snide randos here condescend to me as if it’s somehow a bad thing to consider the ramifications of what a world without aging would actually look like, and how it might not be all sunrays and unicorns shitting rainbows.
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I think for me when we talk about something like ending aging it’s really hard for me to figure out what metric we’d use to say it wouldn’t be a good thing. What if instead we ended cancer? That would increase our average life expectancy, probably by a lot. Basically I think people dying less is good, whether it’s because we don’t age, because we don’t get cancer, we don’t have heart attacks, we don’t starve, we don’t get shot.
But I think your point about what would be better is a very important one. First there’s the raw amount of less-death it produces. I don’t have a lot of confidence that ending aging would increase life expectancy more than 10-15 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if ending cancer actually generated more person years of life.
Ending aging would also be a very unequal way to making people live longer/die less. Even if it was free for everyone, some people would still die at 10, some at 20, some at 30, and on and on, but there would be that one person who lived to 250 for no real reason other than dumb luck. Ending cancer would be a much more equally distributed increase in life expectancy. Ending poverty would be, in my mind, a much, much more equitable way to reduce suffering/increase not-dying. While it’s different, I think that we’ve seen that inequality itself is a cause of a lot of problems when it comes to wealth, I imagine it would create problems with age too.
And of course anti-aging benefits those who are most likely to live the longest to begin with. Wealthier people.
I think that money spent on stopping aging is probably extremely disproportionate to the amount of good it will do: a consequence of the fact that it’s of more benefit to people who decide how money is spent.
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That would be a great place to start…
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Right? Instead of ending aging, let’s focus first on the things that degenerate quality of life. I, for one, could do with less osteoarthritis in mine (and, despite misconceptions, that’s not a disease of getting older), or less mental health problems. Let’s decrease the level of suffering in the world before we look at ways of living longer in it.
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Thus far, most human effort to overcome aging and death, has had to do with raising kids who we trust to carry our values forward, and building institutions to do the same on a scale that kids cannot.
For those who’d like to give up on the idea of having a government, or even a society, I can see a certain appeal to the idea of personal immortality, and not having to bother with the kludgey community versions.
Thing is, even if the personal version made it out of beta, it’s not as if all those legacy institutions would suddenly crumble. Radio didn’t make live performance vanish, TV didn’t erase radio, and the internet hasn’t wiped out TV.
So it seems likely that a robust personal immortality isn’t going to make these pesky churches, governments or corporations go away either.
The interactions between immortal individuals and immortal institutions is something I enjoy reading fiction about, with Methusulas children and stories of the Talamaska high in my list… Just not so sure that’s a fantasy I’d enjoy actually living.
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Before we do anything else, first we need to increase the peace and let the bullshit cease.
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Hmmm…when would this start? The first thing that popped into my mind was kind of a Planet of the Infants. It doesn’t sound promising. Macabrely funny perhaps, but not promising; like a Far Side comic.
I see you haven’t read Perry Rhodan. Plenty of “relative immortals” there, the standard immortality offered in the series is the stop-aging immortality, being immune to most diseases and some poisons. Some of the protagonists are 15,000 year old, though most (surviving) immortals started at 1980 and are at most 3,200 years old at the current in-story time. And quite a few younger ones, in their early 1,500. Not a lot of “being immortal sucks” angst, there.
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That needs the t-shirt treatment!
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Thanks, but it’s not mine; that’s an old peace-march chant, in the Black community…
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