gsfish said:
What will it feel like to be on the outside watching the 1%ers taking advantage of this technology? How will society cope with a situation where the 'working class' still has a life expectancy of 80 years and the 'management class' is hundreds of years old and counting? Will the owners of this technology eventually control the world? It would be a near Godlike power. Would be a good scenario for a SCI FI movie but I don't see it happening in the real world. I imagine that D Cheney is keeping his eye on progress though. HA!
Guy
It doesn't make sense that only the 1% would get this technology, but let's assume they do. We'd have riots of a proportion never before seen. Society would grind to a halt. This benefits nobody. Because these therapies would only have to be applied roughly once every 10 years, there's just more money to be made if you charge everybody, say, $10k (1k/year) instead of the top 1% millions. It doesn't make sense from a profit perspective, and this is assuming it isn't subsidized by taxes and declared free to everyone for humanitarian reasons. As for whether or not it can happen, well, I don't see any compelling reason to believe it can't be done.
LeeRevell said:
IF this 'technology' were applied to everyone, and at the rate our population is growing....... Earth is going to get mighty crowded with oldsters....
And will the retirement ages be increased to meet the change? Do we really want to have to work for a hundred fifty years or more, if we have a life expectancy of two hundred?
A couple of different original Star Trek episodes explored this idea. The results were not pretty.
I talk to dozens of people daily on Omegle about this technology, and 99% invariably give the same knee-jerk reaction as their first answer: overpopulation. Our population is
already growing at a rate which will be a problem if we don't make some changes. The issue isn't the amount of people, but the amount of carbon being produced by each person. It's a matter of inefficient energy, but we have companies like Tesla making strides in that area. Look at a population density map of the US and you'll see that 90% are on the coasts. There is an enormous amount of space left on the land, not to mention the possibility of floating cities on our oceans, and just look at how inefficiently we use space in most rural areas. Huge houses, huge yards. I don't need to tell you all that there's a movement toward smaller, simpler living that's only going to continue. Also, outer space. Mars is just the first step.
Food: something like 40% of all the food produced in this country ends up in the garbage. We can already feed everyone, it's just a matter of distribution. And with vertical farms, we can produce enough food to feed billions more.
Developed countries show a trend of declining new births. Japan now sells more adult diapers than baby diapers. South Korea, if I'm remembering the country correctly, has incentives to sterilize yourself, and actually has a shrinking population. It's projected that they will completely die out in 500 years. If it comes to it, a law could be passed limiting new births. People can afford to wait longer to have a kid as they'll live a lot longer.
Working: Given the nature of the technology and aging, it's unlikely that we'll only be living to 200. The first versions will probably be far from perfect and might only give a 100 year extension, but those 100 years buy us time while the kinks are being worked out. Given the exponential rate at which technology recursively improves, it won't be long from then until the damage of aging can be repaired for many centuries, if not indefinitely.
As specialized robots take over more and more general labor jobs, things are going to have to change. As time goes on more people are turning to the internet as their workplace. There just won't be enough general labor jobs for everyone. Robots are cheaper than people in the long run. Some countries have already instituted a Basic Income to provide every citizen with enough money for food and shelter. It's only a matter of time before this is universal.
All of these problems are well worth thinking about but they're blown way out or proportion, and are dwarfed by the problem we have today called aging that kills everybody, and they're all much easier to solve. Let's say the cure for cancer gave everyone an extra 50 good years (unlikely as Alzheimer's and heart disease would kick in before then), we'd still have to deal with the fears of overpopulation and everything else, and we already do. The work being done by SENS is to keep people healthy. It's meant to prevent the disabilities of old age; living a lot longer is just an obvious side effect.
Here's a video that goes into a little more detail and also gets into why we don't like to think about curing aging and would rather fatalistically believe it to be impossible. "Rational irrationality"
[video=youtube]
