Suppose Science Made Immortality Into A Reality?

[BAYLOR]

Medical science makes the ultimate medical/scientific breakthroughs in which not physical immortality is possible but so is eternal youth and perfect health. WHat effect do you think this new an unlimited time would have on us and as individuals and as society both short term and long term?

How long would you want to live?

 

[Montero]

Huh. Well. In terms of lifespan - until I got permanently bored.

And having said that, are you talking eternal life working as a shop assistant with no pension ever due to lifespan making it uneconomical, or eternal life where you are able and can afford to try to do all the things you've always wanted to do - learn to paint, travel, climb Everest etc.

In one sense vampire books have already touched on this. Carrie Vaugn, in her Kitty series where Kitty the Werewolf is a radio show host has a vampire calling in to talk about working the night shift in a supermarket and how his eternal life sucks. Barbara Hambly in her series has a few very long lived, cautious vampires of varying intelligence and one of them has massive piles of books he is reading.

Other than that, I will mention the elephant in the room - birth rate. If death rate goes to zero or near to it, then kids will have to become a replacement only rarity.

 

[farntfar]

Unless, at the same time, we find a way to expand out into the universe.
So maybe procreation is only banned until the technology for space travel is created.

Generation ships are not required. If everyone is immortal, we can have 100 or 1000 year spaceflights.
But then in flight boredom would be even more likely than on earth boredom, so the ships are going to have to have some pretty good in-flight entertainment.

 

[Overread]

We already have an exponentially growing population without immortality. The only way wide spread common immortality could become a reality would be if childbirth were significantly reduced and our resource base increased to cope with an ever increasing population.

The other aspect would be tax and ownership. At present death (And death duties) tends to put a stopper on people owning everything; companies try but even they can come unstuck. However immortality would leave a huge potential for a few people to eventually control everything without any pass-down to a new generation. Indeed you could well see a lot of hostility, even at a local level. New generations wouldn't be able to gain recognition or even acceptance so easily because older generations would still be hanging around.

 

[farntfar]

I refer you to my previous statement.

Of course it then requires that said technology is available to the poor as well as the rich. But I think this is a fairly minor worry. Don't you?

 

[DelActivisto]

I have a story idea with this in mind. Esssntially I envision that it causes all world religions to die, and people fight over who gets to live the longest. Because that's often the case for new and improved medical science. When it is first released, or if it requires very advanced machinery, it is often only the wealthy who wind up affording it. So I imagine an even sharper class distinction occurring, where the rich live forever and foist upon the masses a cruel system of leveling up enough to earn mortality.

Well, sounds a bit like Hell, doesn't it?

 

[Overread]

I'd see immortality possibly killing religion for the long-livers; but in your description I'd almost expect the lower classes to embrace religion even more strongly as a sign of how wrong it is to live so long.

Something like that you'd get a lot of people who'd want to undergo treatment; but just as many who'd reject it; consider it wrong and evil and who would even fight against it (and those who'd used that viewpoint to further their own agenda as it would be a means to power within the lower ranks)

 

[Biskit]

Unless, at the same time, we find a way to expand out into the universe.

Even then you're going to hit limits.

1: Surplus population is going to need to be pushed off Earth somehow, but they can't really stop at the nearest viable place to live, because in almost no time yet more surplus generations are going to be heading out. So, either the newest migrants have to 'hop over' the earlier generations, or push them further ahead.

2: All of these out-bound migrants are going to steadily strip the Earth of resources.

3: The 'expanding sphere' of immortal humans will be making ever more immortal humans, and pushing them outwards - the whole process is going to be exponential, and potentially exhausting local resources long before the surplus population can be moved on.

It's basic maths - if you have a theoretical system like that, growing with no checks on the growth, and growing faster the bigger it gets, the progress is exponential.

As for how long I would want to live...
Since any system like that will have to have limits imposed, my betting is I would want to live longer than the rules will allow.
Unless that exponential growth wipes out chocolate, then they might as well come and shoot me now. (Or next weekend, because I do still have some chocs left from my birthday.)

 

[DelActivisto]

I'd see immortality possibly killing religion for the long-livers; but in your description I'd almost expect the lower classes to embrace religion even more strongly as a sign of how wrong it is to live so long.

Something like that you'd get a lot of people who'd want to undergo treatment; but just as many who'd reject it; consider it wrong and evil and who would even fight against it (and those who'd used that viewpoint to further their own agenda as it would be a means to power within the lower ranks)

Perhaps, perhaps... but immortality is one of the primary tenets of the "big god" religions. Give people immortality in the objective world, and what reason do they have to believe any longer?

 

[Overread]

Aye but religion is also about purpose as much as it is about a sense of immortality. It also gets tied to morality and the "right" way to live life. So there's ample reason for religion to survive even if people live "forever". Also note that if the advert says "forever" it might well take a LONG time before people believe its forever. Almost everything in life has an end; even if you can live forever you're still mortal - you can still walk under a bus and wind up dead. So its not quite god-like yet.
Of course couple it with personal shields - and lots of other futuristic tech and you could well end up with near-godlike. Heck take it further and if your social divide is big enough those on the bottom could well end up so separated and outclassed that they'd be far closer to peasantry - lacking education to be aware that the god-like immortals are anything but humans (esp if they've lots of technology - a slightly different visual appearance through being from a much older gene-pool and also through the likely rise in plastic surgery and bionics.

 

[Mirannan]

Perhaps, perhaps... but immortality is one of the primary tenets of the "big god" religions. Give people immortality in the objective world, and what reason do they have to believe any longer?

Excellent reasons. Why? Because there are two varieties of immortality, and the OP describes the weaker one. The two forms are "lives until killed" and "can't die no matter what". There are always accidents, and some of them can be lethal - even if medicine is a lot better than now, or even if you are stuffed with nanomachines that can rebuild you after you've been run over by a road roller (for example). In the second case, there are two reasons. One is that rebuilding your body doesn't necessarily mean restoring all the complicated network of neural connections and synapse strengths that comprise your mind. The other is that many types of damage can destroy the body completely.

Even if you assume mind uploading and restoring from backup into a manufactured body - well, backups can fail. Even if you have a dozen backups stored in different types of media, using different operating systems, scattered all over a sphere a hundred parsecs wide - still, there is the potential for all the backups to be destroyed, whether by hugely unlikely accident or malice. And when that happens (admittedly a VERY long time later) you'll be in the same position as someone who dies tomorrow.

I envisage a strain among all religions imagining immortality of the soul (whatever that is!) as the "backup of last resort" by some entity much greater than human, with the proviso that you don't get to come back to the physical universe we all know. (Or at least it's very unlikely - I believe there are 9 resurrections in the Bible, and some of those are probably fictional or not really resurrections. Coming out of a coma, maybe.) I don't know about other religions. Reincarnation doesn't count because it is usually said you don't remember past lives.

In other words, "immortal and unkillable" is impossible in physical law.

I do, however, think that physical immortality (even of the weaker sort) would weaken religion because fear of death is one of the major reasons for people to be religious at all. (Not the only one, before some devout person objects!)

 

[Overread]

Here's another thought - memory. Even if immortality came with no mental degradation, the mind can only make so many connections; which runs on the assumption that the mind will also then forget things to make more space (stupidly simplistic understanding that is likely totally inaccurate but works). As a result you could well have many "immortals" who can only remember things that are stored in some form of digital format - at which point if its not real memory many might come to question themselves.

Almost a reverse; they are not seeking immortality through religion but instead their mortality and history.

 

[Danny McG]

Yes Yes Yes - go for it.
Everyone wants it deep down, two millennia as a sewage worker? So what! Given the option of forty five years followed by twenty years getting feeble then dying of old age it's a no brainer.
Resources and can the world sustain you?
Then start smoking and eating lots of fatty foods right now - by living healthily you are already trying to delay death for a few years. If offered a drug to give you another good decade you'd snap it up.
Eight years later you are offered a more developed one that'll give you another thirty years? Of course you take it.
Twenty years down the line you are offered fifty years, by this time population is growing and scarcities increasing because everyone is taking longevity drugs - are you gonna say no and be the exception who dies?
Eventually you'll be offered several centuries at a time, then it's "oh no, think of the planet?" - No Way!
You'll be in the queue outside your doctor's for your hard earned dosage while pushing emaciated beggars out the way.
Give your long life up? For the likes of them?

 

[ctg]

WHat effect do you think this new an unlimited time would have on us and as individuals and as society both short term and long term?

First of all there would be too many Mondays and for some that would be enough. But the thing is with the longer lifespan is that to some reproduction would drop down with one having so much time in the hand that you might not even think about little ones until you're two hundred and forty. Then it would the question of personal preferences, big family or one offspring.

I bet for many that one child would be enough and maybe you would be producing one per century than try to make as many as you can. Maybe with enough of advancement you might even consider clones or even trying to sleep for a millennia - just to get a change to scenery. After all immortality is incredible naive profession. One could try to master all skills with that amount of time, but the chances are you would forget as much as you've learned because of the biological limitations. Teeth for example would be gone in first century, and you'd be wearing dentures for god awful long time. Not talking about all bone degretation, nerve damage and so on. Therefore immortality or rather longevity has to go hand in hand with the regeneration because otherwise you're buggered.

How long would you want to live?

Six hundred years. If they would prove the cryogenics then I think that would be possible to achieve even with our lifespan, you just would sleep a lot of that time.

 

[R.T James]

I'd say we'd have a feudalistic system ran by elitists which would probably cripple any thought. Technological decline and probably literacy would happen as political instability occurs as factions are placed up against each other and once the violence escalates the new immortal class, No doubt in positions of government or equal power would issue martial law.

This would lock down the cities, and many people would have no means to fight back. Those who would question the rule of the immortals would be unpersoned and those who stood up would be smacked down and killed.

Pretty soon you'd have a massive divide between the immortals the serfs. You'd probably have a few underground factions saving knowledge which no doubt the immortals would make it illegal for one who isn't one of them to have such knowledge.

Sounds like a great future. Where I can sign up?

 

[Vertigo]

This topic has been discussed here several times before. However as it's a topic I'm much interested in some thoughts:

Population: fairly obvious and already discussed above. But I'd add that we're unlikely to be able to change the fact that women are born with their full complement of ova; after around 50 years there are none left. So technology (eg freezing of ova - but how long can they be frozen for? Decades, centuries?) would have to be used to allow pregnancy after that. And that would allow direct control of those births. Ultimately you would have to have a system of one death one birth. I challenge anyone to do the figures on interplanetary or interstellar colonisation; whilst they may be good at removing all humanity's eggs from one basket they will never be able to cope with even today's rate of population growth. Just how long do you thing it would take to shift a billion people off planet?

Bodies worn out: Depending on how immortality is achieved there are many components of the body that could be a problem. For example teeth and bone joints worn out. So either we have to figure out how to get them to self repair or the immortal person might eventually end up more cyborg than human.

Memory: We really do not understand how memory works and we may never do so. The popular SF trope of editing your memory to 'make space' will probably never happen as the one thing we are pretty certain of is that memory is not managed as some simple linear sequential thing like computer memory. So do we reach a point where we simply can't learn anything new or do we constantly forget stuff to make room for new?

Work: as someone commented above, most of us won't want to spend a lifetime cleaning sewers. So we'll need the ability to completely change jobs. And, even after retraining into a completely different role, will we, after say 200 years, really want to go back to 9 to 5? Maybe not an issue if the much fabled post scarcity society is finally achieved (see also below).

Ennui: how many different jobs can you do, how many different adventures can you have, how many times can you fall in love before boredom sets in?

Hierarchy: whether it's family, military or business immortality makes progress almost impossible. Nobody dies or retires so no new opportunities open up for rising stars to fill. The prince/princess will never become the king/queen.

Risk: do we become risk averse because death means the loss of not decades but centuries? Or maybe ennui results in the opposite happening.

Religion: A few have mentioned religion above however one topic not mentioned (I think) is that most religions, to a greater or lesser extent, see death as being the time of final judgement. It is very possible that religious fundamentalists (and I believe there will always be a significant number of these) will see immortality as 'dodging' that final judgement and they are likely to take matters into their own hands...

Just a few thoughts to be going on with

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Bodies worn out: Depending on how immortality is achieved there are many components of the body that could be a problem. For example teeth and bone joints worn out. So either we have to figure out how to get them to self repair or the immortal person might eventually end up more cyborg than human.

The leading edge of longevity research right now is the removal of senescent cells, which has been proven to cause mice to regenerate, and is expected to do the same for humans (I believe the first serious human trials are starting very soon). It probably won't fix all the body parts that can break, but, for example, teeth have been restored in the lab with stem cells. So we may just have to go in for an annual service like a car to fix up anything that's wearing out. Beyond that there are things like reversing the hardening of arteries, which will also have to be done, rejuvenating the immune system, and cleaning out whatever bad thing is accumulating in the blood that makes young mice age when you give them a transfusion.

But we're going to become cyborgs, anyway. As people have pointed out, we have a limited memory capacity, so that at least will have to be upgraded by electronic means. I suspect we'll eventually have so much electronic stuff attached that the human brain will become a legacy component and eventually we won't notice when it goes away.

 

[DelActivisto]

The leading edge of longevity research right now is the removal of senescent cells, which has been proven to cause mice to regenerate, and is expected to do the same for humans (I believe the first serious human trials are starting very soon). It probably won't fix all the body parts that can break, but, for example, teeth have been restored in the lab with stem cells. So we may just have to go in for an annual service like a car to fix up anything that's wearing out. Beyond that there are things like reversing the hardening of arteries, which will also have to be done, rejuvenating the immune system, and cleaning out whatever bad thing is accumulating in the blood that makes young mice age when you give them a transfusion.

But we're going to become cyborgs, anyway. As people have pointed out, we have a limited memory capacity, so that at least will have to be upgraded by electronic means. I suspect we'll eventually have so much electronic stuff attached that the human brain will become a legacy component and eventually we won't notice when it goes away.

And then you also get to explore the classical science fiction tropes, such as what is a human soul, what is one anyhow, and what makes us human, and will we still be human with that many cyborg enhancements?

 

[BAYLOR]

Here's another thought - memory. Even if immortality came with no mental degradation, the mind can only make so many connections; which runs on the assumption that the mind will also then forget things to make more space (stupidly simplistic understanding that is likely totally inaccurate but works). As a result you could well have many "immortals" who can only remember things that are stored in some form of digital format - at which point if its not real memory many might come to question themselves.

Almost a reverse; they are not seeking immortality through religion but instead their mortality and history.

Which means that in time all your original core memories would fade away and be replaced new memories which, would mean that eventually you would cease to be you and would become in effect a different person.

 

[DelActivisto]

Which means that in time all your original core memories would fade away and be replaced new memories which, would mean that eventually you would cease to be you and would become in effect a different person.

Do our memories make us who we are or are we who we are due to who we are due to nature/nurture?