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Tech Based Youthful Immortality

Meffy said:
I'm not concerned with society being hard on me but those around me. And the thing about life insurance is this: if you kill yourself, they don't pay out.
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That would be a tricky one. Sort of like buying fire insurance that covers deliberately burning your house down.
 
See my point about insurance companies. If they have evidence you willingly destroyed your own car, they are less likely to pay. If they have evidence you burninated your house, they are less likely to pay. If they have evidence you got life insurance and then killed yourself, they are less likely to pay. It is very hard to determine if you were doing it to scam them for the sake of your family or had actually just reached a point where your life was for some reason unbearable, but the point is, their contract is very specific about that and I can see their point. Government and society are more likely to change than an insurance company (unless it is for the worse). You are better off saving up all the money you would otherwise have spent on life insurance if your plan is to eventually off yourself.

Just remember to DO IT LIKE A MAN. Eat a tub full of beans, headbutt the sidewalk, slit your NECK through the spine, just don't be a wuss!
 
Meffy said:
I don't see how natural selection can select for people who wish to be immortal, unless death occurs before reaching reproductive age... or unless immortals are allowed to breed more than those who reject such extended lifespans, and that this won't happen seems to have been assumed.
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I don't think people who opt for longer lifespans will be prevented from breeding. The average lifespan has already doubled in the last few centuries, and no one holds it against the people who are living longer.

I don't think overpopulation or scarcity of resources will be an issue either -- I think we will eventually become a society where people only procreate when they are damn well ready, and population will plummet. I hope, at least.
 
I think Meffy brings up some good points about stagnation, but really, isn't all that will happen is that progress may slow down? I don't see that as a bad thing. Really, what do most people over 50 contribute to society? Not so much. They grind it out in their career until they retire, then suckle on society's teats until they start pining for the fjords. So, let's end all medicine past prenatal and infant care, get life expentency down to 50, and society will be better. (don't bother posting counterexamples, of course they exist. I'm talking averages)

Er, no. There's plenty of things that I don't like about our social organization, but the recognition that the person comes before society is not one of them. When you put society before people, then people suffer. I want to live, and so do most people. Let us. Too bad if progress slows down compared to what it could be. That's already the case. Imagine if we took all the money we spent on social security, medicare, etc., and invested it in basic science research. We'd progress faster, but at what cost?
 
Meffy said:
This question seems to include an unstated assumption that when I was thirty I was "young and healthy." In fact I've been in moderate to severe pain the entire time since I was about seventeen,...Yes. My insides will do the job by the means that they've been working at for decades. The loss to the world will be minimal, far outweighed the advantages of my no longer being around to consume increasingly scarce resources.
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I'm am sorry to hear about your pain, and apologies for my wrong assumption. However, your answer misses my point entirely.

I think when most people hear about the possibility of extra longevity, they think it means extra time tacked on at the end, spent being infirm. I can see not wanting that (although some, myself included, would settle for it).

What my question was driving at was, what if, through advancement of medical science, you reach the end of whatever is supposed to be your appointed number of years -- beyond which, you are just being "selfish" in wanting to keep living -- and you are still healthy, vibrant human being? Should you be expected to off yourself?
 
I don't know. Leaving discussion now because the topic makes me feel very bad about the future and I don't need any more of that.
 
I dare say life assurance companies would love an extended lifespan. More time to pay premiums and people who live longer might be more careful about accidents, having more to lose.

My mother, aged 81, is rarely at home, enjoying both complete mental acuity (ie she's no dafter than ever) and good physical health. I'm happy this is the case. Would I be quite so happy if she looked 24 and was constantly coming home drunk with young men in tow?
I don't know the answer to that.

This is a trivial example of what I'm trying to get at. Extending human youth and healthy life span changes every cultural assumption we have.
The political effects globally are incalculable.

Would Arab suicide bombers be more or less willing to blow themselves up if they faced 100 years in their current political situation? I don't know.

This is not just a question about individuals. It's a question about society.

Ask yourself- Who would you rather have sex with- a twenty year old, or an 80 year old who looked twenty? There's a lifetime of difference. Society would be very different.
 
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Am I willing to face the consequences of completely upheaving society and radically altering everything we know, as well as potential negative consequences for society as a whole?

Yes, I want to LIVE.
 
You're a bolshie bugger, is your trouble!;)

I dunno. At eighteen I felt immortal and if someone had offered me an extended lifespan in my eighteen year old body, I might have gone for it.

If medical science could give me that body back today, I'd jump at the chance, because frankly, the one I have now hurts most of the time.

And that, by definition, would be adding (probably) thirty years to my life.
Maybe when I hit 80 , they would do it again...

But I can't see that sort of tech coming without a price; A price to society and to the individual.
What if the treatment cost $1 million, so you spent half your life saving for it, but a year before you got there your wife was hit by a truck and needed her treatment fifteen years early to save her life?

What if the only way to get the money was to kill?

What if the price was compulsory sterilisation?

I dare say there are some interesting SF stories in there. Some have already been written of course. Wyndham's "Trouble with Lichen" is still my favourite.
 
I don't understand why everyone keeps dragging up the problem of "overpopulation," when almost all the developed democratic countries face demographic implosions, and a lot of the developing ones have birthrates declining somewhat ahead of the expected "demographic transition" for their GDP's because of the availability of contraceptives. The Japanese have nearly renounced baby-making as the major value in life -- maybe because of all those hikikomori who won't leave their parents' homes and get married.
 
Yep- and those same countries are now faced with permitting mass immigration, because their aging population needs young people to do the dirty work , earn salaries, pay tax and fund the retirement of the aging population.
Which causes social upheaval because the immigrants tend to be (gasp!) foreign...
Changes in birth rates and in life spans have social effects. Zis iss my point.
 
You guys are so old fasioned. You assume immortality will *have* to be by fixing our bodies, fighting disease and so forth, but what if we didn't have these frail bodies? What if we could have all our memories, personality and so on uploaded into a vastly powerful computer network? If you want a physical body you download into a robot and can walk around and do your thing. I'm thinking few would want to when they could have heaven in whatever virtual worlds they want. Orgasms that last for thousands of years are just the tip of the iceberg.
Anyway, it might be possible to upload like this in seventy-eighty years. Unless you're over the hill now you could live to that time with the stuff that's coming along to keep you going. I really hope I live so long, 'cause if I do I'll live forever, and can someday be a mind spanning multiple solar systems on giant sun-sized computers. Blows the pants off of being human, doesn't it? :)
 
I'd sign up to being uploaded. Not that it would help, subjectively. Suppose I'm uploaded and die only later. Nice playground for shaky philosophy imho. But fun to ponder.
 
Why would you die later after the upload? System crash? I'd love that sort of thing, but if there weren't enough bodies around there would need to be some time share thing on robo bodies.

At any rate, "the cost to me personally" is something I have all eternity to deal with. :D Also, I wouldn't take issue with being steralized. I don't intend on having kids anyway, and I could always adopt if I did change my mind.

What's a bolshie bugger? Sounds British.
 
Johnny Pneumatic said:
You guys are so old fasioned. You assume immortality will *have* to be by fixing our bodies, fighting disease and so forth, but what if we didn't have these frail bodies? What if we could have all our memories, personality and so on uploaded into a vastly powerful computer network? If you want a physical body you download into a robot and can walk around and do your thing. I'm thinking few would want to when they could have heaven in whatever virtual worlds they want. Orgasms that last for thousands of years are just the tip of the iceberg.
Anyway, it might be possible to upload like this in seventy-eighty years. Unless you're over the hill now you could live to that time with the stuff that's coming along to keep you going. I really hope I live so long, 'cause if I do I'll live forever, and can someday be a mind spanning multiple solar systems on giant sun-sized computers. Blows the pants off of being human, doesn't it? :)
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I guess I am old-fashioned, cause I look at uploading as a last resort. I think a more conservative approach towards preserving my conscious identity is to keep it in the milieu where I'm most sure it (I) exist: my brain encapsulated in my body. It doesn't seem unreasonable that this brain and body, with good technology, could keep on going forever. I think there is a serious danger that by "uploading my mind into a computer", what will actually happen is that an entity will be created that will pass the Turing Test of being Dave1001, but it won't actually be me, in the sense that I won't personally be experiencing conscious awareness through it. It will just be fooling everyone else.

However, I could see scenarios where I'll be forced to upload, such as everyone else has, and I'll be at a huge cognitive competitive disadvantage if I don't. In that case, it will probably be like every time I have to get on a plane for business of family reasons. I'll be scared sh*tless, but I'll do it anyway.:(
 
Soapy Sam said:
Yep- and those same countries are now faced with permitting mass immigration, because their aging population needs young people to do the dirty work , earn salaries, pay tax and fund the retirement of the aging population.
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We wouldn't have to depend on immigrants if we stopped our own aging and stayed functional. We'd also have to abolish the system of publicly funded "retirement" as well. Negligibly senescent people with the inclination to stop working will have to pay for their leisure with proceeds from their own invested wealth.
 
Soapy Sam said:
What if the treatment cost $1 million, so you spent half your life saving for it, but a year before you got there your wife was hit by a truck and needed her treatment fifteen years early to save her life?
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Sounds like a good reason not to marry. I don't understand why men feel the need to marry any way, considering the overall social trend away from binding social relations and towards facultative contracts, free agency, self-employment and so forth. The traditional ideal of marriage ("Till death do us part") looks a lot like swearing an oath of lifetime "fealty" to the local warlord in a premodern society.
 
Dark Jaguar said:
Why would you die later after the upload? System crash?
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You wouldn't. In the event of a system crash that copy of you would be gone, and perhaps the most recent memories if they've not been backed up in other places, but for many systems to all go down that have you on it, the odds of that are very, very slim. Lets just say that happened though, you still have a datacopy of yourself stored in a holographic cube, or whatever. Something that doesn't rot and doesn't loose data if it's subjected to an electrical shock or electromagnetic pulse. Stored in an insulated box made of a diamond-like material.
 
advancedatheist said:
Sounds like a good reason not to marry. I don't understand why men feel the need to marry any way, considering the overall social trend away from binding social relations and towards facultative contracts, free agency, self-employment and so forth. The traditional ideal of marriage ("Till death do us part") looks a lot like swearing an oath of lifetime "fealty" to the local warlord in a premodern society.
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Your lover then. (I speak as a lifetime bachelor).
 
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