Disastrous Consequences of Physical Immortality

[Kanastrous]

Inspired by the 'uploading' and 'fear of death' threads elsewhere on SDNet, I wanted to ask for people's ideas regarding the negative consequences of physical immortality/super-effective anti-aging treatments.

For starters, what about fairness? We can't handle providing clean water or civil order to large swaths of the inhabited world, and if one posits that it's fundamentally unfair for First-World nation A to have clean water for most of its citizens while Third-World nation B's people don't, then how much more grossly unfair for people lucky enough to be born in the First World having a crack at indefinite life extension while people in the Third World don't? Even within on First World country, what about the wealthy who will presumably be the ones able to afford life extension, and the poor, who won't? When chronological age is no longer an automatic death sentence, do poor people deserve guaranteed access to life extension, or is virtual immortality for people who can afford it?

What about criminals? Since denial of life-extension treatment is essentially a sort of death sentence, must we make life extension available to prisoners, at state expense? What about people imprisoned for life? If we deny available life extension treatments to life-term convicts, are we basically sentencing them to death by not allowing them access to a greater life span?



Fixed thread title. ~Your friendly neighborhood big badass starship.

[Samuel]

What is moral or what would happen? Because for b I see Jigsaw Man. After all, you need new organs from somewhere...

[Kanastrous]

We could posit that sufficiently advanced technology to indefinitely postpone death = sufficiently advanced technology to grow replacement limbs, organs, etc, if we wanted to, I guess.

Interested both in what people predict ought to happen, and what they predict would happen.

[General Zod]

There's literally a shiltload of sci-fi series that address this. I suppose how this is approached depends on what type of life-extension you're talking about. Cybernetics? Cloned bodies? I can see birth rates dropping to almost nil and ultra-violent sports becoming the norm as a means of entertainment since the consequences involved would be minimal, and there would be no need to perpetuate the species if you can just replace aging body parts.

[Forum Troll]

The two biggest countries of poor people are China and India. If anybody thinks those 3rd-world countries will be any less modern and wealthy than today's 1st-world countries like Europe in 100 years, they're out of touch with modern economic trends.

Besides, let's be honest. Neither you nor me is really giving up 10% of our income or even our budget for internet access to help people in the third world, so let's not pretend we'd want to give up our life to (supposedly) do so.

If mankind hasn't started to seriously get off this planet by the 22nd century, we'd be a failure as a species and likely ending up in disaster anyway. If we do, having by the 22nd century a fraction of a billion extra people healthier than today's elderly wouldn't destroy the economy.

[Forum Troll]

Also, by the way, the only way 100 trillion neural synapses per person's brain are being "uploaded" at all is if you have basically post-Singularity nanotech so a sophisticated and complex robot (a nanorobot) doesn't cost even 1 cent. In the case of that level of self-replicating Godtech, you can wave current concerns goodbye, and the resulting "post-scarcity" economy is such that the current poor versus rich economic distribution is utterly upset, not to mention that space colonization is easy in comparison to that.

If you don't have that and are doing more conventional life extension measures, it's likely that the relevant drugs and treatments might be no more expensive or even actually less expensive than current Medicare expenses, which are often hundreds of thousands of dollars total expense over a decade or two for an elderly person.

Often, when a current drug costs thousands of dollars a year for an annual dose, that is in large part due to trying to reimburse large R&D expenses over a small production run, such as for a particular uncommon disease. Any life extension drug given to many millions of people instead would be the ultimate economy of scale in comparison.

[Kanastrous]

^ so if we were to distill that down a bit, the distillate would read along the lines of the technology supporting indefinite life-extension will become available concurrently with technologies that will resolve all problems associated with scarcity in resources and distribution of wealth and assets.

Is that an accurate condensation?

[Forum Troll]

^ so if we were to distill that down a bit, the distillate would read along the lines of the technology supporting indefinite life-extension will become available concurrently with technologies that will resolve all problems associated with scarcity in resources and distribution of wealth and assets.

Is that an accurate condensation?

Close enough. Elegant wording, thank you.

You probably don't have the godtech for billions of nanorobots a person and truly indefinite life extension until after you have AGI equal to humans; from there is a natural jump to AIs thinking 10x or 100x faster than humans and a whole brave new world for the speed of technological R&D.

Before then, you may have lesser life extension methods which prolong health and have mixed effects but might allow more of the population to stay working longer (or let some retire into suspended animation hoping for the future).

[Stark]

Want to actually prove any of that? Please pontificate more!

[Kanastrous]

...and if some mod were to correct Diasastrous in the thread title, to make me look like slightly less of a doofus, that would be nice, too.

[Forum Troll]

Want to actually prove any of that?

Which part? If you think there is an affordable way for uploading 100 trillion neural synapses per person that doesn't require self-replicating godtech which would revolutionize the whole world economy, please first argue against what's already said in the Brain Recording thread.

If you're questioning the likelihood of any lesser life extension before that, that's a long topic, but there are promising avenues of research. Example: On special diets, squirrel monkeys and rats have been made to live tens of percent longer, and research on the biochemistry involved is progressing.

There are some ideas for what to aim at for early drug-based methods.

List from the SENS group, seven types of aging damage:

1. Cancer-causing nuclear mutations/epimutations:

These are changes to the nuclear DNA (nDNA), the molecule that contains our genetic information, or to proteins which bind to the nDNA. Certain mutations can lead to cancer, and, according to de Grey, non-cancerous mutations and epimutations do not contribute to aging within a normal lifespan, so cancer is the only endpoint of these types of damage that must be addressed.

2. Mitochondrial mutations:

Mitochondria are components in our cells that are important for energy production. They contain their own genetic material, and mutations to their DNA can affect a cell’s ability to function properly. Indirectly, these mutations may accelerate many aspects of aging.

3. Intracellular aggregates:

Our cells are constantly breaking down proteins and other molecules that are no longer useful or which can be harmful. Those molecules which can’t be digested simply accumulate as junk inside our cells. Atherosclerosis, macular degeneration and all kinds of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer's disease) are associated with this problem.

4. Extracellular aggregates:

Harmful junk protein can also accumulate outside of our cells. The amyloid plaque seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients is one example.

5. Cell loss:

Some of the cells in our bodies cannot be replaced, or can only be replaced very slowly - more slowly than they die. This decrease in cell number causes the heart to become weaker with age, and it also causes Parkinson's disease and impairs the immune system.

6. Cell senescence:

This is a phenomenon where the cells are no longer able to divide, but also do not die and let others divide. They may also do other things that they’re not supposed to, like secreting proteins that could be harmful. Immune senescence and type 2 diabetes are caused by this.

7. Extracellular crosslinks:

Cells are held together by special linking proteins. When too many cross-links form between cells in a tissue, the tissue can lose its elasticity and cause problems including arteriosclerosis and presbyopia.

Example from earlier this year of what progress can be made when one of these starts to get understood, such as #4 which mentions the plaque in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients:

News story:

Trials of the drug, known as Rember, in 321 patients showed an 81% difference in rate of mental decline compared with those not taking the treatment.

The Aberdeen University researchers said the drug targeted the build-up of a specific protein in the brain.

Alzheimer's experts were optimistic about the results, but said larger trials were now needed.

Presenting the results at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease, Professor Claude Wischik said the drug may be on the market by 2012.

[Teleros]

Just dealing with the OP's points for now:

For starters, let's consider the loss of life during development of the treatment - which will probably set the whole thing back several years as well. Then we get the high cost of such treatment - possibly (probably?) recurring if people need regular doses to keep going. Fortunately once the price comes down we'll just have to deal with a major overpopulation problem, because I don't see people giving up the chance to have kids in exchange for immortality: much nicer to have your cake and eat it after all. Oh and whilst all this is going on, various religious groups are playing merry hell with the whole idea of immortality-on-Earth.

As for criminals, it'll probably be against their human rights to deny the treatment, so we can look forwards to prisons full of people on life sentences for a very long time, to the point where prisons and the criminals in them take up a considerable amount of any government budget. Cue lots of angry taxpayers advocating either withdrawal of treatment or the death penalty because they don't want to "have their hard-earned wages taxed propping up these parasites in prison" or somesuch. No doubt a good few of the more extreme political parties will be more than happy to take advantage of this as well.

[Ariphaos]

I think we'll start augmenting ourselves at about the same time computers undeniably reach human levels of intellectual capacity. There's more to that than just staving off old age... but that's a different discussion.

The question begins with what problems are there... first, some important notes.

1: Initial treatments, however primitive by these standards, are beginning to show up now. They are limited in scope and address very basic problems, but people don't die of 'old'. They die of Alzheimer's, of cancer, organ failure...
2: What we see now is a sort of waiting game, but I regularly deal with lawyers and other reasonably wealthy people who, today, having kept themselves healthy, are still active and fit into their 70's.
3: So the populace as a whole is going to be capable of production. Not 120 year old geezers, but men and women who were not nearly so productive in the prime of their youth. No such thing as social security - no need for it. If you want to be rich, learn to manage money and hopefully you were born in the 20th century.

My own guess is that humanity is going to derive a great deal of its sustenance from desalination, the brine going into algaculture for food and diesel (which I suspect will be around for a very, very long time). The capacity for the Earth to support human habitation goes up by orders of magnitude if we start drawing directly from the oceans themselves.

Yeah, there'll be a market for real food, and eventually people will start doing brain uploads or full-scale transformations of one form or another, though I think the human body at least in physical shape is going to stick around for a few aeons for nothing if not nostalgic value.

Regarding criminals, then, it comes down to the fact that the people who control the Dyson swarm will be in charge of the Solar System. This could well be a highly democratic process, but ultimately if someone is not willing to function in that society, they are capable of too much damage to be allowed to participate in it. If we dislike the idea of a death sentence it would be trivial to plug them into a support system and let them live in a tiny box for several thousand or million years without external stimuli.

[Korto]

I like kids. I like lots of kids.
I would sooner a world where by some "Act of Q" the average age of death became 50, so there could be more kids, then we all became immortal, so there could never be kids again.

[Samuel]

I like kids. I like lots of kids.
I would sooner a world where by some "Act of Q" the average age of death became 50, so there could be more kids, then we all became immortal, so there could never be kids again.

Well, we could institute death sports so that people who wanted kids could fight to the death for the privilege.

[Guardsman Bass]

I like kids. I like lots of kids.
I would sooner a world where by some "Act of Q" the average age of death became 50, so there could be more kids, then we all became immortal, so there could never be kids again.

Well, we could institute death sports so that people who wanted kids could fight to the death for the privilege.

Or you could limit having children to certain areas, or what not. Not exactly good in terms of human rights, but it would keep the population down.

[Samuel]

I like kids. I like lots of kids.
I would sooner a world where by some "Act of Q" the average age of death became 50, so there could be more kids, then we all became immortal, so there could never be kids again.

Well, we could institute death sports so that people who wanted kids could fight to the death for the privilege.

Or you could limit having children to certain areas, or what not. Not exactly good in terms of human rights, but it would keep the population down.

Controlling reproduction for everyone on the planet already screws over human rights.

[Kanastrous]

Does that imply a right to out-breed available or projected resources, and let the consequences fall where they may?

[Forum Troll]

Projected future resources?

The distant future is unknown. For all you or I know, the crisis of the 26th century is rather that so many people migrate to living in the holodeck, the Matrix, that they're desperate for enough workers and people to remain outside.

Some of us would be unhappy if somebody in 1869 had made what they arrogantly thought were accurate projections of energy resource availability for the year 2739 based on whale oil harvesting, if they managed in advance to get certain life-extending medical procedures banned like the later-developed hip replacements for people in their 60s.

Anybody deciding what they think are projected resources must take care to avoid arrogance of excessive self-confidence in prediction accuracy, because what matters directly is the hard to predict processed resources, not total resources.

It's relatively easy to see total resources within this system, such as 2E17 watts sunlight reaching earth, 4E26 watts total solar output. However, like current terrestrial power generation is 2E12 watts instead, processed resources at a given time and tech level can differ from that by any number of orders of magnitude. The many thousands of tons of dirt and rock underneath a person's backyard, if you go down deep enough, has all the main elements from aluminum in oxides to potassium. It is always the details of technology that determine what is useful or not.

What one can guess in advance is that longer lifespans would lead to a society with a more long-term perspective. If it took 10000 years to make much of a billion cubic kilometer outer planet moon into spacestations when processing a few cubic kilometers of rock a year into component metals and compounds, they could think in those timeframes.

Hell, even interstellar migration becomes pretty easy as the difficulties in conceiving of it now come from arbitrary human time judgments. If you live for centuries and think nothing of going into suspended animation to slowly drift with your friends for a millenia, you don't truly need near-lightspeed travel or even 1 / 100th of lightspeed. At that rate, if the universe did end in some billions of years according to some models of cosmology, you might never run out of new stars before it ended, though of course you'd die long before then anyway unless you had godtech.

My guess might be a society eventually requiring those people choosing to get enough longevity treatments to either (a) have only one child per couple, making the population drop below replacement rate and decline eventually for any finite average lifespan (b) get sterilized entirely first (c) migrate to primarily a virtual reality existence (d) leave for space first. Yet even that's putting on a lot of pretensions about future knowledge.

In the meantime, I know I will support all forms of medical R&D with no arbitrary cutoff point for desirable lifespan, whether treating Alzheimer's disease or more directly attacking the senescence causing it.

[Justforfun000]

Don't forget people will always die from accidents as well. Not to mention murder.

[Setzer]

I don't know how relevant this is, but in the horror RPG Vampire the Masquerade the old, well established vampires tend to kill off the young and capable ones that might be a threat to them. Their society is described as cannibalizing itself because the people on top will never die and have no need to train successors.

[General Zod]

I don't know how relevant this is, but in the horror RPG Vampire the Masquerade the old, well established vampires tend to kill off the young and capable ones that might be a threat to them. Their society is described as cannibalizing itself because the people on top will never die and have no need to train successors.

Uh, yeah, that's a rather poor comparison. Partly because vampires in the world of darkness also have supernatural hungers and urges that they're constantly fighting on a nightly basis in order to prevent themselves from becoming complete and total monsters. Presumably life extension technology would have similar social problems of never needing replacements, but without quite the same degree of bloodlust and supernatural compulsion involved.

[Kanastrous]

Although I guess one could posit a future where people who wanted to could get modified into a vampire-form state. Which is the sort of decadent misapplication of technology that's possible, on the right kind of time line.

[Setzer]

I was thinking more along the lines of a ruling class that will live forever. Vampiric traits aside, a similar situation could exist with humans. There's no shortage of humans who don't want to leave power, and if they don't have to, imagine how things could develop from there?

[General Zod]

I was thinking more along the lines of a ruling class that will live forever. Vampiric traits aside, a similar situation could exist with humans. There's no shortage of humans who don't want to leave power, and if they don't have to, imagine how things could develop from there?

As long as there were methods of ousting a corrupt or non performing leader I don't see how it would be especially problematic. It's not as if monarchies are intrinsic with immortality.