Anyone who's passed the age of 35 knows that we're not built to last. Many of us will slog it out to 76 years, the expected lifetime for American males -- females get two thousand extra days -- but even when young, our bodies barely work, and that marginal situation only worsens as the decades drone on.
It's worth noting that a lifetime of four-score and seven is a new problem for our species. If you lived in Egypt two hundred generations ago, perhaps with a gratifying job as stone chiseler in Giza, you wouldn't worry much about career burnout. You'd be dead by age forty. The up-side was that the Pharaoh didn't have problems with social security.
Life expectancy took a big jump during the Victorian era, when civil engineers fitted out cities with sewers and water pipes. But more improvement is on the horizon: Some people expect lifetimes to double in the coming century as we learn more about our biological makeup. That's nice, but why stop with a mere factor of two?
Gerontologists like Aubrey de Grey figure we can cure death altogether, and in the not-too-distant future. If you're bummed about missing out on this impending medical development, there's always cryonics -- which offers a doubtful promise of time-shifting your life into the 21st century by putting your body on ice today.
I used to be a big fan of living forever, although I soon learned that not everyone agreed. One guy told me he didn't relish the thought of endless dental hygiene appointments. At parties, I found that men were often enthusiastic about immortality, but the women were less so. A physician I know suggests this is due to women's reluctance to confront an infinite future of dealing with boorish men, hitting on them until the heat death of the universe.
Rapid turnover is nature's way of making sure that a species can keep up with changing circumstances and survive the long haul. But since humans have gone beyond basic biology, why not re-engineer ourselves for a lifetime without an end point? Or at least for one where we outlast the Roman Empire?
Well, it turns out there are problems... even beyond the tedium of boorish men.
Let me first state that if we can pull this off -- cure death -- it's self-evident that we'll also obliterate the debilities of aging. You'll be healthy to the end. Nonetheless, there are countless gotchas for any descendants that have made themselves as indestructible as zombies.
First off, they'll need to engineer a major societal revamp. You can't have kids every two years forever: we don't have the real estate. And of course, marriages would have an expiration date.
A myriad of other social structures would also have to be rejiggered: Imagine the frustration of waiting for a tenure slot at the local college which, even after millennia, is still stuffed with its original faculty.
Other difficulties are neither obvious nor tractable. For example, today more than 30,000 Americans die annually on the roads. That means you have a 50 percent chance of being taken out in an auto accident if you live for 3,600 years. So if we extend our lifetimes to thirty or forty centuries, using a car becomes an existential threat. You won't do it.
That may make you a permanent homebody, sitting at your desk playing video games as the eons tick by. Not a pretty picture, and probably not a fragrant one either. Over the course of 3,600 years, you'd have a 4 percent chance of dying in the tub, so bathing will be rare. And if you get hungry, you won't drive to the grocery store -- you'll walk.
Regrettably, you might not find any groceries. Farming is one of the most dangerous jobs around, and any farmer who lives long enough to fear riding in a car has had a more-than-even chance of being killed in the back forty. Incidentally, that's about the same death rate as mining coal, so we'll need to get those wind turbines built if you want electricity at home.
Here's the problem in a nutshell: if we extend human lifetimes a lot -- to millennia, rather than centuries -- all the small risks you heedlessly take every day will have a devastating cumulative impact. Most jobs will become unattractive, because just about any occupation becomes, eventually, a deadly occupation. We'll automate nearly everything we can, and stay at home immersed in a virtual world.
To accommodate this new lifestyle, software for our amusement will become more and more compelling. I mean, for how many centuries can you remain jazzed by "Grand Theft Auto"? I figure that "Roman Orgy III" would quickly be available for Xbox. Humans might become nothing more than protoplasmic containers for their nerve endings, since virtual experience will be the only kind of experience we'll have.
Sure, this is an over-the-top scenario, but there's something to be noted here: our society is made possible by the relatively short timescale of our lives. Extending our life spans a little is merely problematic. Extending them a lot demands a whole new paradigm. Otherwise, our future will be ugly and tedious, punctuated only by video games, dental appointments, and the occasional boorish lout.
Shostak has just about enough imagination to take seriously intelligent extraterrestrial life existing and might communicate with us, but not enough imagination to get beyond Einstein's quaint concept that extraterrestrial travel is limited by the speed of light. Multidimensional physics doesn't impact his conventional cosmology. So he eliminates the possibility that extraterrestrials routinely visit earth with agendas that don't require making their presence publicly ubiquitous and have technology advanced enough to make themselves hard to detect. Neuroscience is already replicating through technology what was formerly the realm of storefront psychics yet numerous reports of memory damping by abductees remains tabloid nonsense to the serious telescope-gazer, not worthy of further consideration.
Likewise, in trying to imagine what life would be like perhaps even exponential multiples of the current measly human lifespan, Shostak thinks that a conscious lifespan measured in millennia or even epochs, will still be concerned with the economics of a single planet, and such contemporary problems as traffic jams and college admissions. Is he kidding? Even ten minutes of Star Trek has enough imagination to give us interstellar warp drive, multiple universes, matter transporters, replicators, holodecks, and guess what alien is coming to dinner?
Read some science-fiction, Seth Shostak. Without it, you come across like a Borneo tribesman trying to figure out what makes a Chevy truck go.
We can see what a culture with a generally older population looks like now. There are huge retirement communities where the average age is well beyond 70. They tend to be stagnant and depressing.
If you want to change the world, go get someone who is 50 and four twenty year olds that trust each other. If you want to fight over an HOA's landscaping, bring in a room of elderly people and watch how nothing happens.
Life expectancy at birth reflects child mortality much more strongly than it reflects how old is old. People who reach forty have always had about as good a chance of reaching seventy, as they had of making it through the previous thirty years from age ten. Death rates were higher at all ages, so life expectancy at forty was lower than it is now. It's just that there wasn't a dramatic increase of death rates with age.
"Rapid turnover is nature's way of making sure that a species can keep up with changing circumstances and survive the long haul."
Genes only "care" about themselves. There's no evolutionary imperative to do anything for the survival of the species.
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As for the main point, yes, increasing life expectancies make us more risk-averse, with significant sociological consequences. But world-weariness makes us more risk-tolerant too. If we conquer death, it will be the relatively young who will be most risk-averse. Ringqworld is a good portrait of such a society, although Niven wisely avoids going into such depth as to get caught looking foolish.
We won't refrain from bathing, but we will redesign our bathtubs with a layer of crushable styrofoam in between the flexible plastic waterproof liner and the structural support. And it will have electronics so that if it gets hit hard enough to break a bone it will automatically call 911.
If you prefer to abstain, have you thought about when you might like to develop Alzheimer's or pancreatic cancer, etc.? Are you looking forward to it?
cacarr, your assumptions are very poignant & precise indeed, 'specially since the following speech last Sunday, the subtlety within which I believe U personally will quickly understand!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biAVBu7WAr4
On occasions, I've asked my own family/friends a paraphrase of this same question you raise! The family quadraped gives me a similar look, but I'm working with them all until they might start to de-sludge toward a higher, civilized perspective. This speech is the best tool for this I've seen yet!
How about we invent the immortality pill now, then compile the bug report on an as-needed basis?
By the way,dying is part of the deal.
The gent in this video below (Mark Hamilton, from just last Sunday) is becoming a name revered by all peoples over the next half-decade or so, (tks. to 'viral MSoft') resulting from over 50 years of brain-sweating results achieved by his completely unique network, (in which anyone, who has your hopes & chutzpah, can be a significant part.)
Concepts they published behind hidden scenes decades ago, have in fact become the largest inspiration behind this whole discussion we are having. For example, Aubrey L.'s 'Methusala Project' foundation is, in large part, a direct result of Hamilton's foundation from the 70-80's:
Youtube user neothinkradio, and their video, tvpc.wmv, (points to this URL):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biAVBu7WAr4
Also, certainly welcome on my Fb.
See U in 'SpaceMed', m' bro Patrick ~ after the 'Earth-work' that has to get done first!
~WT.
Come on along w/ Patrick Sean Farley & I, Super-Kmuzu!
Check the comment above I sent him, & the link I wish to give U too!
See U there!
~W.
Eternity and/or eternal life are my idea of hell.
Also, your second-last paragraph is spot on. Kind of eliminates the need for jobs, an economy, and trade (especially if we have robots that do everything we do now, including build and design more robots.)
Advanced aliens will do this & such! They can only beam messages this way! If discussions about METI (sending messages to space) are opened up to a broad spectrum of sages and the public, the result will be a clamp of silence on Earth that will last... Forever! Whatever the just-so story that is the way the universe operates, without exception.
In this case, he makes a just-so declaration about what people WILL do, if we get extended lifespan. And sure, some darn big adjustments would have to be made. (Yes, including "tenure.") But perpetual timidity as an automatic outcome?
Bah, the counter-examples are blatant. Contemporary westerners already get super-long lifespans, by the standards of other generations and we get 3x the heartbeats of other mammals. And dig it -- rich, healthy, long-lived folk are the principal source of participants in extreme sports, in thrill seeking hobbies and attempts to break world records.
Will dynamic immortals, plagued by ennui, really sit and twiddle their thumbs, just because Seth Shostak decides “logically” that they ought to? I have a little more faith in the power of human imagination, spirit and in ... well... boredom.
David Brin
http://www.davidbrin.com
What's worse, is Seth Shostak's speculations are wrong even if you accept his incorrect presumption of rationality. Don't bathe? That's riskier than bathing.