Can we live 1000 years?
dailygalaxy.com
Can we live 1000 years?
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#2I'm indifferent on whether we should want/attempt to live longer than natural life spans. Either way sounds good and bad.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#3I'd be happy with any radical advance in anti-aging (even extra 50 years would be significant). Alas, I fear the breakthrough may not come within our lifetimes. The article does nothing to dispel my pessimistic notions.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#4I don't know, but I hope we get space colonization first, or it's going to get awfully crowded and competitive around here.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#5It would slow down technical innovation.
People grow accustomed to their surroundings and find newer technology suspicious and unneeded. That's why leaps in innovation are most easily embraced by the generations born with them (ie., current teenagers using computers for communication where their parents use phones).
If people can live 1000 years, that would cause overcrowding of the Earth. So if we don't expand to other planets, there would need to be some kind of very serious birth control.
This would increase the average age of Earth's population and, as discussed before, make them less interested in innovative products.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#6I don't know, but I hope we get space colonization first, or it's going to get awfully crowded and competitive around here.
It would be some pretty big spaceships that could outpace the birth rate.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#7It would slow down technical innovation. People grow accustomed to their surroundings and find newer technology suspicious and unneeded. That's why leaps in innovation are most easily embraced by the generations born with them (ie., current teenagers using computers for communication where their parents use phones). If people can live 1000 years, that would cause overcrowding of the Earth. So if we don't expand to ot…
If we can get to the point where we're reversing aging, I think we can safely assume reversible sterilization.
Use an economic solution (really simplified here): When you receive anti-aging treatment, you're temporarily sterilized. Each person then gets 1 credit for a child. 3 credits are required to bear a child. One can purchase or sell their credit for children as one would like.
For the first time in human history, if one wants children, they'll have to put conscious effort into it. Only those who _really_ want children will have them.
...unless you don't want anti-aging treatment, then you can have as many kids as you'd like and become 'immortal' the old fashioned way.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#8I don't know, but I hope we get space colonization first, or it's going to get awfully crowded and competitive around here.
It would be some pretty big spaceships that could outpace the birth rate.
I think if it's a nanotech-based solution to aging, we'll have the resources to build some whopping big monster colony ships.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#9Living a thousand years has some pretty interesting implications.
- Things that seem safe will become dangerous. Small daily risks, such as crossing a red light, will have a much bigger chance of killing you. If you live 15 times as long the risk is 15 times as big. Expect to see people being insulated from the daily dangers of the world.
- Our personal drive will diminish. If you want to do a startup (or whatever else that is nontrivial) you have to act now or it might be too late. If you live a thousand years you can do it next month or next millenium, and you won't feel the same pressure to get started.
- The relation between people that have just reached adulthood and "old" people will be tremendous in terms of experience. Can you imagine the experience of someone that lived through the middle ages, the Roman Empire, the colonization of America, the French revolution and both world wars?
And these are just off the top of my head...
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#10I think an interesting side effect of extremely long lives would be people would be a lot more careful.
Driving fast, not wearing a seatbelt, skydiving, going to war, heck even leaving the house would be considered crazy. who would want to risk ending their lives in an accident if they could live for another healthy 900 years?