I wouldn't kick a 500-year lifespan out of my genome, would you?
Yes. Living for 500 years sounds exhausting, pointless, terrible for the environment and my descendants, and a selfish use of resources.
It entirely depends on whether or not the person lives selfishly for those 500 years. If they continue gaining and using experience they could be exceedingly productive.
If they sit around doing nothing but eating and playing video games, that would be a waste.
No it won't. All first world countries have less than sustainable population growth as it is. We produce vastly more food than we need, and will be able to produce even more in the future with genetically engineered algae. We have vast areas of the Earth left to settle including deserts, antarctica and the Oceans. Not to mention space. We have millennia worth of nuclear fuel available on Earth, not to mention other f…
The way I see it playing out, if working life extension technology is discovered, it will first be hoarded secretly for many years / possibly generations while the rich + powerful use it to stay in power. It won't be generally accessible until much later, likely after the world is in ruins, if at all. Some people believe that it had been discovered before but lost to the ages. Creepy to think about, but makes sense.…
Making sure everyone has access to life-extension is how you make sure you aren't a target for assassination.
If you try to keep it for yourself you can bet the population-at-large will be gunning for you (literally).
Yes. Living for 500 years sounds exhausting, pointless, terrible for the environment and my descendants, and a selfish use of resources.
It entirely depends on whether or not the person lives selfishly for those 500 years. If they continue gaining and using experience they could be exceedingly productive. If they sit around doing nothing but eating and playing video games, that would be a waste.
Productive at what? All of this assumes some grand human plan you can work at. Thus far the vast majority of "productive" humans are "productively" burning through resources with little value: our burn rate is ALREADY crazy with an upper cap on age.
Yes. Living for 500 years sounds exhausting, pointless, terrible for the environment and my descendants, and a selfish use of resources.
Think of the scientific advancements we might have made had people like Einstein or Fermi or Tesla been able to live another fifty or hundred years, or were still alive. If we ever manage to find a way off-planet, being able to live for half a millenium (or "forever", or until-I-decide) sounds AMAZING. It does sound like quite the economic problem, though, and would certainly make earthbound resources more troublesom…
This keeps me up at night. I hope the collective advancement in science makes it possible to defeat cancer some day. I believe/hope that my contribution as a insignificant CS-student helps somebody develop tools that help somebody researching etc. I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resour…
There is an immense amount of software work to be done in biotech. Molecular biology research is in need of better automation, analysis, visualization techniques, and on and on. We need folks at all levels. I entered biotech as a web developer and have been able to pick more challenging problems to approach on a monthly basis. We know next to nothing about the human body. Im optimistic that tech will help out us on a…
I'd echo sister posts re: how to get involved. My wife is currently in biotech doing mixed research/slightly CS-ey work and it constantly boggles my mind how antique many of their methods are, but they barely have money to keep running let alone pay for the expertise and/or infrastructure to leverage modern computing. Companies that have more freedom tend to be more restrictive I've found, and without a PHD it can be hard to get a foot in the door. Been doing data engineer/distributed systems/full stack engineer for almost a decade now and the recurring feeling of "I should be doing more to contribute to humanity" is often followed by contemplation of pursuing bio, but frankly I've been in such a different part of industry I don't even know where to start without heavily hamstringing my current career (e.g. going back for a PHD, potentially in another field)
Of course not. The point is there are things one can actively do to decrease risk (though not eliminate it). With many types of cancer that isn't the case.
But how is that any different from getting enough sleep, foregoing tobacco and unhealthy foods, etc.?
Odds. As you get older your chance of getting cancer increases substantially.[1]
Getting older doesn't increase your changes of getting in a car accident.
I agree that it should be easier to talk about death. And tech really isn't the issue there -- unless the tech is keeping us in a cocoon. Back when the U.S. Civil War happened, photography was still new. Some folks thought that the new tech would finally wake people up to the horrors of war. Didn't work out like that. People already knew the horrors of war and dying. You could run a picture of ten thousand people dea…
What you described above, the "productization" of someone's death, is part of a bigger problem, where people are isolated from each other by technology and by a dehumanizing (and uncoincidentally technophilic) culture that turns people into appointments or tasks or problems to be solved or opportunities to make money or anything and everything more convenient and less difficult than, well, people . I could go on and…
Not to derail the conversation but this whole discussion on "productization" reminded me of the plot line of a Black Mirror episode. When I originally watched it I found it mostly absurd but now in the context of this thread it makes a whole lot of sense.
And then overpopulation will become a problem even more than it is now.
No it won't. All first world countries have less than sustainable population growth as it is. We produce vastly more food than we need, and will be able to produce even more in the future with genetically engineered algae. We have vast areas of the Earth left to settle including deserts, antarctica and the Oceans. Not to mention space. We have millennia worth of nuclear fuel available on Earth, not to mention other f…
>We produce vastly more food than we need
Global warming could cause some nasty food shortages.
Yes. Living for 500 years sounds exhausting, pointless, terrible for the environment and my descendants, and a selfish use of resources.
Think of the scientific advancements we might have made had people like Einstein or Fermi or Tesla been able to live another fifty or hundred years, or were still alive. If we ever manage to find a way off-planet, being able to live for half a millenium (or "forever", or until-I-decide) sounds AMAZING. It does sound like quite the economic problem, though, and would certainly make earthbound resources more troublesom…
It's one of those things that's great until you realize that as resource constrained people in a capitalist society we will basically poor our scientific advancement into the preservation of the wealthiest. Or birth control: cue the monkey house.