[wgolsen]

My favorite response to this and related objections to ending aging (such as “what about the dictators”): imagine a scenario where humans did not age, but still had the problems of “gerontocracy” and dictatorships. Would you propose subjecting the whole of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases and ultimately death to solve these societal problems?

I picked this up from Ageless by Andrew Steele, a highly recommended and very current overview of the field of aging research.

[majormajor]

I think "those people would be assasinated more frequently than they are today" is a much more plausible outcome than "subject all of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases."

At the country-level scale, that certainly sounds better than everyone aging and dying.

But what would individuals do on a smaller scale? Would this also incentive a lot more violent death among the rest of the population too, to change things up in a world where probably everyone is their own long-lived dictator of some little domain they carved out. Sure, this would be illegal, but you can only catch and prosecute so much crime; what if it becomes unmanageable? Would people create unnatural death to serve the role natural death causes today? I think so. But I think this could still be potentially "better" than today in some measure - you're comparatively healthy and pain-free before your demise, instead of a slow painful decades-long decline.

[spywaregorilla]

If you live forever, committing crimes seems like it carries a larger risk. Including a much higher risk of actually being murdered, in prison.

[Symmetry]

Oh the other hand, consigning yourself to death via assassinating a hated despot seems better, morally, than consigning everybody to death to make them die of old age.

[mkoubaa]

I might not have the heart to but a rational agent acting in the interest of the entire population would. In fact this is basically what natural selection did to us. If much longer lifespans would have benefited our species we would already have them.

It turns out that the way out brains crystallize as we age and make us better at teaching but worse at changing our minds means our ideal lifespan is not very different than the ones we have. I know individuals can work very hard to avoid this outcome but most people don't.

[kiba]

I might not have the heart to but a rational agent acting in the interest of the entire population would. In fact this is basically what natural selection did to us. If much longer lifespans would have benefited our species we would already have them.

Natural selection doesn't act upon humans for the sake of humanity, nor did it ever asked what humans want or need.

It turns out that the way out brains crystallize as we age and make us better at teaching but worse at changing our minds means our ideal lifespan is not very different than the ones we have. I know individuals can work very hard to avoid this outcome but most people don't.

Citation? I would argue that adults are better at learning languages, because we have the benefit of hindsight, experience, and reasoning.

Whereas children are merely subjected to immerse learning environment from which to acquire languages pretty much every waking hours of their life.

[hardwaregeek]

My suspicion is that space travel will become a necessity if we end aging. People will have to move to new worlds to escape the ossified social/economic hierarchies. Kinda like how in the Enders Shadow series they send all of the Battle School alumni to different planets cause Earth can’t handle all of these military geniuses.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Yeah it seems like the same thing as proposing we shorten today's average lifespan from 80 to 50 as a solution.

[giantg2]

This seems like a loaded question. How would the people in power allow someone else to make that decision? If the issue still exists and there are no alternatives (implied by it still existing), then what would the eventual answer be? It seems that the power dynamics would not allow for artificial control and thus, some natural control for which the people in power have little influence over would be necessary.

I kind of like somthing along the same lines as the idea intended in Altered Carbon - everyone gets 100 years of generally healthy life, but then everyone dies at 100. Not realistic at all, but seems highly equitable. Any artificial constraints will be evaded or manipulated at some point, even in the name of what's best for humanity (ie what if Davinci or Einstien were still alive; eventually the people in power would say I'm president, so presidents should live forever too, etc).

Regardless, the bigger issue would be overpopulation.

[kiba]

I kind of like somthing along the same lines as the idea intended in Altered Carbon - everyone gets 100 years of generally healthy life, but then everyone dies at 100. Not realistic at all, but seems highly equitable.

OK. Do you want to die? I don't want to die.

Life is already inequitable as it is. The rich live a little bit longer. The pleb dies short and miserable life.

At the very least, everyone should be able to live as long as they like.

Any artificial constraints will be evaded or manipulated at some point, even in the name of what's best for humanity (ie what if Davinci or Einstien were still alive; eventually the people in power would say I'm president, so presidents should live forever too, etc).

There's also no absolute law of politics that dictators rule forever or indefinitely if they also happen to be immortal.

Regardless, the bigger issue would be overpopulation.

No, the problem is ecological disaster.

There's so much energy coming from the sun that humanity can't even begin to harvest a fraction of it, but we cannot scale to the sun because doing so will poison the Earth.

[giantg2]

"Do you want to die?"

Someday, yes.

"Life is already inequitable as it is."

Which is why my statement was commenting on the equitable nature of lifespan in the fictional system.

"At the very least, everyone should be able to live as long as they like."

How do you propose to achieve this? Specifically, how would resource availability/consumption and indignant support systems be able to support it?

"There's also no absolute law of politics that dictators rule forever or indefinitely if they also happen to be immortal."

Nobody suggested what you are saying.

"No, the problem is ecological disaster."

For which increasing population would greatly contribute. Population is a major driver of consumption and there's no evidence that we can even support our current population sustainably. Your comment about scaling seems to be implicity acknowledge this.

[courtf]

... yes? Preventing immortal dictators is absolutely worth keeping death around.

It's hilarious to me how shortsighted this whole thing is, if immortal dictators rule humanity indefinitely, how long do you think they'll let you live?

[writeslowly]

I've never considered this question before, but if people did live forever, requiring people in certain positions of power to be subject to some sort of incurable, debilitating disease or guaranteed death seems like a pretty reasonable safeguard to me.

[Stupulous]

If people live forever except for those in power, and power is opt-in rather than, e.g., sortition, power can only go to people who prefer it over eternal life.

That group will be composed of the insane/irrational, those who value power at extremes, those who value improving the world over their own lives, and those who have lived long enough that they're ready to move on. The last two categories are great candidates for empowerment, but one is rare and grows rarer, and the other doesn't show up for upwards of centuries. Until then you mostly get the first two, which suck. Eventually, I think, we burn through everyone willing to make the trade-off and we're left with no power centralization.

Unless you mean they only face death for the duration that they are in power, as an enforcement of term limits. I don't think that is materially different from other enforcement of term limits- if a dictator is able to compromise the military, they can probably also compromise whoever has the power to stop their impending death.