How Would Humanity Develop If Immortality Was A Thing?

[Spacescifi]

Scenario: We just developed immortality and can choose who gets it and who does not. Like all technology, no one holds a monopoly on developing it, and it is only a matter of time before the have-nots either purchase or develop it themselves. Nevermind the black market too.

How it works: The first were designer babies that were biologically immortal. The male babies carry the immortality DNA, so they won't age past 40. They can pass on their immortality to their offspring, even if the woman mated with is not immortal. Female immortal babies cannot pass on the immortal trait to their offspring as adults unless the father is also immortal.

Why I even started this thread: No healthy person wants to die, but I could not help but wonder about the alternative, and I considered perhaps it is for the best that we are not immortal.

Since it is reasonable to conclude that both the best, the worst, and the pragmatic side of humanity would decide not only our fate, but the worlds'. And on a faster time scale.

Think civilization evolution... on steroids.

The most obvious problem is overpopulation. Child bearing age for women is ideal in the 20's, less so in the 30's, and definitely not at 40.

Initially space colonization won't be available, so I suppose the humane way to prevent overpopulation would be to government regulate reproduction and only allow the act in goverment hotels after you have cleared all paperwork giving you the OK and what you need or won't.

Birth control would be the rule and not the exception, and goverment hotel staff would make sure of this before any reproductive acts take place.

Having a child illegally would be punishable by jail time and the baby would be taken from you to be a ward of the state.

 

 

My conclusions: I don't like to admit it, but the death of humans seems to be part of a fine tuned system, which would quickly malfunction if every one of us became immortal.

Some religions teach humanity will live forever on Earth, but barring anything beyond divine intervention, as long as we are running this planet, I am not sure giving us immortality is healthy in the long run. Why? Consider how capitalism works

I dare say immortality and capitalism don't get along, since overpopulation creates scarcity of resources and the number of jobs to fill in any society is limited.

Which at some point unless the majority were allowed to die like we already do, capitalism as we know it would break down.

Entire economies would be forced to adjust for a population that is not going to pass away.

 

What are your tboughts? Please try to not get the thread locked. Avoid politics and talk of.... eradication of undesirables

Thank you.

Edited March 20 by Spacescifi

[SunlitZelkova]

43 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Please try to not get the thread locked. Avoid politics and talk of.... eradication of undesirables

That’s difficult when you yourself have brought up political topics like how much a government can intervene in a family’s right to choose when and the debate on capitalism, which are literally politics.

This has nothing to do with science or spaceflight.

[kerbiloid]

10 000 000 000 page long threads would be a normal thing.

And 10 000 000 year necroposting.

[darthgently]

Time printer go brrrrrrr causing massive  devaluation of previously precious moments

[kerbiloid]

The budget deficit of developed countries would be in googodollars.

[farmerben]

Real Estate would become scarce and extremely expensive.  The most beautiful ranches never go up for sale anyway, they pass down through families.  Under immortality the best pieces of real estate stay in the same hands forever and never go on the market.   Meanwhile the TV will be full of home improvement shows to confuse the working class about the value of buildings (which always go down in value) vs land (which goes up).  

A percentage of people would decide it's better to live on a boat than on land.  But, marina space is limited so most people can't afford it.  So new services will deliver supplies to boat people wherever they happen to be, just like now you can order so many things delivered to fixed address.  

[kerbiloid]

Everyone would have his own red dwarf as a personal ranch, where you can sleep under sun without burns, as UV is low.

Unless the unexpected luminosity fluctuation happens while sleeping.

[Terwin]

11 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

I dare say immortality and capitalism don't get along, since overpopulation creates scarcity of resources and the number of jobs to fill in any society is limited.

In capitalism Entrepreneurs create jobs.  More entrepreneurs = more jobs.

So long as there is enough capital made available to entrepreneurs, there is no limit to the number of potential jobs.  Also, productive labor produces capital, allowing for the exponential growth of  wealth we have seen in the last few hundred years.

From 1ad to 1000 ad, india' gdp per capita stayed arout $450(1990's dollars), while china grew from $450 to $466.

Roman Italy was ~$800 in 1ad

By 1500ad India grew to $550, and china to $600, with Italy still at the top with $1100(this was the Renaissance with Michelangelo and da Vinci)

In 1750, 1st world gnp per cap was $804(still 1990 $), but by 1990 that ballooned to 15,413.  A 10x increase over ~250 years when the prior wealth levels had been stable for ~1700 years.

I attribute this growth to the growth of industry, ie capitol.

Population was also only growing very slowly.

190M in 200ad, 275M in 1000ad, 610M in 1700ad, 1B in 1804, 2B in 1927, 3B in 1960, etc

More people means more jobs and more wealth per person(on average) because people performing productive work creates wealth.

Not to mention that someone living in public housing today has luxuries that were simply unavailable, even to kings, a few hundred years ago.

 

[TheSaint]

Did nobody listen to Kosh?

[Spacescifi]

2 hours ago, Terwin said:

In capitalism Entrepreneurs create jobs.  More entrepreneurs = more jobs.

So long as there is enough capital made available to entrepreneurs, there is no limit to the number of potential jobs.  Also, productive labor produces capital, allowing for the exponential growth of  wealth we have seen in the last few hundred years.

From 1ad to 1000 ad, india' gdp per capita stayed arout $450(1990's dollars), while china grew from $450 to $466.

Roman Italy was ~$800 in 1ad

By 1500ad India grew to $550, and china to $600, with Italy still at the top with $1100(this was the Renaissance with Michelangelo and da Vinci)

In 1750, 1st world gnp per cap was $804(still 1990 $), but by 1990 that ballooned to 15,413.  A 10x increase over ~250 years when the prior wealth levels had been stable for ~1700 years.

I attribute this growth to the growth of industry, ie capitol.

Population was also only growing very slowly.

190M in 200ad, 275M in 1000ad, 610M in 1700ad, 1B in 1804, 2B in 1927, 3B in 1960, etc

More people means more jobs and more wealth per person(on average) because people performing productive work creates wealth.

Not to mention that someone living in public housing today has luxuries that were simply unavailable, even to kings, a few hundred years ago.

 

 

True. So if capitalism still thrives, the only real dangers would be pollution and eviromental resource control.... making sure we don't run out of natural resources.

Scifi may be fiction, but I really do get why sometinds old but advanced scifi races are depictef as having homeworlds that are depleted of natural resources.

Because they spent them getting to where they currently are.

[Terwin]

Unless you are shipping tons of rare resources off-world, you cannot 'run out of' resources, you can run out of conveniently available or cost-effective to harvest resources, but you cannot run out of the resources themselves.

(Volatiles like oil may need to be reconstituted, but that is still an option)

Worst case scenario is resources are more or less evenly distributed and we need to harvest them similar to how we harvest 'rate earth minerals' now(they are not rare, they just do not occur in usefully concentrated forms)

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

 

True. So if capitalism still thrives, the only real dangers would be pollution and eviromental resource control.... making sure we don't run out of natural resources.

Scifi may be fiction, but I really do get why sometinds old but advanced scifi races are depictef as having homeworlds that are depleted of natural resources.

Because they spent them getting to where they currently are.

Sci-fi is interesting but there is a cautionary tale in mistaking what authors imagined the future would be like and what it actually ends up being.  Not just authors, all people in the past, in the main, missed the mark fairly widely wrt predicting the future.  Unfortunately, the most accurate ones are often the most alarming;  George Orwell comes to mind.  But there is always those like Arthur C. Clarke to provide some reassurance that accuracy isn't 100% correlated with depressing outcomes

[SunlitZelkova]

11 hours ago, darthgently said:

Sci-fi is interesting but there is a cautionary tale in mistaking what authors imagined the future would be like and what it actually ends up being.  Not just authors, all people in the past, in the main, missed the mark fairly widely wrt predicting the future.  Unfortunately, the most accurate ones are often the most alarming;  George Orwell comes to mind.  But there is always those like Arthur C. Clarke to provide some reassurance that accuracy isn't 100% correlated with depressing outcomes

I'd be wary of treating any sci-fi as having had "predicted the future." It could birth a habit of believing present day sci-fi works can "predict the future," thus leading to them becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.

There's too much fatalism in the world. The future is in our hands, if we stop falling for dogmas and work together to fix problems instead of putting band aids over them.

[Nuke]

20 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Did nobody listen to Kosh?

yea, you dont want to get blowed up by a vorlon dreadnought. its not pretty.

 

i personally think it would be a total disaster.  there's even a thrash metal rock opera about that.

 

Edited March 21 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

On 3/20/2024 at 7:21 PM, TheSaint said:

Spoiler

[Nuke]

also see zardoz. immortality sucks.

[Just Jim]

On 3/20/2024 at 12:21 PM, TheSaint said:

Did nobody listen to Kosh?

That episode "Deathwalker" took a really good look at this very same question. Are we ready?  Probably not...

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

also see zardoz. immortality sucks.

A dream of hikkies. Immortality not necessary sucks.

4 hours ago, Just Jim said:

That episode "Deathwalker" took a really good look at this very same question. Are we ready?  Probably not...

Jha'dur was warning that the offer is limited.

Spoiler

 

[kerbiloid]

A whole star, consisting of metastable metallic hydrogen is discovered on the 15 565 876 435 th year of the forum.

Separate chunks of MMH are orbiting around.

Now we are much closer to the finale of the MMH discussion than we were 15 565 876 423 years ago.

 

Additional info for the red dwarf owners.
All users from Milkomeda galaxy, whose red dwarves are getting depleted, are invited to the Intergalactic Transfer Society.
Our comfortable single-generation ship will start immediately, in two million years.

[magnemoe]

On 3/20/2024 at 7:29 PM, Spacescifi said:

True. So if capitalism still thrives, the only real dangers would be pollution and eviromental resource control.... making sure we don't run out of natural resources.

Scifi may be fiction, but I really do get why sometinds old but advanced scifi races are depictef as having homeworlds that are depleted of natural resources.

Because they spent them getting to where they currently are.

Pollution is an serious problem, wealth is is the best way to solve it, richer countries has much less environmental issues than poor ones as they have money to spend on the environment. 
Compare air quality in the west compared to India or China even if China works on this. 
People living for thousands of years would probably think way more long term. 

And you don't run out of resources.  You find substitutes or optimize how to get them, if something is rare and needed price goes up and it encourages more mining. The problem with say oil is that most was produced in the Middle east who is political unstable so its an risk of an fail of supply, much more spread out now. But rare earth is the new one, its an strategic issue not an scarcity one. 

In the far future and faster in this setting I see asteroid mining as big. More environmental friendly and cheaper down the line. 

Main change I see with immortality would be increased risk migration against stuff who could kill you. Second wold be an more long term thinking.
You would get an constant long term population increase. Say average living age is 2000 years, today if you could not die of diseases or age related issue you would live 1000 years but assume its also safer. 
Say people average has one kid every 100 years. So everybody produces 10 kids every 2000 years, but just 2 people dies
Now population is likely to fall past 2050 with current estimates but this could cause long term problems. 
 

Edited March 30 by magnemoe