Ok, here is the scenario.
I was reading about some breakthroughs in medical tech, mainly around the treatment of heart disease. But a few others.
Lets say in 2030 following a bunch of significant break through discoveries, expectancy for those that can afford it goes from currently ~85 to ~150. Initially only the super rich can afford it, but it doesn’t take long for it to become an order of magnitude cheaper.
By 2050 the original tech (which is mostly out dated), is the same cost as a nice new car ~$50k in today’s money, the cutting edge stuff is still 1000x the cost but has a much more significant effect, think at least another 300 years.
The same pattern holds, by 2070 the the original tech is $500, the 300 year tech is $50k and effective immortality (medical) is now available in the market for $50M.
What would the ramifications be on society?
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Logan’s Run
The poor are killed at 30, the rich live forever.
In time… Minutes become currency
I forsee a shift in the “early years”. 50 is the new 20. Spending an 20 extra years to find a career is normal.
Assuming immortality means age regression, i.e. you’re in your 30’s and 40’s well into your 100’s, then employment squeezes (unemployment increases, labour supply increases and wages drop) necessitating massive welfare spending (or revolution).
… Oh, we see our first multi trillionaires.
I think age regression would happen, maybe not the initial tech, maybe the gen3 stuff.
E.g. say you are 60 and get the gen1 treatment, you stay “60” for 40 years, at which point you can afford the gen3 treatment, over the next two years your body de-ages to the bio equivalent of 30, you are 102 with the body of a 30yo. You are at this point medically immortal.
I think there would be a point at which there wouldn’t be much point in working, let’s say after you have paid for your gen3, you spend the next 38 years working “full time” to ensure you have enough saved/invested to keep going with. You are 140yo, still fit and healthy, you go into a job share with 3 others just to keep the social aspects of working, you work two 5 hour days a week for the next 50 years… You will like a change and start a new career, study for 10 years to get qualified, you are 200yo.
Money aside, the resulting population explosion would be a big issue. Would you need a one child policy to handle this?
Would euthanasia be considered acceptable for those not dying, in the case of effective immortality?
Now imagine Jeff Bezos or Elok Musk could live forever. Social inequality would grow and grow until there was a revolution.
I think it also depends how this life looks. Would immortality be in a body that feels like a 30 year old? 60 year old? Centuries as a 90 year old?
Productive years may be a greater proportion of lives. Instead of entering the workforce in your early 20s and leaving at 65 (assuming current life expectancy of about 80, you only work a bit over half your life), you’d have a higher proportion of productive time. Would it be acceptable to work less for a longer time (e.g. 20 hours a week your whole life)? Or would we more towards a system of supplying basic living needs to everyone (either a UBI, or state housing and food rations of some kind).
When I think about it, I can imagine a structure where this world could work. But when I think about it more, I think in reality we probably wouldn’t handle it well.
Working until you’re 5-10 years pre-death.
Assuming that you are 50 today, by the time the tech is available to “regular” people, you will be 76. I know some fit and healthy people in their 70’s and some who are not so much.
Being 50 today would be close to the max age for this to be a real option for a lot of people…but then again knowing this was on the horizon when you are 56 may make you make different choices; getting / staying healthy may become a much bigger deal for people.
So maybe working till “retirement” 5-10 years before death would stop being a thing.
Living is expensive where I live.
Another 50 years of life at $100k a year (paying for your own health care is expensive; this wouldn’t last long) is another $5mil or more in savings needed.
I don’t think it’s possible to cheat biology this way but maybe by replacing biological parts with mechanical ones we can sustain our brain for a long time.
Of course civilisation looks like it’s going to collapse in a couple of hundred years due to climate change but let’s set that aside.
On the plus side it will foster more long term thinking in the population. On the minus side the world population will hit a trillion and we will have to kill another person just to prevent them from killing us.
It is a lot more possible than you think, the key will be the harness the power of regeneration. It may seem far fetched, it isn’t though.
20 years is a long time in medical research.
In the 80’s AIDS was a death sentence, by 2000 there were drugs that made it less terrible, today it is manageable, in 20 more years it will be curable.
As for population growth, the birth rates are below replacement as it is, without immigration we would already be shrinking. I don’t think run away population growth would cause issues for quite a while ~100 years or so; we would need to slow immigration quite a bit.
I think birth rates would continue to fall.I agree with the idea that long term thinking would probably see a major improvement. Hopefully we would get the climate change thing sorted out, long term thinking and all.
World population would grow slowly, but continuously, to offset this, humanity would need to expand, initially to earth orbit, then beyond. I would put this in the 1-200 year timeframe. I don’t think we would hit 1 trillion for quite a while, 1000 years or so (assuming a low birth rate, and very few deaths), there are plenty of resources just in our solar system to cater to a trillion people, 100 years is an awful long time in science and tech, let alone 1000. 100 years ago we were in the middle of the horse/car transition, 1000 years ago paper was advanced tech.
As for population growth, the birth rates are below replacement as it is, without immigration we would already be shrinking.
Are you sure? NZ has about 30-35,000 deaths per year, and about 60,000 births. Without immigration we would shrink, but only because of emigration.
You are correct, that was a remembered stat, it must have included the emigration. Looking at births-and-deaths shows that the “natural increase” is shrinking considerably though.
I find it super interesting that the number of births has hovered around 60,000 for most of the last 70 years or so while our population has gone from about 2 million to over 5 million in that time.
Another consequence that I can see as quite plausible, is that mental health would be the bulk of medical care. Once we can relatively easily solve most physical issues. Mental issues just become more and more significant.
