What are the consequences of humanity living twice as long?
Recently, researchers backed by billionaire Peter Thiel published a study that made a new breakthrough in stopping, or at least slowing the process of aging that happens in humans. There are special cells, called neuronal stem cells in the brain. Previously, it was thought that there was a correlation between the stem cells changing and aging. This new paper proves that it is not correlation, but causation. Changing neuronal stem cells actually changes the process of aging! This represents a big breakthrough in our understanding of the aging process, and could lead to practical treatments that slow down aging, making us capable of living up to 150 years or longer.
Now, this is still 150 years, not immortality. But still, humanity living to twice as long as it currently does would lead to some big societal changes. I think a society where humans live till 150 would look completely different.
How would society change if people lived to 150?
Now, people talk a lot about "living for centuries" , but in most cases, there is rarely any nuisance in their argument/theory. What will the medical condition of these people actually be? This is perhaps the most important question to ask.
The way I see it, there are 2 possibilities: One Utopian, The other Dystopian
The Dystopian Future
This is the future, that most people think about when they think about this topic. In this future, the treatment essentially only slows the process of aging; Which means that instead of "old age" being classified as 60-90, now it becomes 60-150.
For all kinds of reasons, this would be very, very bad for humanity. It would mean, that for a vast majority of his/her life, the average human is nowhere near as productive as a young person is. Even worse is the fact that you now have to provide care to people for 90 years, instead of 30.
This would almost completely change human society for the worse. Government-funded Social Welfare services would have to have their funding massively increased, and even more importantly, it would drag human productivity down. The rate of advancement in Science and Tech would fall rapidly. Tax rates would skyrocket. Hell , most governments would probably ban this kind of treatment.
In this world, humanity would essentially be on maintenance mode, spending more time caring for the elderly than for creating the future
The Utopian Future
This is the future where humanity will actually be successful at completely stopping ,or delaying the process of aging. So instead of 60-90, old age will now be classified as 120-150.
The effects of this will be HUGE. This would improve human life in ways that seem almost magical. It would mean that humans can work for much longer than is currently possible. Human quality of life will take a quantum leap ahead. The pressure on the youth to support their elders will come down. Because of a larger workforce, the economy will boom. Science and Tech will advance even faster than it does today. Tax rates will plummet because the workforce will be much bigger.Perhaps the biggest factor will be the wisdom that a person will gain by the time he is 90. Except in this case, he still has a good 30 or so years to apply that wisdom, and impart it to the youth. This will perhaps be the biggest impact of this change. This transfer of knowledge will change human life on a scale that we cannot even imagine about.
In conclusion, I believe that whatever one of these 2 possibilities ends up being real, this technology is going to affect humanity in ways that we cannot even imagine yet.
Which path do you think will the world go on? The dystopian or the utopian?
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Sources
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/253470-elixir-immortality-may-reside-deep-within-brains
Header Image from Pixabay.
I think there are definitely a few things which determine average life expectancy in terms of biology, and Neuronal Stem cells are only one part, at the DNA level you have telomeres which break down as we age (more so in men than women hence why women live longer), Telomeres protect DNA from alterations and from degradation and hence as we age and they degrade, we also begin to degrade and thus 'age'.
Nevertheless I just want to say that your article is brilliant, in terms of the impact on society I believe that (If you compare to the bacterium analogy) as the age of the population is extended we will need to reduce the number of births accordingly otherwise there will never be enough resources and we will all die out (Just like Bacteria do when their resource:population ratio is less than 1).
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Wow, this post has REALLY BLOWN UP (at least for a minnow like me...). It actually got like 7 upvotes as of a few hours ago, and now that i come back to it, it has 90 upvotes and more than $100 in potential payout (although it only seems to have 21 views?)
But anyway, to all those who upvoted, THANK YOU VERY MUCH :-)
Interesting I wonder why we live so short now compared to a couple millenia ago. Well done, thanks for this, following you. I hope you have a wonderful day.
Wow you really put some thought into it! I'm honestly really excited to see if either one will become the reality or if something unexpected will happen! There's a lot of knowledge out there just waiting to be discovered!