Methuselocracy!
So why does technology-driven radical life extension spook so many people? I’m honestly baffled by this, and have yet to read anything that amounts to much more than someone’s account of having a vague moral instinct that living that long would be a perversion of human existence. – The Sude
Of the many ways to cut into this, here’s one of the more legitimately dire: ‘beating this thing called death,’ in the parlance of our times, requires some of us to live very much longer than others. People who live for 969 years will consume an extra 900-year-plus quantity of resources. Some significant portion of that will probably still be ‘dotage resources’ – health care costs. The possibilities of radically extending life are likely to be radically expensive, at least in the medium term: major, continuing organ replacements, disembodied Futurama heads hooked up to biomechanical apparati, etc., etc.
That calls for – I think requires – a transfer of resources away from two kinds of people: (a) some who are already alive and don’t have the potential or wherewithal to buy into the methuselocracy and (b) a possibly very large number of people who will have to not be born. In the methuselocracy the human population will probably drop significantly. John Gray might be happy about this, but many people are already unhappy with Gray because of it. You can maybe already grasp some of the darker implications of this line of probability, including robust rates of abortion, ever more strictly refined and revised applied eugenics, etc.
The idea here is not to scare people out of trying to extend human life. It’s from the Bible after all that we get the idea that we don’t live as long anymore as, well, we once were able to live. The idea is to point out that the ‘perversions’ of human existence with which we’ll have to contend are likely less to be perversions of the human experience of being alive per se as perversions of some of the definitional tenets of what our shared humanity entails. A lot of the anxiety here comes from religious sources, but not all. Human rights will be fundamentally rejiggered in the methuselocracy, for no more grandiose reason than that people who are alive have a selfish interest in generally not dying for as long as their resources and ingenuity permit. This as a social force in the world is probably not one we want to unfetter and urge on to ever greater feats of expression. Right?
PS – at the end – presumably! – you still die. Imagine what a cosmic bummer that is, being pulled back down from Mt. Olympus after 500 years of playing the field and another 500 of shuffleboard.
Plus the messy cognitive dissonance that would result from finding out that Star Trek was more like a reality show than we thought.
— Joules · Nov 2, 04:22 AM · #
You seem to be suffering from the Malthusian economic fallacy that usually associated with the more redistributionist portions of the left.
People living “for as long as their resources and ingenuity permit” do not take away from some finite pool of resources which must be divided up among the living and cannot be expanded. As long as they are alive, your Methuselahs will be <i> giving </i> their resources and ingenuity to the rest of us. In return they will be purchasing the ability to live longer, and to continue providing those Rs and Es. (Which are, let us recall, theirs)
This is not taking anything away from anyone else. Let me amplify this, as it is impossible to understand economics without remembering: <i> this will not deprive anyone else of anything that they would otherwise have had. </i>
If you find the idea of living for hundreds of extra years morally repugnant or simply icky, you are welcome to opt out. You are also, of course, welcome to argue against it. I actually agree with you that some of the implications for family structure and population control are troubling, and I’d be interested to see those arguments extended and considered. But please do not inflate your objections with bad economics.
— heedless · Nov 2, 01:45 PM · #
Another thing to consider: all of those people who got tattoos in their teens and 20’s living well past the century mark getting saggier and saggier. My husband’s co-worker with the anatomically correct spine tattooed on her back would have—well, I’ll stop there. I need to eat breakfast.
— Joules · Nov 2, 03:00 PM · #