Technical and Spiritual Development

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/pale_blue_dot.html

It is impossible to ban people from having children. It is uneeded in
advanced industrial cultures. Right now the wealthiest societies are
already declining in numbers and are maintained by constant influx of
settelers from less developed regions. What will happen as society
becomes even wealthier and that wealth is spread throughout the world
by market forces? That's right, the entire world population will be in
decline.

Under these circumstances, the results of longevity research will be
welcomed as a panecea.

The things you imagine being done are the result of a diseased
imagination and have nothing to do with the prospect of living forever.


While it may be possible to indoctrinate a minority of youth to any
sort of aberrant behavior such indoctrination rarely sticks as they age
and mature and come to know themselves better. So, in a world where
everyone lives forever, what you describe as conditions - if they ever
occur at all - will be short lived against the grand arc of ones life.
Recalled and laughed at as one might recall a bad dream.

The only lasting change is one that occurs through universal voluntary
selection. People already voluntarily decide to limit the number of
children they have in the wealthier countries. This has more to do
with empowering women than anything else. The continuation of this
trend will create a situation where people will naturally choose on
average to limit the number of offspring, and restrict the population
to a finite number on Earth.

Well, I think you are applying the standards of our culture and times
to a future situation that will be quite different. Consider the
impact aging has on one's ability to change. Consider the impact of
advancing age on ideas about one's worth and the worth of their ideas.
Remove the physiological deficit, remove the psychological attachment
to one's legacy, add a psychological attachment to one's future legacy
(the first hundred years is only the barest beginning of an infinitely
long life - so, rather than being attached to it, become attached to
what you could be), and you pretty much have the psychological
conditions of youth all over again. Except this time in a person who
has been around, who is wiser, who has more resources, and a person who
is infintely thankful for the chance to live again, a person who won't
waste themselves, a person committed to achieve. This describes those
who seek aging treatment.

So, I see quite the opposite occuring. I see the baby boomers who have
given up on life and are shuffling off toward the nursing home -
recalling their lives and missed opportunities - being presented with a
working youth serum and having their youthful vitality restored. Such
persons will seek out and develop better ideas from every corner. A
population of such persons will be anything but stagnant.

The best is yet to come! You thought the 1960s were special. You
haven't seen the 2060s! It will be the very first time practical youth
serum is broadly available - and the baby boomers who survive to that
time - with youth restored - will be stronger, wiser, and better in
every way imaginable - the culture they create by their actions will
emerge as the antithesis of stagnant!

William Mook wrote:
It is impossible to ban people from having children.

Q: What is a Chinese foster home?
A: a syringeful of formaldehyde

It is uneeded in
advanced industrial cultures.

such as the Arabian peninsula, where it's pretty common for one man to
have a couple dozen children by several different wives and concubines?

Right now the wealthiest societies are
already declining in numbers and are maintained by constant influx of
settelers from less developed regions. What will happen as society
becomes even wealthier and that wealth is spread throughout the world
by market forces?

what makes you think that market forces will make the whole world
wealthy? Is there anything in Rwanda or El Salvador that is of value to
anyone? Otherwise the Rwandans and Salvadorans don't have anything to
become wealthy *with*.

The only chance that Third World countries have to become wealthy is if
they come up with some new in-demand service that doesn't depend on
their own physical resources. India is doing that now with software
development. China is well on the road to doing the same thing (want a
$20 copy of Office? Han can take care of you).

But a prerequisite for that success is a highly educated populace. That
takes time and money. You may notice that the two countries I mentioned
happen to be the most-populated countries in the world, with a combined
third of the world's population. It's a lot easier for big countries
like that to bootstrap themselves than it is for scarcely-populated
regions like Africa or Latin America.

That's right, the entire world population will be in
decline.

that's pretty certain to happen in the last half of the century
regardless of what the world's GNP is or isn't. The countries with
explosive population growth will run out of resources to support that
growth pretty soon, so their numbers will level off and start dwindling.

Under these circumstances, the results of longevity research will be
welcomed as a panecea.

sure, as long as you can afford the exorbitant fee that the drug
companies will charge *because they can*.

The folks who can afford somec/boosterspice/whatever-Spinrad-called-it
will have an enormous competitive advantage over those who can't. Those
people will be the exact same ones who tend to be in leadership
positions (government or captains of industry or investors).

There would be a huge incentive for the host government of the first
drug company to develop an antiaging serum to strictly regulate its
production. The drug company doesn't care, they can make a massive
fortune just selling it to the Beautiful People. Saves them a lot of
organizational bother not to have to expand the company's bureaucracy,
and it's guaranteed profit. The b-school term for that is "cash cow".

So the production runs of the drug are very small because of "technical
difficulties". Which means that the price will be sky-high. Which means
that very few people can afford it. Which means that you get a very few
very rich immortals. Who ruthlessly guard their source of immortality.

Meanwhile that company can plow lots of its earnings from the
immortality drug into spinoff substances that will create superficial
"fountain of youth" effects similar to Botox. *Those* drugs go on teh
mass-market and are wildly successful and profitable as well. The
have-lesses are happy because they feel and look a little younger, and
maybe they get to tack a few more years onto their lifespan. Good for
them. But that draws attention away from the *real* immortality serum,
which is a virtual State Secret.

But pretty soon people start noticing that some folks just do not get
any younger, and questions are raised. So the immortals live a
peripatetic life, traveling from place to place under different
identities. As soon as they start to get compliments on "you haven't
changed a bit!" from locals who have known them for decades, time to
move on. Then they recycle themselves as newly arrived twentysomethings,
or whatever physical state they manage to maintain.

All those Mexican kids in your neighborhood who nobody knows exactly
where they came from and they aren't real eager to flash their IDs?

Them g

The things you imagine being done are the result of a diseased
imagination and have nothing to do with the prospect of living forever.

Ah yes, Bill Mook is the only person in the world who has everything
figured out. Which is why he has to drift from one failed get-rich-quick
scheme to another, always riding the wave of whatever hi-tech fad
happens to be in vogue at the time.

While it may be possible to indoctrinate a minority of youth to any
sort of aberrant behavior such indoctrination rarely sticks as they age
and mature and come to know themselves better.

I've got 90-year-old relatives who still use the N-word, Bill. People
rarely change their opinions, they just learn to gloss them over better

So, in a world where
everyone lives forever, what you describe as conditions - if they ever
occur at all - will be short lived against the grand arc of ones life.
Recalled and laughed at as one might recall a bad dream.

that midlife crisis thing is a real bitch, ain't it Bill?

The only lasting change is one that occurs through universal voluntary
selection. People already voluntarily decide to limit the number of
children they have in the wealthier countries. This has more to do
with empowering women than anything else.

um no, it has to do with working at a job that doesn't require any
manual labor that you need a bunch of kinds to help out with, that and
the fact that many more children survive to their fifth birthday than
they did for all but the last century of human history.


--
Terrell Miller


"Every gardener knows nature's random cruelty"
-Paul Simon George Harrison

William Mook wrote:

This, if it were to occur, would have a dramatic impact on our feelings
about death and dying. Children born into such a culture would mature
and come to view death and dying quite differently than we do today.
As a result, no civilized person would support killing or dying for any
reason, or permit one to threaten death of another for any reason.

This is a vast sea change waiting to happen.
Everyone with the sensitivity of a Christ or a Buddah.

you may be describing the same thing in different words, but what
usually happens in civilizxations with long life spans is they get very
conservative in teh literal sense of the term. People aren't aghast at
the thought of killing (the only way to get rid of someone you don't
like, since you can't wait for them to grow old and retire or move away
from you), they are aghast at the thought of *dying themselves*.

So they stop taking risks. They don't try new things, because new things
have a nasty habit of having unforseen consequences.

Society stagnates. Nothing ever changes. Instead of learning "new"
stuff, people devote massive effort to learning everything they can
about the past. Retro is in. Read every single word that Thackeray ever
wrote many times over, and spend twenty years getting your doctorate on
the topic. Then in fifty years when you've said just about everything
you can stand to say about the man's work, move on to another research
project. Time for another Ph.D in Sumerian pottery or whatever.

So people live immensely long lives doing the same stuff over and over
and over and over and...

Personally, I can't see how in such a society people wouldn't die of
boredom.

The old adage that "the amount of work done expands to fill the time
alloted to do it" applies in a massive way here. there isn't remotely
enough to occupy your time, so even simple things take for****ingever.

Get the picture?

--
Terrell Miller


"Every gardener knows nature's random cruelty"
-Paul Simon George Harrison

William Mook wrote:

A teleomere is a molecule that exists at the end of DNA molecules.

sort of. Telomeres *are* chunks of DNA. Which attach to the ends of
*chromosomes*.

Nice googling, though

--
Terrell Miller


"Every gardener knows nature's random cruelty"
-Paul Simon George Harrison

William Mook wrote:

Scott, people today are hiding in gated communities and behind armies
of police and soldiers to keep what they have amidst a vast ocean of
poverty.

exactly, Bill. The richer you are, the harder you have to work to keep
others from taking your wealth away from you.

Now imagine that a person's wealth is a direct result of their
immortality. Such a person would be *fanatical* about preserving their
riches.

In a world with everyone more vital, more energetic, more
pumped - than today...

sure. Everyone.

People still die of dysentery every day, Bill. Even after a century of
increased wealth and medical advances.

in a world with greater energy resources,
greater intelligence resources, greater communication resources,
greater labor resources - due to robotics, greater resources all around
- there is every reason to believe vast new productive capacities will
be created and used to transform the world of today into a world of
plenty and vast wealth so that even the poorest of us then will seem as
millionaires to us primitives that live today.

Bill, compared to my great-great ancestors I am vastly wealthy.

But I have been in mud shacks in Honduras with dirt floors, no plumbing
or electricity (except for maybe a TV hooked up to a car battery), and
no glass windows.

I have been in a subdivision in Matamoras, Mexico that was literally
built on a landfill. Junk keeps washing up to the surface, and it
doesn't exactly smell too wonderful. Only the people who manage to keep
houses right by the dirt roads have electricity. Nobody has indoor
plumbing (dig more than a foot down and you open up a sinkhole under
your shack, very bad form).

All this is less than ten miles away from the nearest Home Depot. Which
happens to be in Brownsville, Texas, USA. In another world entirely.

Moral of the story: no matter how wealthy some people get compared to
our ancestors, there will *always* be people living in the same level of
poverty as was common a century ago. The sheer number of those people
will not change, it's just that they get outnumbered by the Haves.

Your responses, like those of Pat, are borne of your limited
imagination, informed by looking backwards, not ahead.

a visionary, is our Bill g

--
Terrell Miller


"Every gardener knows nature's random cruelty"
-Paul Simon George Harrison

On 22 Jan 2005 04:37:44 -0800, "William Mook"
wrote:

A few years back I read in one of Carl Sagan's books a comment about
the the shift in feeling towards slavery. In 1800 nearly all civilized
people thought nothing of owning slaves. By 1900 nearly all civilized
people were apalled at the thought of slavery. What happened? The
civil war? No, the civil war was the RESULT of a shift of
conciousness, not the effect. This gave Carl the great hope that
someday humanity will have a similar shift of conciousness with regard
to warfare.

The big change in slavery occurred with the invention of the Ox Yoke.
Prior to that the Ox had no economic preference over humans as slave
beasts of burden. Likewise, the industrial revolution, cotton gin,
steam power, fossil fuel engines, etc. had a huge impact on slavery.
Today, the world is so densely populated that there is no need to take
on the burden of slave ownership. Cheap labor is readily available on
demand, often from foreign nationals.

I"ll spare you the discussions on war and longevity.


Everyone with the sensitivity of a Christ or a Buddah.

But note that the Bible and other major religious texts are not
opposed to slavery and warfare, just that slaves should be well
treated, and wars fought for the right reasons.

Scott Lowther wrote:

Hogwash. Death would be seen as still beign the ultimate punishment,
even in a society that somehow figured out how to survive having a
bunch of immortals.


And you know how we'd have to execute them, don't you? We'd have to cut
off their heads...with a katana sword. ;-)

Pat

Scott Lowther wrote:


There's also the question of who gets it. As with any new medical
tratment, the rich will be able to afford it first. Thus society will
be stratified... the immortal rich, the mortal poor. The mortal poor
will vastly outnumber the immortal rich. There will be war, there will
be death.


The Klingons might like this though.


For the time being, an immortality serum should be one of the most
illegal things known to man... anyone takign it should be shot on sight.


Or have their head cut off... with a Bat'leth.
Does this concept sound a bit familiar? Immortality combined with space
migration?
Rand Simberg was talking about something like this a few months ago.
Before either Rand or William mentioned this, it was two thirds of
Timothy Leary's SMI²LE (Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life
Extension) concept.
And we all know what happened to Timothy Leary, don't we?
They cut his head off. :-D

Pat