this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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I filled it out, but let's discuss in the comments because filling out a one sided form isn't as fun as being able to have a multi sided discussion.
I personally find biological immortality super appealing. Despite the word "immortality" in it, it actually just means you can live as long as you want, which takes away many of the downsides to immortality that often get discussed. Since I'm not religious, I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, so scientific advancement letting me live longer is the only way I can avoid death (which I'm afraid of). And more than just avoiding death, I want to avoid being a frail senior whose quality of life is severely diminished.
That said, for me, I ranked the positive advancements with the disease prevention, medical advancement, and QoL above simply extending human life. I think these all do of course go hand in hand. But fewer people dying young is better than fewer people dying old. Dying young is really tragic, because there's so much of life you won't have experienced. Similarly, the big issue with growing old is age related diseases, which impact your quality of life. At a certain point, Alzheimer's and dementia seem worse than death. I feel conflicted because I don't want to die but if I had a disease like one of those, it seems like I'd no longer be myself and it's unlikely there's any hope for recovery before the disease eventually kills me. There's also the fear that perhaps I would be myself, but feel trapped inside a body, constantly confused and afraid by what's going on, which sounds horrible.
On the negative impact side, by far my biggest concern is imbalance in access to this immortality. My fear is that regular folks (including myself) won't have access but billionaires will. That's worse than not having immortality, since billionaires are generally terrible people and not who we want living longer. Overpopulation is a bit of a concern, but one that I think we can eventually solve. e.g., with social changes to expectations about having kids, automation improvements to reduce our need for people to work, and eventually moving beyond just living on the surface of earth. Wealthy nations already have a declining birth rate, anyway. As well, I'm a bit skeptical about true biological immortality, as opposed to, say, extending life on earth for a good chunk of time, but eventually moving to a digital afterlife, where overpopulation is less of a concern.
I didn't know how to answer the regulation question. I think most things need some level of regulation, but the options were "strict regulation" vs "unrestricted", neither which sound right to me. As well, regulation would likely be completely situational. e.g., obviously safety is a vital part of any form of medical treatment. We shouldn't be reducing any existing regulation there. But I certainly don't want research into the area to be unnecessarily held back. For a large part, I see this as no different from researching a cure for any other disease. Aging can be viewed as a disease.
A negative impact I think you lightly touched upon but want to further expand upon is how will this affect social change in this country. Like lets imagine we go back and say somehow we as humanity discovery this biological immortality around 1886ish (this is going to be very Americancentric) and again lets abstract this and say its given to everyone even though that is unrealistic. I don't think we as a society would have made much progress in terms of rights for women and minorities if we had the lead weight of these god damn fossils outdated view points (their children sort of prove that with the whole bullshit of the daughters of the confederacy and the impact they had in the last 100 years). Hell that is a problem even in the modern world, where our politicians are ancient people in their bloody 50-70s, like congress' median age is 58, some of the most active voters are also the elderly. So we see this problem in the current world and it will only get worse if people had immortality. This doesn't even talk about the idea of the impact this will have on the economy, the idea of retiring is already a foreign concept to many people in this modern world and once again this problem gets worse with immortality since you are literally going to be forced to work till you die.
Like immortality is cool as a concept when its only given to you and a few people you want to select but it gets bloody messy once its a thing that can be handed out willy nilly. It can apply to many concepts like the idea that humans no longer have to sleep, bloody awesome when its only a select few people but once its the norm and seen as the standard it will affect so many different aspects of life. "Well you don't have to sleep Johnson so work for 16 hours or you will get shitcanned because I will find someone who will!".
Agree. I added something like that in the "other negatives" box. There's that saying, society advances one funeral at a time.
I like to think that myself, I'm very good at being open minded and adapting to the times (though honestly only time will tell). But I know many people don't do that. This is clearly evident in electoral polling as well as polls for social issues (eg, US 2023 support for same sex marriage is 89% among 18-29 but only 60% among 65 and older).
Perhaps social changes could help with this problem. Clearly older folks can still change because the stat I just quoted was far worse in the not too distant past. Maybe our problems are with how we run news media or how we basically write off old folks as unlikely to change. Maybe it's because our society focuses on education being something you only do when young and you're never really expected to go back to school after that. Maybe we need to better teach empathy from a young age? Maybe us losing religion will make the biggest difference.
Maybe we don't deserve this kinda advancement yet. To quote one of my favourite parts from the show The Orville: