From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sat Mar 25 2000 - 22:29:43 MST
Zero Powers wrote:
> >From: Adrian Tymes <wingcat@pacbell.net>
> >This isn't an either-or proposition. Both "normal" medical care and
> >longevity can both be financed.
>
> I realize that. I was responding to Natasha who emphasized the need to
> counter the ubiquitous "deathist" meme. My point was simply that it will be
> much easier to get people to support longevity research once it is clear
> that the environment will be able to support 10 billion people who like to
> make babies but don't like to die. It is hard to convince people that
> indefinite life spans won't presently sap our environmental and agricultural
> resources when people now typically only live less than 80 years and yet a
> good percentage of us are living in poverty and starving.
I'm not sure that such could be done, at least not just by funding
medical infrastructure. Suppose that we do manage to cure death - which
is what we propose to do here. Unless this cure causes sterility and
can not be applied to anyone who has already sired a child, this would
make humanity's growth rate permanently positive, barring catastrophies.
Therefore, we could never be satisfied with having the world support X
billion humans, for we would know that there would always be more than X
at some future date. Barring expansion into space - which remains only
a theory until we actually have working and inhabited space stations or
other colonies off of Earth, and thus is not currently a solution that
many will entrust their futures to without some backup plan - this means
that our planet would have to support an indefinitely growing number of
people.
I think there may be a solution to this, though. As has been noted, all
doomsday predictions assume no enhancement of technology to support
increased demand. What if we could make popular the notion that
technology will *always* rise to meet the challenge, at least for our
most critical needs (which, logically, would have more people working on
them to bring technology up to snuff)? If most of the public accepted
that we will always find a way to make enough food to feed all our
people - even if we sometimes stumble in actually getting the food to
the hungriest of mouths, but not in such a way as to make a larger
fraction of humanity hungry - then all "can the Earth support X billion
humans" questions become moot, no?
> >2. The amount of money needed to make decent progress towards longevity
> >- to take the level you quoted, $100 million - would have very little
> >practical impact on supplying "normal" medical care.
>
> I question whether $100 million would have very much impact on longevity
> research. My guess is that there is currently at least that much being
> spent right now on aging research and other research that will be of value
> to life extensionists. And sure $100 million would not end hunger, but you
> could damn sure build a lot of irrigation with it.
And what do you do about the soldiers who hijack the farmers' harvest at
gunpoint, so that they and their bosses may feast while the farmer
starves? The main cause of hunger is not a lack of food production.
> >3. Longevity research may well advance "normal" medical care in ways
> >that purely investing in "normal" medical care would never accomplish.
> >For example, if one were to find a generic vaccine that made humans
> >immune to most or all viruses, that would have immediate applications
> >toward preventing people from getting sick - but such is much more
> >likely to be discovered by researchers looking to minimize health
> >problems over infinite lives, as opposed to researchers looking to just
> >let people live long enough to die at 60 or 70.
>
> Perhaps, but I still maintain that if you couch it in terms like immortality
> or indefinite life span research, you are simply not going to make any
> headway with the public, at least until we have global poverty, ignorance
> and hunger already under control.
Define "under control". I am pessimistic that these problems can be
reduced enough that they dissapear from the public eye, at least within
the predictable future.
> >4. For the past several centuries, there have been some in the world who
> >have lived better than the others. One way to introduce immortality for
> >everyone would be to introduce it for the rich first, then as time goes
> >on - and the technology becomes more familiar and (one hopes)
> >simpler/less expensive - introduce it to everyone else. ("Poverty"
> >these days is not quite as hard a life as "poverty" was 100 years ago,
> >at least in almost any industrialized country, due in part to this
> >practice.)
>
> Oh sure, that's likely to go over *really* well. "Hey, lets all fund a
> bunch of way-out research so Bill Gates can live forever, while millions of
> kids in the third world (not to mention a few thousand right in the good old
> US of A) go to bed hungry every night." Nobody's going to touch that with a
> 10 foot pole. Not Republicans, not Democrats, nobody.
I'm not saying that that's what we advertise, just that that's what will
probably happen. But this does suggest "let the rest of the world
bugger off; we want to make *you* live forever" types of memes,
targetted at anyone who is aware of people in worse poverty than
themselves...which would, I suspect, cover most of people in any kind of
position to fund longevity research. (For instance: most Americans can
be convinced that there are poorer people in other countries. If they
think that citizens of the USA will be among the first to benefit from
this research, and perhaps almost the only ones save for some rich
non-Americans, they might have little problem if their government
supports said research. Repeat for any country where the citizens have
an effective political voice...and where they don't, then sell only to
those who do control the purse strings; similar for non-country holders
of wealth. A cynical approach, perhaps, but might this work?)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:27:38 MST