From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 22:58:59 MDT
The life extension = overpopulation arguments always amuse (and sometimes
dismay) me.
As I see it:
- To get big life extension, you require a wealthy and educated society
+
- Wealthy and educated societies seem to struggle with negative population
growth
- It is my opinion as a parent (anyone got studies to back this up???) that
doubling a person's reproductive lifespan isn't going to double the amount
of children they have (it certainly wouldn't double the amount that I'd
have). I'd say it's likely to have an extremely small effect on the amount
of children one person has over a lifespan.
- The average amount of time before having a child is likely to increase
dramatically. We already see that trend now, only capped by the fact that it
becomes increasingly dangerous for women to have children beyond a certain
age. Imagine if a woman could safely put of childbearing until they were
150. What would the time before having one's first child look like? Would it
continue to hover around the late twenties, or rise a lot higher? I also
propose that the length of time between children would increase at least a
bit.
- If the average amount of time before having a first child increases
dramatically, this will drastically shrink the birth rate (babies per unit
time), so we are likely to see an overall population growth rate that is far
closer to zero than the current one is, even given a death rate of 0. iirc,
Max argues this point well on his population page
(http://www.maxmore.com/LifeExtensionandOverpopulation.htm).
People have been worrying for a long time that we head for an overpopulation
nightmare. They see that population growth is (birth rate)-(death rate), and
reason that if death rate falls, population growth will be even worse. The
error is that these are actually intermingled; it is likely that the birth
rate would fall much further than the death rate, for reasons that I've
outlined above, and that this means population growth (not actual
population) would fall. Life extension is actually part of a *solution* to
potential overpopulation, not an aggravating factor.
The theoretically minded will object that the population still grows, and
that we will still *eventually* have a problem. I agree! And its a problem
that we really must find a solution to... *eventually*. I'm sure that, given
some tens of thousands of years, which a very small population growth will
give us, we can find a solution which satisfies everyone and doesn't involve
voluntary suicide. Or it may become a non-problem for some other reason that
we haven't thought of yet. Here's the gist of it:
http://www.irsos.com/Horse.htm .
Emlyn
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Damien Broderick [mailto:d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au]
> Sent: Tuesday, 15 October 2002 12:40
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: Re: Bill Joy
>
>
> At 07:31 PM 10/14/02 -0700, Olga wrote:
>
> >Bill gave something
> >for the audience to contemplate before the commercial fadeout: (I'm
> >paraphrasing) "*Imagine* you're 1000 years old ... can you
> *imagine* how
> >many people there would be? ... Can you *imagine* ...?"
>
> Why, yes--it's easy if you try.
>
> Six to ten billion, on dismally conservative estimates (no
> Spike, no upload
> explosion, no devastating plague, asteroid or war).
>
> How many of them would be children? As many as the oldsters
> who at any time
> sign the social compact agreement to die within a year in order that a
> fresh life might be created.
>
> This should give Joy and other frightened people some
> comfort, since they
> can delete themselves while giving a new human a chance, rather as
> evolution has arranged things until now. Others will have to make do
> without children, rather as technoculture has arranged things for most
> people over 60 now.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
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