91 replies to this topic

[caston]

I think the cycle of birth and death is already causing more damage to the environment and consumption of resources. I believe we will find that life extentension actually increases our wisdom and provides good leadership/guidence to enable us to look after our planet between now and when it gets recycled by the sun. Simply put I think we will find ourselvs in a worse environmental state if we don't cure aging.

[Futurist1000]

I watched a documentary on discovery channel about a super building; it could put all Tokyo's inhabitants in a few buildings, completely eliminating the overpopulation problem.

They have capsule hotel rooms in japan. Might be a little uncomfortable. Its just like in that Seinfeld episode where the Japanese tourists stayed in Kramer's drawer for the night. The Japanese are always at the forefront of these advanced technological concepts. Capsule hotel rooms could be the answer to overpopulation.

Or if we could all live in virtual reality. Much less actual space would be needed in that case.

Edited by hrc579, 07 November 2007 - 06:14 PM.

[struct]

I don't get it

As I understand, he is saying that for the sake of moving on with the mission he has to give answers/solutions also to the very unlikely and poorly identified to-be-problems to shut the mouth of the ignorant or intentional aggravators.

[RighteousReason]

I believe we will find that life extentension actually increases our wisdom and provides good leadership/guidence

maybe...

But think about how much scientific and engineering output and vision could be expanded.

[Proconsul]

I think overpopulation is a real problem. Even if on paper Earth can mantain a population even greater than the present one, there are a series of practical problems (environmental, social, ethnic and economic problems, differences in resources and climates, distribution bottlenecks etc) that make a decrease of the total world population auspicable, until space colonisation will not be available (and I think it will take quite a time). However, overpopulation is not homogeneously distributed. It is Thirld World and developing countries that have huge overpopulation problems, while in the West generally we have the opposite problem of too low birth rates and population ageing. Since - for technological and economic reasons - life extentions therapies will most probably be developed in the West, and become first available there - I don't see a short term conflict between anti-aging and necessity to limit population growth.

[RighteousReason]

I love this thread

The matter of Earth reorganized into an efficient computational substrate on the molecular level could support the population of a billion Earths at a liveable simulation resolution, and at much higher speeds (e.g. live a lifetime in the time of a day). We don't even know what the upper limit could be.

[Proconsul]

Nobody is asking him to engineer a solution to overpopulation. It is clear by every metric imagineable that the Earth can hold many more humans than anybody should be concerned about.

I completely agree that Earth can hold way more than we have now. I don't think the number is so high that it is something no one should be concerned about, but it is a very large number that we have not yet approached.

You realize that most of those lowly populated areas that you can see in that map are covered by inhospitable environments, like deserts, mountains and jungles, which can't substain an intensive agriculture, and which are inhabitated by people who - for cultural, historical and perhaps even genetic reasons - are very unlikely to reach a high level of development in the short term? So birth rate MUST be lowered. But this concerns only Third World countries, because in Europe and some other Western countries birth rate has actually fallen below the replacement levels. I know, I know this is not politically correct but I think people here are enough open minded to be able to discuss such issues without starting yelling at each other...

[Heliotrope]

I watched a documentary on discovery channel about a super building; it could put all Tokyo's inhabitants in a few buildings, completely eliminating the overpopulation problem.

They have capsule hotel rooms in japan. Might be a little uncomfortable. Its just like in that Seinfeld episode where the Japanese tourists stayed in Kramer's drawer for the night. The Japanese are always at the forefront of these advanced technological concepts. Capsule hotel rooms could be the answer to overpopulation.

Or if we could all live in virtual reality. Much less actual space would be needed in that case.

I watched a Discovery Channel documentary on this. These campsule hotel "rooms" are much cheaper than a regular hotel room of course, only costing a few dollars for a night's stay in your very own coffin-like box, you can see & talk to your neighbors , even TV, radio, screens in there for you to watch while lying in box

The japanese are good at developing these miniature things. In the cartoon show Dragonball Z, there was even a Capsule Corporation that puts houses, cars and many things in tiny pill-size capsules and you throw it out like Pokemon ball, then a life-size produce will expand out.

[RighteousReason]

The Available Matter and Energy
Michael Anissimov
Wednesday, Nov 19 2008 8:58 pm

Accelerating Future

Part of the rationale for being a “transhumanist”, or, more broadly, having grandiose dreams for humanity’s future, is the extremely simple and mundane observation that the available matter and free energy in our general vicinity is far larger than what we have utilized of it thus far. The incoming solar energy is about a million times greater than global energy consumption, and the available hydrothermal energy to be extracted from the energy gradient between the mantle and the upper crust is many times that. These energy sources far exceed that available from all fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium combined. In the long run (less than a century?), solar and hydrothermal will become our primary energy sources, simply because nothing else will be able to meet our exponentially growing demand.

The biosphere contains just two trillion tonnes of carbon, but the oceans contain about 36 trillion tonnes of carbon (mostly as bicarbonate ion), and several trillion tonnes of additional carbon exist as fossil matter, including the leftovers from the catastrophic Azolla event 49 million years ago. Retrieving oceanic carbon and reintroducing it to the organic biosphere could allow us to reestablish beautiful forests over much of the surface of the planet. Historically, tropical forests extended to within 40 degrees of the equator, subtropical forests to 60, and other forests to the poles. Palm trees and turtles thrived at the North Pole. Our current ice, grass, and desert-covered Earth is a geophysical abnormality caused by an Ice Age that began 23 million years ago when Antarctica split from South America, permitting the creation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and leading to an “Icebox Earth” with glaciated poles. We have had greener ages, and we can bring them back with technology, particularly organic and inorganic self-replicating agents.

Though most environmentalists center their efforts around preserving currently existing biodiversity, forward-looking environmentalists should look towards not just preserving the already existing biodiversity, by setting environmental conditions conducive to the development of millions of new species and a planet covered in luxuriant foliage. By using vertical farming, which will be demonstrated as proof-of-concept within years, and closed-cycle manufacturing, we can minimize our footprint and sustain upwards of 100 billion people with negligible environmental impact. The current impression that the planet is overpopulated is a selection effect resulting from people living in crowded cities, concentrated by technological and economic necessity. Decentralized manufacturing and high-resolution virtual communication will allow a more evenly distributed populace.

Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said “Enough”, enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, “we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential”. There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today’s world is “enough”, then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

[Proconsul]

The Available Matter and Energy
Michael Anissimov
Wednesday, Nov 19 2008 8:58 pm

Accelerating Future

Part of the rationale for being a "transhumanist", or, more broadly, having grandiose dreams for humanity's future, is the extremely simple and mundane observation that the available matter and free energy in our general vicinity is far larger than what we have utilized of it thus far. The incoming solar energy is about a million times greater than global energy consumption, and the available hydrothermal energy to be extracted from the energy gradient between the mantle and the upper crust is many times that. These energy sources far exceed that available from all fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium combined. In the long run (less than a century?), solar and hydrothermal will become our primary energy sources, simply because nothing else will be able to meet our exponentially growing demand.

The biosphere contains just two trillion tonnes of carbon, but the oceans contain about 36 trillion tonnes of carbon (mostly as bicarbonate ion), and several trillion tonnes of additional carbon exist as fossil matter, including the leftovers from the catastrophic Azolla event 49 million years ago. Retrieving oceanic carbon and reintroducing it to the organic biosphere could allow us to reestablish beautiful forests over much of the surface of the planet. Historically, tropical forests extended to within 40 degrees of the equator, subtropical forests to 60, and other forests to the poles. Palm trees and turtles thrived at the North Pole. Our current ice, grass, and desert-covered Earth is a geophysical abnormality caused by an Ice Age that began 23 million years ago when Antarctica split from South America, permitting the creation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and leading to an "Icebox Earth" with glaciated poles. We have had greener ages, and we can bring them back with technology, particularly organic and inorganic self-replicating agents.

Though most environmentalists center their efforts around preserving currently existing biodiversity, forward-looking environmentalists should look towards not just preserving the already existing biodiversity, by setting environmental conditions conducive to the development of millions of new species and a planet covered in luxuriant foliage. By using vertical farming, which will be demonstrated as proof-of-concept within years, and closed-cycle manufacturing, we can minimize our footprint and sustain upwards of 100 billion people with negligible environmental impact. The current impression that the planet is overpopulated is a selection effect resulting from people living in crowded cities, concentrated by technological and economic necessity. Decentralized manufacturing and high-resolution virtual communication will allow a more evenly distributed populace.

Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said "Enough", enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, "we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential". There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today's world is "enough", then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

In my personal view, transhumanism is about improving humanity qualitatively, not quantitatively. It is about extending the life of people already existing and improving them, rather than increasing their numbers. Not that I have anything about increasing the size of humanity, but certainly not at the price of living packed like sardines and destroying the beauty of the different Earth environments - even if technology allowed to feed and house 20 times more people than today. It's a question of quality of life and of different choices. Personally, I think an increase in human population will be desiderable only when we'll be able to open the frontiers of space colonization.

[RighteousReason]

The Available Matter and Energy
Michael Anissimov
Wednesday, Nov 19 2008 8:58 pm

Accelerating Future

Part of the rationale for being a "transhumanist", or, more broadly, having grandiose dreams for humanity's future, is the extremely simple and mundane observation that the available matter and free energy in our general vicinity is far larger than what we have utilized of it thus far. The incoming solar energy is about a million times greater than global energy consumption, and the available hydrothermal energy to be extracted from the energy gradient between the mantle and the upper crust is many times that. These energy sources far exceed that available from all fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium combined. In the long run (less than a century?), solar and hydrothermal will become our primary energy sources, simply because nothing else will be able to meet our exponentially growing demand.

The biosphere contains just two trillion tonnes of carbon, but the oceans contain about 36 trillion tonnes of carbon (mostly as bicarbonate ion), and several trillion tonnes of additional carbon exist as fossil matter, including the leftovers from the catastrophic Azolla event 49 million years ago. Retrieving oceanic carbon and reintroducing it to the organic biosphere could allow us to reestablish beautiful forests over much of the surface of the planet. Historically, tropical forests extended to within 40 degrees of the equator, subtropical forests to 60, and other forests to the poles. Palm trees and turtles thrived at the North Pole. Our current ice, grass, and desert-covered Earth is a geophysical abnormality caused by an Ice Age that began 23 million years ago when Antarctica split from South America, permitting the creation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and leading to an "Icebox Earth" with glaciated poles. We have had greener ages, and we can bring them back with technology, particularly organic and inorganic self-replicating agents.

Though most environmentalists center their efforts around preserving currently existing biodiversity, forward-looking environmentalists should look towards not just preserving the already existing biodiversity, by setting environmental conditions conducive to the development of millions of new species and a planet covered in luxuriant foliage. By using vertical farming, which will be demonstrated as proof-of-concept within years, and closed-cycle manufacturing, we can minimize our footprint and sustain upwards of 100 billion people with negligible environmental impact. The current impression that the planet is overpopulated is a selection effect resulting from people living in crowded cities, concentrated by technological and economic necessity. Decentralized manufacturing and high-resolution virtual communication will allow a more evenly distributed populace.

Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said "Enough", enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, "we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential". There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today's world is "enough", then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

In my personal view, transhumanism is about improving humanity qualitatively, not quantitatively.

It's useful to think of improving humanity in terms of utility. In that sense, increasing the total number of people experiencing positive utility increases the total utility of humanity.

You must click the link to see the graphs, diagrams, and images.

Immortalist Utilitarianism
Michael Anissimov :: May 2004

http://www.accelerat...s/immethics.htm

Immortalist Utilitarianism
Michael Anissimov :: May 2004



Step 1: Seeking Peak Experiences

Ever have a moment in your life that made you feel like jumping for joy, or crying in happiness? Many claim that these are the moments that make life worth living, or at least a lot of what life is about. It's that moment where you finish writing a book, get a big promotion, or share an intimate moment with someone special. How many "typical" days would you give for a single moment like that? Some might say 1, others 10, others even 100 or more. Think about it - in a usual day, we're conscious for around 14 hours. Let's be conservative and suggest that the average John Doe would trade 5 typical days in exchange for a peak experience that lasts 5 minutes. The time ratio is about 1000:1, but many would still prefer the peak experience over the same old stuff. Unique experiences are really valuable to us.

This would imply that most people value life not only for the length of time they experience, but for the special moments that, as I mentioned earlier, "make life worth living". As the stereotypical quote goes, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." Ethicists sometimes quantify such satisfaction as "utility" for the sake of thought experiments; we might say that each 5 minute peak experience is worth a thousand utility points, or "utiles". Correspondingly, each 5 days of typical activity would also count as roughly a thousand utiles, because one would trade one for the other. Although it may make some of us uncomfortable to quantify utility, our brain is unconsciously performing computations accessing the potential utility of choices all the time, and the model is incredibly useful in the psychology of human decision making and the field of ethics. Please bear with me as I make some assumptions about utility values and probabilities. Note that I acknowledge that two different people will not tag everything with the same utility, nor will they necessarily compute utility mathematically.

Following is an example of a typical human's lifelong utility trajectory. It plots utile-moments (u) against time (t). Let's say that the maximum u value reached is around 200 utiles/minute, or 1000 utiles for the 5 minute peak experience described above. For the sake of simplicitly, let's assume about a hundred 5-minute peak experiences per typical lifetime. Since peak experiences are so fun to have, much of the activity on "typical" days probably entails setting the groundwork for these experiences to happen; ensuring that one does not starve and so on.

The curve rises as the agent has a series of interesting new experiences, plateaus throughout most of adulthood, and subtly falls off in later years, until death is finally reached. It punctuates through peaks and valleys. Some might strongly associate utility with wealth or frequency of sexual activity, others might see utility in their intellectual pursuits.



Total utility: around 6,000,000 utiles, if we figure a lifespan of 80.


Step 2: Avoiding Premature Death

In life there is always the risk of a fatal accident or illness. Death implies an immediate dropoff to the utility curve, a profoundly negative event. That's why people say stuff like "I'm too young to die!", or "I can't stop fighting, I have so much to live for". Humans despise death, because death sucks. People are willing to go out of their way to avoid it, and rightly so. Some even assert that their lives are the most important thing in the world to them, but I wouldn't go that far personally.

Let's introduce another aspect into the model. Say event X occuring at the 20-year mark has a probability 10% of eliminating all future experiences, which means a risk of 4,000,000 utiles. In qualitative terms, this would translate into emotional, heart-wrenching arguments like those quoted above. There are some things that people would be willing to give their life for. Just not too many. Death is a horrible thing if it stands in the way of living a long and fulfilling life. Therefore, it seems like a good idea to take actions to avoid event X if at all possible. Actions and thoughts leading to the avoidance of X have high utility; they are desirable in the same way that setting the groundwork for the a peak experience is desirable. That's why we are so grateful when someone saves our life, and why we never drive under the influence after that one close call.



The two possible trajectories after the decision instance are represented by red and blue lines. If we die, experienced utility drops to zero immediately. If we survive, it's business as usual; a life of fun experiences and growth to look forward to. The purple line represents the curve before it splits.

Total utility of blue trajectory: same as above, around 6,000,000 utiles.
Total utility of red trajectory: around 2,000,000 utiles.

Total expected utility of blue trajectory at decision instance: 4,000,000 utiles
Total expected utility of red trajectory at decision instance: 0 utiles, immediate death.

Since the event only has a 10% chance of killing us, we might not fight against it as hard as an event with 90% chance of death. Some people engage in extreme sports or other risky activities because they see the thrill as worthwhile. But I strongly doubt many of these people would ever engage in an activity with a 5% or greater risk of death, for example. Unless you are completely suicidal, it just isn't worth the cost.

I'm sure you can imagine the utility trajectories for events such as lethal illness, serious injury, and so on. These things really suck, so people devote a lot of effort to avoiding them, which makes sense. Our society revolves around preventing these negative occurences, or at least minimizing their probability.


Step 3: Life Extension

It has been shown that cigarette smoking often correlates to shorter life. It has also been shown that good nutrition, specific genes, and regular exercise all contribute predictably to longer lifespan. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the average human lifespan was around 20, today it's around four times longer; 80. Isn't that great?

We're able to have many more interesting experiences per typical life because our average lifespan has increased so greatly. This leads us to the notion that extending one's lifespan is a worthy focus, a convenient path to increasing one's total future utility (fun experiences, growth, etc). We don't appreciate how lucky we are to live 80 years rather than a mere 20. Our Western culture is accustomed to these longer lifespans. It's now considered normal to live such long lives, so our default frame of reference tends to settle there. We should realize how spoiled we are relative to our ancestors, but also how transient our lives might be from the perspective of a person with a much longer life or more fulfilling experiences. As far as we know, there are no such persons in 2004, so we have no comparisons for the moment.

Say we want to add 5 years to our life by quitting cigarettes. This would imply that we value long life more than the short-term pleasure of a nicotine buzz. We may consider the experiences and learning we could gain as a result of this wise decision. We will have displayed the maturity to choose long-term benefits over short-term ones; some people might call this "wisdom". I'm sure you can visualize the various utility trajectories and the desirability of choosing between them, but here is a picture anyway:



Imagine the blue curve as a cigarette smoker, the pink as a non-smoker who doesn't exercise, and the yellow as the best possible scenario; a non-smoker who exercises. The yellow trajectory includes the most fun experiences, and the most growth. Total utility is greater.

Here's where I start talking about potential sources of utility you may not be familiar with.

Say that I have a few friends who offer to preserve the physical structure of my entire body in a deep freeze immediately after my heart stops, and keep frozen until medical science is able to revive me safely. Let's say my friends happen to be employees of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and they've been doing these cryonic suspensions for years. Their services are relatively cheap - life insurance pays for the suspension as long as you pay the bills while you are alive.

There are a series of risks - the cryonics company could go out of business, nuclear war might occur, civilization could collapse, your brain decay might be too severe to reverse, and so on. But there is potentially an immense benefit. If a civilization has the technology and desire to revive a freshly preserved frozen body, then that same civilization probably has a great degree of control over biological processes in general. Aging occurs in humans because ordinary biological processes produce byproducts that the body fails to remove completely. So they build up in the body, causing decay. (Source.) Keep in mind that most byproducts are removed, only a small percentage of the total remains. But that is enough to cause aging. Stopping aging is a matter of amplifying the human ability to self-regenerate - that is all. There is no mysterious mechanism that forces all organisms to perish at a certain age in order to comply with some Cosmic Order. Ensure that the byproducts of our biology are contained and removed, or not produced in the first place, and you have cured aging.

So we are faced with the decision posed to us by our friends, "would you like to sign up for cryonics, or not?" Let's say we're being extremely conservative, and only estimate the likelihood of a successful future revival at 0.1%. Let's say furthermore that our estimate of successful elimination of aging after the initial revival is only 10%, remaining conservative. But if revival and the aging cure are both successful, then let's say we figure our lifespan could be as long as 10,000 years, at which point we expect some random cosmic accident or war will wipe us out. Even though the civilization we are talking about probably has extensive control over all biological processes and extremely advanced technology, let's say our quality of life doesn't go much further above that which we experienced during our prime - a steady fluctuation of peak experiences and typical days. We also assume that one doesn't get bored during those ten thousand years, which shouldn't be too hard if the civilization is developing technologically and has plenty of new stuff to do. Many sci-fi, anime, and fantasy characters have lifespans on this scale, and they seem to be doing fine, so how hard could it be, right?




Character: Washu
Occupation: mad scientist
Age: over 10,000
Conclusion: 10,000 years is not so bad. In the future, it will be normal. The main challenge is aging.





So, what kind of utility function might a successful cryonics patient have? Maybe something like that shown below. The curve dips down to zero when the patient is frozen solid, and quickly jumps back up after revival. (The squiggy line on the time axis implies that around ten thousand years passes during that time.) Notice the massive potential for extremely long life after revival based on relatively conservative assumptions. The estimated probability of revival needs to be considered separately from the potential benefits.



Total utility of complete trajectory: a whopping 750 million! Much more impressive than a mere 6 million, isn't it?

From the perspective of the pre-cryonics human being, experiencing the huge 10,000-year future lifespan is not certain. As we said; the estimation of successful revival is only 0.1%, and the estimation of an aging cure is 10%. Combine these, and we get an aggregated probability estimate of 0.01% that the whole thing will work at all. So we divide the expected utility of the outcome, 744 million utiles, by our probability estimate, 0.01%. The result is 74,400 utiles only. But what if paying our life insurance isn't that big of a deal to us, and the opportunity cost of the lost money only works out to 10,000 utiles or so? In that case, it would make sense to buy life insurance and sign up for cryonics - the expected utility exceeds the projected cost!

If the scenario matches that described above:

Total utility of "yes" answer: 6,074,000 utiles.
Total utility of "no" answer: 5,990,000 utiles.

Many people have made that decision. They tend to be well educated, successful, scientifically literate, and intelligent. Here is a short list by Ralph Merkle, plus a longer study of attitudes toward cryonics by W. Scott Badger. If our estimate of the probability of success goes up from 0.1%, the utility trajectories diverge even farther, and saying "yes" to cryonics seems to be an extremely compelling choice. The prospect of cryonics can contain a massive amount of expected positive utility.


Step 4: Extending Life for Everyone, Not Just Yourself

Stuff like cryonic suspension, regular exercise, good health, and so on, only apply to you. Other people don't benefit from these practices. Some of us care about humanity as a whole rather than just ourselves, our nation, or our clique, so we devote effort to technologies with the potential to grant more life to wide numbers of people. For example, respected Cambridge biogerontologist and co-founder of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, Aubrey de Grey, would like to extend the healthy human lifespan an order of magnitude or more beyond its current limits within the next twenty to fourty years. Yes, this is a serious strategy for workable anti-aging. He explains fully on his website, please feel free to read it thoroughly. From his proposed Institute outline, de Grey seems to be suggesting that a cure for human aging may come with a price tag of only $10-100m. Not so bad for the benefits, huh?

Let's say that you continue experiencing 1,000 utiles per 5 days of normal living, but also experience an additional 1 utile per 5 days for every 1,000 people whose lives are extended when they would have otherwise been snuffed out at the arbitrary age of 80 or whatever. "Added years" that people only get to experience as a result of this extreme life extension. If you feel that the success of de Grey's Institute will lead to an anti-aging therapy available to millions within the first decade of its release and billions within the third with a probability of, say, 25%, then contributing to this effort would be well worth the time and money. Since you care about each individual person that gets to experience the benefits of added life, it means a lot to you to raise the probability that the necessary anti-aging technology is widely available before they fall to the injustices of aging and premature death.

On his website, Aubrey mentions lifespans that exceed 5000 years. So, if the Institute is successful, then let's assume that translates into around five million people with five-millenia lifespans shortly after the technology is invented, around five hundred million people with lifespans of that length a decade after, and five billion people two decades after. Considering the fast global adoption of techologies such as the Internet and cell phones, this distribution pattern seems extremely conservative. People would surely be willing to focus on buying a drug that extends one's lifespan to 5000 healthy years or more. Possibly it could be a one-time thing, or "booster shots" might be required every few decades for negligible cost.

So, you find yourself with a million dollars. You can either buy a mansion or contribute the money to aging research. Your assumptons are roughly in line with those outlined above; you have examined Aubrey de Grey's arguments in detail and regard them as valid. The lives of other human beings are important to you and you feel satisfaction when their lives are extended. You want to compute the expected utility of both outcomes; how does the math work out?

Say $1,000,000 is about 2% of the Institute's total financial requirements.
So you are contributing 2% of the effort toward the Institute's success.
If success is achieved, about five million people immediately get an extra 10 years of life.
Every five days, you would get an extra 5,000 utiles in addition to the usual 1,000.
After another decade, five hundred million people have the drug.
That means five million more utiles per five days.
After yet another decade, five billion people have it - half of Earth's projected population.
You get fifty million utiles per five days.
Let's say you feel the satisfaction for a total of another five decades before you get used to it.
(When you get used to it, it becomes the new status quo, not really providing utility anymore.)
Five decades times fifty million utiles per five days is... a lot.
At this point our results may look a little odd and we will question the original utilitarian assumptions. The point of this thought experiment is not really to encourage you to formalize your ethical system as a set of utility values and probabilities, but to convey the huge value of extending the human life span for millions or billions of people. Gandhi, MLK, or the inventor of the polio vaccine couldn't possibly have imagined a good deed on this scale. Giving huge lifespans to humans that want them is an action with huge utility, unless the whole thing backfires due to population problems. (Unlikely due to the availability of clean manufacturing processes, efficient habitats, and cheap space travel. See "Will extended life worsen overpopulation problems?")

So, the resulting utility graph is a bit more complicated:



Total expected utility of donation: massive; billions of utiles or more.
Total expected utility of a mansion: not nearly as much.

Utility goes up more and more as additional lives are saved. This graph assumes that one considers the lives of all those living after his or her life to be meaningless. In real life, people often feel otherwise. The fuzziness of to the right side of the graph represents our uncertainty about the long-term consequences - 5,000 years may turn out to be a ridiculously low estimate, and our real lifespans may lie in the realm of the millions or even billions - who knows! If there are no huge cosmic disasters, no war, and you can repair yourself or back up your memories at a whim, who's to say that your lifespan won't be as long as that of the universe?

You'll also notice that the utility axis has been expanded in the upward direction. That's because contributing to the extended life of millions or billions of people is (presumably) a bigger deal than only extending your own life. Engineering the human brain to better experience pleasure may be another may to increase total utility, or perhaps through enhancing our intelligence, empathy, creativity, and so on. These speculations are the province of transhumanism. Feel free to read up on the topic if you're interested in learning more. See also the question on our FAQ, "wouldn't it be boring to live forever in the perfect world?"


Step 5: Threats to Everyone - Existential Risk

The value of contributing to Aubrey de Grey's anti-aging project assumes that there continues to be a world around for people's lives to be extended. But if we nuke ourselves out of existence in 2010, then what? The probability of human extinction is the gateway function through which all efforts toward life extension must inevitably pass, including cryonics, biogerontology, and nanomedicine. They are all useless if we blow ourselves up. At this point one observes that there are many working toward life extension, but few focused on explicitly preventing apocalyptic global disaster. Such huge risks sound like fairy tales rather than real threats - because we have never seen them happen before, we underestimate the probability of their occurrence. An existential disaster has not yet occurred on this planet.

The risks worth worrying about are not pollution, asteroid impact, or alien invasion - the ones you see dramaticized in movies - these events are all either very gradual or improbable. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom warns us of existential risks, "...where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." Bostrom continues, "Existential risks are distinct from global endurable risks. Examples of the latter kind include: threats to the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosphere, moderate global warming, global economic recessions (even major ones), and possibly stifling cultural or religious eras such as the “dark ages”, even if they encompass the whole global community, provided they are transitory." The four main risks we know about so far are summarized by the following, in ascending order of probability and severity over the course of the next 30 years:

Biological. More specifically, a genetically engineered supervirus. Bostrom writes, "With the fabulous advances in genetic technology currently taking place, it may become possible for a tyrant, terrorist, or lunatic to create a doomsday virus, an organism that combines long latency with high virulence and mortality." There are several factors necessary for a virus to be a risk. The first is the presence of biologists with the knowledge necessary to genetically engineer a new virus of any sort. The second is access to the expensive machinery required for synthesis. Third is specific knowledge of viral genetic engineering. Fourth is a weaponization strategy and a delivery mechanism. These are nontrivial barriers, but are sure to fall in due time.





Nuclear. A traditional nuclear war could still break out, although it would be unlikely to result in our ultimate demise, it could drastically curtail our potential and set us back thousands or even millions of years technologically and ethically. Bostrom mentions that the US and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Miniaturization technology, along with improve manufacturing technologies, could make it possible to mass produce nuclear weapons for easy delivery should an escalating arms race lead to that. As rogue nations begin to acquire the technology for nuclear strikes, powerful nations will feel increasingly edgy.





Nanotechnological. The Transhumanist FAQ reads, "Molecular nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology that will make it possible to build complex three-dimensional structures to atomic specification using chemical reactions directed by nonbiological machinery." Because nanomachines could be self-replicating or at least auto-productive, the technology and its products could proliferate very rapidly. Because nanotechnology could theoretically be used to create any chemically stable object, the potential for abuse is massive. Nanotechnology could be used to manufacture large weapons or other oppressive apparatus in mere hours; the only limitations are raw materials, management, software, and heat dissipation.





Human-indifferent superintelligence. In the near future, humanity will gain the technological capability to create forms of intelligence radically better than our own. Artificial Intelligences will be implemented on superfast transistors instead of slow biological neurons, and eventually gain the intellectual ability to fabricate new hardware and reprogram their source code. Such an intelligence could engage in recursive self-improvement - improving its own intelligence, then directing that intelligence towards further intelligence improvements. Such a process could lead far beyond our current level of intelligence in a relatively short time. We would be helpless to fight against such an intelligence if it did not value our continuation.

So let's say I have another million dollars to spend. My last million dollars went to Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Mouse Prize, for a grand total of billions of expected utiles. But wait - I forgot to factor in the probability that humanity will be destroyed before the positive effects of life extension are borne out. Even if my estimated probability of existential risk is very low, it is still rational to focus on addressing the risk because my whole enterprise would be ruined if disaster is not averted. If we value the prospect of all the future lives that could be enjoyed if we pass beyond the threshold of risk - possibly quadrillions or more, if we expand into the cosmos, then we will deeply value minimizing the probability of existential risk above all other considerations.

If my million dollars can avert the chance of existential disaster by, say, 0.0001%, then the expected utility of this action relative to the expected utility of life extension advocacy is shocking. That's 0.0001% of the utility of quadrillions or more humans, transhumans, and posthumans leading fulfilling lives. I'll spare the reader from working out the math and utility curves - I'm sure you can imagine them. So, why is it that people tend to devote more resources to life extension than risk prevention? The follow includes my guesses, feel free to tell me if you disagree:

They estimate the probability of any risk occurring to be extremely low.
They estimate their potential influence over the likelihood of risk to be extremely low.
They feel that positive PR towards any futurist goals will eventually result in higher awareness of risk.
They fear social ostracization if they focus on "Doomsday scenarios" rather than traditional extension.

Those are my guesses. Immortalists with objections are free to send in their arguments, and I will post them here if they are especially strong. As far as I can tell however, the predicted utility of lowering the likelihood of existential risk outclasses any life extension effort I can imagine.

I cannot emphasize this enough. If a existential disaster occurs, not only will the possibilities of extreme life extension, sophisticated nanotechnology, intelligence enhancement, and space expansion never bear fruit, but everyone will be dead, never to come back. Because the we have so much to lose, existential risk is worth worrying about even if our estimated probability of occurrence is extremely low.

It is not the funding of life extension research projects that immortalists should be focusing on. It should be projects that decrease the risk of existential risk. By default, once the probability of existential risk is minimized, life extension technologies can be developed and applied. There are powerful economic and social imperatives in that direction, but few towards risk management. Existential risk creates a "loafer problem" — we always expect someone else to take care of it. I assert that this is a dangerous strategy and should be discarded in favor of making prevention of such risks a central focus.

Organizations explicitly working to prevent existential risk:

Lifeboat Foundation
Despite the numerous risks of human extinction, there is only one organization working to devise strategies to prevent them all — the Lifeboat Foundation. Brainstorming a comprehensive set of solutions to bio, nano, and AI/robotics-derived risks, the Lifeboat Foundation has a Scientific Advisory Board of over 300 members, all showing their support for the effort. Members issue reports on their suggested countermeasures to specific risks.

Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Advanced nanotechnology can build machines that are thousands of times more powerful — and hundreds of times cheaper — than today's devices. The humanitarian potential is enormous; so is the potential for misuse. The vision of CRN is a world in which nanotechnology is widely used for productive and beneficial purposes, and where malicious uses are limited by effective administration of the technology. An important organization doing genuinely valuable, positive work.
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a nonprofit corporation dedicated solely to the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence. The Singularity Institute sees no reason why we won't be able to eventually build such intelligences - it basically burns down to an engineering problem. If the first greater-than-human intelligence were a benevolent one, it could use its intelligence to further improve its own intelligence, the intelligence of human beings, and assist others in the pursuit of humanitarian causes.

Thank you for your attention!
Michael Anissimov

Edited by Savage, 26 November 2008 - 11:24 PM.

[Illuminatusdarksoul]

I think that many people are taking a humanist viewpoint to this arguement- is that really realistic taking into account what we may actually be on the timeframes we are suggesting.

I think it is a tautology to create wild situations which are obviously faulted and claim they are faulted. Such as- what if in a world without:

mind uploading
space travel
robots and A.I taking up space too! on servers and in a more physical way! :O
more efficient energy creation
new types of architecture or efficient housing (pods, virtual reality, hive like mile high structures etc)
murders and accidents
immortal people that have super intelligence to see evolutionary psychological reasons and dissipative structure copying mechanisms for procreation
or anything else...

except for:

a limited space resource and immortal people who breed like rabbits because they can

Well yes my dears-in this ridiculous situation of course there are going to be problems. If you don't consider all the data, create flawed scenarios, wish to enact such flawed scenarios to prove a point and do not take into account future advances in all fields you are going to come to such a conclusion.

If I knew I would be immortal and could conserve myself without an inefficient copying mechanism that loses half my data and also my sentiency when I die and I knew that child rearing was tantamount to cloning and was probably only different as it provokes an ape like emotional response-If I were enlightened due to knowledge and technology-then yes-I wouldn't give an iota about children unless they were clearly a functional need at that spatiotemporal point.

Edited by illuminatus, 04 March 2009 - 06:19 PM.

[DJS]

The Available Matter and Energy
Michael Anissimov
Wednesday, Nov 19 2008 8:58 pm
Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said “Enough”, enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, “we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential”. There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today’s world is “enough”, then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

This is a good use of Bostrom's Reversal Test.

The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics

[VictorBjoerk]

What is wrong with Aubrey's ideas, even if the earth can hold twice the population that won't be possible forever. It can't hold thousands of times the current amount of humans. What if you want to have a large garden and not live like the people in Tokyo?
The state will expropriate people's houses like in a communist country and force them to share it with others and you won't have any privacy or integrity.
If aging is cured,yes then people will have to have less children, what's the problem with that?
If people had 20 children each we would already have overpopulation.

[RighteousReason]

It can't hold thousands of times the current amount of humans.

I would simply argue

The matter of Earth reorganized into an efficient computational substrate on the molecular level could support the population of a billion Earths at a liveable simulation resolution, and at much higher speeds (e.g. live a lifetime in the time of a day). We don't even know what the upper limit could be.

Although some may say I am being "overly theoretical"

[sumphilosopheô]

I think the cycle of birth and death is already causing more damage to the environment and consumption of resources. I believe we will find that life extentension actually increases our wisdom and provides good leadership/guidence to enable us to look after our planet between now and when it gets recycled by the sun. Simply put I think we will find ourselvs in a worse environmental state if we don't cure aging.

Yes.

If I look inside to see what all makes me human I find that I really want humanity to have indefinate lifespan for these reasons. Even if I should die.

Suffering and destruction are ugly.

We waiste time and resources on irrationalities and ugliness.

[sjayo]

I suspect if we approach ending the blight of involuntary death it will be associated with greater communication as well as understanding the moral implications of science, that we all be of one family. Then all children will be seen as being the responsibility of all. If having more kids will outstrip ecological boundaries we will choose not to do so not only for our own sakes but for those children we do have. Seems we are already adhering to such a trend.

I watched the video and am encouraged by the intelligence and quick wit of Aubrey. I feel fortunate to have aided his presence here early on. Sorry he got rather alienated from Immist but then, I understand as I was basically banned by the same person that drove him away along with a bit of help of the general air of an online forum and the individuals such a venu appears to promote into positions of authority.

I agree with a couple of recent posts here. The subject of this thread appears to be a bit on the bogus side..

Aubrey and others commenting on this thread, my suggestion is to decouple the issue of population size and growth from efforts to slow aging (or whatever degree you have in mind with regard to life extension). Birth rates are already so low in many developed nations (with TFRs approaching 1.0), that they realistically can't get much lower. Bob Butler published my answer to this question in his recent book on aging where I illustrated that even if humanity became immortal tomorrow, the growth rate would still be only a fraction of what it was in the post World War II era (i.e., the growth rate would be defined entirely by the birth rate). You probably feel compelled to answer this question because it must come up during your talks, but population arguments should not stand in the way of extending healthy life. If they did, there would have been no reason to add 30 years to life expectancy in the 20th century. As for those who argue that the world can hold 100 billion+ people, and support this line of reasoning by showing population densities on land, it would be worth your while to read an introduction to population textbook. There is much more to sustaining a human population than land mass. Again, decouple population growth from healthy life extension and remind anyone who tries to link them together that the growth rate would probably be around 1-1.5 percent with immortality. Since I don't expect immortality any time soon, healthy life extension is an easy argument to support in light of arguments about population growth.
Jay

[sumphilosopheô]

I suspect if we approach ending the blight of involuntary death it will be associated with greater communication as well as understanding the moral implications of science, that we all be of one family. Then all children will be seen as being the responsibility of all. If having more kids will outstrip ecological boundaries we will choose not to do so not only for our own sakes but for those children we do have. Seems we are already adhering to such a trend.

I watched the video and am encouraged by the intelligence and quick wit of Aubrey. I feel fortunate to have aided his presence here early on. Sorry he got rather alienated from Immist but then, I understand as I was basically banned by the same person that drove him away along with a bit of help of the general air of an online forum and the individuals such a venu appears to promote into positions of authority.

I agree with a couple of recent posts here. The subject of this thread appears to be a bit on the bogus side..

Aubrey and others commenting on this thread, my suggestion is to decouple the issue of population size and growth from efforts to slow aging (or whatever degree you have in mind with regard to life extension). Birth rates are already so low in many developed nations (with TFRs approaching 1.0), that they realistically can't get much lower. Bob Butler published my answer to this question in his recent book on aging where I illustrated that even if humanity became immortal tomorrow, the growth rate would still be only a fraction of what it was in the post World War II era (i.e., the growth rate would be defined entirely by the birth rate). You probably feel compelled to answer this question because it must come up during your talks, but population arguments should not stand in the way of extending healthy life. If they did, there would have been no reason to add 30 years to life expectancy in the 20th century. As for those who argue that the world can hold 100 billion+ people, and support this line of reasoning by showing population densities on land, it would be worth your while to read an introduction to population textbook. There is much more to sustaining a human population than land mass. Again, decouple population growth from healthy life extension and remind anyone who tries to link them together that the growth rate would probably be around 1-1.5 percent with immortality. Since I don't expect immortality any time soon, healthy life extension is an easy argument to support in light of arguments about population growth.
Jay

I wonder. Would it be irrational to say that if everybody decided on helping to focus on disease, famine, education worldwide...science and technologies... that we might mitigate to a great extent any worries about overpopulation....anywhere on the globe? What all is exactlly behind the phenomenon of people deciding to have fewer children as well as having them later in life? What causes people to have many children?

Also, would it be irrational to suggest that governments do things that only 'appear' to be helping the world when in fact if we took the path of least resistence to helping peoples we would be actually mitigating much more of the worlds ills?

Why is it that to me love your neigbor as yourself seems so logical in the long run?

Am I crazy? Childish?

[Infernity]

I think it's the gazilion time I'm gonna say this.

What's common to all life-forms and it's aliking is their attempt for preservation of theirselves, or in ither words. survival.
Every one of these life-forms has some kind of a tool to help them with it, venom, hiding abilities, speed, strengh, poison, sharp teeth, warning colours and so on.
We have a BRAIN, this is our tool of surviaval. We weren't told what to do with the brain, but it is most logical for us to develop tools using this brain. We got a very unique tool, a tool that can create tools. That means, whatever action taken, is legitimate, considering the fact it is what we have for our surviving. If we find out how to stop our natural death (we did acknowledge it is a necessary step before handling the rest of the endless killers here), wonderful.

Offsprings.
They are the closest thing to survival thus far. We have gotten wiser with the generations, untill we've reached the generation that will find out the ultimate way of surviving.
We only have offsprings because we can't live forever. They carry half of our genetic budget. It's why it' so important for us to find a suitable mate, so the offspring will be the BEST we could get, whatever we lack to be perfect.
We care so much about our children because they have a bigger potential to be there when we die, and they carry a part of us. It is hard to define a form of life according to the defenition of attempting to self-preserve, especially considering the fact many organic and even non organic compositions have the tendency to do so. Maybe we aren't that different, simply more complicated.

Anyway, once found a way to not die, the offsprings are no longer needed. The will shall stay out of evolutionary causes.


Normally, a couple should have two children (one for each person), one goes, one comes. Since many people die without giving birth, say three at max for a couple, gives higher chances and yet keeps the world balanced.

upposing we overcome aging only- the numbers should be decreesed to ONE child for a couple at max, for many people will survive ages. But there ar emany other deaths to take into account.

One we overcome it all, we should disallow or disable birth-giving.
The process should start before so it'll get into the heads of people.
this of course, for as long as we have only the earth planet to stay on. Once we have more spcae, this should be a bit more free, obviously depending on the space we have and can use.

What about the morality of the thing of supressing birth-giving?
Well, think, what's more immoral, to tell someone "hey, mr. you lived X time, you should die so we can have space for new creatures, that still don't have consciousness, knowledge, will, experience or anything to lose so they will get their opportunity to live temporary lives as well, so we can continue our circle of vanity".
Or just not give a damn about non-existing creatures, for the sake of the living like you and I, so we can preserve what we have, have more, and pay only the price of having no children at all.

I do want children. But if I have to not have any in order for my great goal to come true- I won't have children! It's a sacrifice everyone in my humble opinion should be willing to make (all already [arents, ignore this, because I know how much you love your children- they ALREADY exist).


Let us hope I won't have to repeat this.

[VictorBjoerk]

I think it's the gazilion time I'm gonna say this.

What's common to all life-forms and it's aliking is their attempt for preservation of theirselves, or in ither words. survival.
Every one of these life-forms has some kind of a tool to help them with it, venom, hiding abilities, speed, strengh, poison, sharp teeth, warning colours and so on.
We have a BRAIN, this is our tool of surviaval. We weren't told what to do with the brain, but it is most logical for us to develop tools using this brain. We got a very unique tool, a tool that can create tools. That means, whatever action taken, is legitimate, considering the fact it is what we have for our surviving. If we find out how to stop our natural death (we did acknowledge it is a necessary step before handling the rest of the endless killers here), wonderful.

Offsprings.
They are the closest thing to survival thus far. We have gotten wiser with the generations, untill we've reached the generation that will find out the ultimate way of surviving.
We only have offsprings because we can't live forever. They carry half of our genetic budget. It's why it' so important for us to find a suitable mate, so the offspring will be the BEST we could get, whatever we lack to be perfect.
We care so much about our children because they have a bigger potential to be there when we die, and they carry a part of us. It is hard to define a form of life according to the defenition of attempting to self-preserve, especially considering the fact many organic and even non organic compositions have the tendency to do so. Maybe we aren't that different, simply more complicated.

Anyway, once found a way to not die, the offsprings are no longer needed. The will shall stay out of evolutionary causes.


Normally, a couple should have two children (one for each person), one goes, one comes. Since many people die without giving birth, say three at max for a couple, gives higher chances and yet keeps the world balanced.

upposing we overcome aging only- the numbers should be decreesed to ONE child for a couple at max, for many people will survive ages. But there ar emany other deaths to take into account.

One we overcome it all, we should disallow or disable birth-giving.
The process should start before so it'll get into the heads of people.
this of course, for as long as we have only the earth planet to stay on. Once we have more spcae, this should be a bit more free, obviously depending on the space we have and can use.

What about the morality of the thing of supressing birth-giving?
Well, think, what's more immoral, to tell someone "hey, mr. you lived X time, you should die so we can have space for new creatures, that still don't have consciousness, knowledge, will, experience or anything to lose so they will get their opportunity to live temporary lives as well, so we can continue our circle of vanity".
Or just not give a damn about non-existing creatures, for the sake of the living like you and I, so we can preserve what we have, have more, and pay only the price of having no children at all.

I do want children. But if I have to not have any in order for my great goal to come true- I won't have children! It's a sacrifice everyone in my humble opinion should be willing to make (all already [arents, ignore this, because I know how much you love your children- they ALREADY exist).


Let us hope I won't have to repeat this.

I agree with you completely Infernity.

[RighteousReason]

I think it's the gazilion time I'm gonna say this.

What's common to all life-forms and it's aliking is their attempt for preservation of theirselves, or in ither words. survival.
Every one of these life-forms has some kind of a tool to help them with it, venom, hiding abilities, speed, strengh, poison, sharp teeth, warning colours and so on.
We have a BRAIN, this is our tool of surviaval. We weren't told what to do with the brain, but it is most logical for us to develop tools using this brain. We got a very unique tool, a tool that can create tools. That means, whatever action taken, is legitimate, considering the fact it is what we have for our surviving. If we find out how to stop our natural death (we did acknowledge it is a necessary step before handling the rest of the endless killers here), wonderful.

Offsprings.
They are the closest thing to survival thus far. We have gotten wiser with the generations, untill we've reached the generation that will find out the ultimate way of surviving.
We only have offsprings because we can't live forever. They carry half of our genetic budget. It's why it' so important for us to find a suitable mate, so the offspring will be the BEST we could get, whatever we lack to be perfect.
We care so much about our children because they have a bigger potential to be there when we die, and they carry a part of us. It is hard to define a form of life according to the defenition of attempting to self-preserve, especially considering the fact many organic and even non organic compositions have the tendency to do so. Maybe we aren't that different, simply more complicated.

Anyway, once found a way to not die, the offsprings are no longer needed. The will shall stay out of evolutionary causes.


Normally, a couple should have two children (one for each person), one goes, one comes. Since many people die without giving birth, say three at max for a couple, gives higher chances and yet keeps the world balanced.

upposing we overcome aging only- the numbers should be decreesed to ONE child for a couple at max, for many people will survive ages. But there ar emany other deaths to take into account.

One we overcome it all, we should disallow or disable birth-giving.
The process should start before so it'll get into the heads of people.
this of course, for as long as we have only the earth planet to stay on. Once we have more spcae, this should be a bit more free, obviously depending on the space we have and can use.

What about the morality of the thing of supressing birth-giving?
Well, think, what's more immoral, to tell someone "hey, mr. you lived X time, you should die so we can have space for new creatures, that still don't have consciousness, knowledge, will, experience or anything to lose so they will get their opportunity to live temporary lives as well, so we can continue our circle of vanity".
Or just not give a damn about non-existing creatures, for the sake of the living like you and I, so we can preserve what we have, have more, and pay only the price of having no children at all.

I do want children. But if I have to not have any in order for my great goal to come true- I won't have children! It's a sacrifice everyone in my humble opinion should be willing to make (all already [arents, ignore this, because I know how much you love your children- they ALREADY exist).


Let us hope I won't have to repeat this.

I agree with the spirit of argument, that it is immoral to kill an existing person for the sake of creating a new person, however the argument you are making here is based on a false premis- that existing people MUST die for new people to be created. Even if our Universe is spatially finite, it is so ridiculously huge that we could continue growing our population for a long, long time before one's act of reproduction (in the usually understood way) would interfere with the rights of existing people- it is in fact foolish to even mention it at this point.

This is the original point of the thread, though I have still yet to fully flesh out the full explanation. Gotta go for now.

Edited by advancdaltruist, 11 March 2009 - 05:08 PM.

[RighteousReason]

Resorting to suppressing people's reproductive rate requires a completely messed up society that has gone horribly wrong. It would have an economy incapable of undertaking engineering projects, a complete lack of any continued scientific progress, and would require an all-powerful evil dictatorship.

Suffice to say that if the best solution is to suppress birth rates, we have some much bigger problems, and the majority of the population almost certainly hasn't overcome aging.

[Skötkonung]

Resorting to suppressing people's reproductive rate requires a completely messed up society that has gone horribly wrong. It would have an economy incapable of undertaking engineering projects, a complete lack of any continued scientific progress, and would require an all-powerful evil dictatorship.

Suffice to say that if the best solution is to suppress birth rates, we have some much bigger problems, and the majority of the population almost certainly hasn't overcome aging.

According to Wikipedia:

The Chinese government introduced the policy in 1979 to alleviate social, economic, and environmental problems in China,[4] and authorities claim that the policy has prevented more than 250 million births from its implementation to 2000.

Several months ago, there was a documentary on PBS covering China's One Child Policy. Because of China's massive over-population problem, the country needed to reduce birthrate so that it could modernize its economy and infrastructure. If China had kept growing at its current rate, the country's infrastructure would have collapsed. It should be noted that China does not appear to have a economy incapable of undertaking engineering projects, a complete lack of any continued scientific progress, and does not have an all-powerful evil dictatorship. In fact, according to the documentary and someone of the online literature I have read, most people prefer this approach - 75% according to Pew Research Center.

Compare China to India - a country that has not practiced birthrate suppression and as a result, has become massively overpopulated. Tell me which one is better off?

[VictorBjoerk]

I do not think it is a right to have kids if aging would be cured, however China is famous for not being a very nice country in a lot of aspects, there is a lot of corruption etc and crimes against human rights like eg the practitioners of Falun gong, Tibet etc... Also the law system is barbaric,no justice, many innocent people executed, mandatory military service, just to name a few horrible things.. etc.I'm very happy that I'm not chinese.

[RighteousReason]

Compare China to India - a country that has not practiced birthrate suppression and as a result, has become massively overpopulated. Tell me which one is better off?

good question.

[RighteousReason]

If China had kept growing at its current rate, the country's infrastructure would have collapsed.

The root problem isn't its growth rate. The root problem is that its a crappy, unproductive society.

[forever freedom]

If China had kept growing at its current rate, the country's infrastructure would have collapsed.

The root problem isn't its growth rate. The root problem is that its a crappy, unproductive society.

I agree. They even may have to lift the ban soon before their population grows too old.

[kurt9]

But if all I can say is that we *might* not, the deafening retort will be "Oh right, so that's OK then - just as we *might* not devastate the planet with greenhouse gases or we *might* not accidentally create unfriendly AI if we make recursively self-improving intelligent systems - someone lock this guy up, right now." That would be an unsatisfactory outcome.

I don't get it

Some of the developed countries are now taking the position that depopulation is a greater threat than overpopulation. Examples of countries that are now paying women to have kids include Russia, France, and Japan. There is an entire political faction on the net that talks about the coming depopulation and the problems it will bring. This faction includes writers such as Mark Steyn (the muslims are coming! the muslims are coming!) and Philip Longmont. I do not necessarily agree with these people. However, the fact that depopulation is now being taken seriously in respectable circles is indicative that the population picture is more complicated than the John Ehrlich scenario in the late 60's. Of course, none of these people have considered the possibility of radical life extension (despite my having pointed it out to them several times).

Naam's book "More than Human" makes the point that even if we all became immortal tomorrow and the birth rate did not change at all, that the global population in 2100 would be 13 billion rather than 10 billion without immortality, a difference of 3 billion. So, it appears that within the context of this century that immortality's impact on population is relatively limited. However, I think the birth rate will drop significantly with the advent of immortality. Industrialization and economic development tends to turn formerly traditional agricultural populations into consumerist urbanized yuppies within a single generation. I think that immortality will lead to the "super yuppie" or "super slacker" with an even lower birthrate than the urbanized yuppies of the developing world today.
These trends are profound and probably irreversible. Do realize that the Islamic Republic of Iran now has a below replacement birthrate, one that is lower than that of our own U.S.A. So, I do not think that immortality will lead to over population.

Space settlement is likely in the long term future (22nd century and beyond). O'Neill style habitats are certainly doable with present-day technology and processes. The limiting issue is space transportation costs, which is more a matter of developing a competitive commercial marketplace than anything else. I think that if any of us make it to immortality, that we will leave the earth after a couple of centuries of life. It will be a case of "been there, done that, time to move on".

If you guys like immortality fiction, I recommend Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth and Void series (Pandora's Star, Judas Unchained, Dreaming Void, Temporal Void).

[RighteousReason]

But if all I can say is that we *might* not, the deafening retort will be "Oh right, so that's OK then - just as we *might* not devastate the planet with greenhouse gases or we *might* not accidentally create unfriendly AI if we make recursively self-improving intelligent systems - someone lock this guy up, right now." That would be an unsatisfactory outcome.

I don't get it

Some of the developed countries are now taking the position that depopulation is a greater threat than overpopulation. Examples of countries that are now paying women to have kids include Russia, France, and Japan. There is an entire political faction on the net that talks about the coming depopulation and the problems it will bring. This faction includes writers such as Mark Steyn (the muslims are coming! the muslims are coming!) and Philip Longmont. I do not necessarily agree with these people. However, the fact that depopulation is now being taken seriously in respectable circles is indicative that the population picture is more complicated than the John Ehrlich scenario in the late 60's. Of course, none of these people have considered the possibility of radical life extension (despite my having pointed it out to them several times).

Naam's book "More than Human" makes the point that even if we all became immortal tomorrow and the birth rate did not change at all, that the global population in 2100 would be 13 billion rather than 10 billion without immortality, a difference of 3 billion. So, it appears that within the context of this century that immortality's impact on population is relatively limited. However, I think the birth rate will drop significantly with the advent of immortality. Industrialization and economic development tends to turn formerly traditional agricultural populations into consumerist urbanized yuppies within a single generation. I think that immortality will lead to the "super yuppie" or "super slacker" with an even lower birthrate than the urbanized yuppies of the developing world today.
These trends are profound and probably irreversible. Do realize that the Islamic Republic of Iran now has a below replacement birthrate, one that is lower than that of our own U.S.A. So, I do not think that immortality will lead to over population.

Space settlement is likely in the long term future (22nd century and beyond). O'Neill style habitats are certainly doable with present-day technology and processes. The limiting issue is space transportation costs, which is more a matter of developing a competitive commercial marketplace than anything else. I think that if any of us make it to immortality, that we will leave the earth after a couple of centuries of life. It will be a case of "been there, done that, time to move on".

If you guys like immortality fiction, I recommend Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth and Void series (Pandora's Star, Judas Unchained, Dreaming Void, Temporal Void).

That's interesting. Thanks for the perspective and the fiction recommendations.

[Skötkonung]

If China had kept growing at its current rate, the country's infrastructure would have collapsed.

The root problem isn't its growth rate. The root problem is that its a crappy, unproductive society.

The resources to be considered when evaluating whether an ecological niche is overpopulated include clean water, clean air, food, shelter, warmth, and other resources necessary to sustain life. If the quality of human life is addressed, there may be additional resources considered, such as medical care, education, proper sewage treatment and waste disposal. Overpopulation places competitive stress on the basic life sustaining resources, leading to a diminished quality of life. Diminished quality of life results in reduced productivity.

Both China and India have universal health care. The medical system in each of these countries labors under the tension of whether to stress quality of care or to spread scarce medical resources as widely as possible. Reducing population size is the best way reduce the spread of finite medical and financial resources. Nearly half of India's children are malnourished, according to recent government data. In China, only 8% of children are underweight. Which country is providing better for its people?

China's government is far from perfect, but without a doubt, their emphasis on family planning has allowed their economy to modernize more effectively. It is believed that reducing birthrate has prevented their population from growing by almost 250 million people. "These reductions in fertility have eased at least some of the pressures on communities, state, and the environment in a country which still carries one fifth of the world's people."

Source: http://www.pubmedcen...i?artid=1116810