Yesterday the Financial Times published an article titled "Curing death’ will create a vast pensions crisis". The article talks about the big dangers to the economy if people lived longer lives.
Without a doubt, for most of us the longer we live the smarter we get about life and what is and isn't important. We also start appreciating the advice of others as we get older. When I say we get smarter I am not referring to suddenly being able to grasp complex science, but rather we start seeing that many things we thought are important are not important at all.
Living longer does not mean that instead of figuring things out a bit better at 45 we will start figuring them out at 95. That is because the reason we figure many things out is because we are exposed to something a few times or try something a few times and after a while it gets knocked into our brains that what we are doing is wrong, thus allowing us to try something else and sooner or later we find (hopefully) the truth.
If we all lived to 300, THERE is no way the current political system would ever work, at least not in the USA. We would remember to many times how the promises made are mostly nonsense and sooner or later we would figure out that we need a system that involves no leaders but just the public voting (using specialized criteria's and systems).
If we lived to 300 we would also realize the many financial games and cons being played on us and sooner or later we would modify the system of finance and employment to a point where the idea of someone being poor would not exist.
Extremely long lives / immortality would knock out lots of the hellish aspects that religion delivers upon mankind. After all, so much of the daily death and destruction that befalls mankind has its roots in some form of religion / belief. This does not mean religions will be gone, it means that many of the extreme ideas of it will fall away. Remember, so much of religion is based on scaring a person that illness, poorness, hell and other things will happen if they do not do X.
Science would also progress better. Imagine if Einstein, Newton, Tesla etc. would have lived way longer.
Then again, the way things are going now we might become extinct before we ever get to figure out anything. Imagine if Zika or a virus like it gets more extreme? We might be the last generation of humans. Maybe the new Zika humans will evolve and get smarter over 50,000 years and find our bodies and declare they found some savages kinda like we call the Neanderthals.
