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Our (Near) Future Lifespan

8 Comments

Four visions.

I think it’s a mistake to call the fourth one “immortality.” A better phrase is “indefinite lifespan.” Unless our understanding of the universe is wrong, we’ll all die eventually, when it gets cold. And medical breakthroughs won’t save us from having an ACME anvil dropped on us.

Absent backups, that is. Which is philosophically unsatisfying, from the standpoint of identity.

But we need to start thinking about policy in terms of scenarios three and four, and ObamaCare is a disaster on that front (as is social security, lifetime tenure for academics and judges and popes, etc.). Plus, if people are going to continue to be born, and not die, we will eventually need other places to live than this planet.

8 thoughts on “Our (Near) Future Lifespan”

  1. It’s not enough to have an “indefinite lifespan”. If science can keep the brain viable, and make the failing body liveable, then an indefinite lifespan could be desireable. But I am at an age where my body is causing me more and more pain, and I’m watching my elders disintegrate into senility. That is not a viable future, as far as I’m concerned.

    1. Did you read the article? Your essentially just saying “Not Scenario B, please”, which everyone probably agrees is the worst scenario.

    2. The notion that we would have an significantly extended lifespan without a significantly extended health span simply makes no sense. We can’t do it. You will extend life by extending health, and by treating aging as the disease that it is. All of what you suffer from now is simply side effects of the Great Disease – aging.

      When we solve the two of them simultaneously.

      Consider HIV: Untreated, it has horrible side effects, monstrosities that make normal aging look like a walk in the park. But when we started to get a handle on controlling the underlying HIV, we also controlled those horrible consequences of the disease.

      Aging and its consequences is going to be that.

      1. Bingo. I’m always bemused by people who think we’re going to live to be five hundred years old, but not cure the effects of ageing.

        Curing the effects of ageing will be required to dramatically extend lifespans.

  2. That article leaves out the negative cases entirely. What about the future in which we genetically engineer our children to be seven foot tall handsome geniuses — only to discover that they all die at the age of forty due to some flaw in the gene splicing? Or what about the future where we accidently engineer a virus that kills seventy percent of us? And what about the future where Hillary Clinton actually becomes president and we all commit suicide rather than listen to her and her husband prattle and preen for eight more years?

  3. ObamaCare is a disaster on that front

    I think you have Obamacare confused with Medicare. Under scenarios 3 and 4 health care for under-65 adults becomes much cheaper, making Obamacare easier to finance. But Medicare, which covers Americans from 65 to death, has to balance the lower unit cost of health care with the fact that enrollees are living much, much longer.

  4. “up from her 30s in 1900”

    And that’s where I stopped reading. Typos I can live with. Attempts to re-write standard English for the sake of Political Correctness grate on my nerve. When sex is not specified, one defaults to the male pronoun. If that’s too infuriating for the feminist writer, the third-person plural is an acceptable, though awkward, alternative.

    Using “her” or “she” is just obnoxious feminist-supremacy.

    Sorry for the mini-rant, but I really can’t read anything after a writer pulls that kind of stunt.

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