What effect would immortality have on the human condition?

[John21]

Borodog is giving the over/under for genetic immortality at 30 years. So what would be the effect on our psyche and belief systems.

A few things that come to mind:

-Murder would have considerably different consequences. Both for the one killed and the one doing the killing. With the consequences being so severe, I could see the death penalty applied as a strong deterent.

-Then I don't think people would be so apt to put themselves in a position to be killed, through war and such.

-Religions would be the next to suffer, and probably signifigantly with the ones that hold the heaven trump card.

[FortunaMaximus]

Genetic immortality != conscious immortality. We'd have to engineer some sort of storage device in whereas the quantum processes of our brain could be saved and updated constantly in real-time.

Given that second condition, wars would be entertaining, more for team pride and participation. Battles could be recreated, etc.

Oh, you're devaluing the decline of religions. New ones would pop up in their place, and among established religions there would be severe fundamental shifts. But even those religions would adapt, if only to pay respect to the martyrs of olden days. If you mean they would suffer economically, yes, that's too bad for them. They've whisked too much tithe over the centuries.

[Borodog]

It's really, really, really difficult to assess this. I put the over/under on biological immortality at 20 years. But I also put the over/under on the technological singularity at 30 years, which might make biological humanity totally obsolete. My guess would be that both will occur. The same person could opt for both routes, conversion to machine intelligence as well as biologically immortality augmented by machine IA (intelligence amplification).

For a glimpse at how weird a post-singularity humanity could be, I highly recommend Greg Egan's short story "Wang's Carpets" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan).

[hmkpoker]

In the end, it will all be one big machine.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
In the end, it will all be one big machine.

[/ QUOTE ]

Almost certainly not. Three words: Light travel time.

[FortunaMaximus]

And an Universe without walls to slam into. QFT.

"Let there be... c!"

[tame_deuces]

Are we talking immortality or cloning? I'm a little confused.

If immortality obviously there will be tremendous riots from those who doesn't want to die but still can't afford the treatment not to do so. Secondly you'd probably see the slowcoming collapse of current eco-systems, crumbling of societies and culture as an attempt to forbid the unnatural prolonging of human life supported by religious groups, economists and some members of the scientific community is started.

Politicians will succumb to popular pressure and the treatment will start being given to the people. Due to lack of proper birth control in this brave new world of foreverer living the human race will expand too rapidly, and since this will mostly be going in the western countries the consumption of the earth's natural resources will explode to unforeseen levels and wars will erupt in an attempt to secure resources. And then as the infrastructure of modern human society starts to fail and people start dying as a result of the anarchy in the streets, the problem will pretty much have resolved itself as far as mother earth goes and perhaps we will see philosophical shifts in the viewing of human life in the remaining crumbled bits of human civilization, we can only hope..

Err..or to answer more truthfully...I really don't know.

If it's cloning it will probably be regarded as a little tack and the gossip columns will be all over celebrities cloning themselves. A new fetish for having an affair with your clone will come and after 10-20 years of hatred they will have parades and become more and more accepted into society. Cloned children will be harassed in school for about a generation or so in time.

[Borodog]

None of the above.

[vhawk01]

Cloning is really totally unrelated to this. Cloning is just like what we are doing now, providing immortality through our progeny...its just a little bit more accurate.

[John21]

[ QUOTE ]
None of the above.

[/ QUOTE ]

Assuming our economic system remained the same, and we had some sort of population control - could we ever retire? who would provide the labor?

Would wealth still be related to labor and effort?

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
None of the above.

[/ QUOTE ]

Assuming our economic system remained the same, and we had some sort of population control - could we ever retire? who would provide the labor?

Would wealth still be related to labor and effort?

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't know.

[FortunaMaximus]

Wealth would be redundant. I mean, if you're immortal, you would only need as much energy as is necessary to move around.

WTF are you gonna do, starve to death? /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

This development would have to run concurrently with increased robotics for assembly production. People might still like to do menial tasks for pleasure.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
None of the above.

[/ QUOTE ]

On second thought, I could see a lot of bad things happening if governments got in the way of the process.

[Stu Pidasso]

Genetic immortality is an illusion. However its entirely credible that will acheive the technology to expand our lifespans to several hundred, perhaps even thousands years. In such a world progeneration would need to be regulated. Wars would become a lot more proliferate.

Stu

[Stu Pidasso]

[ QUOTE ]
If immortality obviously there will be tremendous riots from those who doesn't want to die but still can't afford the treatment not to do so. Secondly you'd probably see the slowcoming collapse of current eco-systems, crumbling of societies and culture as an attempt to forbid the unnatural prolonging of human life supported by religious groups, economists and some members of the scientific community is started.

[/ QUOTE ]

There won't be any riots because there won't be any single treatment that makes you immortal. The lifespan of an individual will just get longer and longer and longer unitl eventually a person is essentially immortal. For instance in 30 years the expected lifespan of an individual might be 150 years. When then that person reaches 100 the, the lifespan might be pushed out to 500 years. When that person reaches 500 the lifespan might be pushed back to 2000 years. ETC...ETC...ETC.

Stu