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Comment by j9461701 | Hacker News Reader

I believe so many problems in our society would be solved by lifespan increasing technology. It would make people have to seriously consider the long-term ramifications of their actions, and I imagine adopt a kinder, gentler, more sustainable attitude. Climate change is a personal threat to you if you're immortal, not your children or your children's children. Crime goes down, as the risks of having jail time on your record grow and grow - it's one thing to be a felon for 60 years, but to be a felon for 500 years? 1000 years? No one would risk that just for the contents of a 7/11 cash register. Being nice and kind to everyone you see makes more and more sense, because the longer your lifespan the higher the probability you'll meet some of those people again and get your kindness repaid.

The only downside is potential overpopulation issues, but (perhaps this is naive of me) I imagine most people would accept sterilization in exchange for eternity.

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I like your thinking here, but I don't know if it'd really happen. I think humans just generally aren't very good at long-term thinking. Heart disease—something almost entirely preventable—is our #1 killer. We tend prioritize immediate enjoyment over long-term benefits. I don't think immortality will solve this, unfortunately.

It won't solve it, but it certainly won't make it worse. I fail to see how immortality would cause any problems at all, instead of actually making things better, though it won't be the cure-all that some people seem to think it's being pushed as.

Even if ignoring the huge overpopulation concern, I'm still not so optimistic. How much social progress has happened simply because older people die off and can no longer vote? If we still had a significant population of people born in the 1700s, what might U.S. politics look like?

Why would there be a concern for overpopulation? Population is falling in every developed nation now, if you ignore immigration. People don't want to have a lot of kids when they have money and education, and this is happening to every nation as it develops.

>If we still had a significant population of people born in the 1700s, what might U.S. politics look like?

Not that different, because 1) there just weren't that many people alive back then in the first place, and 2) most of them would be dead anyway, because immortality doesn't make you impervious to accidents, murder, tornadoes, etc. Even with immortality, people are eventually going to get killed somehow.

Do you know more now than you did a decade ago?

The show Altered Carbon described an alternative consequence of extended lifespans - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and because the rich don't die, there's no 'reset button' at the transition between generations and the situation never changes. The rich guy's money can accumulate interest indefinitely, while the poor guy may never get past the paycheck to paycheck life (or he lives long enough to eventually figure out how to save enough to improve his situation).

This can be easily and trivially fixed with some simple taxation to transfer wealth from the ultra-rich to everyone else. If that isn't happening, it's most likely a failure of the voters to demand such laws.

> easily and trivially

Really? I think the current ecosystem of lobbyists and tax evasion (remember the Paradise Papers?) puts the lie to that idea. I don't think you have any basis on which to make that claim.

Sure I do: there are other countries out there, you know, and they do tax very wealthy people more. There's more to the world than America.

How do these countries tax the money which is hidden in offshore tax havens?

I don't see why that's any of their business. The only thing that's the business of a government is the income generated inside its own borders by that person or company, and the government should be able to have access to that data to make sure that person/company is not cheating on their taxes. Once they've paid their taxes on that income, if they want to move it offshore, that's their business. If the person or company is generating income offshore, that's not the business of that government, it's the business of the government where the income is being generated.

> The only thing that's the business of a government is the income generated inside its own borders by that person or company,

> Once they've paid their taxes on that income

Tax havens allow you to move your profits by having the HQ in the tax haven while having a subsidiary which makes a loss in the actual country.

Are we talking about multinational corporations or about wealthy individuals now? This whole thread has been about wealthy individuals, and now you're talking about big corporations. Which is it?

Your comment was about people/companies so we are talking about both. Tax havens do not discriminate people and companies are welcome.

Why did you think I was talking about America?

It would certainly be advantageous to be a member of the first generation of immortals. Imagine entering an economy as a young twenty something competing against people who've had centuries to build their careers and accumulate wealth.

Feels like the current situation with millenials and baby-boomers taken to the n'th level.

I'm all for it, but I think you're overoptimistic. Climate deniers aren't generally making a selfish but rational calculation that they're unlikely to be affected - many have children they care deeply about, after all. Instead, they're flinching away from uncomfortable ideas and refusing to acknowledge the unfolding catastrophe.

Maybe the benefits to brain plasticity would undo some of this retrenchment, but that's a big maybe.

> Instead, they're flinching away from uncomfortable ideas

In my experience of talking with 'climate deniers', that has never been the case.

IYE what is the case - what is their motivation for their position?

Generally, complete stupidity plus being told falsehoods by people who stand to benefit. It's the exact same with anti-vaxxers.

Fair enough, but it's been mine. There are loud voices telling people they don't have to worry about the impact of their choices. That's seductive, and the truth is painful - many people instinctively prefer comforting lies.

Fair enough. In my case it's been more motivated by conspiracy theory, that maybe there's some suppression of incongruous data going on. Which could be reasonable, given Monsanto & Snowden.

Conspiratorial thinking is widely regarded to be an example of the phenomenon I mentioned: people find it comforting to think that the world is explainable in simple terms rather than chaotic, even if the explanation requires us to blame sinister and secretive actors for bad things. People think there should be a reason for things happening, when often there's really not.

Disclaimer: I don't have a citation and I'm not a psychologist.

Honestly, it could go both ways. It can also be a comforting thought that the world isn't sinister and corrupt, and that people who think it is must have psychological problems. :)

Same disclaimer applies.

Actually, I think increased lifespan is likely to reduce overpopulation.

Worldwide, over many years, we have consistently seen fertility rates decreasing where life expectancy is increasing. There is debate as to cause and effect[1,2], but I believe it is largely due to a lessening of perceived risk to successful reproduction.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233807 [2] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

If watching the Boomer generation has taught me one thing, it's that people do not necessarily grow milder and wiser with age. I think it would be catastrophic if society gets locked down in its current model because people simply will not vacate their place (in work, in housing, in use of resources) by dying.

People will still die, due to accidents etc., just not as quickly. History has shown that younger generations aren't always better than older ones. The rise of Naziism in the 30s wasn't because of a bunch of elderly people.

Accidents are a small percent of overall mortality, and the likelihood of accidents has been decreasing over time, and can be decreased further with lifestyle choices that reduce such risks.

Warfare can and will kill many, but the rich are generally the least likely to die, because they are the most mobile and can afford the best defense.

>Accidents are a small percent of overall mortality

No, they aren't. Where'd you get this crazy idea? Car accidents alone are the largest killer of younger people in the US. 30,000 people every year die in the US alone in cars.

Here's a list of leading causes of death from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Accidents is #3, at 170,000 people per year.

>and can be decreased further with lifestyle choices that reduce such risks.

So what? What makes you think people are going to do that? They aren't doing it now; they're happily taking up stuff like vaping, which is now killing people and is all over the news.

> 500 years? 1000 years?

I'm genuinely curious what the average life expectancy would be if we were able to prevent deaths due to "old age" and its concomitant ailments.

There are plenty of other ways to get yourself killed so you're still guaranteed to die some day.

~100k years?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742898

We already have way too many people on the planet. if no one died, it would cause all our environmental problems, lack of wealth problems to multiply.

Actually, I think we need to get our population down to a much lower level where we're not stressing our the planet and not stressing the limited resources we have. politically speaking, we just can't handle this many people on the planet.

Yes, I also think that killing literally everybody is the most reasonable solution to environmental and social problems.

Or maybe on a long enough timeline everyone's a criminal with a record, and the social ramifications of having a record become less significant because it's so ubiquitous among adults.

I could see it having an opposite effect, people make strange decisions when they view outcomes as inevitable.

I wrote some scifi story where immortality tech exists, but is only used as punishment for serious crimes. One of the characters was serving an eternal sentence for doing something really bad a long time ago...

Don't forget that long starship travels and long timeline scientific endeavors are now a reality.

That is far from the only downside. Economic stratification would be a major one.

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