Accelerating Future

Overpopulation Problems Wednesday, May 7 2008 

life extension Michael Anissimov 4:26 am

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15 Responses to “Overpopulation Problems”

1. Ryan says:

   May 7, 2008 at 6:12 am

   “Will extended life worsen overpopulation problems?”

   Answer: No

   I thought overpopulation was yesterday’s disaster fetish (right next to eugenics) don’t tell me its coming back!

   By the way, the answer to this question lies more in economics then in science (though science and technology play a huge part.)

   Reply
2. martin says:

   May 7, 2008 at 12:05 pm

   Answer: No

   Our governments will take care that extended life will be only available to very few people (primary politicians, rich people and “valuable” people like scientists, doctors etc.). Extended life for all humans would endanger the current status quo.

   The rest will die as always.

   Reply
3. Jonathan says:

   May 7, 2008 at 1:44 pm

   “Our governments will take care that extended life will be only available to very few people (primary politicians, rich people and ‘valuable’ people like scientists, doctors etc.)”

   Well at least Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson will stay young forever. I can admire their gorgeous bodies when I’m really old and decrepit.

   Reply
4. mitchell porter says:

   May 8, 2008 at 12:29 am

   “Our governments will take care that extended life will be only available to very few people (primary politicians, rich people and “valuable” people like scientists, doctors etc.). Extended life for all humans would endanger the current status quo.”

   martin, this is about as realistic as supposing that governments will ban Internet access to the human genome sequence. The basis of medicine is first of all biological knowledge, and second a very broad base of technologies. It is not a thing you can ban without vetoing biomedical research comprehensively.

   The idea that a gerontocratic elite might manage society so as to maintain indefinitely a majority undercaste of short-lived proles also presupposes that one can identify certain life-extension technologies as the special ones and control them accordingly. Again, that’s not how things work even now. People don’t live to 90 by going to the doctor regularly and getting a quota of live-until-90 pills, the availability of which is therefore a crucial political issue… The medical practices and technologies which assist people in living as long as they do are diverse, both in cost and in nature, and it sometimes takes a long time to know which ones work and which ones don’t. Look at the complexity of the politics and economics of medicine and health care in the real world: that’s how the “life-extension revolution” is going to be.

   I would further suggest that the idea that some power elite is going to stop the majority of us from experiencing a longevity we could otherwise have, results from substituting one form of oppression for another. The substituted form of oppression, the one that’s false to reality in this case, is oppression by other people. The genuine oppression here is oppression by impersonal reality – by the facts of life, so to speak. In certain respects people are much more comfortable with the first form of oppression, because the solution is obvious: get rid of the bad people who are oppressing us (and perhaps put good people in their place). So people are motivated to pose their problems in forms that could be solved politically when in fact they are psychological, technological, or existential problems.

   This is entirely separate from the issue of medical technologies which are genuinely expensive and scarce, in the present and near future. The rich really do live longer because of the health care they can afford. But that is a matter of the rich having better access to a scarce good because they are rich; not the poor being denied access to something which they could all already have, if the rich just got out of the way. The scarcities involved are real and to be ameliorated must be addressed as such.

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5. Jonano says:

   May 8, 2008 at 1:29 am

   Population growth, if it continues long enough, may also lead to unvoidable scarcity. As pointed out by Paul Ehrlich, Albert Bartlett,
   and others, exponential growth in human population has the capacity to overwhelm any finite supply of resources, even the entire known universe, in a remarkably short time. For example, if the human population could continue to grow indefinitely at its 1994 rate, in 1,900 years the mass of the human population would equal the mass of Earth, and in 6000 years the mass of the human population would equal the estimated mass of the observable universe Although this would imply the invention of faster than light travel, necessary for
   humanity to spread throughout the universe as fast as population growth, even at lower growth rates these levels would still be reached
   in readily imaginable times. It is therefore difficult to conceive of a credible post scarcity scenario which does not also imply zero
   population growth or very low population growth.

   Zero Population Growth, sometimes abbreviated ZPG, is a condition of demographic balance where the number of people in a specified population neither grows nor declines, considered as a social aim.

   Reply
6. martin says:

   May 8, 2008 at 3:03 am

   “martin, this is about as realistic as supposing that governments will ban Internet access to the human genome sequence. The basis of medicine is first of all biological knowledge, and second a very broad base of technologies. It is not a thing you can ban without vetoing biomedical research comprehensively.”

   Our governments will try to suppress the information, they will just lie to the public, telling us fairy tales about the technology and its dangers or distract us with wars for natural resources (take a look at the us administration and the new eu-reformation-contract). dwindling resources and an ever increasing population won’t be allowed, people have to die so that others can live a life in comfort. i do hope that this does change one day and that we will arrive in true democratic societies instead of money democracies.

   Reply
7. mitchell porter says:

   May 8, 2008 at 4:11 am

   “Our governments will try to suppress the information”

   What information, exactly? Again, it’s not like we’re going to wake up one day with the news that a single miracle technology extends life expectancy to 150. There is a large but finite number of things that people die from, and there is incremental progress in curing those conditions, arising from increasingly thorough understanding of the molecular cause-and-effect behind them, and from an ever broader array of ways to hack with a living organism.

   The basis of power in a biotech society cannot be the sort of extreme secrecy you describe (unless it’s some utterly hypothetical desiccated future culture living off the discoveries of its ancestors). The only way to bottle it all up is to be against the whole thing, in which case you’re not a biotech society, you’re an anti-biotech society. It just doesn’t compare to the politics of warfare, because when the state goes to war it’s a highly centralized act. But a biotech society will be more like the Internet, with tens of millions of ‘users’, hundreds of thousands of ‘technicians’, constant novelty, and sustained by a body of knowledge bigger than any one person can master. Only societies with a considerable degree of openness will be able to make it work.

   I don’t entirely discount the possibility of genuine anti-biotech populism, if and when truly terrible things happen, but the urban populations of the world seem pretty wedded to their technology. I can’t see convinced, organized, effective luddites seizing power everywhere. So you should count on the status quo being upended, though it won’t take radical life extension to do it. The distribution of financial and technological power in the world is already changing rapidly, and the existing energy system is manifestly inadequate for the long run.

   I am far more worried that the whole evolutionary episode of technology is going to blow up on us, than that some malign techno-illuminati will manage to bottle us all up in the human condition indefinitely.

   Reply
8. Michael Anissimov says:

   May 8, 2008 at 4:29 am

   The government will suppress me from having my favorite cereal!!!

   Reply
9. Paul Mohr says:

   May 8, 2008 at 4:34 am

   This is my first view of this site and I have to say I am impressed. I have been considering this issue for some time. It seems from the information I have gathered that the actual break over point of AI has passed. I work in AI, genetics, nano-technology, computer design, bot netting, and semiconductor wafer fabrication. The combinations of these technologies has already surpassed my own capability to comprehend without the help of the technology I employ. I don’t see any greater threat or promise in any other area of development than AI, IMHO.

   Reply
10. webonauta » Blog Archive » Pero, ¿y la sobrepoblación? says:

    May 9, 2008 at 12:02 am

    [...] Link: Accelerating future [...]

    Reply
11. robomoon says:

    May 9, 2008 at 2:01 pm

    The so-called developing countries are overcrowded with older humans who don’t care about technologies for space colonization. Those “experienced” people are against any world religion other than their own and they mostly care about the preparation of nutrition for daily consumption. Positive effects on prospective opportunities in outer space aren’t available in most countries where life-extension is progressing. Check out South-America, Southeast Asia, and Africa, then review your attitude.

    Reply
12. Jonano says:

    May 10, 2008 at 8:32 pm

    robomoon

    I think space colonization is impossible.

    We will never find a battery able to power our navigation while billions of years. Or to travel in space faster than light.

    I think we are confined in this solar system forever until we rank out of energy.

    We will greatly need to understand a battery technology, to use as less as possible energy, to be free from it, to make our body free from any source.

    –Jon

    Reply
13. robomoon says:

    May 12, 2008 at 1:12 pm

    When I say space colonization, I take
    http://www.search.com/reference/Space_colonization for its definition. The target location in http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html#36 isn’t only outside the solar system, so it can’t be no point of contention. Since missions to MIR and ISS weren’t fake or scam, space colonization in orbit around the Earth is written history.

    Reply
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