Maximizing Life Expectance and Death after Immortality

vincentmarch (26)in #immortality • 7 years ago

3 minutes read

Do you believe, that by achieving immortality you could avoid death forever?

Discussions about immortality often take a wrong turn and stop making sense. I love the picture of the future, where we achieved clinical immortality, but I also respect reality.

Many people cannot accept the concept of immortality, because they believe we would have no children anymore or overpopulate the planet. In my opinion, the reality would more be look like, we would extend the average lifespan to 300-600 years, even if we achieve perfect immortality.

Immortality is NOT "deathlessness"

Clinical immortality is actually the absence or even reversal of aging in our biological systems we call bodies. Consider aging as the worst disease a human is infected with by evolution. But don't forget, that there are 6 million ways to die and aging only leads to some of them (Hi to all Game of Thrones fans out there ;))

After we become immortal, we still would be exposed to hunger, disease, violence and nature - and die. It is very difficult to calculate an exact percentage of death causes triggered by aging.

So let's assume that percentage would be somewhere between 70-90%. At that percentage the average lifespan wouldn't be even four-digits - you would live 300-600 years, until an accident, a disease, or some other kind of fuckup would cease your existence.

What do we get after immortality? HIgher lifespans and heavily decreased death rates leading to increasing population leading to government birth control (see China), and finally - social adaptation.

We doubled our average lifespans in the last 50 years. What happened to humanity? We adapted. We study, enjoy our lives, pursue a big carreer. Often we found families in our 30s or 40s. Fifty years ago we would do that an our 20s.

Immortality leads to procreation at a higher age

Considering the high child mortality in the 19th century it wasn't unusual for women to give birth to 7-10 children, as only 2-4 of them survived until maturity.

The first pregnancy at the age of 14 and 3 children at the age of 18? Absolutely acceptable in large parts of the world until late 1930s!

If we extend our lifespans even further than now, we will also adapt to that circumstances. With a healthspan of 150 years it would become acceptable to plan the first child at the age of 50-70. That offset will keep on growing while we fight aging.