How old are you?

A month from now, I’m going to celebrate my 25^th birthday. That makes me officially a quarter of a century old! But how old can we really say that is? If I were a mouse, I would have outlived the oldest one ever recorded by a factor of more than five. As a dog, I’d be mightily close to the world record for the oldest, and as a cat I might still make it for about ten more years. As a human being, I’m about one third into my average expectancy, but about only one fifth of the oldest living human on record: Jeanne Calment, who died at a whopping 122 years old. That being said, I’d be even younger to a Galapagos tortoise, a tuatara or a bowhead whale, which can all live up to around 200 years old! That would be height times how old I am right now! Some molluscs have been known to live up to 400 years while some other animal species, such as the so-called “immortal jellyfish” could live indefinitely by reverting back to its immature stage, although this is very unlikely given the high predation they are subjected to.

On the plant spectrum, the oldest know tree, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine called Methuselah, is 4,846 years old and still kicking! That is almost 40 times as old as Jeanne Calment was when she died and 194 times as long as I’ve personally been alive! For even more mind boggling numbers, a clonal tree colony of quaking aspen called Pando, considered as a single super organism has been estimated to be 80 000 years old while some dormant bacteria have been revived after periods of dormancy of 34 000 years!

Clearly, from a living being point of view, it seems difficult to say how old I am. Furthermore, am I really going to be 25 years old when I blow my candle lights? After all, my conception actually happened nine months before I was born, meaning I will have been 25 years old for a little while when I celebrate my birthday. That being said, the cell that was going to be me was actually already there when my mother was in the womb of my grandmother, some 50 years ago. Should I say I’m going to enter my 50’s, then? If I look up the germ line, shouldn’t I go back all the way back to my first homo sapiens ancestor, some 250 000 years ago? That would put even Pando to shame! But why stop there? My immortal germ line can most likely be traced back to the very first living organism! Perhaps next time someone asks me how old I am, I should say I’m 3,6 billion years! And even then, it could date to an even older time, since there are some solid theories that life could have actually originated outside the solar system! My germ line could then be as old as the Milky Way, which is 13,2 billion years old.

All that being said, as a transhumanist, one of my main goals in life is to live for as long as I can. From that transhumanist perspective, just spreading my germline by reproducing doesn’t seem good enough because there one factor that I care about which isn’t taken into consideration by it: My consciousness. Since I want my consciousness to survive for as long as I can make it, it would make sense to actually start calculating how old I am from the point where my consciousness started existing: From my first memories as a child about 22 years ago. This would mean I’m actually younger than my birthday would make it seem. Furthermore, I could consider that my consciousness wasn’t actually developed until it matured into its adult stage, some five’ish years ago. We could even argue that a year ago, or a month ago, I wasn’t the person I am today and that every day brings something new to who I am! In that line, it would be very difficult for me to answer the question: How old are you?

Sources

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/oldest-known-living-organisms-world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_history_of_life

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_life_span#In_other_animals

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

The environment in a world that doesn’t age

In my last blogpost, I have discussed the issue of overpopulation in a world where degenerative aging would be eliminated. If overpopulation were to become an issue, it seems obvious that the environment, with problems such as climate change, ecosystem destruction and resource crisis would come about very quickly. However, as I have pointed in my previous entry, I do not believe that overpopulation will become an issue to the point that such problems would become too serious.

That being said, it is obvious today that, regardless of our numbers, there are serious issues with the way we tend to the environment we live in and that, unless we seriously change the way we relate to it, it would be utterly pointless to live for hundreds of years only die from an ecological disaster brought on by our carelessness. While bringing awareness to the case is definitely an issue today, I believe that radical longevity enhancement would go a long way in solving the problems we are facing today. After all, how many times have you heard (and perhaps thought yourself) that if an issue will take a few hundred years to become a problem, why would you care about it since you would be long dead when it starts becoming serious? Knowing that it is very likely that whatever you do that might affect the environment long term would then obviously go a long way into implementing long term thinking into politics and decisions.

However, I don’t think that this is a good reason to start advocating that we stop funding for the advocacy of environmental causes and put everything we got in longevity treatments. After all, humans are wired for very short time thinking, and merely knowing that something is going to affect us personally in a long time is not necessarily a guarantee that we are going to act in an adequate manner to prevent it. Just think about the number of people who are ready to sacrifice their long term health for the fleeting pleasure of their daily cigarettes, despite a mountain of evidence that such behavior is deleterious. One of the reason such behaviors are a happening is that, when we think about future us, we think about that person as if it was someone different than who we are now. This effect has actually been measured with brain imaging in an experiment where people have been asked to think about themselves now, their future self, and a different person. The experiment has shown that the brain area that activate when you think about your future self are closer to the one that activate when you think about a different person than to the one that activate when you think about yourself now. (McGonigal, 2011) (Mitchell, Schirmer, Ames, & Gilbert, 2011)

One way that has been shown to help is to imagine your future self as someone you care about, someone for whom you want to work now in order to help. The website futureme.org gives you the awesome possibility of writing an email to your future self. (“Futureme.org,”)Having used it myself, it is really a great way to connect with the consequences of the actions we are taking now and to have respect for the person we are going to be in the future. Plus, it is absolutely awesome to receive an email from past you that you wrote a year ago and totally forgot. There is also the Long Now foundation that aims to foster long term thinking. Among its projects, the building of a clock that will last for 10 000 years is extremely inspiring in terms of long term thinking. (“The long now fondation,”)

In conclusion, I believe that  while enable radical longevity enhancement is certainly going to be very helpful when it comes to environment issues, there is still a lot of work to do in order to ensure we as humans are capable of the long term thinking it takes to implement the kind of measures that would prevent most major problems. However, if you’re willing to put money and energy into longevity enhancement therapy, the chances are high that you are already thinking more long term than just your next vacation, and I see this as a very positive measure for our common future.

Sources:

Futureme.org. from https://www.futureme.org/

The long now fondation. from http://longnow.org/

McGonigal, K. (2011). The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It: Penguin.

Mitchell, J. P., Schirmer, J., Ames, D. L., & Gilbert, D. T. (2011). Medial prefrontal cortex predicts intertemporal choice. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 23(4), 857-866.

Reproduction in a world that doesn’t age

One of the main concerns that people have when there is a discussion about radical longevity enhancement is that if people stop dying of old age, population is going to explode and cause a major overpopulation problem. I believe this fear to be unfounded, for many reasons. First, it would certainly be important to define what overpopulation actually is. Overpopulation could be defined as the moment in a population growth where the productivity of the environment can no longer sustain the population growth. In fruit flies or other simple being in a closed, controlled environment, it is typically shown that population will grow exponentially until there is no more resources available, at which point the population drops dramatically as every member starves to death. It is obvious that we wouldn’t want to see such a scenario happen to human civilizations, which would seem to indicate that a warning against overpopulation might be wise. After all, there has been a faster than exponential growth of human population since the industrial revolution. Are we doomed to death by starvation?

First and foremost, contrary to fruit flies in a glass box filled with sugar, our food sources are renewable. Not only are they renewable, but the productivity has been growing over the years, and will probably keep doing so as technologies allow us to generate food in a more sustainable way than they do right now. Non-renewable resources, such as gas, oil and minerals might become more of a problem in the future if the population keeps growing, especially if we don’t find a way to use them more sparingly or to find renewable alternatives.

However, I don’t believe that the populations will keep growing at the kind of rates we have been seeing in the last decades. Especially if there is going to radical longevity enhancements.

I believe it won’t be a problem because of trend that has already been observed among developed countries, which is called the demographic transition theory. It has been around for a while and so far its predictions have been following reality relatively closely. Basically, populations can be described in three categories: Those with high deaths rate and high birth rates, those whose death rates have lowered but have kept high birth rates and finally populations with low birth rates and low death rates. The first group is characteristic of pre-modern societies, where childhood mortality is still very high and people don’t generally have access to modern hygiene and medical technology. The second group generally includes the developing countries where the death rates are lowering as a result of better access to the different technologies, but where birth rate is still very low. The final group, which includes pretty much includes every modern westernized countries are populations the lowest death rates as a result of their very high standards of living, but that are also having less children than any other population.

The explanations for the lower birth rates are numerous. As people live with better conditions, it becomes much easier to become individualists and having a big family no longer is a priority, since it effectively become possible for an individual to take care of themselves on their own. Easier access to contraception is also characteristic of these societies, and they are generally viewed as a positive measure for someone to take in their lives. People have other priorities than having children and getting married to have a family is no longer the main goal of many people. There is also a rise in the numbers of same-sex couples or couples who chose not to have children and it is less and less seen as something that is stigmatized.

Furthermore, if longevity enhancement were to become more popular, I believe the desire to have children would decline even more. For what would the point be in having children if you know for a fact that, a hundred years from now, you would be just as likely as any of your children to still be alive and active in society? Surely some people would still want to have a child or two, but I don’t believe that this would be a problem at all. After all, longevity enhancement through the medical treatment against degenerative aging would certainly help us to live longer, but it wouldn’t grant us immortality. People would still die from car accidents, rare sickness and whatever else that wouldn’t be covered by the longevity treatments.  Therefore, I honestly don’t think overpopulation in civilisations that have access to better lifespans would be a problem. We would simply have a lot less children than we do today.

That being said, I don’t have a crystal ball that can predict the future with certainty. Maybe there will be overpopulation problems to deal with if longevity technologies were to become a thing. However, from an ethical point of view, I believe it would be morally wrong to let billions of people die from degenerative aging simply because we couldn’t be sure that keeping them from dying wouldn’t bring about some challenge we would have to overcome as a society.

Sources:

Kasun, J. (1989). Too many people? The myth of excess population. Economic Affairs, 9(5), 15-18.

Cutas, D. E. (2008). Life extension, overpopulation and the right to life: against lethal ethics. Journal of medical ethics, 34(9), e7-e7.

Kirk, D. (1996). Demographic transition theory. Population studies, 50(3), 361-387.