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.