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.

Happiness in a world that doesn’t age

 

Allowing people to radically enjoy more years of youthfulness seems like something that no one in their right mind would refuse. And yet one of the most common response that people give when they first hear of it is “Why would anyone wish to love forever?” The most common reason why people see it that way is that they imagine that longevity enhancement would mean experiencing the crippling frailty of aging for a longer period of time, perhaps even forever. This is obviously not what approaches like the SENS research are aiming for, since repairing the damage of aging would effectively mean keeping the youthful vigor well into old age. However, this view is relevant in an important issue about longevity: Without happiness, longevity enhancement is nothing but a condemnation to longer suffering in an unjust world.

For this reason, I believe that any transhumanist advocating for radical life extension should also be a strong voice for an equitable society that allows everyone to live a happy, satisfying life. This is where I believe that it becomes very important for the movement to become intersectional with pretty much every other social right movement, and to become a strong ally for the advancement of every marginalized group. This also needs to be done in a way that is truly empowering for the different communities, by allowing them to be the leaders of their own social movement.

However, I believe that even while advocating for more rights for everyone, some people simply won’t be happy. I have great hopes that the advances in psychology will allow people who struggle with mental disorders will see their pain and suffering go down, but in some chronic cases, whatever you do, there still is some level of helplessness from the caring community. The same could be said of people with chronic physical illness that cripple them and for which the science of aging and longevity might be powerless to help. In all these cases, I think it would be completely immoral to force longevity treatments on people whom only escape is the knowledge that death will put them out of their misery in the long run. The ethical concerns with this question are obviously very high, especially when it comes to people for whom the notion of consent and their ability to truly understand the consequences of refusing treatments would bring. Then there is everyone who is incapable of communicating. How can we know if they wish to go through the types of treatments that could give them more years of suffering?

In all these cases, we could hope that longevity enhancement would provide these people with the hope that, given enough time, the medical community might come up with a solution to whatever chronic illness they are facing. In the end, however, the decision should always be left in the hand of the person, when it’s possible.

Beside the people who might not want to live because of their lack of happiness, there is also the issue of all the people who might want to benefit from life extension therapy even as they might be crushing other people’s happiness. Disruptive tyrants, criminals and otherwise dangerous people might not have a problem with living forever, but is it beneficial to society to keep them around for so long? What about those who get a “life” sentence of prison? Would it be ethical to keep someone in prison for hundreds of years? Could we even understand someone who’s served 50 years in jail or more to be the same person who entered prison initially?

I personally believe that longevity technology should be available to anyone who expresses the desire to benefit from it. If we want to make our world safer from people who would give us harm, then I think it is our responsibility to work at the root of the problem and start working more into rehabilitation rather than punishment and to attack the social causes of crime. As for the “Toughened criminals” and tyrants, I honestly believe that it is impossible for someone who knows they are going to live forever to hold onto a vision of themselves for such a long time. In the long run, long sentences with a strong emphasis on rehabilitation might be the solution for such “hardened cases”.

In any case, I believe that longevity enhancement is going to radically alter the way society considers happiness.

To think further about it:

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/should-biotech-make-life-hellish-for-criminals/

Ageism in a world that doesn’t age

If we are to conceive radical longevity enhancement as a real possibility, it stems from this idea that society itself is going to undergo radical changes in the way it is organized. Ageism is a systematic bias that uses age as a mean of discrimination. In one of its manifestation, ageism stems from a belief that older people are frail and diminished, which leads to decisions that robs them from their autonomy and of their empowerment. Such a vision of ageism would likely be greatly reduced, if not completely eradicated, by the types of treatments that would provide the ability to remain youthful even as the years go by and by. However, another type of ageism, one that considers youth to be immature and lacking in experience is going to become a lot more problematic as the general active population is going to become older and older.

In a society where experience is one of the most important factor for employment, and where employment is effectively vital to a person’s well-being, how will a 30 year old young adult be able to have any hopes of competing with someone who has a hundred years of experience in any given field? If radical longevity enhancement were to become a reality, we would soon end up living in a world of elders where the place of the much smaller younger generations is going to be increasingly hard to take. Market as it is now is highly dependent on older people going on retirement to free up spaces for the younger workers to take over. If people can keep their jobs for hundreds of years, what is it going to mean for the people who don’t have one?

I think this problem could be easily overcome by putting measures that are going to change the way people perceive work. By implanting a minimum income measure, jobs would turn from a life-line people have to cling onto for their own survival to something you do for you own self-growth and the good of society. If people are able to leave their jobs to start working on personal projects, the job market will become much more flexible and is going to have the space necessary for younger people to take their places. Furthermore, there could be other measures implanted within the system to allow for even more flexibility. Free education seems like a no brainer, since it would allow people to get the type of knowledge and abilities that do compensate for a lack of experience in any given field. Free schooling, when combined with minimum income measures, are also going to allow anyone to leave their fields whenever they feel the need to in order to take on new challenges. This combination is probably the best way to ensure that people will be able to live happy productive lives at pretty much any age.

In conclusion, I believe that ageism in a society that progressively gets older and older will indeed become a serious concern for the younger generations. However, I believe that there are measures that we can take that are going to make the transition much smoother and allow everyone to benefit from a society in which people no longer age.

The evolution of gender

In our world today, gender is considered by most to be one of the most fundamental characteristic of identity. It is one of the first information we share about ourselves and one of the first one we seek in someone else. It is so fundamental to our present understanding of people that most languages are effectively making it almost impossible to talk about someone without referring to their gender at some point. First it would make sense to define what gender is.

To the casual observer, gender is usually seen as something that is stable and constant in a person and thought to be divided between male and female.  This understanding of gender stems from the fact that most people are born with clearly different reproductive organs, which usually lead to the development of a sexual differentiation during puberty such as beard, breast and a size difference during puberty. Gender is also a common marker for the creation of a fertile heterosexual relationship. Evolutionarily wise, gender makes sense.

But what would gender look like in a post-human world? One where artificial wombs and pluripotent cell development allows for any two people of any gender to have children? One where physical strength wouldn’t be relevant and could easily be accessible to anyone of any gender via robotization of labor, cybernetics and bioenhencement. How could gender even make sense in such a world?

This is not the world we live in, but these questions are obviously relevant even today. Having children is no longer the unique goal of sexual partnership and the cisgender heterosexual couples is obviously no longer the unique model. And even to non-fertile couple or people, technologies of today are capable of providing the means for them to reproduce. What about gender roles, then? Are they still relevant today? As I’ve mentioned in my post about ectogenesis, the mysticism surrounding motherhood is certainly a big hindrance to achieve any reasonable discussion about the usefulness of women being the bearers of children’s responsibilities. Even in today’s world that attempts to be as equal as possible, the burden of domestic chores and domestic roles still falls again and always on women. As if the capacity to bear children was to be systematically to be associated with the keeping of the household.

So while gender roles and sexual orientation are slowly being put into question, what of gender itself? The existence of trans people and non-binary people are certainly the proof that gender is no more fixed than it is binary. However, even trans people have to deal with the cultural system of gender, where everything, names, language, clothing, hairstyles and, most of all, bodies are gendered. In that system, identifying outside de cisgender binary system of gender becomes so much harder when people are forced by their own language and experience to put a gender on every single person they meet. So even though gender itself has the ability to adapt into numerous forms, it is still shaped and often crushed by the cultural machine that keeps pushing its expectation on it.

All of this brings back to the question: Is gender bound to disappear? Given what we are witnessing in the world among LGBT and queer feminism movement, I think we could safely say that what’s going to happen is even better. While the binary gender system might still exist as a system of reference, people of all bodies and expression will become free to play with the codes and shape their world into whatever they want it to be. In this world, technology will simply be another way to express diversity. For this to happen, flexibility will have to be introduced in the system. Gender will have to be taken out of legal papers and language will have to adapt to accept that a person is not necessarily primarily defined by their gender. Such changes will take time and will certainly cause a lot of grunting and yapping, but the freedom gained from such a process would certainly outweigh any of the possible discomfort it might cause.