I’ve sometimes thought about if ‘immortality’ is the right framing, at least for the current moment. Like AllAmericanBreakfast points out, I think that anti-ageing research is unlikely to produce life extensions in the 100x to 1000x range all at once.
In any case, even if we manage to halt ageing entirely, ceteris paribus there will still be deaths from accidents and other causes. A while ago I tried a fermi calculation on this, I think I used this data (United States, 2017). The death rate for people between 15-34 is ~0.1%/year, this rate of death would put the median lifespan at ~700 years (Using X~Exp(0.001)).
Probably this is an underestimate of lifespan—accidental death should decrease (safety improvements, of which self-driving cars might be significant given how many people die of road accidents), curing ageing might have positive effects on younger people as well, and other healthcare improvements should occur, and people might be more careful if they’re theoretically immortal(?). However, I think this framing poses a slightly different question:
Do we prefer that more people:
Live shorter lives and die of heart disease/cancer/respiratory disease*, or
Live (possibly much) longer lives and die of accidents/suicide/homicide
I don’t know how I feel about these. I think in the theoretical case of going immediately from current state to immortality I’d be worried about Chesterton’s-fence-y bad results—not that someone put ageing into place, but I’d expect surprising and possibly unpleasant side effects of changing something so significant**.
*I inferred from the data I linked above that heart disease and cancer are somewhat ageing-related, I’m not sure if this is true
**The existence of the immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, implies that a form of immortality was evolvable, which in turn might imply that there’s some reason evolution didn’t favour more immortal things/things that tended slightly more towards immortality.
I’ve sometimes thought about if ‘immortality’ is the right framing, at least for the current moment. Like AllAmericanBreakfast points out, I think that anti-ageing research is unlikely to produce life extensions in the 100x to 1000x range all at once.
In any case, even if we manage to halt ageing entirely, ceteris paribus there will still be deaths from accidents and other causes. A while ago I tried a fermi calculation on this, I think I used this data (United States, 2017). The death rate for people between 15-34 is ~0.1%/year, this rate of death would put the median lifespan at ~700 years (Using X~Exp(0.001)).
Probably this is an underestimate of lifespan—accidental death should decrease (safety improvements, of which self-driving cars might be significant given how many people die of road accidents), curing ageing might have positive effects on younger people as well, and other healthcare improvements should occur, and people might be more careful if they’re theoretically immortal(?). However, I think this framing poses a slightly different question:
Do we prefer that more people:
Live shorter lives and die of heart disease/cancer/respiratory disease*, or
Live (possibly much) longer lives and die of accidents/suicide/homicide
I don’t know how I feel about these. I think in the theoretical case of going immediately from current state to immortality I’d be worried about Chesterton’s-fence-y bad results—not that someone put ageing into place, but I’d expect surprising and possibly unpleasant side effects of changing something so significant**.
*I inferred from the data I linked above that heart disease and cancer are somewhat ageing-related, I’m not sure if this is true
**The existence of the immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, implies that a form of immortality was evolvable, which in turn might imply that there’s some reason evolution didn’t favour more immortal things/things that tended slightly more towards immortality.