I do wonder how the psychology of humanity will change once you can't wait for someone to die, and conversely, you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you.
Without going in to spoilers, the recent season of the Revolutions podcast about a future fictional revolution on Mars touches on this a fair bit. Someone about to die seizes power for himself, but no one cares much because he was already in charge and extending his reign a few more years till he dies was no big deal, until he extends his life and lives another 75 years.
"Putin Eternal", or something like that. Ironically, the technology will probably lead to faster, worse fates for many like that than might have been the case if they'd just left it alone.
The risk of death per year increasing with number of years lived is aging.
Without that people have lived longer are more likely to have lower risks of death per year. And thus older people in such a society would on average live longer.
Unless it also cures cancer a more likely outcome is that people who get the treatment will just stay young until they get cancer and die. Also, as I understand it cancer also slows down in old age, so staying younger could mean faster cancers possibly negating some of the gains from the decreased aging.
Cancer is primarily caused by aging, so in this world there likely wouldn’t be much cancer outside of the deliberate cancers caused by things like smoking
This is grossly wrong. "anti-aging" treatments won't reduce people's ages and won't undo epigenetic damage. And while age is the single strongest risk factor for cancer, it isn't the "primary cause", and there are numerous non-age-related causes of cancer.
Bad “anti-aging” treatments definitely won’t do it, but they also won’t provide indefinite lifespans.
> it isn't the "primary cause
Only if you’re using an inaccurate definition of aging. If everyone over 20 should have the same risk of cancer as 20 years olds the total number of cancers would drop by more than half.
If someone has an increased risk of death per year from cancer or whatever because something is failing over time they are still aging.
If the rate per year stays the same IE being 20 or 20,000 has no impact on your risks of cancer each year then someone that’s 20,000 likely takes very few other risks and is more likely to live another 20,000 years than the random 20 year old.
Most of humanity will die in this century as a consequence of global warming, a subject that barely gets a mention at this site. There was a window of hope, but the Trump administration's policies have closed it.
Altered Carbon used alien magic, the way this works in the real world will be far worse: Brain transplants. First, many poor people will need to be used as guinea pigs (a la the Sun King's anal fistula). Then once it works.. well some strapping young man (or woman!) will have to "volunteer" their body to host Elon's brain.
They don't need a volunteer. They can clone themselves when they are, say, 30 year old and they will have a 100% compatible, 20 year old donor who has spent their life in suspended animation when the original is 50.
The practice of illegal clone brain transplants figures in some of the Vorkosigan series books: The clone-children of various customers are raised in cohorts, and taught little while enduring years of strictly controlled diets, cosmetic surgeries, and exercise regimes.
Then, one day, the are told their important and distant "parents" are finally arriving to bring them away to their new life...
Anyway, the point is that any aging wealthy pedicidal murderers are also gonna insist the body is perfect before they move in. The easiest way to do that without conjuring more new technology is the force the future-victim to do it.
Thanks for bringing that up, it's probably time got for me to reread the Vorkosigan Saga.
And you also reminded me of the flawed but moving film "Never Let Me Go" from 2010 about a more present version of this. Oh, and there's also Michael Bay's "The Island".
No that won't do. You need someone else to prepare the body: you know... rigorous workouts for strength and physique. Ideally the person is an excellent cage fighter and has the reflexes of a top-tier video gamer.
All options are too far away to predict which will come first, or with what side effects.
(In practice, almost everything over 5 years away, even when already in early human trials, has this property; the only reason the Covid vaccines happened faster is that everyone was willing to throw unlimited resources at the problem and do simultaneous tests on all candidates, and in a pipeline, rather than cost-efficiently and slowly like everything else has been).
IIRC, there's no current way to scan even a single living synapse/synaptic cleft/dendrite combination to read out the corresponding connection strengths, let alone for the whole brain, so we can't yet scan a brain — but if we could do that, writing it back to a fresh blank one currently seems(!) like the easy part, as neurons change shape and grow in response to electrical gradients.
One non-measuring idea is to gradually replace portions of the brain with artificial blanks, relying on some sort of holistic (or holographic) redundancy where the "damage" is repaired by neighbors.
This, er, Brain of Theseus would retain operational patterns even if the individual cells have been replaced.
A variation on that would be too do it stochastically, constantly substituting a miniscule percentage of cells evenly across the entire brain.
I'm not an expert in psychology, but within a fixed population window, the murder rate will only go up unless there is a limited supply of those who murderers want to murder or unless murderers tend to prefer murdering other murderers, perhaps due to the change in game theory creating a new incentive. As humans would begin to live ever increasingly far away, we may approach a "murder death" condition where no new murders are possible. I will leave alone those who played Among Us until their numbers diminish and there is a better chance of reaching an early asymptote.
> you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you.
Many of the worst people in humanity, seem(ed) to act like they thought they were immortal.
Even being grazed by a bullet didn't stop Trump praising the second amendment.
(Though I say that as a non-American, and someone for whom the 2nd was part of why I never even considered attempting to migrate to the US; I do recognise the language used to support it as a quasi-religious badge of identity, i.e. hard to shake).
> Even being grazed by a bullet didn't stop Trump praising the second amendment.
This at least gives the semblance of Trump having and sticking to a set of principles (though I suspect it's more to do with what his supporters would accept)
If you’re curious about fiction which thinks about this there’s Altered Carbon which is “what if the rich assholes can live forever” and there’s The Postmortal where all assholes get to live forever.
“To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
I don't think that the assertions are nonsense, but I don't understand how this works.
I have heard variants on this assertion:
"Two of the most prominent purported underlying causes of aging are chronic inflammation and senescent cells."
One thing that surprises me is that telomeres aren't mentioned.
I also don't understand how this is happening (is apoptosis somehow triggered?):
"Now, the Academy researchers demonstrate that SRCs reduce senescent cells, measured using a blue dye called SA-β-Gal, in multiple organs, including the brain, heart, and lungs."
The main mechanism of action appears to be:
"The therapeutic efficacy of MPCs is largely attributed to their paracrine actions, with exosomes playing a pivotal role in mediating these effects."
The researchers do not appear to fully understand how this is happening:
"Among the diverse geroprotective functions of SRCs in the brain and ovary, the restorative effect of SRC-derived exosomes on aged cells and their surroundings emerges as a key mechanism. Rejuvenation of aged cells by exosomes likely involves multiple pathways and targets."
it kinda looks like you've assumed my "ideology", or even a country. Also, to die of natural causes, you know, for some people in some positions is actually a good wish. And we all will be there, I just really hope to outlive particular people.
we may alternatively end up with even older elders because of general lifespan increases, it just so happens people with more experience are older, if you think older people being in charge is bad just wait until you see how the younger ones do
What will that achieve? Next generation with no doubt will have their own POSs, their offspring think pretty much like them already, there is no way out of this vicious cycle.
I don't really blame humans in particular, a bear can eat it's prey alive and feel nothing at all about it, and many other similar examples of cruelty exist in nature, many even eat their own species in special circumstances, despite that I don't consider any of them evil.
Nothing short of a highly contagious virus that affects the brain and makes us more emphatic (with no other side effect) would break the cycle, but that's just sci-fi talk.
No idea who that is, but it's not particularly challenging to realize evolution doesn't overall favor empathy -even if it played some role-, sometimes it's the full opposite, sometimes is punished ("no good deed goes unpunished"), firemen are the most prone to burns, the equivalent it's true for many other altruistic endeavors, including rare occasional ones unlike firemen.
It's also not particularly challenging to see society lacks any intrinsic defence from the most ruthless and greedy from advancing in any given power structure inside of it, it's a long term damage so it's abstracted away while more immediate issues take presedence, it's in our DNA to give too priority to immediate threats, while long term problems such as this don't make the top 10 (another example being climate change, etc)
Stalin died literally in his bed, secure and surrounded by dozens of protecting bodyguards who ironically were so afraid to bother him that his stroke wen't unattended for hours after he'd had it. And in dying at 74, he enjoyed what despite the hard toll of heavy smoking, drinking, eating richly, and deprivation in his youth, was a pretty decent lifespan by the standards of his time.
Hitler ultimately died from the sheer gambler's recklessness of reaching for far too much that belonged to too many other powers, and being burned by all the consequences. Had he not started a multi-front world war against almost every single one of the world's other major nations, he could have stayed safely in power as Germany's beloved dictator right up until any old age he managed to reach (as Franco pulled off by much more wisely focusing on consolidating domestic power and avoiding wars)
Societies do have ways of dealing with tyrants, yes, and mostly it's just by rewarding them with more. The bad parts mostly happen to utterly foolish tyrants who make tremendous missteps.
