Aubrey De Grey discusses how all of the aspects of fighting the damage of aging have reached an investable stage. Ten years ago only stem cells were investable. Now companies have been formed to attempt to counter all of the types of aging damage.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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It’s remarkable how many comments on youtube (ostensibly average mainstream population) are still at the “immortal tyrants” and “instant overpopulation” stage.
It’s remarkable how many comments on youtube (ostensibly average mainstream population) are still at the immortal tyrants”” and “”””instant overpopulation”””” stage.”””
Say the price is as low as ten dollars a day. Maybe a single pill you take. That’s like a couple of coffees at Starbucks. I’d buy one for everyone I love (and another for myself). That would come to $3,650 dollars a year per person. Meanwhile, the median per-capita household income for the world is $2,920. That means over half the world doesn’t make enough to pay for this, even if they buy nothing else and pay no taxes. In fact, there are only about 15 to 20 countries where you could expect to see the rank-and-file being able to afford this (you can probably figure out which ones without even looking). Coincidentally, in those countries, longer life spans would mean an economic boom, so much for overpopulation. In many other countries, only the elite would be able to afford this. Would the populace in such a country allow these long-lived super-privileged people to exist so far above their own meager station? Probably. It’s not much of a stretch from the situation that already obtains. On the other hand, too much income inequality (like too much income equality) tends to eventually result in extreme social disorder.
Perhaps more to the point, even if you eliminate aging entirely, people don’t live forever. They just die by accident, instead.
Living longer does not mean that over population will happen. We will never have this technology for the masses until the ones in control of this new technology realize that they cannot have all that they have without everyone else doing their unknown but important jobs.
Say the price is as low as ten dollars a day. Maybe a single pill you take. That’s like a couple of coffees at Starbucks. I’d buy one for everyone I love (and another for myself). That would come to $3650 dollars a year per person. Meanwhile the median per-capita household income for the world is $2920. That means over half the world doesn’t make enough to pay for this even if they buy nothing else and pay no taxes. In fact there are only about 15 to 20 countries where you could expect to see the rank-and-file being able to afford this (you can probably figure out which ones without even looking). Coincidentally in those countries longer life spans would mean an economic boom so much for overpopulation. In many other countries only the elite would be able to afford this. Would the populace in such a country allow these long-lived super-privileged people to exist so far above their own meager station? Probably. It’s not much of a stretch from the situation that already obtains. On the other hand too much income inequality (like too much income equality) tends to eventually result in extreme social disorder.
Perhaps more to the point even if you eliminate aging entirely people don’t live forever. They just die by accident instead.
Living longer does not mean that over population will happen. We will never have this technology for the masses until the ones in control of this new technology realize that they cannot have all that they have without everyone else doing their unknown but important jobs.
Death rate by accidents isn’t going to suddenly jump if longevity is increased. There may be a small increase as people may be more inclined to take risks, but other improvements in medicine and safety may counter that. More relevant is birth rate vs death rate. Even if death rate is brought to zero, it will take 38 years for the population to double at current birth rates, compared to 66 years with today’s death and birth rates – if I remember the numbers correctly. But increased longevity is likely to cause a drop in birth rate, so the actual difference may well be smaller. Furthermore, there a lot more resources than most people realize (I can elaborate, but it’ll get long). “Over”population is a problem of management, not numbers.
Conceivably, the cheaper/cheapest price option could be ten dollars. Just pointing out that not every new thing is always in reach of everyone and that even a modest cost for longevity might seriously reduce overpopulation concerns stemming from it, regardless of how anyone feels about that, good, bad, or indifferent. The way this prescription stuff works though, yes, it would probably cost more for folks in the US than anywhere else. That was me making a comment addressing people who wave their hands in the air and shriek about overpopulation at the first mention of extreme longevity. Then there are those who are worried about a future where, with the reset button never getting pushed on the ultra-rich, and they just get richer and richer, at the expense of everyone else. That’s a legitimate concern, so far as I can tell, but, to some degree or another, its been dealt with over and over again since the dawn of civilization, although not always in a tidy efficient manner.
Oh no, the poor won’t be able to afford iPhones, how will they react facing this horrible injustice? Well, they mostly won’t have to face it. They can get them even if they are used/refurbished ones and they have cheaper options too. If it’s as expensive as you say for the poor, they will probably get watered down versions of it from public sources or cheaper channels, or the poorer countries will simply steal the intellectual property and copy it, given life is demonstrably more important than any mega-corporations profit. My hunch is that a lot more people than just those able to pay the patented version in the West would get it, as long as a cure for aging exists. Besides there will be strong market pressure to make it cheaper quickly, because once one approach is tested, several others copying it or imitating it will emerge. In the end, the scarcity will come to pass, with a period of adjustment when we go from having it from a single expensive source, to have it from many cheaper ones.
Death rate by accidents isn’t going to suddenly jump if longevity is increased. There may be a small increase as people may be more inclined to take risks but other improvements in medicine and safety may counter that.More relevant is birth rate vs death rate. Even if death rate is brought to zero it will take 38 years for the population to double at current birth rates compared to 66 years with today’s death and birth rates – if I remember the numbers correctly. But increased longevity is likely to cause a drop in birth rate so the actual difference may well be smaller.Furthermore there a lot more resources than most people realize (I can elaborate but it’ll get long). Over””population is a problem of management”””” not numbers.”””
Conceivably the cheaper/cheapest price option could be ten dollars. Just pointing out that not every new thing is always in reach of everyone and that even a modest cost for longevity might seriously reduce overpopulation concerns stemming from it regardless of how anyone feels about that good bad or indifferent. The way this prescription stuff works though yes it would probably cost more for folks in the US than anywhere else. That was me making a comment addressing people who wave their hands in the air and shriek about overpopulation at the first mention of extreme longevity.Then there are those who are worried about a future where with the reset button never getting pushed on the ultra-rich and they just get richer and richer at the expense of everyone else. That’s a legitimate concern so far as I can tell but to some degree or another its been dealt with over and over again since the dawn of civilization although not always in a tidy efficient manner.
Oh no the poor won’t be able to afford iPhones how will they react facing this horrible injustice?Well they mostly won’t have to face it. They can get them even if they are used/refurbished ones and they have cheaper options too.If it’s as expensive as you say for the poor they will probably get watered down versions of it from public sources or cheaper channels or the poorer countries will simply steal the intellectual property and copy it given life is demonstrably more important than any mega-corporations profit.My hunch is that a lot more people than just those able to pay the patented version in the West would get it as long as a cure for aging exists.Besides there will be strong market pressure to make it cheaper quickly because once one approach is tested several others copying it or imitating it will emerge.In the end the scarcity will come to pass with a period of adjustment when we go from having it from a single expensive source to have it from many cheaper ones.
It kind of sounds like there’s a lot of assumptions under that assertion. One point of no return for mass availability will be as soon as people realize that it exists and that it exists within the same budgetary reality as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid : just a few percent of those would probably dwarf even the highest realistic hopes for near/medium term funding that de Grey & co would imagine right now. Because there’s no chance that SS, Medicare and Medicaid will be voted to negligible proportions (IOW to proportions as low as anti aging’s current funding), it follows that there’s no chance people will vote against antiaging therapies in large enough numbers that it doesn’t become at the very least affordable to anyone who wants it. Because the national discourse would have to reach double speak and double think levels beyond even today’s, for the sheer contradiction to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness” not to wake almost everyone from their pro-aging trance. Instead of “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia”, it would be “we’ve always been condemned to suffer old age at 75”. Not only does involuntary aging completely upend human culture and society as we’ve known it, it likely bridges us to the other end of scarcity – the effective negligible level of material scarcity that’s somewhere in the next 50-100 years due to automation, material science, etc. In that sense it’s wrong to say anti-aging technology will never democratize because those “unknown but important jobs” are not for much longer. — Many lies have worked as crowd controlling opium of the masses, and the inevitability of scarcity of time and matter/energy are arguably the all-time worst and largest of those lies. It’s not hard to imagine people a few centuries from now will look at pro-aging period of humanity as fairly barbaric. 100,000’s of people dying every day, unnecessarily; most of them against their will or even against the knowledge that they could have li
how will they react facing this horrible injustice?” What ‘injustice’? Property rights are not an ‘injustice’. Particularly when the poor have suffered far more when state-led assaults on property rights were in effect, i.e. Communism.
Nation-states reserve the right to ‘nationalize’ pharma IP if they see fit. I think South Africa did or at least threatened to so that with HIV treatment drugs back when they were expensive.
It kind of sounds like there’s a lot of assumptions under that assertion.One point of no return for mass availability will be as soon as people realize that it exists and that it exists within the same budgetary reality as Social Security Medicare and Medicaid : just a few percent of those would probably dwarf even the highest realistic hopes for near/medium term funding that de Grey & co would imagine right now.Because there’s no chance that SS Medicare and Medicaid will be voted to negligible proportions (IOW to proportions as low as anti aging’s current funding) it follows that there’s no chance people will vote against antiaging therapies in large enough numbers that it doesn’t become at the very least affordable to anyone who wants it.Because the national discourse would have to reach double speak and double think levels beyond even today’s for the sheer contradiction to Life” Liberty” and the Pursuit of happiness”” not to wake almost everyone from their pro-aging trance. Instead of “”””we’ve always been at war with Eastasia”””””””” it would be “”””we’ve always been condemned to suffer old age at 75″”””.Not only does involuntary aging completely upend human culture and society as we’ve known it”” it likely bridges us to the other end of scarcity – the effective negligible level of material scarcity that’s somewhere in the next 50-100 years due to automation material science”” etc. In that sense it’s wrong to say anti-aging technology will never democratize because those “”””unknown but important jobs”””” are not for much longer.—Many lies have worked as crowd controlling opium of the masses”” and the inevitability of scarcity of time and matter/energy are arguably the all-time worst and largest of those lies. It’s not hard to imagine people a few centuries from now will look at pro-aging period of humanity as fairly barbaric.100000’s of people dying every day unnecessarily; most of them against their will or even against th”
how will they react facing this horrible injustice?””What ‘injustice’? Property rights are not an ‘injustice’. Particularly when the poor have suffered far more when state-led assaults on property rights were in effect”””” i.e. Communism.”””
Nation-states reserve the right to ‘nationalize’ pharma IP if they see fit. I think South Africa did or at least threatened to so that with HIV treatment drugs back when they were expensive.
The talk about a $10 pill has led posters here to forget that there probably will NOT be a single pill. Of Aubrey’s 7 solutions, maybe the “waste products” and “stiffening” treatments can use generic pills anyone can take – MAYBE. Those three will likely do a lot for improved health and longevity – so they might be the “$10 pill” being discussed. Stem cells for cell loss pretty much has to be a customized treatment for each individual, matching their needs and producing the appropriate and compatible cells. Probably not cheap, but once all the other treatments are in place it might be rarely needed. The other three involve genetic manipulations, which may have to be customized for each individual, and even for particular cells for two of them. The mitochondrial mutation gene mods might be somewhat more generic, if we assume every cell is targeted and the same genetic patch can be applied to every person.
I wonder what the next crazy batch of theories will be once everyone does have a potential lifetime that’s doubled or more, once that lifetime coincides with the coming decades of genetic engineering and AI automation and in-space industry etc all picking up the pace like they seem to… when almost everyone lives long enough and earns more than enough to see with their own eyes that the earth isn’t flat and that they can choose anything between being a deadbeat bum content with VR/video game escapism in a cheap 1-bedroom rental forever or that they more possibly than ever in history could be living the start of a 10,000 year lifespan? Like Aubrey de Grey says, most people are shit scared of getting their hopes and dreams up.
The latest formulation I heard was “Death, Taxes and Spam” With the explanation that Death is the cost of being a multicellular organism (not necessarily death by old age however) Taxes are the cost of living in a society (may take the form of being expected to “donate” labour and resources to public works, but there will always be something) Spam is the cost of having advanced communication technology (with the observation that even ancient pre-literate societies were filled with bards and poets telling epics that somehow always end up pushing things like the need for young men to sacrifice themselves for the king, and the story that the royal family was descended from a god.)
If you wanted to be paranoid you could assume that the powers that be don’t want the peasantry looking at this stuff. It’s already available for a 9 figure price and that’s the way they like it. Less tinfoil-hattery suggests simple Stockholm Syndrome.
Yes, immortality is something else but that is what would shine in the eyes of the “poor man”, as $currency signs would in the creditor’s. What’s that saying about certainty in life being death and taxes? It’d be truer than ever.
That’s a good point. We expect that throwing eternal youth (not immortality, that’s another thing all together) into any society would have HUGE implications, at least equal to handing out firearms and whiskey to a stone age tribe. (An experiment that has already been performed a few times.) After a couple of trial runs (almost certainly run in the most developed countries) you would probably have a fairly good idea of what is going to suddenly shoot up in value, and what will collapse. Hence any large wealthy donor (corporation, billionaire individual, other country, the small wealthy minority in this country etc.) could “give free treatment” to a nation while making sure they grab some decent % of the sudden wealth reshuffle. And yes, one major asset class that would suddenly shoot up in value enormously would be the “expected lifetime earnings of a worker”.
CMIIW, but it seems like focusing on the hole rather than the donut. Because that hole begs to be filled: Is there no possible way (I’m laughing already) for something like the pharma industry to hook a poor man up with some kind of extended contract where said poor man will owe (hopefully only the initial part of) his extended healthspan to pharma+whatever creditor (they’re already salivating) while the poor man works whatever terms (something a bit like in bankruptcy?) e.g. going to school to make his labor more valuable. The time frame seems ripe for profit. — What price immortality?
They can nationalise all they like, they still can’t make it cost less than the “marginal” cost of producing the drug. Nationalisation works if the price of the drug is much, much higher than the marginal cost of producing another pill. And this is usually the case with new drugs. It costs a billion dollars to invent the drug and get it through years of testing. (No, seriously, about a billion dollars for a new drug is the current price.) But once it’s made you can set a plant up to churn them out for $10 a dose or so. Far less if it’s a very simple chemical with well understood synthesis. eg. Aspirin, I can get a pack of 24 for $1 and they are probably making a good margin on that. So if you ignore the $1billion as being a rich-white-male problem, then you can just make the pills for a couple of dollars each. For something fairly complex and new I think you’d be lucky to get to $10/dose, but let’s go with that. But as Snazster points out, even at $10/day you’ve still got billions who can’t afford that. And refusing to deal with the $1billion up front cost doesn’t get rid of that manufacturing cost. Nigeria or South Africa can subsidise that price, but only by transferring money from their few wealthy citizens.
> You’ve extrapolated only one thing, as if the world remained frozen in the mean time. > It would not make sense for other countries not to reap their economic future by sowing today the seeds of effectively un-aging population. As you said the world is bottom heavy enough that the sheer democratization of anti-aging will not be denied. Even if it begins with some ridiculous economic schemes where your lifespan basically belongs to big pharma. The point of no return for anti-aging happens relatively very quickly. It may or may not be soon for us, but it most likely doesn’t happen after a relatively long time of denying it to the majority of humanity.
The rich will have their prestige significantly rolled back when everyone has (for the sake of brevity) their Drexler and Mr Fusion. If you can live hundreds or thousands of years, then you have enough time for that Drexler/Fusion tool to build you more luxury than absolutely anyone previously in history has ever had. The scarcity of space will remain, but only in the sense that it will inverse-scale in proportion to the expansion of people out into space and the astronomical amount of virgin real estate to be had. A transitory period where birthrate is artificially curbed, until we manage to make off-Earth real estate an ordinary thing, is a small price to pay — effectively you merely displace the time you would’ve had now, to a few decades into the future; just an exercise in deferral. It only is vaporware while we figure out interplanetary and interstellar travel, but when that calculation is recalibrated to the scale of hundreds/thousands year human lifetimes it is kind of a self-evident truth. Then, why would someone really care if Earth was the original Eden? When they have their own effectively infinitely reconfigurable parcel of space and matter, possibly the size of a province or country today. The scarcity of culture is arguably all-but-completely behind the horizon of AI, genetic engineering (what is the meaning of life when pleasure and every other sensation is arbitrarily controlled?) etc.
I wonder what the next crazy batch of theories will be once everyone does have a potential lifetime that’s doubled or more once that lifetime coincides with the coming decades of genetic engineering and AI automation and in-space industry etc all picking up the pace like they seem to… when almost everyone lives long enough and earns more than enough to see with their own eyes that the earth isn’t flat and that they can choose anything between being a deadbeat bum content with VR/video game escapism in a cheap 1-bedroom rental forever or that they more possibly than ever in history could be living the start of a 10000 year lifespan?Like Aubrey de Grey says most people are shit scared of getting their hopes and dreams up.
The latest formulation I heard was Death” Taxes and Spam””With the explanation thatDeath is the cost of being a multicellular organism (not necessarily death by old age however)Taxes are the cost of living in a society (may take the form of being expected to “”””donate”””” labour and resources to public works”” but there will always be something)Spam is the cost of having advanced communication technology (with the observation that even ancient pre-literate societies were filled with bards and poets telling epics that somehow always end up pushing things like the need for young men to sacrifice themselves for the king”” and the story that the royal family was descended from a god.)”””
If you wanted to be paranoid you could assume that the powers that be don’t want the peasantry looking at this stuff. It’s already available for a 9 figure price and that’s the way they like it.Less tinfoil-hattery suggests simple Stockholm Syndrome.
Yes immortality is something else but that is what would shine in the eyes of the poor man”””” as $currency signs would in the creditor’s. What’s that saying about certainty in life being death and taxes? It’d be truer than ever.”””
That’s a good point. We expect that throwing eternal youth (not immortality that’s another thing all together) into any society would have HUGE implications at least equal to handing out firearms and whiskey to a stone age tribe. (An experiment that has already been performed a few times.)After a couple of trial runs (almost certainly run in the most developed countries) you would probably have a fairly good idea of what is going to suddenly shoot up in value and what will collapse. Hence any large wealthy donor (corporation billionaire individual other country the small wealthy minority in this country etc.) could give free treatment”” to a nation while making sure they grab some decent {22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of the sudden wealth reshuffle.And yes”””” one major asset class that would suddenly shoot up in value enormously would be the “”””expected lifetime earnings of a worker””””.”””
CMIIW but it seems like focusing on the hole rather than the donut. Because that hole begs to be filled:Is there no possible way (I’m laughing already) for something like the pharma industry to hook a poor man up with some kind of extended contract where said poor man will owe (hopefully only the initial part of) his extended healthspan to pharma+whatever creditor (they’re already salivating) while the poor man works whatever terms (something a bit like in bankruptcy?) e.g. going to school to make his labor more valuable. The time frame seems ripe for profit.—What price immortality?
They can nationalise all they like they still can’t make it cost less than the marginal”” cost of producing the drug.Nationalisation works if the price of the drug is much”” much higher than the marginal cost of producing another pill. And this is usually the case with new drugs. It costs a billion dollars to invent the drug and get it through years of testing. (No seriously about a billion dollars for a new drug is the current price.) But once it’s made you can set a plant up to churn them out for $10 a dose or so. Far less if it’s a very simple chemical with well understood synthesis. eg. Aspirin I can get a pack of 24 for $1 and they are probably making a good margin on that.So if you ignore the $1billion as being a rich-white-male problem then you can just make the pills for a couple of dollars each. For something fairly complex and new I think you’d be lucky to get to $10/dose but let’s go with that.But as Snazster points out even at $10/day you’ve still got billions who can’t afford that. And refusing to deal with the $1billion up front cost doesn’t get rid of that manufacturing cost. Nigeria or South Africa can subsidise that price”” but only by transferring money from their few wealthy citizens.”””
It would not make sense for other countries not to reap their economic future by sowing today the seeds of effectively un-aging population.As you said the world is bottom heavy enough that the sheer democratization of anti-aging will not be denied. Even if it begins with some ridiculous economic schemes where your lifespan basically belongs to big pharma.The point of no return for anti-aging happens relatively very quickly. It may or may not be soon for us but it most likely doesn’t happen after a relatively long time of denying it to the majority of humanity.
The rich will have their prestige significantly rolled back when everyone has (for the sake of brevity) their Drexler and Mr Fusion. If you can live hundreds or thousands of years then you have enough time for that Drexler/Fusion tool to build you more luxury than absolutely anyone previously in history has ever had. The scarcity of space will remain but only in the sense that it will inverse-scale in proportion to the expansion of people out into space and the astronomical amount of virgin real estate to be had. A transitory period where birthrate is artificially curbed until we manage to make off-Earth real estate an ordinary thing is a small price to pay — effectively you merely displace the time you would’ve had now to a few decades into the future; just an exercise in deferral.It only is vaporware while we figure out interplanetary and interstellar travel but when that calculation is recalibrated to the scale of hundreds/thousands year human lifetimes it is kind of a self-evident truth.Then why would someone really care if Earth was the original Eden? When they have their own effectively infinitely reconfigurable parcel of space and matter possibly the size of a province or country today.The scarcity of culture is arguably all-but-completely behind the horizon of AI genetic engineering (what is the meaning of life when pleasure and every other sensation is arbitrarily controlled?) etc.
No need to curb anything. We are already controlling population growth without coercion through economic development education and enforcement of female rights.In a world with a big reduction or delay on age and frailty related death diseases and spending there will be plenty more opportunities for the poor to get out of that state.There will be other shorter term crises like the collapse of all retirement schemes (they no longer work if people get to live several decades more worse if people live for an indefinite time span ) but that’s a small price to pay for a significantly longer life.Besides Earth has plentiful space for a lot more people to live in Western or above standard of living. We are but a speck on this planet’s surface and all our bodies and mighty works of engineering could be placed into a consequential but small region and leave most of the planetary surface still untouched.Therefore we won’t turn Earth into an ecumenopolis all of a sudden just because we can live more. The problems are more of territorial allocation defined by countries’ politics and history and desirability of the spots (we prefer big lively cities and towns). I think this will remain so in a future of long lived people. But we can indeed choose to go to space for tapping its riches and resources and out of a sense of adventure. The adventurous/entertainment part will become even more important if we get to have several current lifetimes worth of time to live. We will probably get bored of Earth and its hyper-gentrified cities and look for bigger newer projects.
The talk about a $10 pill has led posters here to forget that there probably will NOT be a single pill.Of Aubrey’s 7 solutions maybe the waste products”” and “”””stiffening”””” treatments can use generic pills anyone can take – MAYBE. Those three will likely do a lot for improved health and longevity – so they might be the “”””$10 pill”””” being discussed.Stem cells for cell loss pretty much has to be a customized treatment for each individual”” matching their needs and producing the appropriate and compatible cells. Probably not cheap but once all the other treatments are in place it might be rarely needed.The other three involve genetic manipulations which may have to be customized for each individual and even for particular cells for two of them. The mitochondrial mutation gene mods might be somewhat more generic”” if we assume every cell is targeted and the same genetic patch can be applied to every person.”””
In some regards the phones that you can get in the 2nd and 3rd world are better than the US. Not as thin, sure, but back in the Philippines my wife had a phone that also got radio and TV, and had an extensible whip antenna for when reception was poor. Try getting all that in a phone here. And it had room for several SIM cards, you could switch between networks on the fly, because it wasn’t locked to one network. The phone system here is really screwed up in some ways, because I guess we can afford for it to be screwed up.
No need to curb anything. We are already controlling population growth without coercion through economic development, education and enforcement of female rights. In a world with a big reduction or delay on age and frailty related death, diseases and spending, there will be plenty more opportunities for the poor to get out of that state. There will be other shorter term crises, like the collapse of all retirement schemes (they no longer work if people get to live several decades more, worse if people live for an indefinite time span ), but that’s a small price to pay for a significantly longer life. Besides Earth has plentiful space for a lot more people to live in Western or above standard of living. We are but a speck on this planet’s surface and all our bodies and mighty works of engineering could be placed into a consequential but small region, and leave most of the planetary surface still untouched. Therefore we won’t turn Earth into an ecumenopolis all of a sudden just because we can live more. The problems are more of territorial allocation defined by countries’ politics and history and desirability of the spots (we prefer big lively cities and towns). I think this will remain so in a future of long lived people. But we can indeed choose to go to space, for tapping its riches and resources and out of a sense of adventure. The adventurous/entertainment part will become even more important, if we get to have several current lifetimes worth of time to live. We will probably get bored of Earth and its hyper-gentrified cities and look for bigger, newer projects.
In some regards the phones that you can get in the 2nd and 3rd world are better than the US. Not as thin sure but back in the Philippines my wife had a phone that also got radio and TV and had an extensible whip antenna for when reception was poor.Try getting all that in a phone here. And it had room for several SIM cards you could switch between networks on the fly because it wasn’t locked to one network.The phone system here is really screwed up in some ways because I guess we can afford for it to be screwed up.
I disagree. Stem cells is the only one that would have to be personalized. Mitochondrial genes could be personalized, but generic mitochondrial genes should be good enough. Just use the most common versions of each gene. Telomere control and suicide genes are probably universal. At most, there could be a common version that works for most people, and a few alternatives for those who aren’t compatible. Waste products are probably largely the same for most people. You really only need to clear the most common junk in the early treatments. We can get more sophisticated as the treatment costs drop. Cross-links are pretty much the same for everyone. Even if not, it’d be the same story as with telomere control and suicide genes – a common drug and a few alternatives.
I disagree. Stem cells is the only one that would have to be personalized. Mitochondrial genes could be personalized but generic mitochondrial genes should be good enough. Just use the most common versions of each gene. Telomere control and suicide genes are probably universal. At most there could be a common version that works for most people and a few alternatives for those who aren’t compatible. Waste products are probably largely the same for most people. You really only need to clear the most common junk in the early treatments. We can get more sophisticated as the treatment costs drop. Cross-links are pretty much the same for everyone. Even if not it’d be the same story as with telomere control and suicide genes – a common drug and a few alternatives.
It will be a weird world if octogenarians are expected to leave retirement and go back to work for who knows how many years… ;-( Eventually almost everyone will save will save enough to retire forever… even without things like government retirement incentives. If the AIs haven’t gotten smart enough to do our labor by then society will be in real trouble. Of course if AIs get too smart too soon then we’ll all get to die in poverty unable to afford life extension treatments. ;-(
It will be a weird world if octogenarians are expected to leave retirement and go back to work for who knows how many years… ;-( Eventually almost everyone will save will save enough to retire forever… even without things like government retirement incentives. If the AIs haven’t gotten smart enough to do our labor by then society will be in real trouble. Of course if AIs get too smart too soon then we’ll all get to die in poverty unable to afford life extension treatments. ;-(
It would be nice – I guess we’ll see.
You must imagine the future as the future, and not the present. We don’t have the same world today as we did 100 years ago. Likewise 100 years from now. Just one aspect out of a myriad future prospects: a man’s life today is dwarfed by a multicentenarians or thousander’s life. In that time you can accomplish many times over the amount of work that an activist for human rights can today. And if you don’t, others will. Others who also live multiple centuries. All while the rest of the state of the world evolves. For instance if AI do our labor then their labor turns our world into a work free life of leisure, basically. *all* consequences must be accounted for, not only the scary or charming or seemingly insignificant ones.
The MrFusion/Drexler rich-rollback bit was a very long term prospect. When you have negligible energy and matter scarcity AND negligible manufacturing scarcity, the fundamental tenets of wealthy prestige mostly evaporate. You’re left with intellectual value at best. If I can fast fab myself a diamond/graphene Lamborghini and grow my own Spa Francorchamps in my own Earth atmosphere’d habitat dome on Mars or Venus, with the whole racetrack infield and surrounding area a tasteful pastiche (human plus AI spending 100s of years of refining it, etc) of Versailles (50B$ estimated) and many more, then what’s left of the old prestige? Even today that dymanic exists: you can’t print Versailles but you could arguably print a Lamborghini or Gucci or Mona Lisa. And if they’re molecularly identical, then what’s left to distinguish ? What’s the original’s prestige, for all practical intents and purposes? The old status quo is not going to survive the end of scarcity.
I mostly agree. I don’t see sovereign nations being conducive to reshuffling real estate so most of Earth can be preserved. Stopping things like the Amazon deforestation probably, but people won’t just lighten up overnight and get on draconian population density bandwagons. I think that will definitely be one of the interim crises. Material and spatial scarcity are separate from time scarcity. All of a sudden, government can’t answer questions (education, drugs, taxes…) much like religion has had its existential relevance retreat & regroup in the past, in the face of scientific culture. I agree on the last paragraph as one eventual outcome to whatever happens in between. I predict it’ll be a nicer experience, for at least a large minority of people, to go out and build comfortable habitats off Earth, then to deal with reorganizing the stratified and calcified old world habits on Earth. Of course if too many people do that, then it’ll make “forever tyrants” a self fulfilling prophecy. I can definitely see “old money” clinging to the chance to forever be “older money” than everyone else in time and space. Simultaneously refuse to change with the times when the ends of time/space/matter scarcities come, and also later snobbishly pretend Spacers/Martians etc as having abandoned/forfeited Earth.
It would be nice – I guess we’ll see.
You must imagine the future as the future and not the present. We don’t have the same world today as we did 100 years ago. Likewise 100 years from now.Just one aspect out of a myriad future prospects: a man’s life today is dwarfed by a multicentenarians or thousander’s life. In that time you can accomplish many times over the amount of work that an activist for human rights can today. And if you don’t others will. Others who also live multiple centuries.All while the rest of the state of the world evolves. For instance if AI do our labor then their labor turns our world into a work free life of leisure basically.*all* consequences must be accounted for not only the scary or charming or seemingly insignificant ones.
The MrFusion/Drexler rich-rollback bit was a very long term prospect. When you have negligible energy and matter scarcity AND negligible manufacturing scarcity the fundamental tenets of wealthy prestige mostly evaporate. You’re left with intellectual value at best. If I can fast fab myself a diamond/graphene Lamborghini and grow my own Spa Francorchamps in my own Earth atmosphere’d habitat dome on Mars or Venus with the whole racetrack infield and surrounding area a tasteful pastiche (human plus AI spending 100s of years of refining it etc) of Versailles (50B$ estimated) and many more then what’s left of the old prestige?Even today that dymanic exists: you can’t print Versailles but you could arguably print a Lamborghini or Gucci or Mona Lisa. And if they’re molecularly identical then what’s left to distinguish ? What’s the original’s prestige for all practical intents and purposes?The old status quo is not going to survive the end of scarcity.
I mostly agree.I don’t see sovereign nations being conducive to reshuffling real estate so most of Earth can be preserved. Stopping things like the Amazon deforestation probably but people won’t just lighten up overnight and get on draconian population density bandwagons. I think that will definitely be one of the interim crises. Material and spatial scarcity are separate from time scarcity. All of a sudden government can’t answer questions (education drugs taxes…) much like religion has had its existential relevance retreat & regroup in the past in the face of scientific culture.I agree on the last paragraph as one eventual outcome to whatever happens in between.I predict it’ll be a nicer experience for at least a large minority of people to go out and build comfortable habitats off Earth then to deal with reorganizing the stratified and calcified old world habits on Earth. Of course if too many people do that then it’ll make forever tyrants”” a self fulfilling prophecy. I can definitely see “”””old money”””” clinging to the chance to forever be “”””older money”””” than everyone else in time and space. Simultaneously refuse to change with the times when the ends of time/space/matter scarcities come”””” and also later snobbishly pretend Spacers/Martians etc as having abandoned/forfeited Earth.”””
It’s an even weirder world to have the means to give people a chance to continue living, and to not use it. It is effectively no different from condemning anyone who could have lived, to die.
It’s not a cheap single pill, but is it an intractable number of treatments whose price must be impractical? Because even the worse possible financial scenario for a one-payment price still can be mitigated to some degree by (in a perfect world) the goodwill and farsightedness of whoever/whatever produces the treatments. Just like nowadays most people cannot afford and do not pay for a house or vehicle in a single payment. Except this won’t be about luxury for one person but about creating more work-hours and insight/hour per capita because each capita potentially exists for one or more centuries instead of a few decades.
It’s an even weirder world to have the means to give people a chance to continue living and to not use it. It is effectively no different from condemning anyone who could have lived to die.
It’s not a cheap single pill but is it an intractable number of treatments whose price must be impractical?Because even the worse possible financial scenario for a one-payment price still can be mitigated to some degree by (in a perfect world) the goodwill and farsightedness of whoever/whatever produces the treatments. Just like nowadays most people cannot afford and do not pay for a house or vehicle in a single payment.Except this won’t be about luxury for one person but about creating more work-hours and insight/hour per capita because each capita potentially exists for one or more centuries instead of a few decades.
It’s an even weirder world to have the means to give people a chance to continue living, and to not use it. It is effectively no different from condemning anyone who could have lived, to die.
It’s not a cheap single pill, but is it an intractable number of treatments whose price must be impractical?
Because even the worse possible financial scenario for a one-payment price still can be mitigated to some degree by (in a perfect world) the goodwill and farsightedness of whoever/whatever produces the treatments. Just like nowadays most people cannot afford and do not pay for a house or vehicle in a single payment.
Except this won’t be about luxury for one person but about creating more work-hours and insight/hour per capita because each capita potentially exists for one or more centuries instead of a few decades.
It would be nice – I guess we’ll see.
You must imagine the future as the future, and not the present. We don’t have the same world today as we did 100 years ago. Likewise 100 years from now.
Just one aspect out of a myriad future prospects: a man’s life today is dwarfed by a multicentenarians or thousander’s life. In that time you can accomplish many times over the amount of work that an activist for human rights can today. And if you don’t, others will. Others who also live multiple centuries.
All while the rest of the state of the world evolves. For instance if AI do our labor then their labor turns our world into a work free life of leisure, basically.
*all* consequences must be accounted for, not only the scary or charming or seemingly insignificant ones.
The MrFusion/Drexler rich-rollback bit was a very long term prospect.
When you have negligible energy and matter scarcity AND negligible manufacturing scarcity, the fundamental tenets of wealthy prestige mostly evaporate. You’re left with intellectual value at best. If I can fast fab myself a diamond/graphene Lamborghini and grow my own Spa Francorchamps in my own Earth atmosphere’d habitat dome on Mars or Venus, with the whole racetrack infield and surrounding area a tasteful pastiche (human plus AI spending 100s of years of refining it, etc) of Versailles (50B$ estimated) and many more, then what’s left of the old prestige?
Even today that dymanic exists: you can’t print Versailles but you could arguably print a Lamborghini or Gucci or Mona Lisa. And if they’re molecularly identical, then what’s left to distinguish ? What’s the original’s prestige, for all practical intents and purposes?
The old status quo is not going to survive the end of scarcity.
I mostly agree.
I don’t see sovereign nations being conducive to reshuffling real estate so most of Earth can be preserved. Stopping things like the Amazon deforestation probably, but people won’t just lighten up overnight and get on draconian population density bandwagons. I think that will definitely be one of the interim crises. Material and spatial scarcity are separate from time scarcity.
All of a sudden, government can’t answer questions (education, drugs, taxes…) much like religion has had its existential relevance retreat & regroup in the past, in the face of scientific culture.
I agree on the last paragraph as one eventual outcome to whatever happens in between.
I predict it’ll be a nicer experience, for at least a large minority of people, to go out and build comfortable habitats off Earth, then to deal with reorganizing the stratified and calcified old world habits on Earth. Of course if too many people do that, then it’ll make “forever tyrants” a self fulfilling prophecy.
I can definitely see “old money” clinging to the chance to forever be “older money” than everyone else in time and space. Simultaneously refuse to change with the times when the ends of time/space/matter scarcities come, and also later snobbishly pretend Spacers/Martians etc as having abandoned/forfeited Earth.
It will be a weird world if octogenarians are expected to leave retirement and go back to work for who knows how many years… ;-( Eventually almost everyone will save will save enough to retire forever… even without things like government retirement incentives. If the AIs haven’t gotten smart enough to do our labor by then society will be in real trouble. Of course if AIs get too smart too soon then we’ll all get to die in poverty unable to afford life extension treatments. ;-(
I disagree. Stem cells is the only one that would have to be personalized. Mitochondrial genes could be personalized, but generic mitochondrial genes should be good enough. Just use the most common versions of each gene. Telomere control and suicide genes are probably universal. At most, there could be a common version that works for most people, and a few alternatives for those who aren’t compatible. Waste products are probably largely the same for most people. You really only need to clear the most common junk in the early treatments. We can get more sophisticated as the treatment costs drop. Cross-links are pretty much the same for everyone. Even if not, it’d be the same story as with telomere control and suicide genes – a common drug and a few alternatives.
In some regards the phones that you can get in the 2nd and 3rd world are better than the US. Not as thin, sure, but back in the Philippines my wife had a phone that also got radio and TV, and had an extensible whip antenna for when reception was poor.
Try getting all that in a phone here. And it had room for several SIM cards, you could switch between networks on the fly, because it wasn’t locked to one network.
The phone system here is really screwed up in some ways, because I guess we can afford for it to be screwed up.
No need to curb anything. We are already controlling population growth without coercion through economic development, education and enforcement of female rights.
In a world with a big reduction or delay on age and frailty related death, diseases and spending, there will be plenty more opportunities for the poor to get out of that state.
There will be other shorter term crises, like the collapse of all retirement schemes (they no longer work if people get to live several decades more, worse if people live for an indefinite time span ), but that’s a small price to pay for a significantly longer life.
Besides Earth has plentiful space for a lot more people to live in Western or above standard of living. We are but a speck on this planet’s surface and all our bodies and mighty works of engineering could be placed into a consequential but small region, and leave most of the planetary surface still untouched.
Therefore we won’t turn Earth into an ecumenopolis all of a sudden just because we can live more. The problems are more of territorial allocation defined by countries’ politics and history and desirability of the spots (we prefer big lively cities and towns). I think this will remain so in a future of long lived people.
But we can indeed choose to go to space, for tapping its riches and resources and out of a sense of adventure. The adventurous/entertainment part will become even more important, if we get to have several current lifetimes worth of time to live. We will probably get bored of Earth and its hyper-gentrified cities and look for bigger, newer projects.
The talk about a $10 pill has led posters here to forget that there probably will NOT be a single pill.
Of Aubrey’s 7 solutions, maybe the “waste products” and “stiffening” treatments can use generic pills anyone can take – MAYBE. Those three will likely do a lot for improved health and longevity – so they might be the “$10 pill” being discussed.
Stem cells for cell loss pretty much has to be a customized treatment for each individual, matching their needs and producing the appropriate and compatible cells. Probably not cheap, but once all the other treatments are in place it might be rarely needed.
The other three involve genetic manipulations, which may have to be customized for each individual, and even for particular cells for two of them. The mitochondrial mutation gene mods might be somewhat more generic, if we assume every cell is targeted and the same genetic patch can be applied to every person.
I wonder what the next crazy batch of theories will be once everyone does have a potential lifetime that’s doubled or more, once that lifetime coincides with the coming decades of genetic engineering and AI automation and in-space industry etc all picking up the pace like they seem to… when almost everyone lives long enough and earns more than enough to see with their own eyes that the earth isn’t flat and that they can choose anything between being a deadbeat bum content with VR/video game escapism in a cheap 1-bedroom rental forever or that they more possibly than ever in history could be living the start of a 10,000 year lifespan?
Like Aubrey de Grey says, most people are shit scared of getting their hopes and dreams up.
The latest formulation I heard was “Death, Taxes and Spam”
With the explanation that
Death is the cost of being a multicellular organism (not necessarily death by old age however)
Taxes are the cost of living in a society (may take the form of being expected to “donate” labour and resources to public works, but there will always be something)
Spam is the cost of having advanced communication technology (with the observation that even ancient pre-literate societies were filled with bards and poets telling epics that somehow always end up pushing things like the need for young men to sacrifice themselves for the king, and the story that the royal family was descended from a god.)
If you wanted to be paranoid you could assume that the powers that be don’t want the peasantry looking at this stuff. It’s already available for a 9 figure price and that’s the way they like it.
Less tinfoil-hattery suggests simple Stockholm Syndrome.
Yes, immortality is something else but that is what would shine in the eyes of the “poor man”, as $currency signs would in the creditor’s. What’s that saying about certainty in life being death and taxes? It’d be truer than ever.
That’s a good point. We expect that throwing eternal youth (not immortality, that’s another thing all together) into any society would have HUGE implications, at least equal to handing out firearms and whiskey to a stone age tribe. (An experiment that has already been performed a few times.)
After a couple of trial runs (almost certainly run in the most developed countries) you would probably have a fairly good idea of what is going to suddenly shoot up in value, and what will collapse.
Hence any large wealthy donor (corporation, billionaire individual, other country, the small wealthy minority in this country etc.) could “give free treatment” to a nation while making sure they grab some decent % of the sudden wealth reshuffle.
And yes, one major asset class that would suddenly shoot up in value enormously would be the “expected lifetime earnings of a worker”.
CMIIW, but it seems like focusing on the hole rather than the donut. Because that hole begs to be filled:
Is there no possible way (I’m laughing already) for something like the pharma industry to hook a poor man up with some kind of extended contract where said poor man will owe (hopefully only the initial part of) his extended healthspan to pharma+whatever creditor (they’re already salivating) while the poor man works whatever terms (something a bit like in bankruptcy?) e.g. going to school to make his labor more valuable.
The time frame seems ripe for profit.
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What price immortality?
They can nationalise all they like, they still can’t make it cost less than the “marginal” cost of producing the drug.
Nationalisation works if the price of the drug is much, much higher than the marginal cost of producing another pill. And this is usually the case with new drugs. It costs a billion dollars to invent the drug and get it through years of testing. (No, seriously, about a billion dollars for a new drug is the current price.) But once it’s made you can set a plant up to churn them out for $10 a dose or so. Far less if it’s a very simple chemical with well understood synthesis. eg. Aspirin, I can get a pack of 24 for $1 and they are probably making a good margin on that.
So if you ignore the $1billion as being a rich-white-male problem, then you can just make the pills for a couple of dollars each. For something fairly complex and new I think you’d be lucky to get to $10/dose, but let’s go with that.
But as Snazster points out, even at $10/day you’ve still got billions who can’t afford that. And refusing to deal with the $1billion up front cost doesn’t get rid of that manufacturing cost. Nigeria or South Africa can subsidise that price, but only by transferring money from their few wealthy citizens.
<< That would come to $3,650 dollars a year per person. Meanwhile, the median per-capita household income for the world is $2,920. That means over half the world doesn't make enough to pay for this, even if they buy nothing else and pay no taxes. >>
You’ve extrapolated only one thing, as if the world remained frozen in the mean time.
<< Coincidentally, in those countries, longer life spans would mean an economic boom, so much for overpopulation. >>
It would not make sense for other countries not to reap their economic future by sowing today the seeds of effectively un-aging population.
As you said the world is bottom heavy enough that the sheer democratization of anti-aging will not be denied. Even if it begins with some ridiculous economic schemes where your lifespan basically belongs to big pharma.
The point of no return for anti-aging happens relatively very quickly. It may or may not be soon for us, but it most likely doesn’t happen after a relatively long time of denying it to the majority of humanity.
The rich will have their prestige significantly rolled back when everyone has (for the sake of brevity) their Drexler and Mr Fusion. If you can live hundreds or thousands of years, then you have enough time for that Drexler/Fusion tool to build you more luxury than absolutely anyone previously in history has ever had.
The scarcity of space will remain, but only in the sense that it will inverse-scale in proportion to the expansion of people out into space and the astronomical amount of virgin real estate to be had. A transitory period where birthrate is artificially curbed, until we manage to make off-Earth real estate an ordinary thing, is a small price to pay — effectively you merely displace the time you would’ve had now, to a few decades into the future; just an exercise in deferral.
It only is vaporware while we figure out interplanetary and interstellar travel, but when that calculation is recalibrated to the scale of hundreds/thousands year human lifetimes it is kind of a self-evident truth.
Then, why would someone really care if Earth was the original Eden? When they have their own effectively infinitely reconfigurable parcel of space and matter, possibly the size of a province or country today.
The scarcity of culture is arguably all-but-completely behind the horizon of AI, genetic engineering (what is the meaning of life when pleasure and every other sensation is arbitrarily controlled?) etc.
It kind of sounds like there’s a lot of assumptions under that assertion.
One point of no return for mass availability will be as soon as people realize that it exists and that it exists within the same budgetary reality as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid : just a few percent of those would probably dwarf even the highest realistic hopes for near/medium term funding that de Grey & co would imagine right now.
Because there’s no chance that SS, Medicare and Medicaid will be voted to negligible proportions (IOW to proportions as low as anti aging’s current funding), it follows that there’s no chance people will vote against antiaging therapies in large enough numbers that it doesn’t become at the very least affordable to anyone who wants it.
Because the national discourse would have to reach double speak and double think levels beyond even today’s, for the sheer contradiction to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness” not to wake almost everyone from their pro-aging trance. Instead of “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia”, it would be “we’ve always been condemned to suffer old age at 75”.
Not only does involuntary aging completely upend human culture and society as we’ve known it, it likely bridges us to the other end of scarcity – the effective negligible level of material scarcity that’s somewhere in the next 50-100 years due to automation, material science, etc. In that sense it’s wrong to say anti-aging technology will never democratize because those “unknown but important jobs” are not for much longer.
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Many lies have worked as crowd controlling opium of the masses, and the inevitability of scarcity of time and matter/energy are arguably the all-time worst and largest of those lies. It’s not hard to imagine people a few centuries from now will look at pro-aging period of humanity as fairly barbaric.
100,000’s of people dying every day, unnecessarily; most of them against their will or even against the knowledge that they could have lived far longer. You could go as far even, as arguing that if genocides like WWII’s were the manifestation of evil in action, then the tragedy of 100,000 people/day * 365 d/yr * 10 yr/each decade, all deprived of the life they may have wanted, that evil though it may be of inaction and ignorance, is nonetheless much greater.
“how will they react facing this horrible injustice?”
What ‘injustice’? Property rights are not an ‘injustice’. Particularly when the poor have suffered far more when state-led assaults on property rights were in effect, i.e. Communism.
Nation-states reserve the right to ‘nationalize’ pharma IP if they see fit. I think South Africa did or at least threatened to so that with HIV treatment drugs back when they were expensive.
Death rate by accidents isn’t going to suddenly jump if longevity is increased. There may be a small increase as people may be more inclined to take risks, but other improvements in medicine and safety may counter that.
More relevant is birth rate vs death rate. Even if death rate is brought to zero, it will take 38 years for the population to double at current birth rates, compared to 66 years with today’s death and birth rates – if I remember the numbers correctly. But increased longevity is likely to cause a drop in birth rate, so the actual difference may well be smaller.
Furthermore, there a lot more resources than most people realize (I can elaborate, but it’ll get long). “Over”population is a problem of management, not numbers.
Conceivably, the cheaper/cheapest price option could be ten dollars. Just pointing out that not every new thing is always in reach of everyone and that even a modest cost for longevity might seriously reduce overpopulation concerns stemming from it, regardless of how anyone feels about that, good, bad, or indifferent. The way this prescription stuff works though, yes, it would probably cost more for folks in the US than anywhere else. That was me making a comment addressing people who wave their hands in the air and shriek about overpopulation at the first mention of extreme longevity.
Then there are those who are worried about a future where, with the reset button never getting pushed on the ultra-rich, and they just get richer and richer, at the expense of everyone else. That’s a legitimate concern, so far as I can tell, but, to some degree or another, its been dealt with over and over again since the dawn of civilization, although not always in a tidy efficient manner.
Oh no, the poor won’t be able to afford iPhones, how will they react facing this horrible injustice?
Well, they mostly won’t have to face it. They can get them even if they are used/refurbished ones and they have cheaper options too.
If it’s as expensive as you say for the poor, they will probably get watered down versions of it from public sources or cheaper channels, or the poorer countries will simply steal the intellectual property and copy it, given life is demonstrably more important than any mega-corporations profit.
My hunch is that a lot more people than just those able to pay the patented version in the West would get it, as long as a cure for aging exists.
Besides there will be strong market pressure to make it cheaper quickly, because once one approach is tested, several others copying it or imitating it will emerge.
In the end, the scarcity will come to pass, with a period of adjustment when we go from having it from a single expensive source, to have it from many cheaper ones.
Say the price is as low as ten dollars a day. Maybe a single pill you take. That’s like a couple of coffees at Starbucks. I’d buy one for everyone I love (and another for myself). That would come to $3,650 dollars a year per person. Meanwhile, the median per-capita household income for the world is $2,920. That means over half the world doesn’t make enough to pay for this, even if they buy nothing else and pay no taxes. In fact, there are only about 15 to 20 countries where you could expect to see the rank-and-file being able to afford this (you can probably figure out which ones without even looking). Coincidentally, in those countries, longer life spans would mean an economic boom, so much for overpopulation.
In many other countries, only the elite would be able to afford this. Would the populace in such a country allow these long-lived super-privileged people to exist so far above their own meager station? Probably. It’s not much of a stretch from the situation that already obtains. On the other hand, too much income inequality (like too much income equality) tends to eventually result in extreme social disorder.
Perhaps more to the point, even if you eliminate aging entirely, people don’t live forever. They just die by accident, instead.
Living longer does not mean that over population will happen. We will never have this technology for the masses until the ones in control of this new technology realize that they cannot have all that they have without everyone else doing their unknown but important jobs.
It’s remarkable how many comments on youtube (ostensibly average mainstream population) are still at the “immortal tyrants” and “instant overpopulation” stage.