My friend’s daughter is doing a project on biological immortality. It would be great if you could help her by answering a short survey.
She writes:
"This is a part of the primary research for my EPQ, titled: “To what extent does telomere biology hold the key to achieving biological immortality?”
By completing this form, you will be helping me to gather data for the second half of my project, which involves an evaluation of public understanding and perspectives on biological immortality. The results will be analysed and used as a source of information for my final dissertation."
I filled it out, but let’s discuss in the comments because filling out a one sided form isn’t as fun as being able to have a multi sided discussion.
I personally find biological immortality super appealing. Despite the word “immortality” in it, it actually just means you can live as long as you want, which takes away many of the downsides to immortality that often get discussed. Since I’m not religious, I don’t believe in any kind of afterlife, so scientific advancement letting me live longer is the only way I can avoid death (which I’m afraid of). And more than just avoiding death, I want to avoid being a frail senior whose quality of life is severely diminished.
That said, for me, I ranked the positive advancements with the disease prevention, medical advancement, and QoL above simply extending human life. I think these all do of course go hand in hand. But fewer people dying young is better than fewer people dying old. Dying young is really tragic, because there’s so much of life you won’t have experienced. Similarly, the big issue with growing old is age related diseases, which impact your quality of life. At a certain point, Alzheimer’s and dementia seem worse than death. I feel conflicted because I don’t want to die but if I had a disease like one of those, it seems like I’d no longer be myself and it’s unlikely there’s any hope for recovery before the disease eventually kills me. There’s also the fear that perhaps I would be myself, but feel trapped inside a body, constantly confused and afraid by what’s going on, which sounds horrible.
On the negative impact side, by far my biggest concern is imbalance in access to this immortality. My fear is that regular folks (including myself) won’t have access but billionaires will. That’s worse than not having immortality, since billionaires are generally terrible people and not who we want living longer. Overpopulation is a bit of a concern, but one that I think we can eventually solve. e.g., with social changes to expectations about having kids, automation improvements to reduce our need for people to work, and eventually moving beyond just living on the surface of earth. Wealthy nations already have a declining birth rate, anyway. As well, I’m a bit skeptical about true biological immortality, as opposed to, say, extending life on earth for a good chunk of time, but eventually moving to a digital afterlife, where overpopulation is less of a concern.
I didn’t know how to answer the regulation question. I think most things need some level of regulation, but the options were “strict regulation” vs “unrestricted”, neither which sound right to me. As well, regulation would likely be completely situational. e.g., obviously safety is a vital part of any form of medical treatment. We shouldn’t be reducing any existing regulation there. But I certainly don’t want research into the area to be unnecessarily held back. For a large part, I see this as no different from researching a cure for any other disease. Aging can be viewed as a disease.
A negative impact I think you lightly touched upon but want to further expand upon is how will this affect social change in this country. Like lets imagine we go back and say somehow we as humanity discovery this biological immortality around 1886ish (this is going to be very Americancentric) and again lets abstract this and say its given to everyone even though that is unrealistic. I don’t think we as a society would have made much progress in terms of rights for women and minorities if we had the lead weight of these god damn fossils outdated view points (their children sort of prove that with the whole bullshit of the daughters of the confederacy and the impact they had in the last 100 years). Hell that is a problem even in the modern world, where our politicians are ancient people in their bloody 50-70s, like congress’ median age is 58, some of the most active voters are also the elderly. So we see this problem in the current world and it will only get worse if people had immortality. This doesn’t even talk about the idea of the impact this will have on the economy, the idea of retiring is already a foreign concept to many people in this modern world and once again this problem gets worse with immortality since you are literally going to be forced to work till you die.
Like immortality is cool as a concept when its only given to you and a few people you want to select but it gets bloody messy once its a thing that can be handed out willy nilly. It can apply to many concepts like the idea that humans no longer have to sleep, bloody awesome when its only a select few people but once its the norm and seen as the standard it will affect so many different aspects of life. “Well you don’t have to sleep Johnson so work for 16 hours or you will get shitcanned because I will find someone who will!”.
The change has already begun. Today in conversations about how it will impact us and tomorrow how we’ll actually deal with it but I believe it’s arrival is imminent.
We have to see beyond our current problems. Look further down the road.
Social upheaval and massive changes, absolutely. Something comes after that though. An immortal being would seem to be far more concerned about the world we live in than a recent news station saying something like “why take care of the earth when we have heaven?”
You do have a great point about those fossils and outdated viewpoints but it’s a massive generational social construct built off of generations of life existing in the way it has for millions of years. It is changing in more ways than just immortality though. We’re already on the bleeding edge of replacing people with AI (wendys drive through) and it will grow.
Put it all together and you have robot/ai workers to fill most of the slots people currently work along with immortality, advances in every field of science… So much is changing so fast. Faster than it’s ever changed.
Ok, I apologize for my jumbled not very connected or well thought out response but my imagination is over caffeinated.
Agree. I added something like that in the “other negatives” box. There’s that saying, society advances one funeral at a time.
I like to think that myself, I’m very good at being open minded and adapting to the times (though honestly only time will tell). But I know many people don’t do that. This is clearly evident in electoral polling as well as polls for social issues (eg, US 2023 support for same sex marriage is 89% among 18-29 but only 60% among 65 and older).
Perhaps social changes could help with this problem. Clearly older folks can still change because the stat I just quoted was far worse in the not too distant past. Maybe our problems are with how we run news media or how we basically write off old folks as unlikely to change. Maybe it’s because our society focuses on education being something you only do when young and you’re never really expected to go back to school after that. Maybe we need to better teach empathy from a young age? Maybe us losing religion will make the biggest difference.
Maybe we don’t deserve this kinda advancement yet. To quote one of my favourite parts from the show The Orville:
Also super appealing. Achieving this advancement will be our first step in exploring the universe. Seeing as we’ve as yet found no others, it falls on us to become the “precursors”
The prospect of getting older - now that I’m older - and running out of time, ability or mental sharpness has had a negative impact on me in the last couple years.
There are so many things I still want to do, try, and create. Some of which I have a lot of regrets that I haven’t done yet. Some of which I fear I’ve grown too old to accomplish.
I’d really like to live a lot longer. Now, fear of death, running out of time and my body and mind degrading have established a firm purchase on part of my mind.
What I’d love to be able to do is survive the trip to another planet and spend a couple decades researching and exploring the local flora/fauna.
I agree that billionaires will own it but… advanced tools like the crispr are available to almost anyone today and as science progress is posted and talked about, I think there will be a lot of people that can duplicate the work.
The medical side to things is definitely a huge step up. On a personal side, I think it would be cool to be able to actually witness history as it’s being made. Sure, we already are, but there’s going to be so much more. I’m a big fan of horror, and one discussion I’ve has more than once with people is “Would you become a vampire if given the chance?” And while the whole drinking blood thing is a turn off, there is the idea of getting to see humanity evolve. If anything, I almost would rather have had that option earlier. Getting to see everything from the mid 1800s to now would be perfect. But they say there’s no better time than the present, so I guess if given the chance, I would actually consider going the immortal route to see everything.
But the whole financial factor is also the big thing that makes me really question if I could support it. We are already seeing how fucked capitalism can be. And since it would likely only be for the rich for awhile, it would mean they can just take even longer to set up a world for them even more than it already is. Eventually they might start to offer it to us, but it would be more so for working purposes. Line Bezos will provide it to people for free… as long as they work for him. But once they quit, they no longer have it available. So either work 60 hours a week minimum for Amazon, or you don’t get to be immortal.
I agree there’s a lot of interesting things to discuss about this topic. It can hardly be contained in a short survey like this.
For the additional thoughts I put:
Positive: Selfish human thinking restricts most people to considering only how their actions will impact the world within their lifetime. The potential for living hundreds or thousands of years could allow people to think more long term about their actions. Very few things are persued in the 50-year time span, let alone planning for something that could take 200 years.
Negative: People may be much less willing to take risks. If the only things that can kill you are possible to avoid entirely, wouldn’t you?
I hadn’t considered how bad the unequal access could be in the way that you talked about. I was thinking it would be one of those things like advanced cancer treatments, for example, that the mega-rich get access to when it is first developed and then within a few years to decades it becomes the standard of care. What I didn’t consider is that whatever the breakthrough is that allows immortality may need to be near-constantly applied for it to work. Almost like a potion of immortality that lasts only weeks. Even if the cost of the treatment is lowered very quickly it’s not likely it will be something as simple as insulin for treating diabetes or aspirin for treating blood pressure. It could take decades for it to become affordable for the upper class and may never become economical to give to everyone. Having a class of people who die of old age and a class who doesn’t is some super dystopian cyberpunk type shit.