Advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology will extend human life, but overpopulation is a concern. Life extension advocates argue for responsible reproduction and better resource management, while bioconservatives and environmentalists are skeptical. Some argue that immortality would eliminate the meaning of life, while others suggest intelligence enhancement as a solution to boredom.
In the coming decades, advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology will provide us with new and effective therapies for radical extension of human life. Over the last century or so, human life expectancy has increased by an average of a quarter of a year per year, and this trend is almost certain to accelerate in the future. There is enormous financial support for technology that demonstrably extends human life or improves its quality. With the inevitability of better anti-aging technology, both bioconservatives and life extension advocates have begun to look into the potential issues that come with living a longer, healthier life. Of course, the most frequent objection in life extension discussions is overpopulation.
Before we get into the objections, note this: Given enough resources, humans reproduce exponentially. That is, the population doubles at any given time interval. Currently this range is about 34 years.
The amount of resources we can accumulate is bounded by three dimensions, meaning that our resource growth is at best a cubic function. If you plot an exponential function versus a cubic function on a graph, you’ll see that exponentials always overwhelm such functions given enough time. The bottom line is that, even with short life spans, organisms are simply designed to reproduce rapidly and consume all local resources faster than new resources can be acquired. This means that, with or without life extension, the birth rate must be kept low enough that resources are not exhausted before more can be acquired.
People like Leon Kass and Bill McKibben have argued that radical life extension would eliminate the meaning of life. The finiteness of life is supposed to give it meaning and a clear beginning, middle and end. It maintains the necessary social roles of young people, middle-aged people and the elderly. At the BBC, one commentator even went as far as to say that extreme life extension would ruin Christmas.
Overpopulation is a widespread concern. Environmentalists are particularly concerned about the human footprint on our fragile biosphere. Life extension advocates point to declining birth rates around the world, noting that as women are better educated and manual labor becomes less important, parents are focusing on quality over quantity. They point out that we will inevitably have to move to a world where we reproduce responsibly and have only as many children as the social infrastructure can support. Technological improvements would also allow us to make better use of limited resources and support our expansion into space.
Bioconservatives and environmentalists are not so optimistic. They see renewable energy and popular space travel as future advances, solutions that won’t arrive until it’s too late. Some even argue that the “resource wars” have already begun and that we are irreversibly headed for a Malthusian catastrophe.
Another common objection is that as immortals we would be bored. Of course, there are plenty of people who argue against this, citing hundreds or even thousands of years of experiences they wish they had given the opportunity. Some transhumanists see intelligence enhancement as the solution to boredom. They say that if we were smarter, we could support a wider and more complex variety of thoughts and observations that would sustain our interest almost indefinitely.
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