5 ms·
Immortality == the end of childhood. Yes, I'm referencing the title of the novel, Childhood's End. But it's true. If we lived 1,000 years, we couldn't have t
by cryptonector 7y ago
Immortality == the end of childhood.
Yes, I'm referencing the title of the novel, Childhood's End. But it's true. If we lived 1,000 years, we couldn't have two children per-woman every 40 years -- we could only have two children per-woman every 1,000 years. That would yield a minuscule number of children at any time. A life expectancy of 1,000 years would require finding a way to extend fertility from ~35 years, otherwise many opportunities to reproduce would be missed completely and fertility would drop well below replacement rate, furthering the end of childhood.
No, we can have immortality, or we can have children, but not both.
I can't imagine a life without children. So I choose mortality. I want to die (in time) so that my children may have children. And my children too will have to die (in time). It's just how it has to be.
But we can talk about what would be a good life expectancy. 200 years would be fine, provided the first 160 of them one could have a young body and mind. And provided we can find a way to not get too bored :) Even 1,000 would be fine provided our bodies and minds stayed young for 850+ of those 1,000. In any case, I don't want to live 120 of 200 years in an old people's home.. Who would?!
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- catbird 7y agoWow. That was beautiful. I just spent the last couple hours reading through it. Being stuck in my house looking at the world through a screen, I can empathize with that little trashcan hurtling through space. Thanks for sharing.
- rowanG077 7y agoHuh that doesn't seem true at all. Even if you lower the amount of children 20 times then there still would be hundreds of thousands of them in the US. This doesn't seem like a problem at all. Actually it would be a blessing since those children could receive way better education compared to now.
- cryptonector 7y agoThere would hardly be any playgrounds or schools even.
- rowanG077 7y agoThere would be but 20 times less then now. For instance New York has over 1500 playgrounds. That would become 75. I wouldn't call that hardly any. I can't easily find the number but I bet there are far less Apple stores in NY for instance. And I wouldn't say there are hardly any of them. Besides imagine the godly playgrounds we could build of we had 20x the budget for each one.
- jonshariat 7y agoI don't follow. How would it be any different than today? The children a woman has, will in turn have children. So the rate of births would be exactly the same as it is now. The only difference is people would not die as quickly.
- cryptonector 7y agoFertility would stabilize around replacement rate once life expectancy stabilized too. The number of children in a population would still go down though, as for any one woman's 1,000 year lifetime, there would be two children. Unless, of course, you mean that people who live to 1,000 would be children (immature) until they reached 180 years of age. I.e., just scale our perception of time along with our life expectancy. But merely scaling time isn't interesting. People who want to live forever want to live forever as adults.
- xwdv 7y agoAs adults frozen at about 25 years of age. Basically children. No one wants to be a decrepit old immortal man.
- cryptonector 7y agoRight. But now we're talking about two very difficult to achieve things.
- psandersen 7y agoSo people who choose not to have kids can have immortality? ;) It would be pretty unethical to prevent people from getting the best available medical treatment just so there are more children, on the other hand giving people a choice would have many social implications.
- cryptonector 7y agoThe way the social dynamics would work is that everyone would have to get "immortality" and the total number of children at any time would have to be much smaller than today. Real immortality would literally require having zero fertility (or else a galaxy colonization program) for obvious reasons.
- ardy42 7y ago> The way the social dynamics would work is that everyone would have to get "immortality" and the total number of children at any time would have to be much smaller than today. Real immortality would literally require having zero fertility (or else a galaxy colonization program) for obvious reasons. It depends. If by immortality you mean "each individual actually lives forever", then what you say is true. If it means "each individual could live forever," then you could have immortality and fertility... as long as you replaced death with literally murderous competition between the immortals for survival of themselves and their offspring. IIRC, that's part of the plot of The Mote in God's Eye (which has an alien society oscillating between relative peace and population-annihilating war).
- cryptonector 7y agoYes, indeed. I would define "immortality" (i.e., with the quotes, so not immortality) as the ratio of average or mean life expectancy to years-to-maturity. Today our "immortality" is ~4.4. If we lived to ~200 years with adulthood still starting at 18 we'd have an "immortality" of ~11. If we lived to 1,000 with adulthood starting at 18 then we'd have an "immortality" of 55.56. We could fix these problems by lengthening childhood by the same factor as life expectancy, but then the new thing wouldn't be very interesting.
- yters 7y agoThe religious view is the best of both worlds: immortality and children. No wonder religions are the most fecund, whereas atheism tends to sterility.
- cryptonector 7y agoI don't think one has to be religious to prefer being able to have children to immortality. FYI.
- yters 7y agosure, but it's easier
- cryptonector 7y agoIs it? I don't want to live forever in a decrepit state. And I don't want child-rearing to be 1/100th of my life. No religion needed to get to that.
- pharke 7y agoI think the main hurdle that people seem to face when conceptualizing immortality is that they assume you would want to remain static throughout your eternity of existence. That's absurd considering no one stays exactly the same person as they live their current mortal life, why would immortality be different? No, immortal humans would continue to evolve along side their culture or would choose to splinter off from it to pursue their own developmental goals. An end to death is not an end to striving and changing, it would only be the beginning.