18 ms·

What if we could live for a million years?

36 points by egfx 6y ago

ardy42 6y ago
> What would change if we could live for even just a million years? ... First, tenure in academia would have to be capped. Universities would have to limit faculty appointments to a century at most in order to refresh their talent pool and mitigate old-fashioned education and research dogmas.... > An extended life experience could make us wiser and more risk-averse since there is much more at stake.... > Increasing our fertility period in proportion to our life span will bring the risk of overpopulating Earth. With the current birth rate per person, the number of million-year-old people could increase to the untenable level of a hundred trillion. Moderating that would require a public policy that limits the birth rate to the desired level. So basically, social ossification and stasis. You'll also have voters who made up their minds on all the political and social issues half-million years ago, and see no reason to change their minds (just like you have people who did the same a half-century ago). I think any kind of extreme longevity scenario will result either ossification or a re-invention of death under another name (e.g. a memory reset). A finite thing can only go on forever by settling into some kind of repetitive cycle, otherwise it will quickly exhaust its memory.
peter303 6y ago
You'd have a 50-50 chance of dying from an accident in 960 years in current US society. My guess is government would get more serious about safety if we live less than percent of our lifespan.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  We'd be so cautious we'd never leave our homes in the first place. When there is that much at stake any risk is going to be too much. People will call each other daring for walking across the street or leaving a window open. Also, the whole world would be owned by the few people that were there since the beginning, with them seeking rent on everybody else. You'd be hip deep in debt to the ruling class from day one. Forget about democracy in a setup like that.
  - epicureanideal 6y ago
    I see it as more hopeful than that. With a long time to think about things, I think people would cooperate to organize society better. If their lack of organization for 100s of years leads to no improvement in quality of life, eventually they'd do something about it. Also, with that much time, differences in education would smooth out, and even people who started with a small amount of resources would eventually be able to build up to financial independence, which gives labor more negotiating power.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    Brain backups are the way to maintain a healthy immortality ;)
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Or they’d install better public transit and monitor air pollution more carefully.
run2arun 6y ago
This is not a serious article. There are many topics they could have discussed in depth but the biggest miss for me is that they did not talk about human psychology. Human brains are not evolved to handle a million years of noise and notifications. There would be an incalculable amount of damage to a person's personality from all the ups and downs and vagaries of life. So many of our physiological systems and the way our consciousness works will have to change unrecognizably that the being that exists after these transformations can no longer be called human. If a thing thinks, it will be finite and want to be.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I do believe that.. to the point that I believe that we're following an emotional program and I'm quite worried that extending your biology without understanding of this side of your psyche will only lead to higher pile of people at the bottom of a bridge. I'm open to suggestion and discussion but the 20-30 shift in experience may probably be a necessary part of the parenting cycle. And I quite regret the simple and deep joy of kids. Now (as I mentioned often here) I'm not in the best moods but so far no doctor or researcher addressed how to restore this happiness to agreeable levels.
  - sp3000 6y ago
    To your first point, is it shown that people who live the longest follow this emotional program, in a way that is actually detrimental to their psyche? I am not talking about people experiencing various diseased states such as dementia and other chronic illness. Restoring in your life the same levels or type of happiness that you see in kids seems unrealistic. Not only that, there tends to be a bias towards nostalgia and how good we had it when we were younger. As I have gotten older, I have only felt a continuous trend towards more happiness in general though. I was a confused, anxious child. I feel better on every level - but that has come with a lot of work on making sure I am eating nutritiously, moving regularly (outside and in the sun), sleeping well, and leaning in towards work that I feel fulfilled doing. It also comes with fostering social relationships and cultivating a good social circle. That's what worked for me. There is a path for everyone, and there are some generalities we can make on what that looks like, but in the end it is going to be unique to the individual due to their specific circumstances and genetics.
xwdv 6y ago
If we could live a million years it would allow us to produce a better society by making ultra long investments. Looking at a century’s candlestick chart for a stock would be something like looking at a weekly chart today.
- treeman79 6y ago
  I would think society would stagnat. People in power would have time and a reason to fully solids it. Japan went through a few centuries were innovative wasn’t allowed. It was seen as a threat to the ruling class.
  - grogenaut 6y ago
    But was it stable? I don't know Japanese history very well. If it was stable (until upset by the outside) then it'd be a good example.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      Japan went through famine and social upheaval in the decades before they were forced to open up. Their economy was fundamentally broken and on the verge of collapse.
      - grogenaut 6y ago
        so "no". thanks for the followup
- coldcode 6y ago
  I think suicides would go way up. People would get bored with life after a couple hundred years. If everyone lived that long life would stagnate into a boring grayness.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    How do you know they would? Greenland sharks live for 300-500 years and they seem to enjoy eating fish well into old age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark
umvi 6y ago
You'd have Mistborn-esque tyranny with God Kings that last virtually forever (unless assassinated).
_nalply 6y ago
Death is the only sure thing. Even if we could live for billions of years, the Heat Death of the universe will eventually reap us. So we must understand and embrace Death before we massively extend our lifespan. This is only one of the many things we must do.
- epicureanideal 6y ago
  We've only known about quantum mechanics for 100 years. Let's give us another couple hundred years of investigation before we decide there's no way out of the heat death mess.
  - _nalply 6y ago
    But should we?
    - epicureanideal 6y ago
      Should we what?
stared 6y ago
> Increasing our fertility period in proportion to our life span will bring the risk of overpopulating Earth. With the current birth rate per person, the number of million-year-old people could increase to the untenable level of a hundred trillion. Moderating that would require a public policy that limits the birth rate to the desired level. Alternatively, travel ports could launch people into space to balance the birth rate and maintain a terrestrial population suitable for the available supply of food and energy. Wait, does it imply that the current population trajectory is sustainable?
- CraneWorm 6y ago
  It absolutely is.
kanobo 6y ago
This thought experiment crosses my mind everytime I read the crazy ages of the characters in the book of genesis, the obvious consequence is that space travel and technology would be the dominant science since the earth and this solar system is way too small and boring for creatures who live that long.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gherkinnn 6y ago
Bad ideas die one generation at a time. I’m all for a limited lifespan.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Not only, that death serves as a moment in time when there is some redivision of resources, and as a way of making room for the next generation(s). A million years * the per-capita-per-annum-consumption and your best contribution to society and the environment would be to jump off a bridge. Nobody would have children for fear of further dividing that meager pie. Earth's population would skyrocket.
  - epicureanideal 6y ago
    Let's worry about pushing the average lifespan to 150 before we start talking about the end of civilization. Let's increase our lifespan a little bit and see what happens, rather than theorize about it.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      150 isn't 'a little bit'. That's disruptive if there ever was something disruptive. A little bit would be to raise the average lifespan by 5 years. Prediction: all of our pension systems would collapse immediately.
      - epicureanideal 6y ago
        But that's solvable by people working longer if their health lasts longer.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  Yes, it would be interesting to know how much of progress (on racial issues, gay marriage, etc) drives from the new generation replacing the old vs people from the wrong side of history changing their minds.
- 6y ago
256lie 6y ago
Maybe something like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776
hliyan 6y ago
In the Arthur C. Clarke novel City and the Stars, human civilization has survived a billion years and human lifespans could too, theoretically. There, most humans live as long as they can until boredom overtakes them. Then then they sort of clean up their memories -- keeping only the most valuable memories and deleting the rest -- and then go into hibernation for thousands of years. Society has reached a steady state so very little changes over time, but just enough for a person to rise from hibernation and start a new life. I suspect that limits of human psychology will probably result in a society like this, if we were to ever stretch our lifespans into millions of years.
- leafboi 6y ago
  >until boredom overtakes them. What's wrong with being bored? I only live 100 years and I spend the majority of my life being bored. I want to be immortal so I can spend eternity being bored. The people who claim they don't want to be immortal because they don't want to be bored don't get human psychology... Humans generally prefer being bored over being dead, period.
  - rhn_mk1 6y ago
    I think the value of boredom is that it nudges to do something. Introspection, creativity are the best examples that come to mind. Being bored because of having literally nothing interesting left to do sounds depressive. I don't know what the novel's idea was, but this is what I would tell if I was going to write such a novel (alas, I'm not bored enough to do that).
  - Gunax 6y ago
    I don't think anyone really knows what or how people's thoughts would change if they were to live to a thousand years (or a million, whatever). Given that, I think there are probably different feelings which we all call bored. There is bored in the immediate term, bored in general, and ennui.
    - leafboi 6y ago
      That notion goes both ways. How do you know we'll be so bored that we'd give up immortality? Extrapolating from information we already have I'd say we get plenty bored with about 80 years of life... I think we'd do well with another million.
jandrese 6y ago
Imagine trying to get ahead in the company when you're behind a 500 year old middle manager that isn't going to retire for another 999,500 years? I'd think society would have a lot of trouble moving forward on issues when you don't have the great equalizer of the coffin to kill off old ideas.
- leafboi 6y ago
  Just quit. Who cares. You're stuck in this mindset of eternity under management. You're immortal. Do the vanlife for a month, Live on an island, start a business. Chill.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    This isn’t just about a work, think of the social implications when you don’t have a generational reset button, people’s minds can change and bad ideas can die out that way but more often than not they die out with the people themselves.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Just quit. Who cares. You're stuck in this mindset of eternity under management. You're immortal. Do the vanlife for a month, Live on an island, start a business. Chill. That's assuming that you're going to have the resources to live a life of leisure, just because you're immortal. I think that's likely a false assumption.
  - rabidrat 6y ago
    You're not immortal, you still need to eat and stay warm and get medical care. In fact if anything now the stakes are even higher to achieve a certain sustainable dollar amount so that you can 'retire' (i.e. live sustainably off passive income for a million years).
    - leafboi 6y ago
      Stakes are lower. More time to achieve a certain net worth. Once I reach that threshold compounding growth takes over. Two centuries is more than enough to achieve this.
acvny 6y ago
"Universities would have to limit faculty appointments to a century at most in order to refresh their talent pool and mitigate old-fashioned education and research dogmas." - has the author realized that a century to a million years is the same as 3 days to 100 years?
- Gunax 6y ago
  Anything 'lifetime' would have to be re-thought. Warranties. Sentences. Appointments.
a3n 6y ago
Euthanasia would become compulsory, like a draft, so that people who build personal power would have leverage and patronage.
tosser0001 6y ago
I've wondered what the relationship between long term interest rates and the human lifespan is. Even if you lived only, say, a thousand years, just putting a little money into some reasonably safe investment would result in enormous wealth over time. Surely if everyone did this, the amount of wealth would tend to drive down rates.
not2b 6y ago
Imagine what the world would look like if our natural life span were a million years, but people could still be killed by accidents or homicide at the same rate as today. Our attitude towards risk would almost certainly change.
z3t4 6y ago
sense of time would be very different if you was even a thousand year old. One day would feel like five minutes.
d1zzy 6y ago
I recommend people watch Ad Vitam (it's on Netflix). It shows a society where ageless/disease-free immortality has been achieved.
smusamashah 6y ago
I recommend watching "The man from earth". It's a film literally discussing this same idea. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/
me_me_me 6y ago
Look at the amount of comments from the cult of death in this thread. Making so many arguments why they so desperately want to die. Oh how meaningless and boring it would be. But given they could live 1000's of years not one would choose to end it at 80. Where does it come from? Deeply rooted pessimism? I for one couldn't be more happy to live long enough to see us take to the stars. So much happened in last 1000 years who is to say next 1000 will be boring.

36 points by egfx 6y ago

> What would change if we could live for even just a million years? ... First, tenure in academia would have to be capped. Universities would have to limit faculty appointments to a century at most in order to refresh their talent pool and mitigate old-fashioned education and research dogmas.... > An extended life experience could make us wiser and more risk-averse since there is much more at stake.... > Increasing our fertility period in proportion to our life span will bring the risk of overpopulating Earth. With the current birth rate per person, the number of million-year-old people could increase to the untenable level of a hundred trillion. Moderating that would require a public policy that limits the birth rate to the desired level. So basically, social ossification and stasis. You'll also have voters who made up their minds on all the political and social issues half-million years ago, and see no reason to change their minds (just like you have people who did the same a half-century ago). I think any kind of extreme longevity scenario will result either ossification or a re-invention of death under another name (e.g. a memory reset). A finite thing can only go on forever by settling into some kind of repetitive cycle, otherwise it will quickly exhaust its memory.

peter303 6y ago

You'd have a 50-50 chance of dying from an accident in 960 years in current US society. My guess is government would get more serious about safety if we live less than percent of our lifespan.

jacquesm 6y ago
We'd be so cautious we'd never leave our homes in the first place. When there is that much at stake any risk is going to be too much. People will call each other daring for walking across the street or leaving a window open. Also, the whole world would be owned by the few people that were there since the beginning, with them seeking rent on everybody else. You'd be hip deep in debt to the ruling class from day one. Forget about democracy in a setup like that.
- epicureanideal 6y ago
  I see it as more hopeful than that. With a long time to think about things, I think people would cooperate to organize society better. If their lack of organization for 100s of years leads to no improvement in quality of life, eventually they'd do something about it. Also, with that much time, differences in education would smooth out, and even people who started with a small amount of resources would eventually be able to build up to financial independence, which gives labor more negotiating power.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  Brain backups are the way to maintain a healthy immortality ;)
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Or they’d install better public transit and monitor air pollution more carefully.

run2arun 6y ago

This is not a serious article. There are many topics they could have discussed in depth but the biggest miss for me is that they did not talk about human psychology. Human brains are not evolved to handle a million years of noise and notifications. There would be an incalculable amount of damage to a person's personality from all the ups and downs and vagaries of life. So many of our physiological systems and the way our consciousness works will have to change unrecognizably that the being that exists after these transformations can no longer be called human. If a thing thinks, it will be finite and want to be.

agumonkey 6y ago
I do believe that.. to the point that I believe that we're following an emotional program and I'm quite worried that extending your biology without understanding of this side of your psyche will only lead to higher pile of people at the bottom of a bridge. I'm open to suggestion and discussion but the 20-30 shift in experience may probably be a necessary part of the parenting cycle. And I quite regret the simple and deep joy of kids. Now (as I mentioned often here) I'm not in the best moods but so far no doctor or researcher addressed how to restore this happiness to agreeable levels.
- sp3000 6y ago
  To your first point, is it shown that people who live the longest follow this emotional program, in a way that is actually detrimental to their psyche? I am not talking about people experiencing various diseased states such as dementia and other chronic illness. Restoring in your life the same levels or type of happiness that you see in kids seems unrealistic. Not only that, there tends to be a bias towards nostalgia and how good we had it when we were younger. As I have gotten older, I have only felt a continuous trend towards more happiness in general though. I was a confused, anxious child. I feel better on every level - but that has come with a lot of work on making sure I am eating nutritiously, moving regularly (outside and in the sun), sleeping well, and leaning in towards work that I feel fulfilled doing. It also comes with fostering social relationships and cultivating a good social circle. That's what worked for me. There is a path for everyone, and there are some generalities we can make on what that looks like, but in the end it is going to be unique to the individual due to their specific circumstances and genetics.

xwdv 6y ago

If we could live a million years it would allow us to produce a better society by making ultra long investments. Looking at a century’s candlestick chart for a stock would be something like looking at a weekly chart today.

treeman79 6y ago
I would think society would stagnat. People in power would have time and a reason to fully solids it. Japan went through a few centuries were innovative wasn’t allowed. It was seen as a threat to the ruling class.
- grogenaut 6y ago
  But was it stable? I don't know Japanese history very well. If it was stable (until upset by the outside) then it'd be a good example.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Japan went through famine and social upheaval in the decades before they were forced to open up. Their economy was fundamentally broken and on the verge of collapse.
    - grogenaut 6y ago
      so "no". thanks for the followup
coldcode 6y ago
I think suicides would go way up. People would get bored with life after a couple hundred years. If everyone lived that long life would stagnate into a boring grayness.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  How do you know they would? Greenland sharks live for 300-500 years and they seem to enjoy eating fish well into old age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark

umvi 6y ago

You'd have Mistborn-esque tyranny with God Kings that last virtually forever (unless assassinated).

_nalply 6y ago

Death is the only sure thing. Even if we could live for billions of years, the Heat Death of the universe will eventually reap us. So we must understand and embrace Death before we massively extend our lifespan. This is only one of the many things we must do.

epicureanideal 6y ago
We've only known about quantum mechanics for 100 years. Let's give us another couple hundred years of investigation before we decide there's no way out of the heat death mess.
- _nalply 6y ago
  But should we?
  - epicureanideal 6y ago
    Should we what?

stared 6y ago

> Increasing our fertility period in proportion to our life span will bring the risk of overpopulating Earth. With the current birth rate per person, the number of million-year-old people could increase to the untenable level of a hundred trillion. Moderating that would require a public policy that limits the birth rate to the desired level. Alternatively, travel ports could launch people into space to balance the birth rate and maintain a terrestrial population suitable for the available supply of food and energy. Wait, does it imply that the current population trajectory is sustainable?

CraneWorm 6y ago
It absolutely is.

kanobo 6y ago

This thought experiment crosses my mind everytime I read the crazy ages of the characters in the book of genesis, the obvious consequence is that space travel and technology would be the dominant science since the earth and this solar system is way too small and boring for creatures who live that long.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gherkinnn 6y ago

Bad ideas die one generation at a time. I’m all for a limited lifespan.

jacquesm 6y ago
Not only, that death serves as a moment in time when there is some redivision of resources, and as a way of making room for the next generation(s). A million years * the per-capita-per-annum-consumption and your best contribution to society and the environment would be to jump off a bridge. Nobody would have children for fear of further dividing that meager pie. Earth's population would skyrocket.
- epicureanideal 6y ago
  Let's worry about pushing the average lifespan to 150 before we start talking about the end of civilization. Let's increase our lifespan a little bit and see what happens, rather than theorize about it.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    150 isn't 'a little bit'. That's disruptive if there ever was something disruptive. A little bit would be to raise the average lifespan by 5 years. Prediction: all of our pension systems would collapse immediately.
    - epicureanideal 6y ago
      But that's solvable by people working longer if their health lasts longer.
jtsiskin 6y ago
Yes, it would be interesting to know how much of progress (on racial issues, gay marriage, etc) drives from the new generation replacing the old vs people from the wrong side of history changing their minds.
6y ago

256lie 6y ago

Maybe something like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776

hliyan 6y ago

In the Arthur C. Clarke novel City and the Stars, human civilization has survived a billion years and human lifespans could too, theoretically. There, most humans live as long as they can until boredom overtakes them. Then then they sort of clean up their memories -- keeping only the most valuable memories and deleting the rest -- and then go into hibernation for thousands of years. Society has reached a steady state so very little changes over time, but just enough for a person to rise from hibernation and start a new life. I suspect that limits of human psychology will probably result in a society like this, if we were to ever stretch our lifespans into millions of years.

leafboi 6y ago
>until boredom overtakes them. What's wrong with being bored? I only live 100 years and I spend the majority of my life being bored. I want to be immortal so I can spend eternity being bored. The people who claim they don't want to be immortal because they don't want to be bored don't get human psychology... Humans generally prefer being bored over being dead, period.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  I think the value of boredom is that it nudges to do something. Introspection, creativity are the best examples that come to mind. Being bored because of having literally nothing interesting left to do sounds depressive. I don't know what the novel's idea was, but this is what I would tell if I was going to write such a novel (alas, I'm not bored enough to do that).
- Gunax 6y ago
  I don't think anyone really knows what or how people's thoughts would change if they were to live to a thousand years (or a million, whatever). Given that, I think there are probably different feelings which we all call bored. There is bored in the immediate term, bored in general, and ennui.
  - leafboi 6y ago
    That notion goes both ways. How do you know we'll be so bored that we'd give up immortality? Extrapolating from information we already have I'd say we get plenty bored with about 80 years of life... I think we'd do well with another million.

jandrese 6y ago

Imagine trying to get ahead in the company when you're behind a 500 year old middle manager that isn't going to retire for another 999,500 years? I'd think society would have a lot of trouble moving forward on issues when you don't have the great equalizer of the coffin to kill off old ideas.

leafboi 6y ago
Just quit. Who cares. You're stuck in this mindset of eternity under management. You're immortal. Do the vanlife for a month, Live on an island, start a business. Chill.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  This isn’t just about a work, think of the social implications when you don’t have a generational reset button, people’s minds can change and bad ideas can die out that way but more often than not they die out with the people themselves.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Just quit. Who cares. You're stuck in this mindset of eternity under management. You're immortal. Do the vanlife for a month, Live on an island, start a business. Chill. That's assuming that you're going to have the resources to live a life of leisure, just because you're immortal. I think that's likely a false assumption.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  You're not immortal, you still need to eat and stay warm and get medical care. In fact if anything now the stakes are even higher to achieve a certain sustainable dollar amount so that you can 'retire' (i.e. live sustainably off passive income for a million years).
  - leafboi 6y ago
    Stakes are lower. More time to achieve a certain net worth. Once I reach that threshold compounding growth takes over. Two centuries is more than enough to achieve this.

acvny 6y ago

"Universities would have to limit faculty appointments to a century at most in order to refresh their talent pool and mitigate old-fashioned education and research dogmas." - has the author realized that a century to a million years is the same as 3 days to 100 years?

Gunax 6y ago
Anything 'lifetime' would have to be re-thought. Warranties. Sentences. Appointments.

a3n 6y ago

Euthanasia would become compulsory, like a draft, so that people who build personal power would have leverage and patronage.

tosser0001 6y ago

I've wondered what the relationship between long term interest rates and the human lifespan is. Even if you lived only, say, a thousand years, just putting a little money into some reasonably safe investment would result in enormous wealth over time. Surely if everyone did this, the amount of wealth would tend to drive down rates.

not2b 6y ago

Imagine what the world would look like if our natural life span were a million years, but people could still be killed by accidents or homicide at the same rate as today. Our attitude towards risk would almost certainly change.

z3t4 6y ago

sense of time would be very different if you was even a thousand year old. One day would feel like five minutes.

d1zzy 6y ago

I recommend people watch Ad Vitam (it's on Netflix). It shows a society where ageless/disease-free immortality has been achieved.

smusamashah 6y ago

I recommend watching "The man from earth". It's a film literally discussing this same idea. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/

me_me_me 6y ago

Look at the amount of comments from the cult of death in this thread. Making so many arguments why they so desperately want to die. Oh how meaningless and boring it would be. But given they could live 1000's of years not one would choose to end it at 80. Where does it come from? Deeply rooted pessimism? I for one couldn't be more happy to live long enough to see us take to the stars. So much happened in last 1000 years who is to say next 1000 will be boring.