3 ms·

Fair enough, I'll refer to his most salient point: A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian. So

Fair enough, I'll refer to his most salient point: A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian. So if life extension technology gets implemented with something like mRNA technology, then it seems like that would have to be balanced out by higher birthrates.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Personally, I think that artificial wombs will be operational before widespread aging reversal.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
We don't need to worry about mRNA vaccines doing this. You'd need to actually reverse aging. Stopping diseases one by one will never work. They're simply not preventable in the long term. The population dynamics of such a situation would be dwarfed, imo, by the political and wealth inequality problems. Society is structured firmly around an average human lifespan.
- programmarchy 5y ago
  Just to clarify, I didn't mean mRNA technology in the sense of vaccines, but rather gene therapy techniques that could reverse or slow down aging processes. Like the top post in this thread mentioned, there are new mRNA medicines coming out to treat cancer, for example, and if that pans out and the technology is really up and running then I imagine things like life extension would be on the table.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Nah don't get your hopes up. "Treat a cancer" is very different from a general cure for cancer, which is simply never going to be possible with a generic injection or anything like that. These approaches will fundamentally ever work. Life extension in the sense of average lifespan marginally increasing is possible, but in the sense of reducing aging is a very very different problem.
long_time_gone 5y ago
==A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian.== Using the word "enslaved" will successfully paint anything as a dystopian future, that doesn't mean it is the inevitable path of mRNA vaccines. If we have life-extension technology, maybe people will start having more kids, maybe twins/triplets will become more common, maybe the poorest countries will never achieve the technology, nobody knows. Maybe this puts some context around it. The first nuclear power plant came online in 1951. 70 years later, only 32 countries have nuclear power plants and the content of Africa has 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

inglor_cz 5y ago

Personally, I think that artificial wombs will be operational before widespread aging reversal.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

We don't need to worry about mRNA vaccines doing this. You'd need to actually reverse aging. Stopping diseases one by one will never work. They're simply not preventable in the long term. The population dynamics of such a situation would be dwarfed, imo, by the political and wealth inequality problems. Society is structured firmly around an average human lifespan.

programmarchy 5y ago
Just to clarify, I didn't mean mRNA technology in the sense of vaccines, but rather gene therapy techniques that could reverse or slow down aging processes. Like the top post in this thread mentioned, there are new mRNA medicines coming out to treat cancer, for example, and if that pans out and the technology is really up and running then I imagine things like life extension would be on the table.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Nah don't get your hopes up. "Treat a cancer" is very different from a general cure for cancer, which is simply never going to be possible with a generic injection or anything like that. These approaches will fundamentally ever work. Life extension in the sense of average lifespan marginally increasing is possible, but in the sense of reducing aging is a very very different problem.

long_time_gone 5y ago

==A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian.== Using the word "enslaved" will successfully paint anything as a dystopian future, that doesn't mean it is the inevitable path of mRNA vaccines. If we have life-extension technology, maybe people will start having more kids, maybe twins/triplets will become more common, maybe the poorest countries will never achieve the technology, nobody knows. Maybe this puts some context around it. The first nuclear power plant came online in 1951. 70 years later, only 32 countries have nuclear power plants and the content of Africa has 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country