4 ms·

it's good to see billionaires putting money into health moonshots (vs real moonshots). Helps so many more people.

itg 5y ago
TBH, the research produced from unrelated moonshots help out in many different areas.
metalliqaz 5y ago
If immortality was somehow cracked, it would cause the end of civilization if it became available to everyone. Imagine the population of Earth ballooning to 12+ billion. Instead, it would be kept for the billionaires. Imagine the staggering inequality of 180-year-old trillionaires and their kin, that never ever relinquish their hordes. It's straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia. (Tessier-Ashpool comes to mind)
- onemoresoop 5y ago
  That sounds terrifying. Imagine a 5 century reign by one and the same dictator. Can't think of too many positives for this scenario.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- marstall 5y ago
  would you rather face that - or death?
  - metalliqaz 5y ago
    I would face death in both scenarios. I prefer the scenario where the ultra elite also face death.
- est31 5y ago
  One could imagine a societal model where the number of children is restricted instead of access to life prolonging technology. So to target a stable population, you'd allow people to have only as many children as people have died in the last couple of years. It's doable, we already had societies that deployed such restrictions on a scale similar to the global human population. Whether it should be done is another question, as many people criticize the issue of the state policing procreation.
- sfink 5y ago
  We're accustomed to thinking about the population boom, but the derivative looks like it peaked just before 1970 and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of it continuing to fall below 0%. While I personally feel that that's probably a good thing in the short term, in the longer term we will probably want to decrease the negative side of the population equation more than we want to increase the positive side. That may be particularly true for billionaires, who profit off of a growth engine that is going to be under serious pressure once the population starts dropping for real. Increasing life span (in particular increasing the span of life not dominated by illness) could balance out quite a bit of declining fertility rate. And I for one think that if fertility became more dominated the people who want to be fertile, it would be a Good Thing. I'm not going to worry about immortality, because I think it's still very very far out. Which means your trillionaires are about generational wealth. Generational wealth is lost by the first generation 70% of the time, by the second 90% of the time. It's not that big of a thing. I'm just not too worried that 110 years of healthy life is going to tip the balance too far. It'll slow down progress some ("X advances one funeral at a time"), and we'll massively screw things up for a while, but long term it seems good to me.

itg 5y ago

TBH, the research produced from unrelated moonshots help out in many different areas.

If immortality was somehow cracked, it would cause the end of civilization if it became available to everyone. Imagine the population of Earth ballooning to 12+ billion. Instead, it would be kept for the billionaires. Imagine the staggering inequality of 180-year-old trillionaires and their kin, that never ever relinquish their hordes. It's straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia. (Tessier-Ashpool comes to mind)

onemoresoop 5y ago
That sounds terrifying. Imagine a 5 century reign by one and the same dictator. Can't think of too many positives for this scenario.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marstall 5y ago
would you rather face that - or death?
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  I would face death in both scenarios. I prefer the scenario where the ultra elite also face death.
est31 5y ago
One could imagine a societal model where the number of children is restricted instead of access to life prolonging technology. So to target a stable population, you'd allow people to have only as many children as people have died in the last couple of years. It's doable, we already had societies that deployed such restrictions on a scale similar to the global human population. Whether it should be done is another question, as many people criticize the issue of the state policing procreation.
sfink 5y ago
We're accustomed to thinking about the population boom, but the derivative looks like it peaked just before 1970 and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of it continuing to fall below 0%. While I personally feel that that's probably a good thing in the short term, in the longer term we will probably want to decrease the negative side of the population equation more than we want to increase the positive side. That may be particularly true for billionaires, who profit off of a growth engine that is going to be under serious pressure once the population starts dropping for real. Increasing life span (in particular increasing the span of life not dominated by illness) could balance out quite a bit of declining fertility rate. And I for one think that if fertility became more dominated the people who want to be fertile, it would be a Good Thing. I'm not going to worry about immortality, because I think it's still very very far out. Which means your trillionaires are about generational wealth. Generational wealth is lost by the first generation 70% of the time, by the second 90% of the time. It's not that big of a thing. I'm just not too worried that 110 years of healthy life is going to tip the balance too far. It'll slow down progress some ("X advances one funeral at a time"), and we'll massively screw things up for a while, but long term it seems good to me.