7 ms·

Living a thousand years has some pretty interesting implications. - Things that seem safe will become dangerous. Small daily risks, such as crossing a red ligh

• patio11 18y ago
  Imagine the implications for wealth, too. If the means of life extension is not hideously expensive, then anyone past a certain age with even the smallest bit of sense will be rich beyond the dreams of mortal men. Compound interest works. This would have interesting social ramifications. As it is, most states are organized such that the old are relatively rich, the young are relatively poor, and the young's income subsidizes the old's healthcare costs. In a state with some people who are 420 and some people are 20, the Methuselah will be worth $300 million. For every dollar invested back when he was twenty.
  • Retric 18y ago
    If 20% of the population becomes mufti billionaires a billion will not buy what it used to. Compound interest works in large part because capital has value. As the world becomes rich the value of wealth will go down relative to the value of peoples effort. Basically over the extremely long term expected ROI should go down if people start living into extreme old age. Granted some people will always balance this out with the 700 year old with credit card debt keeping the people who get that interest well paid but if 60 million people are willing to lend billions the interest rate is going to be vary low. PS: What I wonder about is how the death penalty vs life in prison is going to work out. As people live longer I expect more people to commit "major" crimes and even larger groups of people to know someone that "flipped out". Will we want to punish people for mistakes they made 200 years ago or will people become so jaded that minor crimes are are just dealt with by killing the offender?
    • patio11 18y ago
      I don't know that wealth necessarily implies a lower return to capital. More people are wealthier worldwide right now than at any point in history -- the poorest American makes old European royalty like paupers. (Lives two to three times as long, too.) But what does the return on capital look like in 2008 versus 1408? It is much, much higher. People, in aggregate, have trillions to invest right now. The market finds a way to deploy it. In a society marked by superabundance for a few, the market would presumably deploy capital towards projects with enormous ROIs and entrance requirements which stagger the imagination. (Think on a sci-fi scale, except with reasons to do it other than to sell sci-fi books. Less "colonize a new planet... because we can!", more "harness a star for energy".)
      • rsheridan6 18y ago
        >But what does the return on capital look like in 2008 versus 1408? It is much, much higher. No it isn't. See table 2 here: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:K7gncYlDrYQJ:www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/prod2002.pdf+%22return+on+capital%22+1400+1500&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:K7gncYlDrYQJ:www.econ.uc... Think of it this way: there is only so much wealth being produced in the world. Increasing lifespan by itself does not increase wealth (unless it increases the proportion of people who are of working age, but at most that would less than double it). So, if a large proportion of people are going to be equivalent to today's millionaires or billionaires, where's all this wealth going to come from?
      • DaniFong 18y ago
        I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you don't sound like you know too many of the very poorest Americans. They are in debt, or completely insolvent, living a life of vagrancy, homeless, family-less, mentally disturbed, and diseased, often terminally. Kings lived lives of prestige and luxury.
        • yummyfajitas 18y ago
          The very poorest in our society are, as you note, mentally ill, addicted and diseased. Beyond those people, however, most of the poor do live quite well even in comparison to nobility of the past.
  • yummyfajitas 18y ago
    Consider investments in, e.g., a german bank in 1900. Today worth what? Over the past 1000 years, we've seen major epidemics that wiped out big chunks of the world (e.g., 95% of the population of the americas, 30% of eurasia), deranged dictators who confiscated wealth, revolutions and all sorts of total collapses of society. Over 1000 years, the risk of losing everything becomes significant.
    • JeffL 18y ago
      Hopefully one would diversify among many countries and also with some gold.
  • russell 18y ago
    Regardless of lifespan we are going to move into a post scarcity economy, where wealth won't mean what it does today. We must do it because we can already see the decline of extracted resources like oil and minerals. We will do it because we can. The internet has enabled telecommuting. Telecommuting enables the move to smaller communities where housing is cheaper. As robots get more capable they will take over the manufacturing base. I think we are closer to a post scarcity economy than we realize. The biggest big ticket item is housing. The biggest item in the cost of housing in sub/urban areas is land. If we disperse to small towns, the cost of land goes down. If housing were really low cost and we telecommuted, maybe 10 or 20 hours of work per week would meet our needs. Suppose we adopted a Peace Corps/Habitat for Humanity model. After school/college a person spent 3 years building housing, including their own? Maybe all he has to mortgage is the land and materials. Maybe not even that. Add other ideas like a robot taxi service, 3D copying machines, reasonable health care; and the need for much of the need for the credit economy would disappear. I don't view this as a socialist utopia, more a natural evolution of our current market economy. It still has lots of room for entrepreneurs (less for VCs), volunteers, and open source whatever.
    • nazgulnarsil 18y ago
      i truly hope so. wealth in a post scarcity world will revolve around experiences that people value, i.e. fun.
    • Raphael 18y ago
      This sounds really cool. The only problem is that people like to congregate, but maybe virtual reality could help.
    • sadfsa 18y ago
      The only problem with your 10-hour workweek is that, as living expenses go down and people try to stop working, wages drop also (because workers won't complain as much if the cuts won't put them out on the street), so you'll still have to work two full-time jobs to keep your cheap house surrounded by endless farmland.
  • kragen 18y ago
    And that's why Sumerian investment banks rule the world today. To get your $300 million number, you're assuming a 5% risk-free return on investment over 400 years. I very much doubt that you would have received a 5% return on investment by investing in a diversified international portfolio of joint stock corporations from 1608, leaving aside the great likelihood that you would have lost everything by personally being a victim of one war or another, as the Cherokees did on the Trail of Tears, as the Jews and Gypsies did in the Holocaust, as many of the Guaraníes did in the War of the Triple Alliance, etc.
• yummyfajitas 18y ago
  Our personal drive will diminish, but so will our aversion to non-fatal risks. My current reasoning: doing a startup has the opportunity cost of me taking a finance job (not so much these days) or trying to become a tenured professor. Realistically speaking, due to the aging process, I have about 13-18 years of my life to spend on such things (after 40-45, change gets harder). After age 40, I'll probably just keep doing what I'm already doing. Give me 1000 years to live, I might just spend the next 20 years trying to build an AI. I agree with Yudkowsky that it might be the most important problem of our time, but I'm unwilling to spend my life on such a long shot. Give me 1000 years to spend, 900 youthful, and I'll give it a shot. Worst case, I learn a lot, and I can use those skills in my startup phase (my next 20 years, out of 1000). Of course, it's different for potentially fatal risks; if I lived 1000 years, I'd probably be less likely to take up Eskrima (my latest project) and I probably wouldn't have fenced in college. [edit: added this paragraph.] Incidentally, anti-aging would be a major boon for women. Realistically speaking, most women can pick only one of {career/accomplishments/etc, children}. Even those who can pick two must still face the choice of mid level management + children vs startup founder (or something along those lines). Anti-aging gives the opportunity to do both.
• rthomas6 18y ago
  Another interesting aspect is the concept of retirement. The way I see it, retirement is done in one of two main ways now: people who save their entire lives to live comfortably for the last 20-30 years, and people who live paycheck to paycheck until they fall into a meager retirement. I think this difference will be magnified many times if people live to 1000. Imagine working for 100 years to save up enough money to live comfortably for the next 900 years, and how different that is than the people who will live paycheck to paycheck until only the last 20 years or so of their lives. It will create two very separate classes of people.
  • newt0311 18y ago
    What makes you think that a person planning on living for 1000 years would go retire for 90% of their life? What makes you think that a person who lives from paycheck to paycheck would be able to afford anti-aging treatments which are likely to be (at least initially) very expensive. Lastly, I doubt that a centenarian (or multi-centenarian) would be stupid enough not to save a $100 in an index fund to come back a century or two later to find a sizable amount in-place waiting to be used? It is very likely that anybody over ~300 years will be filthy rich because they have had hundreds of years to build up interest on their investments and they have several hundred years of experience in what does and doesn't work in life, not to mention 300 years of contacts.
    • nazgulnarsil 18y ago
      except that that will affect prices. specifically, things that tailor themselves to multi-centenarians will be much more expensive than other things. can you imagine what 1000 year lifespans would do to the loan market?
• surki 18y ago
  The Man from Earth http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/
  • gnaritas 18y ago
    I loved that movie, wish more movies like it were made.
• signa11 18y ago
  Work is not an end in itself; there must always be time enough for love. -lazarus long
  • joubert 18y ago
    Think how many offspring you could spawn in a thousand years.
    • cabalamat 18y ago
      There would probably be laws against that. If people were immortal, perhaps the law would say every two humans can have one child between them; that way population could only double once.
      • deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
      • newt0311 18y ago
        Doubt it. Population control laws are too unpopular and anybody over ~300 is probably very rich thanks if nothing else, due to the magic of compound interest. Since rich = powerful, it is unlikely that any population control measure would hold up well.
        • stcredzero 18y ago
          Right. And even if the docs make you get snipped in exchange for the immortality treatments, by then we'll be able to induce meiosis, combine and crossover genes with another and produce offspring anyhow, for the right price.
          • newt0311 18y ago
            Hard to tell if you are arguing against my point through sarcasm or supporting my point by covering a contingency. Weird.
• russell 18y ago
  I remember a study that found that the average lifespan for immortals would be 2500 years because of fatal accidents.
  • newt0311 18y ago
    Better medical technology = an accident that is fatal now may not be fatal a hundred years into the future. All these studies are complete bullshit because none of them can predict the social factor and over a period as long as 2500 years, it dominates everything else.
    • sadfsa 18y ago
      This social factor includes murders and other petty crimes, as well as holocausts, wars, and things of that sort, all of which have a tendency to reduce lifespan, and none of which would stop just because we live 2500 years.
      • newt0311 18y ago
        Maybe maybe not but who here is willing to make any bet on what technology we will have in 2500 years? I certainly am not. And thats just one example of something that could (and is likely to) change drastically.
• seiji 18y ago
  Make a society immortal and it becomes afraid of going outside: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunnen-G http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunnen-G Or, you could end up in the bottom of a cave for a few thousand years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorien_ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorien_(Babylon_5)
• zasz 18y ago
  When you start a startup, are you really thinking, "holy shit I only have 44.9 years of life left! Better make the most of it!" Your old age and death are pretty abstract concepts if you're young and healthy. I think for most of us, the thought process is more, "holy shit, I could spend the next twenty years working on shitty enterprise software in Cobol! Better work my way out now!" If you're making every decision now in the context of a death that's decades away, that's a bit sad.