If We Solve Aging

I recently spent most of a week in Prospera, a charter city in Honduras. I was there partly to see how the attempt to create a first world enclave with a first world system of law (civil but not criminal) was working, in part to attend a program on life extension. My conclusion from the talks was that there is probably no silver bullet, no single medical breakthrough that will substantially slow, stop or reverse aging. The human body is a very complicated interrelated system and decline due with age consists of multiple interrelated changes. Solving any one of them can be expected to add at most a few years to life expectancy, to add a century or centuries may require us to solve all or at least most. In principle it should be doable, since the information to reconstruct my body is in every cell, massively redundant; if the information in one cell is degraded by mutation it can be reconstructed by majority vote of several others. In practice …

Suppose we do it. What would the world be like? I am certainly in favor of my being able to live for centuries but it is less clear whether I should be in favor of everyone being able to do so.

And if I could live for centuries, how would I spend them?

A Very Long Life

Having raised one family, grown old and then had my and my wife’s youth restored, would we decide to see if we could do even better at a second try or conclude that that was something we had already done? Having had one career as an economist would I continue along the lines of my past work or decide that this time around I wanted to be a novelist, an entrepreneur, a computer programmer?

In many fields, people do their best and most original work young, which suggests a possible research project: Fund successful scholars past their prime to retrain in some entirely unrelated field, see if the result was a second burst of creativity. In a world without aging, that pattern might become a great deal more common. And a novelist or entrepreneur who had first been an academic economist or a Marine officer might bring some interesting background to the new profession.¹

An alternative is leisure. You could work for your first fifty years and then retire on your investments. You could continue working half or third time, picking those activities that you liked to do and other people were willing to pay for. Good work if you can get it. One can easily enough imagine a future along these lines where a large fraction of the population, even a large majority, was at least semi-retired.

We cannot all retire, since there has to be someone left to mow the lawn, grow the food, and do the rest of the world's work, but it might be possible for most of us to retire or for all of us to mostly retire. Capital as well as labor is productive; more and better machinery, other forms of improved production, permit one person to do the work of ten or a hundred. Consider the striking fall in the fraction of the U.S. work force engaged in producing food, from almost everybody to almost nobody in the space of a little more than a century. The potential of AI to replace many forms of human labor is currently viewed by many as a problem. It might be a solution.

A World Without Aging: Population

Back when the peril of population growth was a hot topic, playing the same role in the public discourse that climate change plays now, I was a skeptic; my view was that population growth had both good and bad effects, might make us a little worse off or a little better off, but that there was room on Earth for a lot more people.² If we end aging, whether that remains true may depend on whether people retire as parents after producing one set of children or keep doing it. The former gives roughly linear population growth; if each generation reproduces itself at age fifty — with aging defeated we need not be in quite such a hurry as we are how — world population would grow at 16 billion a century minus however many die from other causes.

If the death rate from other causes remains constant, growth will gradually taper off, since the more people there are the more of them will die from auto accidents, murder, war. Currently, about a quarter of US deaths are before age 65. If we take that as a rough measure of mortality in a developed country not caused by aging, population should stabilize at about four times its present level, with as many people dying each year from causes other than aging as are born.

That assumes the rate stays the same. It might increase, as some very old people get bored with life. On the other hand, the same technological progress that ends aging may also reduce other forms of death as well.

What if people keep having children? If, on average, every couple produces two every fifty years, population increases four fold every century.³ In two or three centuries that might push past even my optimistic view of how many people the planet can carry.⁴

Whether grandchildren turn out to be a superior or inferior substitute for children may very much matter.

Gerontocracy

Under our political system, incumbents have an enormous advantage, at the congressional level almost always win reelection. If aging stops and nothing else changes, our representatives will grow steadily older. An incumbent who is guaranteed reelection is free to do what he wants within a fairly large range so one result of ending aging would be to make democratic control over democratic governments even weaker than it now is. Another could be to create societies dominated by the attitudes of the old: bossy, cautious, conservative.

The effect on undemocratic systems might be still worse. In a world without aging it seems likely that Salazar would still rule Portugal and Franco Spain. It would have been Stalin, equipped with an arsenal of thermonuclear missiles, who presided over, and did his best to prevent, the final disintegration of the Soviet Union. With the aging problem solved, dictatorship could become a permanent condition, provided dictators took sufficient precautions against other sources of mortality.

"An absolute monarchy is one in which the sovereign does as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins." (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary)

The problem is not limited to the world of politics. It has been argued that scientific progress consists of young scientists adopting new ideas and old scientists dying. It is frightening to imagine the universities our system of academic tenure might produce without either compulsory retirement, now illegal in the U.S., or mortality.

These worries assume that we are curing the physical effects of aging but not all of the mental effects. Whether that assumption is reasonable depends on why it is that old people think differently than young people. One answer, popular with the old, is that it is because they know more. If so, perhaps gerontocracy is not such a bad thing. Centuries of rule by a competent dictator, Oliver Cromwell or Lee Kwan Yu, might have some advantages over the alternative. For one thing, it might give us a government whose concern with long-term policies was not entirely feigned.

An alternative explanation of the mental effects of aging is that the brain has limited capacity; having learned one system of ideas, there may be no place to put another, especially if they are mutually inconsistent. Humans, old and young, demonstrate a strong preference for the beliefs they already have, and old people have more of them.

One pattern with aging that I have observed in myself is a shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is what you use to solve a new problem. Crystallized intelligence consists of remembering the solution you found last time and using that. The older you are, the more problems you have already solved and the less the future payoff from finding new and possibly better solutions. If that shift has been hard wired in by evolution, with its timing based on past lifespans, it could make us less and less able to deal with issues that arise in our later centuries.

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For a more extended treatment of these issues see The Last Lethal Disease, Chapter 17 of my Future Imperfect.

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1. Elizabeth Moon was a military officer before she retired and started writing science fiction and fantasy. For a more famous example, consider Conrad, first a sailor and later a novelist.

2. For a very crude calculation, divide the land area of the Earth, 148 million square kilometers, by the current population, about 8 billion people, to get an area per capita of 18,500 square meters, about four and a half acres. The Earth feels more crowded than that because most of our time is spent in the places where there are people.

3. At this point I am ignoring mortality from causes other than aging and assuming that individuals who want more than two children balance those who want none.

4. This assumes that we are stuck on Earth. A spacefaring population would have a lot of additional room and resources. It also assumes that we are stuck with our current physical bodies. Uploading ourselves would raise a different set of issues …