My friend’s daughter is doing a project on biological immortality. It would be great if you could help her by answering a short survey.
She writes:
"This is a part of the primary research for my EPQ, titled: “To what extent does telomere biology hold the key to achieving biological immortality?”
By completing this form, you will be helping me to gather data for the second half of my project, which involves an evaluation of public understanding and perspectives on biological immortality. The results will be analysed and used as a source of information for my final dissertation."
A negative impact I think you lightly touched upon but want to further expand upon is how will this affect social change in this country. Like lets imagine we go back and say somehow we as humanity discovery this biological immortality around 1886ish (this is going to be very Americancentric) and again lets abstract this and say its given to everyone even though that is unrealistic. I don’t think we as a society would have made much progress in terms of rights for women and minorities if we had the lead weight of these god damn fossils outdated view points (their children sort of prove that with the whole bullshit of the daughters of the confederacy and the impact they had in the last 100 years). Hell that is a problem even in the modern world, where our politicians are ancient people in their bloody 50-70s, like congress’ median age is 58, some of the most active voters are also the elderly. So we see this problem in the current world and it will only get worse if people had immortality. This doesn’t even talk about the idea of the impact this will have on the economy, the idea of retiring is already a foreign concept to many people in this modern world and once again this problem gets worse with immortality since you are literally going to be forced to work till you die.
Like immortality is cool as a concept when its only given to you and a few people you want to select but it gets bloody messy once its a thing that can be handed out willy nilly. It can apply to many concepts like the idea that humans no longer have to sleep, bloody awesome when its only a select few people but once its the norm and seen as the standard it will affect so many different aspects of life. “Well you don’t have to sleep Johnson so work for 16 hours or you will get shitcanned because I will find someone who will!”.
The change has already begun. Today in conversations about how it will impact us and tomorrow how we’ll actually deal with it but I believe it’s arrival is imminent.
We have to see beyond our current problems. Look further down the road.
Social upheaval and massive changes, absolutely. Something comes after that though. An immortal being would seem to be far more concerned about the world we live in than a recent news station saying something like “why take care of the earth when we have heaven?”
You do have a great point about those fossils and outdated viewpoints but it’s a massive generational social construct built off of generations of life existing in the way it has for millions of years. It is changing in more ways than just immortality though. We’re already on the bleeding edge of replacing people with AI (wendys drive through) and it will grow.
Put it all together and you have robot/ai workers to fill most of the slots people currently work along with immortality, advances in every field of science… So much is changing so fast. Faster than it’s ever changed.
Ok, I apologize for my jumbled not very connected or well thought out response but my imagination is over caffeinated.
Agree. I added something like that in the “other negatives” box. There’s that saying, society advances one funeral at a time.
I like to think that myself, I’m very good at being open minded and adapting to the times (though honestly only time will tell). But I know many people don’t do that. This is clearly evident in electoral polling as well as polls for social issues (eg, US 2023 support for same sex marriage is 89% among 18-29 but only 60% among 65 and older).
Perhaps social changes could help with this problem. Clearly older folks can still change because the stat I just quoted was far worse in the not too distant past. Maybe our problems are with how we run news media or how we basically write off old folks as unlikely to change. Maybe it’s because our society focuses on education being something you only do when young and you’re never really expected to go back to school after that. Maybe we need to better teach empathy from a young age? Maybe us losing religion will make the biggest difference.
Maybe we don’t deserve this kinda advancement yet. To quote one of my favourite parts from the show The Orville: