Quote:
Originally Posted by RogorMortis
That will mark the beginning of the end for humans - that's if the earth hasn't succumbed to pollution and lack of food ect. No death means too many humans = path to total war.  And why? Well when the crib is bare the horses bite. And this will happen here unless of course science takes the right course and avoids this but I'm afraid it will be left to the politicians who can't decide on the mustard in a hot dog. So we're doomed in the long run. |
Possibly, but I doubt it will lead to our extinction, probably a lot of violence, but probably not extinction of the human species IMHO. But then I'm an optimist when it comes to that kind of thing
. It will certainly change everything in the sphere of human existence. The obvious issue of overpopulation, which possibly could be handled by people only being allowed to procreate if somebody in their family dies for whatever reason (tough sell), will certainly have to be dealt with. My guess is there will continue to be death of the folks that can't afford to live forever and population growth of those that can. There will likely be much violence as a result of this, but that's not news for humans. But, perhaps a less obvious issue, if nobody dies in the future, how does the economy function? The haves will go on accumulating wealth and power and if they never die it doesn't ever get passed on to the next generation; that could be a major problem. Immortality will not happen overnight however so hopefully we'll have some time to figure out how to deal with it before depletion of earth's resources becomes too dire. I of course assume we'll have clean (solar or fusion based) energy LONG before we ever achieve immortality, otherwise peak oil is going to cause drastic changes in how we live and possibly greatly slow technological development not to mention great death and destruction from wars and famine.
I imagine that if we ever have the technology to provide immortality it will also provide the means to exist in a non-terrestrial environment and this will be the beginning of the human colonization of space. I think this is essential for the long-term survival of the human race since having all our eggs in one basket so to speak, here on the Earth, we could be wiped out by a singe meteor impact. When people live forever (or even just 1000s of years), and if space vessels can be made comfortable enough and can be made large enough to house thousands or even millions of people, travelling through space for long voyages to other planets will become reasonable to many people, perhaps even desireable. Of course that might lead to interstellar wars down the line, but it's possible that as technology (e.g. advanced molecular nanotechnology) allows humans to exist without having to scratch out a living in the hard earth and there is abundance (assuming some fascists don't take over and try to mete it out as they see fit), human nature will evolve and we won't always be at each other's throats. Obviously there's no guarantee human nature will ever evolve, but I continue to hope.
There was an interesting CSPAN program with Ray Kurzweil 11/5/2006 that discussed some of these topics that Moonfolk might find interesting, it's 3 hours long:
http://www.booktv.org/feature/index....15&schedID=457