The Speculist

Some Restrictions Apply?

At the risk of being one of those guys who quotes himself, allow me to reiterate the following from yesterday's award-winning piece on transhumanism:

I believe the struggle that's shaping up in this world is going to take place between those who believe that we should be defined by our limits — and who have restrictive and pointless notions as to what those limits are — and those who refuse to be so defined.

Okay, so everybody knows where I stand.

Now, let's look at the commentary that's coming in on this week's Speaking of the Future interview. I spoke with Aubrey de Grey, a man who is doing serious scientific research towards developing a cure for aging.

Kadamose makes a highly provocative suggestion:

What happens when we achieve near-immortality? What about the population problem? If such methods of curing aging exist, and it is given to everyone on the planet, then the only solution to this problem is to shut the human reproductive system down...for good.

Many people would not agree with this stance, but I think immortality should come with sacrifice.

I agree with the second point. Immortality (which is not, in the strictest sense, what's on the table) will involve sacrifice. We will have to give up the poignancy and sense of drive and purpose that life's brevity currently supplies. That may sound ridiculous from this side of the chasm, but it will be very real to ourselves and our descendants when facing a vast and open-ended future. We will also have to give up many cherished notions that have carried the species through thus far. Concepts of family, tribe, and nation, in their current form, may disappear — replaced by new forms of association that we can barely imagine now.

But give up reproduction? I don't think so.

Posse ringleader Vick takes the opposite approach, and returns us to those halcyon days of Dick Lamm and the "duty to die."

Death and aging are an important part of evolution. Nothing is eternal. Life will end. Considering that, we must get the old members of the species out of the way. Leave space and food for the strong to eat and reproduce. That's what we are a lean, mean f***in'/eatin' machine.

I disagree. If I understand what Aubrey is telling us about evolution, aging is more of a by-product than a necessary component. But let's look at this space and food issue.

The potential for overpopulation is there and it must be seriously addressed. But if we're going to discuss a future development such as life extension, I think we need to take other future developments into consideration when making our plans. There is a famous (possibly apocryphal) story of a city planner in New York circa 1890 who wrote a report, reasonably extrapolated from then-current trends, that showed that by the middle part of the twentieth century, the city would be practically buried in horse manure.

Now the fact that Manhattan in the year 1960 was not deluged with poop doesn't mean that the city was totally without problems. But that "reasonable extrapolation" was not one of them. Technology had intervened, eliminating that problem and creating new ones.

I expect that overpopulation may have a lot in common with New York City's manure problem. The overall standard of living for planet earth is going up. As standard of living increases, population growth tends to slow. I believe that new technologies are going to bring about dramatic increases in worldwide standard of living levels over the next half century or so. Plus, if our life expectancy does increase tremendously, that should have an additional dampening effect on population growth rate. There is a significant correlation between countries whose citizens can expect a long life and those where the birth rate is dropping sharply.

Even so, with people taking a very long time to die and having some babies, the population will continue to grow. Probably quite dramatically. That's why we have to get off this planet.

Not all of us, just most of us. This would be a good start. Eric Drexler devotes a chapter to the idea of space settlements in Engines of Creation, now available online. A few excerpts:

Space holds matter, energy, and room enough for projects of vast size, including vast space settlements. Replicator-based systems will be able to construct worlds of continental scale, resembling Dr. O'Neill's cylinders but made of strong, carbon-based materials. With these materials and water from the ice moons of the outer solar system, we will be able to create not only lands in space, but whole seas, wider and deeper than the Mediterranean. Constructed with energy and materials from space, these broad new lands and seas will cost Earth and its people almost nothing in terms of resources. The chief requirement will be programming the first replicator, but AI systems will help with that. The greatest problem will be deciding what we want.

[R]eplicators and space resources will bring a long era in which genuine resource limits do not yet pinch us - an era when by our present standards even vast wealth will seem virtually free. This may seem too good to be true, but nature (as usual) has not set her limits based on human feelings. Our ancestors once thought that talking to someone across the sea (many months' voyage by sailing ship) would be too good to be true, but undersea cables and oversea satellites worked anyway.

The history of human advance proves that the world game can be positive-sum. Accelerating economic growth during recent centuries shows that the rich can get richer while the poor get richer. Despite population growth (and the idea of dividing a fixed pie) the average wealth per capita worldwide, including that of the Third World, has grown steadily larger. Economic fluctuations, local reversals, and the natural tendency of the media to focus on bad news - these combine to obscure the facts about economic growth, but public records show it clearly enough. Space resources and replicating assemblers will accelerate this historic trend beyond the dreams of economists, launching the human race into a new world.

All of which leads, finally, to Karl Hallowell's inventive modifications to Kadomose's shut-down-our-reproductive-capability idea:

A caveat here. There should be a way to restore the Human race even if most or all technology is destroyed in some cataclysm.

I don't think we should shut down reproduction, anyway, but potential future cataclysms are something we should take into consideration. A huge asteroid, for example, could wipe us and our technology out altogether. We will eventually have technology that will allow us to prevent this. But in the mean time, maybe we don't want to put all our egss in one basket. Or one planet, for that matter. Sustainable human settlements off the earth can mitigate the overpopulation problem and help to ensure the survival of the species.

Further discussion is encouraged.

Posted by Phil at August 7, 2003 09:18 AM | TrackBack