What would it be like to live in an extended world, a world where lots of people live extended lives? I’m not asking what it’s like to live an extended life; we discussed that in chapters 2 and 3. I am asking what the world would be like, for everyone, if a large portion of the human race used life extension. Of course, the answer depends partly on how many people have access to life extension. If very few people can get it, the consequences will be less dramatic. If lots of people can get it, the consequences will be more dramatic. Let’s imagine an extreme case and assume that anyone can get it and a large portion of the human race decides to use it. How would that change the world, not just for particular groups such as the Haves, Have-nots, or Will-nots but for everyone? (In chapters 7 and 8, I’ll discuss issues that are specific to the Have-nots.)
In section 5.2, I’ll survey several potential bad social consequences that opponents of life extension often mention. They include, among other things, possible problems with pensions and supporting retired people, changes in the relations between older and younger family members, the possibility of dictators living forever, and what I call “opportunity drought,” where older people hang on to property and position forever and ever. I’ll argue that these are not insurmountable problems, and they’re not strong reasons against developing life extension. In section 5.3, I’ll try to balance the conversation by pointing out several possible good consequences from widespread life extension. These include a human race with enough time to become wiser, better-informed, more concerned about posterity, and less violent. They also include the possibility of developing new opportunities and new and desirable ways of living we can’t foresee now.
In this chapter, I won’t discuss the most important problematic consequence widespread life extension might cause: a Malthusian crisis. If people live far longer, the earth may become overpopulated, partly because people fail to die on schedule and hang around a lot longer and partly because they have more time to have more children. This could put catastrophic pressure on the world’s resources and ecosystem. This consequence is so important, and the issues it raises so complex, that it needs a chapter of its own. I take this up in chapter 6. (In chapter 8, I take up the other major problem: life extension may be so expensive that only the rich, or the middle class, can afford it.)
As for the consequences I do discuss in this chapter—good, bad, or indifferent—bear in mind that radical changes are coming whether or not life extension becomes widely available. Automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, virtual reality, and self-driving cars are just a few of the technologies that are already turning the world upside down, and most of these technologies promise both benefits and challenges. The human race has a long history of adapting to radical changes of all kinds—from the advent of domesticated animals through the development of agriculture, writing, industry, and technology—ultimately leading to a world of colossal cities in a “global village.” Arguably all of those developments have both an upside and a downside. At very least, they all present challenges. Life extension will be no exception.
Many people, when they think about life extension for the first time, see an array of possible social problems.1 Most of these problems are not all that difficult to handle; the human race has surmounted far greater challenges. As we sort through them, ask yourself this: Is living in a world with those problems a life worse than death? Would you prefer to die earlier in order to avoid living in that world? That is, after all, the alternative.
In the movie In Time, everyone halts aging at around 25, so the hero (played by Justin Timberlake) has a mother (played by Olivia Wilde) who looks as young as he does (they make a weirdly attractive couple). We can take this a bit further: Imagine trying to keep track of not just 3 or 4 generations of relatives, but 10 or more. Imagine meeting your great-great-grandmother, and she looks like your contemporaries. Imagine trying to maintain anything like a traditional relationship with your children when you and they enjoy the health and appearance of a young adult and the generations pile up, one after another, with no one obviously qualified for role of an elderly counselor, for no one looks older and everyone has time enough to gain the wisdom of age. It would take some time to adjust to these situations and work out new ways of interacting with each other, but doing so does not strike me as a life worse than death. These adjustments don’t even seem particularly difficult once you consider that we have already gotten adjusted to same-sex marriage, gender transition, surrogate mothers, effective birth control, and other novelties.
Of course, lifelong marriage may not survive all this. It’s one thing to vow to stay together until death when you expect death in 50 years or so. It’s quite another to make that commitment when death may be centuries away. However, there are other possible forms of marriage: marriages intended to last a fixed period of time, with an occasion for recommitment every so often, or polyamorous relationships that involve a shifting collection of individuals, to take two examples. Humans have had many different forms of marital relationship, and we may find that we’re more limber than we realize. You could, of course, as part of your marriage vows, vow that neither of you will use life extension and that you will grow old together on a traditional schedule: 80 years or so. There’s nothing to stop you from doing this if it means that much to you.
There’s not much more we can say about this: your imagination is as informative as mine. My take on this is that extended life is just another massive change in the human condition, on a par with what we navigated as we moved from being hunter-gatherers to living on farms or from farms to the industrial and technological world of the city. We’ll work it out, bit by bit, over time.
Many people worry that dictators will extend their lives; we’ll be stuck with North Korea’s current ruler indefinitely, along with Syria’s president Assad and any number of lesser tyrants, including workplace bosses and anyone else with enough power to make life miserable for those under them. Tenured professors may keep their jobs and crowd out younger thinkers. Land may rise in price as older generations hang on to it. Promotions may be harder to get. Middle and upper management may become thick with people who have generations of experience, and workplaces might practice age-discrimination against the young—or the younger.
But then again, maybe not. Tyrants can be overthrown or killed, and we need not wait until they’re elderly. (The vast majority of Roman emperors died in office—and not from natural causes.) Tenure can be eliminated, if that becomes a problem. New business enterprises can be founded to compete with old ones. Microsoft was not taken down by an antitrust lawsuit, but it has been undermined by new companies exploiting new technology, like Google. Laws can be passed to institute land reform, forcing it out of the hands of those who’ve held it long enough (a kind of geriatric eminent domain), much the way land reform transfers land from elites to peasants. We already set a time limit on patents; we can do the same for ownership of other things.
As for the career advantage of having lived a lot longer than other people, this may be overrated. I have some personal exposure to three professions: teaching philosophy in a college, practicing law, and medicine (I never practiced medicine, but my first academic job was teaching medical ethics in a medical school). For whatever it’s worth, my impression was that in most professions—even very demanding ones—most people get about as good as they ever will in the first 20 years. Additional experience adds something, but less than you might think; the law of diminishing returns applies here.
Some writers have warned that a world full of people who live extended lives will become increasingly conservative and resistant to change. It’s true that young people tend to be the agents of social change and more open to novel approaches and ideas. Creative and innovative industries tend to be led by people in their 20s and 30s. Of course, we might be pleasantly surprised. We might find that there is still enough innovation and social change going on. Even now, some people remain actively committed to social change or creative work all the way into their 80s and might do so even longer if they had more time. In fact, we may find that some people enter completely new phases of life when they live long enough; who knows what personal growth we may achieve when we live for centuries?
Still, the critics may have a point. Most of us form our worldview by our mid-40s or sooner, and it doesn’t seem to change much after that. Still, what price would we pay to preserve this? Is living in a world that has grown more conservative in this way a life worse than death? Run the argument backward: Suppose we could achieve an even more innovative, fast-changing, creative world by taking medication that produced accelerated aging after age 35—two years of senescence followed by death at 38. This would get rid of all the older generations who slow everything down. If 35 seems too young as a cutoff age for avoiding the conservatism of older generations, then suppose we could devise a drug that kicks in as soon as you stop forming new neural pathways so that you start aging as soon as you become less open to new ways of thinking. Those who keep their creative edge longer get to live longer. Would you vote for that policy? Now run the argument in the other direction: If you would not shorten your life to get that result, why would you refuse to extend it to get that result?
It’s also possible to overestimate the value of innovation and change. During most of human history, the pace of change was glacially slow. Most people living any time before the last three hundred years or so would not have noticed much change during their lifetimes, aside from new cycles of war, famine, and conquest. Moreover, although rapid innovation is exciting for some people, many people find it very stressful. There’s a lot to be said for tranquility and predictability.
Will we end up with huge numbers of elderly people needing a lot of expensive care from a shrinking pool of younger people? One fear is that people will retire at 65 and live to 165, straining the pension system to the breaking point.
The first thing to note is that we may already be facing that problem, even without life extension. The world’s population is becoming older on average, and in many countries, there are fewer young people to support a growing number of retirees. Fertility is falling below replacement levels almost everywhere (except Africa, for another century), and the population in many countries is shrinking and becoming more and more gray. In 2015, 12 percent of the world’s population were over 60 (24 percent in Europe); by 2050, one-quarter in all regions outside Africa will be 60 or over.2
The older the average age, the harder it is for a society to support its elderly. The number of workers per retiree is known as the potential support ratio (PSR). According to one team of demographers, America’s PSR will drop from 4.6 today to 1.9 by 2100.3 Here are comparable figures for some other countries:
| Workers per retiree today | Workers per retiree in 2100 | |
|---|---|---|
|
Brazil |
8.6 |
1.5 |
|
China |
7.8 |
1.8 |
|
Germany |
2.9 |
1.4 |
|
India |
10.9 |
2.3 |
Note that all these countries (and many others) will have fewer workers per retiree than Japan currently has (2.6 workers per retiree today), and Japan is already noteworthy for having so few that supporting its retirees is a serious challenge.
This trend poses a severe challenge for pensions and other institutions that provide for the elderly: there just aren’t enough young people to easily care for the old people. How would life extension affect this? It probably won’t make this any worse. Suppose, for example, that we slow aging to half its current rate and that the elderly portion of a life span is the same portion as now (roughly 15–20 percent). In that case, instead of needing a pension and care from age 65 to 85 in an 85-year life span, we would need pension and care from age 130 to 170 in a 170-year life span, but there would be as many younger people supporting that group as there are now.
Life extension might even help solve this problem. Suppose, for example, that life extension compresses morbidity—in other words, that the percentage of life we spend in an elderly condition is smaller than it is now. For example, in that 170-year life span we might be in an elderly condition for only the 20 years or so that we are now—or even fewer, perhaps 5 or 10 years. In that case, the number of healthy working people supporting each individual too old to work will be larger than it is now, and the pension crisis will be easier to handle.
Finally, if we halt aging altogether, we will not become elderly at all. In that event, the only people who need to be cared for are those who suffer a serious physical or mental disability, not because they are old, but for other reasons. Of course, you might not want to work forever and ever and ever, but the fact that you do not age does not stop you from taking a break. You will have abundant time to save money, pay off your mortgage, get all your kids through college, and take a long sabbatical from the working world if you wish, coming back into the workforce when your savings are depleted.
Here’s another pension-related objection to life extension that comes up now and then: Even if life extension halts aging in a youthful phase of life, what about all those lifetime pensions people are entitled to under social security and various private pension funds? We can’t keep paying social security benefits forever to someone who worked 40 years and then lives on for centuries. The answer is obvious: Change the law so that lifetime pensions are phased out or converted into time-limited pensions. (Amend the Constitution if you have to.) Those who have paid into social security all their lives but also halted aging at a pre-elderly phase could collect their benefits for, say, 25 years, then go back to work.
Now let’s look at some ways in which the advent of life extension might make the world a better place.
Start with the fact that people often grow in wisdom, perspective, maturity, and patience as they age. If the human race slows or halts aging, we might, as a species, finally grow up. People may have a better grasp of what really matters in life. I have heard people in their 60s, who have been very successful in some career, say that they now believe they were mistaken to value worldly success as much as they did. I regard that as a sign of maturity. The world may grow less materialistic, shallow, and superficial when people have enough time to mature and capitalize on their maturity over a longer period of time.
We might, if we live long enough, take the long view more often than we do now. We might care about future generations more, given that we will get to know more of them. We might care more about our long-range impact on the environment a hundred or a thousand years from now. That posterity is us, after all.
We might appreciate our history and our cultural patrimony more than we do now. We might care much more about preserving historical sites and other cultural treasures. As I grow older, I have more appreciation for long-term friendships, kindness, compassion, and other qualities than I did 20 or 30 years ago. I’ve seen enough ugliness in the world to appreciate the good when I find it. I have a deeper appreciation of first-rate philosophy than I had when I began my studies and a deeper appreciation of good movies and good literature than I had at 35. We learn a lot along the way, and we might learn a lot more along a longer way.
A population of people who have lived a very long time and tried out many different kinds of work, education, and living arrangements is a very well-informed population. Such people might do a better job of deliberating about social policy and political issues than we do now. As things now stand, most of us know only one profession or a narrow range of occupations and have only a few years or decades of experience. We might make better choices after we have wider and longer experience. Most of us never get the chance to travel extensively for long periods of time or to live overseas and experience another culture at close range. A population where many people have done such things might do a better job of making collective decisions about foreign affairs than we do now.
We might do a better job with other things. For example, right now we have to have children while our bodies are young enough to produce them, but imagine having more time to mature, gather economic resources, and get some life experience and then, after several decades, tackling parenthood. I’m pretty sure I would have made a mediocre father when I was young. I think I would be much better at it now. Perhaps I’d be better still 50 years from now—or 100 years from now.
Even opportunities may increase in a world where lots of people extend their lives. Yes, those who control existing institutions may lock in their positions, but we would also have more time to create new institutions. If you have all the time in the world, you can use it to create a new business or institution to compete with existing ones. This may happen more often when people have more time to gain experience, make connections with potential investors, learn from mistakes, and so on. Even if it happens relatively slowly, we may see many more people achieve economic independence sometime during their long lives. Often, we’re busy raising families and worried about retirement and wisely decide not to take too many chances. Given more decades or centuries to work with, we might find that we can take chances we can’t take so easily now.
The world may grow less violent. Violent crimes tend to be committed by the young; gang members, for example, often outgrow their violent tendencies over time. Young people sometimes act as if they think they’re immortal or as if their later years mean little to them, but they take fewer chances as they grow older. This may be true of war too. Young people can more easily be persuaded to take physical risks—that’s one reason they make the best soldiers. Perhaps an older, life-extended population would be less inclined to go to war, for they would better appreciate how much they lose when they die, and with so much time at stake, they might be far more cautious. We might be less inclined to value the competitive power games that sometimes lead to war. We may have more experience with other cultures and understand them well enough to find other ways to coexist with them. Widespread life extension could bring the world closer to peace.