What would the causes of death be? Accidents and war are the main things I can think of, assuming diseases are completely cured. Would people only be able to have a child if somebody else dies? (Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing; I’m trying to understand how controlled procreation would work.)
Elimination of aging doesn’t mean elimination of diseases. Even without diseases, motor vehicle accidents make cca. 2% of all deaths. Present average lifespan is cca. 80 years, which means 1⁄80 of the population dies each year, 1 person of each 4,000 dies each year due to motor vehicle accidents. That leads to expected lifespan about 4,000 years and population is in equilibrium if people have children in average once in 4,000 years.
How exactly would the reagulation work isn’t something we can reasonably expect to know in advance. Elimination of aging would most probably be a gradual process during which human institutions will adopt. Whatever will be the final state, it’s very improbable that it would be the starvation scenario.
It’s unlikely that a general cure for disease will come about as a result of cracking aging; some of the more outlandish possible solutions (i.e. direct intervention by medical nanotech) might qualify, but those require such advanced technology that it probably doesn’t make sense to talk about them in conjunction with conventional Malthusian constraints. In any case, the accident rate isn’t that low, and birth rates appear to correlate negatively with lifespan and standard of living; I haven’t actually done the math, but the constraints on the problem seem to suggest a steady state well before Malthusian catastrophe, even in the absence of regulation.
What would the causes of death be? Accidents and war are the main things I can think of, assuming diseases are completely cured. Would people only be able to have a child if somebody else dies? (Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing; I’m trying to understand how controlled procreation would work.)
Elimination of aging doesn’t mean elimination of diseases. Even without diseases, motor vehicle accidents make cca. 2% of all deaths. Present average lifespan is cca. 80 years, which means 1⁄80 of the population dies each year, 1 person of each 4,000 dies each year due to motor vehicle accidents. That leads to expected lifespan about 4,000 years and population is in equilibrium if people have children in average once in 4,000 years.
How exactly would the reagulation work isn’t something we can reasonably expect to know in advance. Elimination of aging would most probably be a gradual process during which human institutions will adopt. Whatever will be the final state, it’s very improbable that it would be the starvation scenario.
It’s unlikely that a general cure for disease will come about as a result of cracking aging; some of the more outlandish possible solutions (i.e. direct intervention by medical nanotech) might qualify, but those require such advanced technology that it probably doesn’t make sense to talk about them in conjunction with conventional Malthusian constraints. In any case, the accident rate isn’t that low, and birth rates appear to correlate negatively with lifespan and standard of living; I haven’t actually done the math, but the constraints on the problem seem to suggest a steady state well before Malthusian catastrophe, even in the absence of regulation.