For the religious ones, perhaps a good frame would be “young for 1000 years”, so that they can still enjoy the afterlife. More time to do the earthly stuff, and the afterlife is supposed to be infinite anyway.
Population… the best case would be something like “people are young forever, but they can only have kids during the first few decades”. Anyway, with exponential growth we would run out of resources even without immortality. And if there is ever a law against exponential growth, like “only 2 kids per a pair of adults”, then immortality would mean a linearly growing population, which should be doable somehow. But yeah, this is difficult to explain, and requires some faith in either space travel or linear increases in food production.
I made the following claim in reply to wunan’s comment below:
“I make this claim: Individuals with sufficiently strong religious beliefs in a religion that has an afterlife will more often than not prefer to die on the “mortal plane” and go to their faith’s afterlife than continue living (even in good health and restored to youth, etc.) for [100 more years] [300 more years] [lots more years] [the rest of time].”
I think there would be variation even amongst individuals with strong faith in the afterlife of their religion regarding how long they may wish to keep living when restored to youth, but I do think more often they would eventually prefer to die instead of living indefinitely. I think your point “More time to do the earthly stuff, and the afterlife is supposed to be infinite anyway” is a good one, and agree that it’d likely motivate some such individuals to keep living some amount longer, though for how long I’m not sure. I do think there would be some such individuals who would not choose life extension past humanity’s current “natural” (scare quotes for a reason) lifespan though.
As I mentioned in my reply to wunan, I don’t want to make a claim and forever rely on anecdote to support it, so I’ll look for some research on this topic and see if anyone has researched the sorts of questions one would expect for this topic and if so, what they found.
I have a reactionary knee-jerk reaction against controlling peoples’ reproductive capabilities / rights / choices, in addition to finding that idea pretty awful and horrifying, and would like to find a way for humanity to get immortality yet not have to place any sort of reproductive restrictions on anyone: I don’t want to live in a world where there are such restrictions, because I think that’s wrong and goes against some essential aspect of being human. But I do understand that figuring out resources for a potentially exponentially growing population is an exceptionally hard problem, that just means we should have people working on that now and sooner rather than later.
I’m not so worried about the population problem if we as a species can get into space, improve food growing technologies, and do a lot with nuclear energy generation + renewables and batteries. Plus, truly having to worry about that problem seems so far out from now timewise compared to worrying about life extension and preservation and the imminent mortality we all still possess, so maybe I’ll care about the problem in 500-5000 years once everyone who wants to be immortal truly is in all senses of the word, but until then I’d rather focus on more immediate concerns like I mentioned.
For the religious ones, perhaps a good frame would be “young for 1000 years”, so that they can still enjoy the afterlife. More time to do the earthly stuff, and the afterlife is supposed to be infinite anyway.
Population… the best case would be something like “people are young forever, but they can only have kids during the first few decades”. Anyway, with exponential growth we would run out of resources even without immortality. And if there is ever a law against exponential growth, like “only 2 kids per a pair of adults”, then immortality would mean a linearly growing population, which should be doable somehow. But yeah, this is difficult to explain, and requires some faith in either space travel or linear increases in food production.
I made the following claim in reply to wunan’s comment below: “I make this claim: Individuals with sufficiently strong religious beliefs in a religion that has an afterlife will more often than not prefer to die on the “mortal plane” and go to their faith’s afterlife than continue living (even in good health and restored to youth, etc.) for [100 more years] [300 more years] [lots more years] [the rest of time].”
I think there would be variation even amongst individuals with strong faith in the afterlife of their religion regarding how long they may wish to keep living when restored to youth, but I do think more often they would eventually prefer to die instead of living indefinitely. I think your point “More time to do the earthly stuff, and the afterlife is supposed to be infinite anyway” is a good one, and agree that it’d likely motivate some such individuals to keep living some amount longer, though for how long I’m not sure. I do think there would be some such individuals who would not choose life extension past humanity’s current “natural” (scare quotes for a reason) lifespan though.
As I mentioned in my reply to wunan, I don’t want to make a claim and forever rely on anecdote to support it, so I’ll look for some research on this topic and see if anyone has researched the sorts of questions one would expect for this topic and if so, what they found.
I have a reactionary knee-jerk reaction against controlling peoples’ reproductive capabilities / rights / choices, in addition to finding that idea pretty awful and horrifying, and would like to find a way for humanity to get immortality yet not have to place any sort of reproductive restrictions on anyone: I don’t want to live in a world where there are such restrictions, because I think that’s wrong and goes against some essential aspect of being human. But I do understand that figuring out resources for a potentially exponentially growing population is an exceptionally hard problem, that just means we should have people working on that now and sooner rather than later.
I’m not so worried about the population problem if we as a species can get into space, improve food growing technologies, and do a lot with nuclear energy generation + renewables and batteries. Plus, truly having to worry about that problem seems so far out from now timewise compared to worrying about life extension and preservation and the imminent mortality we all still possess, so maybe I’ll care about the problem in 500-5000 years once everyone who wants to be immortal truly is in all senses of the word, but until then I’d rather focus on more immediate concerns like I mentioned.