Life Extension: Environmental Cost
One of the supposed benefits of dramatically extending the human lifespan claimed by life extensionists is that it will make people much more inclined to preserve the environment. The reasoning is that if people know they will still be living when negative effects of environmental destruction will start to severely impact society, they will take environmental issues much more seriously and ensure that these are dealt with appropriately. This is a weak argument for two main reasons.
First, this assumes an extended lifetime automatically brings with it improved foresight. There's no particular reason to think that living longer will make people better at long-term thinking. Next week will always loom larger than something that might perhaps conceivably happen 200 years from now. Simply because there is a good chance I will still be alive then will not make it any less distant and intangible.
Second and more importantly, it completely ignores the direct environmental impact of a much longer-lived population. Population size and growth has indeed been overstated as an environmental problem. Current indicators suggest that world population will grow in the next few decades, then level off and begin to drop. In other words, a Soylent Green scenario is increasingly unlikely. However, this assumes that lifespans will change little. If people will soon be able to live 500 years or more, it could be a very, very different situation. Populations will become far larger as people die less and less, and it will mean additional centuries of consumption and pollution for each individual. Add to that the potential for each person to be able to reproduce -- either naturally or artificially -- for all of that 500+ span, and you have the recipe for unimaginable environmental calamity.
First, this assumes an extended lifetime automatically brings with it improved foresight. There's no particular reason to think that living longer will make people better at long-term thinking. Next week will always loom larger than something that might perhaps conceivably happen 200 years from now. Simply because there is a good chance I will still be alive then will not make it any less distant and intangible.
Second and more importantly, it completely ignores the direct environmental impact of a much longer-lived population. Population size and growth has indeed been overstated as an environmental problem. Current indicators suggest that world population will grow in the next few decades, then level off and begin to drop. In other words, a Soylent Green scenario is increasingly unlikely. However, this assumes that lifespans will change little. If people will soon be able to live 500 years or more, it could be a very, very different situation. Populations will become far larger as people die less and less, and it will mean additional centuries of consumption and pollution for each individual. Add to that the potential for each person to be able to reproduce -- either naturally or artificially -- for all of that 500+ span, and you have the recipe for unimaginable environmental calamity.
posted by Bernhardt Varenius at 10:56 AM
2 Comments:
You ignore the fact that people have less children when their mortalities lessen; "Gee, maybe I don't need 12 children to have one slave left in my old age." The thought may not be as coherent as that but it is the way it works. And, what parent in their 60's, capable or not, says, gee, I think it sounds like a good idea to start that nightmare all over again. I'd really like to have another teenager someday.
Yes, admittedly I'm stating the worst-case scenario here, and not taking into consideration the cultural changes that might come with RLE. I'm pretty sure that RLE will indeed make having children less attractive for many.
But my plan with this series is to fully sketch out the most negative possibilities first before coming up with potential rebuttals. That way I can write it in little chunks, since I can't afford big writing distractions at the moment.
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