Fears About Radical Life Extension Consequences Are Unrealistic Extending the Human Lifespan, 2013 Listen Fears About Radical Life Extension Consequences Are Unrealistic Sonia Arrison is the author of the book 100+: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family & Faith. The recent science fiction movie In Time perpetuates several myths about the consequences of real-life radical life extension. While the movie portrays a dystopian society, in reality extreme longevity is nothing to fear. The movies scenario of harsh population control is based on mistaken Malthusian beliefs, and real studies show that cutting death rates doesnt increase population very much at all. Likewise, the movies portrayal of social disruption and income and class disparities misses the mark. In reality, life-extending technologies would become available to everyone in due course because the rich would have a powerful incentive to share them—profit. And rather than the longevity of some coming at the expense of others, in real life everyone would benefit from the increased productivity and creativity. Radical life extension will change the world, but not in the negative way that In Time portrays. Would the world be a better place if science could stop people from aging? In Time, the new sci-fi thriller starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried, is based on the outdated idea that longer lives would mean chaos. The film imagines a world in which somatic aging has been engineered to stop at 25; after that, a person is given just one years worth of time and must earn more by working, and the minutes tick by on a display embedded in his arm. Once someones clock runs out, he or she literally times out and dies. Whats more, time serves as money—the longer you have on your life clock, the richer you are. While the films fun, it falls into a dystopian trap, assuming that greater longevity would create a terrifying society. But it gets almost everything about human life extension wrong. Scientists are on the verge of discovering ways to radically extend human life—though they probably wont figure out how to maintain the pristine looks of 25-year-olds any time soon. In Time seems to argue that we should be concerned about this looming longevity. But theres nothing to be afraid of. Heavy population growth actually comes from births, not from fewer deaths. Timberlakes character, Will Salas, is a working-class man who lives in the ghetto and barely scrapes by, earning just enough time to make it to work the next day—bringing new meaning to living paycheck to paycheck. One night, he meets a wealthy centenarian suffering from an acute case of rich guilt. He opens Salas eyes to the depths of the time systems inequities: The rich can live forever because they oppress the poor. Everyone cant live forever, Hamilton explains. Where would we put them?... How else can there be men with a million years when most live day to day? After Hamilton commits suicide and gifts his vast amounts of remaining time to Salas, Timberlake becomes a fugitive as police assume foul play. The Population Growth Question In Times perhaps most frightening assertion is that an age of extended longevity would require strict population controls (i.e., death) to combat overcrowding and resource depletion. (Indeed, even this week [October 2011] we are seeing renewed concern about overpopulation, as the global head count hits 7 billion.) But this is premised on mistaken Malthusian beliefs that humans consume more than they produce. Sure, if people dont die at the same rate as they do today, then the population may go up (depending on fertility rates), but by how much? The answer might surprise you. Scholars at the University of Chicago have approached the population/longevity question in an interesting way. If the entire population of Sweden were to become immortal, they asked, how much would population increase? Their model suggests that Swedens population would increase by only 22 per-cent over 100 years. (For comparisons sake, the number of people in Sweden grew from 5.1 million in 1900 to 8.8 million in 2000, or 57 percent.) One of the reasons that cutting death rates doesnt affect population as much as we might think is that heavy population growth actually comes from births, not from fewer deaths. Rich vs. Poor? So lets say the earth can handle people living longer. What about the movies claim that the wealthy will have access to longer life, but the poor will not? The sad fact is that that is already the case, to a less dramatic extent: A Native American man living in South Dakota has a life expectancy of about 58 years, while an Asian-American woman in New Jersey has a life expectancy of 91 years. As breakthrough longevity technologies become available, the rich will certainly be the first to partake; they are the ones who will pay most of the early fixed costs for everything from flat-screen TVs to experimental medical treatments. Eventually, these life-extenders will reach everyone. The question is, how long will it take? If the gap between the fountain of longevitys availability for the wealthy and accessibility for the poor is a negligible amount of time, the transition to a long-lived population will be smooth. But if the trickle-down takes a long time, we may indeed face serious social disruption—but not exactly the way In Time suggests. The movie assumes that large groups of people who know their lives could be saved will be complacent about their unnecessary deaths. In reality, those people could pick up arms and literally fight for their lives. Luckily, that scenario seems unlikely, thanks to technological progress. Historically, the time necessary to distribute new technologies across socioeconomic borders has been speeding up. For instance, it took 46 years for one-quarter of the U.S. population to get electricity and 35 years for the telephone to get that far. But it took only 16 years for one-quarter of American households to get a personal computer, 13 years for a cellphone, and seven years for Internet access, a promising trend for those who wish to see the widespread use of longevity technologies. Yes, these examples are all communication innovations—but actually, health technologies themselves are fast becoming information technologies. Just like computers have a code based on 1s and 0s, so too do humans have a code, based on DNA. For example, prices for human genome sequencing are falling, which will make personalized medicines—one potential source of extended lifespans—cheaper in the future. Even if there is a gap between the life expectancy of the rich and the poor, it likely would not be a case of the rich gaining extra years at the expense of the underprivileged. Instead, the opposite is true: The rich have an incentive to make the technologies accessible to everyone, because that means more customers. Hoarding the technology would offer no advantages and would result in an unstable world. The last major flaw of In Times long-living world is its portrayal of the economy as a zero-sum game. If one person gets more time, it is at the expense of others. Rather than expanding, the economy just shifts a fixed set of resources from one place to another. There will be a day in the not-too-distant future when life expectancy ... is 150 years. Time Equals Opportunity In reality, individuals innovate and economies grow, allowing more people to prosper than in the past. But people dont seem to innovate in the films world, either because they are so distressed about living day-to-day or because they are so rich that they wont try anything new for fear of losing their long lives. (Even those with scads of time left on their clock can die by misadventure, so we see a wealthy girl, played by Amanda Seyfried, who is terrified of going into the ocean and drowning.) As one character puts it, The poor die and the rich dont live. The knowledge that time is limited should instead tilt things in favor of enhanced ambition. More time means more opportunity. And, despite well-publicized stories of young tech entrepreneurs creating the next big thing, the reality is that innovation is a late-peak field. Leonardo da Vinci was 51 years old when he started painting the Mona Lisa, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was 50 when he discovered the X-ray. Though they might seem middle-aged by our current standards, they were actually on the elderly side for their time periods. Benjamin Franklin was 46 when he conducted his famous kite experiment verifying the nature of electricity, but he didnt stop there. He was 55 when he invented the glass harmonica and 78 when he invented bifocals. If Franklin had the opportunity to live longer in a healthier state, one wonders what else he would have contributed to society. During the Cro-Magnon era, human life expectancy was a meager 18 years. By the time of the European Renaissance, one could expect 30 birthdays; by 1850, life expectancy had risen to 43 years. Now, those born in Western societies can expect close to 80 birthdays and look forward to more as science and technology advance. Fact Not Fiction These gains are stunning, but even bigger possibilities await. There will be a day in the not-too-distant future when life expectancy—and, more importantly, health expectancy—is 150 years. It wont stop there, of course, but that is what is in our near-term view. That doesnt mean the world will be problem-free or that core tensions between people will disappear. Indeed, in a world where people are around for longer, relationship issues may be more pronounced. (Get ready to deal with a great-grandmother-in-law.) Young workers entering the workforce will have to battle supercentenarians who have no urge to retire. We may face new and troubling types of pollution and perhaps epidemics that we cannot yet fathom. Being around to witness those problems will be exciting and challenging, but it wont be anything like the scenario portrayed in In Time. Further Readings Books Aubrey de Grey and Michael RaeEnding Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime. New York: St. Martins Press, 2007. David Ewing DuncanWhen Im 164: The New Science of Radical Life Extension, and What Happens If It Succeeds. New York: TED Books, 2012. Gregory Fahy et al, eds.The Future of Aging: Pathways to Human Life Extension. New York: Springer, 2010. James GolczewskiLife Extension: Current and Future Possibilities. Camp Hill, PA: Sunbury Press, 2012. Stephen HallMerchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension. New York: Mariner Books, 2004. Leon KassAgeless Bodies: Beyond Therapy—A Report of the Presidents Council on Bioethics. Washington, DC: PCBE, 2003. Raymond Kurzweil and Terry GrossmanFantastic Voyage: The Science Behind Radical Life Extension. New York: Rodale, 2004. Derek Maher and Calvin Mercer, eds.Religion and the Implications of Radical Life Extension. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Thomas MooneyLive Forever or Die Trying: The History and Politics of Life Extension. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011. James Schultz and Robert BinstockAging Nation: The Economics and Politics of Growing Older in America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Jonathan WeinerLong for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality. New York: Ecco, 2010. Arlene WeintraubSelling the Fountain of Youth: How the Anti-Aging Industry Made a Disease Out of Getting Old—And Made Billions. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Periodicals and Internet Sources Nick Bostrom Recent Developments in the Ethics, Science, and Politics of Life-Extension, Aging Horizons, vol. 3, Autumn/Winter 2005. Adam Bulger Want to Live Forever? The Human-Life-Extension Movement Sees a Glorious Future for Us All, Hartford Advocate, August 8, 2008. John Davis Collective Suttee: Is It Just to Develop Life Extension if It Will Not Be Possible to Provide It to Everyone? Annals NY Academy of Sciences, vol. 1019, June 2004. John Davis The Prolongevists Speak Up: The Life-Extension Ethics Session at the 10th Annual Congress of the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology, 2004, The American Journal of Bioethics, vol. 4, no. 4, December 2004. Julian Dibbell The Fast Supper, New York Magazine, October 23, 2006. Lydia Dugdale and Autumn Alcott Ridenour Making Sense of the Roman Catholic Directive to Extend Life Indefinitely, Hastings Center Report, vol. 41, no. 2, 2011. Jennifer Fishman, Robert Binstock, and Marcie Lambrix Anti-aging Science: The Emergence, Maintenance, and Enhancement of a Discipline, Journal of Aging Studies, vol. 22, no. 4, December 2008. Lev Grossman 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal, Time, February 10, 2011. Robin Holliday The Extreme Arrogance of Anti-Aging Medicine, Biogerontology, vol. 10, no. 2, April 2009. Alison Kadlec et al. The Science of Aging Gracefully: Scientists and the Public Talk About Aging Research, Public Agenda, 2005. publicagenda.org. Steven Leckart How Beer, Oprah and Sergey Brin Can Help Cure Aging, Wired, October 19, 2010. wired. Carl Marziali Reaching Toward the Fountain of Youth, Trojan Family Magazine, December 7, 2010. uscnews.usc.edu. Michael Mason One for the Ages: A Prescription That May Extend Life, New York Times, October 31, 2006. Sherwin Nuland Do You Want to Live Forever?, MIT Technology Review, February 2005. S. Jay Olshansky A Wrinkle in Time—A Modest Proposal to Slow Aging and Extend Healthy Life, Slate, November 12, 2010. slate. S. Jay Olshansky et al. In Pursuit of the Longevity Dividend: What Should We Be Doing to Prepare for the Unprecedented Aging of Humanity?, The Scientist, vol. 20, March 2006. grg.org. Caspar Llewellyn Smith Aubrey de Grey: We Dont Have to Get Sick as We Get Older, The Observer, July 31, 2010. Gregory Stock, Daniel Callahan, and Aubrey de Grey The Ethics of Life Extension, Rejuvenation Research, vol. 10, no. 3, September 1, 2007. Rebecca Traister Diet Your Way to a Long, Miserable Life!, Salon, November 22, 2006. salon. Nicholas Wade Quest for a Long Life Gains Scientific Respect, New York Times, September 28, 2009. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2013 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. Source Citation Arrison, Sonia. Fears About Radical Life Extension Consequences Are Unrealistic. Extending the Human Lifespan. Ed. Tamara Thompson. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2013. At Issue. Rpt. from Dont Be Afraid To Live Longer, Justin Timberlake: What the Dystopian In Time Gets Wrong About a World of Extreme Life Extension. Slate. 2011. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. Document URL ic.galegroup/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=Viewpoints&dviSelectedPage=&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=&displayGroups=&sortBy=&zid=&search_within_results=&p=OVIC&action=e&catId=&activityType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3010880205&source=Bookmark&u=spl_main&jsid=396c4a0b051c8e91b7b9e9d20380e4b8 Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3010880205
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:54:19 +0000
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