Death and dying in the future.
Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:31 am
I'm feeling pessimistic after some health issues, though I do recall a saying that pessimism is often more likely to be realism.
So let's start with the premise of longevity and health span. This is not likely to be a single pill, or one treatment. This is more likely to come as multiple things that don't come all at once. It will more than likely begin with animal models of a few treatment plans that suggest they could benefit humanity. and they will then need to go through early safety testing in humans, likely with some not passing the bar on that, and then some going on to effectiveness testing where some will not be effective in human models, some will be hard to tell, some might have promise but actually trade benefits for some other issues/sideeffects. Nothing will come across completely safe and viable methods.
And it will take decades to get through those courses. So, let's say, optimistically 25 years total for the first options to get through these phases. Now they have to go into production and unless we make cultural and economic changes before then, don't imagine any of that will suddenly be available to just anyone. Expect further years or even decades for those to become available to people on a larger scale.
meanwhile during the first 20 some odd years there will be other courses of therapy that come up. Some will be off label uses of things that already exist and thus they may move along the development timeline faster. But some others that make it through the first weeding process may actually react poorly with the other therapies and so nobody gets a complete course of treatment right away. but eventually there will be courses of therapy that can cover all the bases...
But I suspect that's likely to take 40-60 years to navigate. For anyone currently in their 40s or above, there may be current courses and advancements to come out in that time that will get you to your 80s or 90s, but we're gonna lose a lot of us before then and I doubt I will be making to my mid 80s or the other side of 100 that that prediction suggests.
But just going forward with the hypothetical. We get a point where we reach the ability to replace and treat our aging bodies to extend lifespans. There will be plenty who refuse, and plenty more who will try and prevent people from being able to use these technologies. And there will be civil wars, and international wars where this plays a role. (Imagine a Russian who develops or acquires the tech to extend lives indefinitely, and denying it to LGBTQ+ people in the country, or a China adoption of the tech that they refuse access to religious minorities and political disodents and prisoners, Or the US evangelicals, or capitalism seeking 30-50 year contracts to serve your masters in order to get coverage for the treatments or funds to purchase it). There will be riots at some point and there will be wars fought about other things that really are about access to these treatments.
And through this all, you will watch your parents die. Aunts and Uncles die, you might lose siblings or even a spouse. Co-workers will die, and celebrities and people who filled your life will die. You might even lose a child along the way. And eventually when you have the ability to access the treatments, friends and family might after going through all that, not be willing to live for decades or centuries more with those losses.
But if you press on and keep going you learn that solving the riddle of aging isn't the same as beating death. Car accidents, plane crashes, freak storms and natural disasters, murder and terrorism, household accidents, suicide and pandemics. They will not only still claim people all the time, but they will appear to be getting worse... because the number of people who would have died of old age before the odds caught up to them now will be living longer and meet their end in another way.
Some of the medical advancements that are used for addressing aging will have an impact in saving people from other issues. But the death rate won't ever really be zero. Live long enough and somethings bound to try and get you.
Maybe you get 300 years instead of 75. Maybe you beat the odds and you are able to make it thousands of years. Along the way you will lose plenty of others to fate. More family, more friends, more coworkers, more spouses, more children. Some of those losses with be people who give up after their own losses weigh too much for them to want to continue to carry.
And after s few hundred years you won't even remember them all. Like you even now don't recall all the other people who were at your seventh birthday party. You will not be able to remember your parents, just vague information you've held onto about them, you'll not remember your various jobs, or the exact makeup of the family across the hall in the bomb shelter during the war. after a few thousand years you'll wonder if your are even you or if this is a real version of the ship of Thesues.
You won't be world famous, you will continue to be just another person. You'll have not achieved most of your ambitions and goals in life and moved on to others that you will equally have failed to achieve. you will be unnotworthy. Your can't even claim to have done it for the experiences and the memories, because you've forgotten most of it and your data storage of photos and video had to be pruned and weeded to make room for the important things, most of which you can't remember anymore and most of the rest are things you no longer consider important.
And you still luck out and push on, to the party at the end of the universe. The universe is done and you with it. And then it might as well never have happened. There's no memory of it and nobody to learn about it. No living on through any legacy, no stories about your life because there is nobody to remember them, nobody to tell them and nobody to hear them. It might as well not have happened.
It matters not if you died at 48, or lived to be 1 million. what does any of that matter in the end where there was nothing before, and there is nothing after?
... maybe the point isn't a goal, or a memory that will last. Maybe it's experiencing the journey of now, however long that lasts.
But anyway, I remain skeptical that any of us will live much extended lives, and some of us even less than the average.
So let's start with the premise of longevity and health span. This is not likely to be a single pill, or one treatment. This is more likely to come as multiple things that don't come all at once. It will more than likely begin with animal models of a few treatment plans that suggest they could benefit humanity. and they will then need to go through early safety testing in humans, likely with some not passing the bar on that, and then some going on to effectiveness testing where some will not be effective in human models, some will be hard to tell, some might have promise but actually trade benefits for some other issues/sideeffects. Nothing will come across completely safe and viable methods.
And it will take decades to get through those courses. So, let's say, optimistically 25 years total for the first options to get through these phases. Now they have to go into production and unless we make cultural and economic changes before then, don't imagine any of that will suddenly be available to just anyone. Expect further years or even decades for those to become available to people on a larger scale.
meanwhile during the first 20 some odd years there will be other courses of therapy that come up. Some will be off label uses of things that already exist and thus they may move along the development timeline faster. But some others that make it through the first weeding process may actually react poorly with the other therapies and so nobody gets a complete course of treatment right away. but eventually there will be courses of therapy that can cover all the bases...
But I suspect that's likely to take 40-60 years to navigate. For anyone currently in their 40s or above, there may be current courses and advancements to come out in that time that will get you to your 80s or 90s, but we're gonna lose a lot of us before then and I doubt I will be making to my mid 80s or the other side of 100 that that prediction suggests.
But just going forward with the hypothetical. We get a point where we reach the ability to replace and treat our aging bodies to extend lifespans. There will be plenty who refuse, and plenty more who will try and prevent people from being able to use these technologies. And there will be civil wars, and international wars where this plays a role. (Imagine a Russian who develops or acquires the tech to extend lives indefinitely, and denying it to LGBTQ+ people in the country, or a China adoption of the tech that they refuse access to religious minorities and political disodents and prisoners, Or the US evangelicals, or capitalism seeking 30-50 year contracts to serve your masters in order to get coverage for the treatments or funds to purchase it). There will be riots at some point and there will be wars fought about other things that really are about access to these treatments.
And through this all, you will watch your parents die. Aunts and Uncles die, you might lose siblings or even a spouse. Co-workers will die, and celebrities and people who filled your life will die. You might even lose a child along the way. And eventually when you have the ability to access the treatments, friends and family might after going through all that, not be willing to live for decades or centuries more with those losses.
But if you press on and keep going you learn that solving the riddle of aging isn't the same as beating death. Car accidents, plane crashes, freak storms and natural disasters, murder and terrorism, household accidents, suicide and pandemics. They will not only still claim people all the time, but they will appear to be getting worse... because the number of people who would have died of old age before the odds caught up to them now will be living longer and meet their end in another way.
Some of the medical advancements that are used for addressing aging will have an impact in saving people from other issues. But the death rate won't ever really be zero. Live long enough and somethings bound to try and get you.
Maybe you get 300 years instead of 75. Maybe you beat the odds and you are able to make it thousands of years. Along the way you will lose plenty of others to fate. More family, more friends, more coworkers, more spouses, more children. Some of those losses with be people who give up after their own losses weigh too much for them to want to continue to carry.
And after s few hundred years you won't even remember them all. Like you even now don't recall all the other people who were at your seventh birthday party. You will not be able to remember your parents, just vague information you've held onto about them, you'll not remember your various jobs, or the exact makeup of the family across the hall in the bomb shelter during the war. after a few thousand years you'll wonder if your are even you or if this is a real version of the ship of Thesues.
You won't be world famous, you will continue to be just another person. You'll have not achieved most of your ambitions and goals in life and moved on to others that you will equally have failed to achieve. you will be unnotworthy. Your can't even claim to have done it for the experiences and the memories, because you've forgotten most of it and your data storage of photos and video had to be pruned and weeded to make room for the important things, most of which you can't remember anymore and most of the rest are things you no longer consider important.
And you still luck out and push on, to the party at the end of the universe. The universe is done and you with it. And then it might as well never have happened. There's no memory of it and nobody to learn about it. No living on through any legacy, no stories about your life because there is nobody to remember them, nobody to tell them and nobody to hear them. It might as well not have happened.
It matters not if you died at 48, or lived to be 1 million. what does any of that matter in the end where there was nothing before, and there is nothing after?
... maybe the point isn't a goal, or a memory that will last. Maybe it's experiencing the journey of now, however long that lasts.
But anyway, I remain skeptical that any of us will live much extended lives, and some of us even less than the average.