On the contrary the position of most people seems to be knee-jerk opposition to any possibility of extending life indefinitely.

It's always a good idea to apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_test. Given you lived in a world where death was a choice, would you prefer to take that away?

Using the reversal test: I imagine living in an overcrowded world whose population was out of control with nothing to cull its growth. With resources running out, and we had the opportunity to slowly and 'naturally' phase out individuals to reduce the population (read: dying of natural causes as people do now), then yes, I would prefer that.

One thing about that hypothetical world - we would have a strong economical incentive to expand inwards and outwards - to start underwater settlements, to turn deserts into habitable, arable lands, to build Mars colonies and Venus cloud cities. Those things aren't beyond our technological capabilities now, we just have no strong incentive to do them.

>...to build Mars colonies and Venus cloud cities.

That doesn't solve the problem on Earth, it only spreads it across the solar system.

It's logical, it's clear - there's only one way to go from here. Without a doubt, the only way to go from here is out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab_mH8R0KTM

http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Julia_Ecklar:One_Way_To_Go

And to just be more thrifty with our resources in general.

I imagine we'd just end up with some sort of extreme aversion to reproducing. It's not hard to imagine - many people don't even care to reproduce now, and fertility rates in advanced countries are sometimes below replacement fertility levels. The replacement rate drops dramatically when you can stop aging and most forms of death, but I imagine that if you always had the body of a 22-year old Olympic athlete, you might be less interested in having children. You might even develop an ethos like buying organic food or being vegetarian - it's gauche to have children once you're taking stem cell patches.

At the moment the majority of the developed world is suffering from underpopulation and an aging population.

Immortality would change that but I expect by the time we figure actual immortality out we'll have either gotten off the planet or figured out brain uploads (this is what I imagine applying the reversal test to). In both those cases overpopulation is not a significant problem.

In the mid-term we're much more likely to see life extension and staving off dementia, and that would be helpful to countries struggling to sustain a workforce.

1) We're not getting off this planet for centuries, if ever. Don't hold your breath. Doing this is MUCH harder than solving immortality, which probably is about as difficult as patching some stem cells.

2) Brain uploads are dumb. Let me ask you this: I create a 'brain upload' program, run it on you, and tell you, "OK, now your brain is uploaded!" Will you walk willingly into a blender? You are your body. It does not matter what sort of digital derivative has been made of you, your subjective experience is tied to your corpse.

> 1) We're not getting off this planet for centuries, if ever. Don't hold your breath. Doing this is MUCH harder than solving immortality, which probably is about as difficult as patching some stem cells.

It's not harder, it's much easier. Hell, it's somewhat within our current technological capabilities. It's just expensive and we have zero economic incentive to do it.

Sure, we can blast off and die in space of cold and asphyxiation. I assumed this meant 'move to inhabit another planet indefinitely in a manner that does not suck'.

I meant exactly that. We are technologically advanced enough to blast off to Mars and build a permanent settlement there. We just don't have the will (as measured in money - the unit of caring). Would the colony suck? Initially, probably yes. But hey, if we were to suddenly hit immortality tomorrow, we have enough space in deserts and oceans to inhabit before going to Mars that we'll be experts in self-contained settlements by the time colony ship reaches red planet's surface.

There is the "does not suck" part to consider, though. I have a hard time thinking of any parameters in which a current or nearish-future self-contained settlement would not, across many parameters, suck. Maybe it's a failure of imagination, but...I dunno.

I'm inclined to believe that the "sucking" part of it is a consequence of new technology and capabilities. It's rarely the case that something that is done for the first time is even remotely comparable in quality to the mass marketed refined implementation of that thing.

No matter what our technological capabilities are at the time of doing so, I believe the first colonies on other planets will "suck" by the standards of living of that era.

For 2), the standard "ship of Theseus" argument applies: progressively replace your brain by parts which are emulated. Initially you are you, at the end of the process you are uploaded. When did your "subjective experience" change?

The notion of the continuity of consciousness is not well-defined, so I don't think we have any idea about whether brain uploads can make sense or not. But I don't see why it's obvious that they wouldn't.

It's not the brain that I'm worried about losing, it's the body. The ship of Theseus imagines I am replacing parts with nigh-indistinguishable parts. There is a fundamental difference in going from squishy biology to program in the cloud. I'm not even sure it's possible for a machine to have a subjective experience like a human's without the squishy meat parts, and I doubt we'll learn enough to emulate those parts successfully for a good while. I'm pretty attached to my hands and face and would probably be very unhappy if I lost them.

>2) Brain uploads are dumb. Let me ask you this: I create a 'brain upload' program, run it on you, and tell you, "OK, now your brain is uploaded!" Will you walk willingly into a blender? You are your body. It does not matter what sort of digital derivative has been made of you, your subjective experience is tied to your corpse.

I agree with you about the brain uploads, but I think that the final conclusion is that either continuity of consciousness is an illusion, or it spans all life (i.e. pan-consciousness). Most cells, and all atoms, in your body will be cycled many times before you die. Why would there be any continuity of consciousness across those total changes? How is it fundamentally any different than the brain upload scenario?

The only reason why you think that your consciousness is continuous from even a moment ago is that you have memories of it (just like your uploaded self would, by the way). Just as you insist that you are the same person you were a minute ago, your uploaded self would insist it is the same person as it was before the upload.

Yeah, my subjective experience is an illusion. But:

1) My uploaded self would probably immediately be appalled at the loss of that subjective experience. You identify deeply with your embodied self; I am my vagus nerve and the intestinal distress it transmits as much as I am anything.

2) My embodied self would still have its own subjective experience and would experience dying, none the happier that there's some counterfeit digital version running around claiming to be me.

> Let me ask you this: I create a 'brain upload' program, run it on you, and tell you, "OK, now your brain is uploaded!" Will you walk willingly into a blender?

If it was well researched, well tested, had been known for some years to work, and I could meet with my virtual self and confirm his authenticity, then yes, absolutely I would. Assuming this "blender" of yours isn't painful, of course. What a small price to pay for immortality!

Consider taking a look at the book Glasshouse. It portrays a world where this is normal.

How would you confirm his authenticity? I mean, if I was a machine created from a human who would stand to inherit all of that human's wealth, power, and status, I'd say whatever the hell I thought he wanted to hear to make him walk into a blender.

You don't think you could tell yourself from a stranger?

Absolutely not, I've never talked to myself as a stranger.

I was barely able to understand what the Internet would do to the world, and still don't. You're asking me to successfully imagine the consequences of ending death, and then apply a 'reversal test' in that society? This methodology is too difficult.

No, it's appalling that something like this is not already done. That it requires bunch of rich people to become seriously discussed at all, instead of being a continued major focus of medical research for decades now. People are funny this way. They'll bury their dead and mourn their loss, consider their own mortality and preach about life everlasting, or write stories about elixirs of youth. But to actually move a finger and support the war against death? No, that's insane.

I don't think it's as easy as you portray it. To "cure death", you have to cure every thing that can go wrong with you.

Look at just once thing that can go wrong with you: cancer. There are huge amounts of money poured into cancer research around the world.

But I don't even know if my wife, only 30 years old but recently diagnosed with cancer, will live long enough for us to have kids and see them grow up.

> write stories about elixirs of youth

One of our earliest extant pieces of literature (fragments from ~2100 BCE, earliest complete version before 1000 BCE) is about that, in fact. It's a cautionary tale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

It's easy to be cautionary if there's no chance of actually achieving it. http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2625

Truth be told, we have cautionary tales in our literature about pretty much any single thing a human being can desire. Power? Check. Riches? Check. Love? Check.

Oh but how much fun is it to contemplate? How does love, war, work, retirement, achievement, purpose, etc. change once you can live forever? Or once some subset of humanity can live forever? If you were nearly immortal how long would you mourn the death of a non-immortal spouse? Would you work an additional 5 years before retirement on the off chance that they figure out how to make you immortal between now and then? How would you treat a person who was immortal because they spent $1 million on a treatment that you couldn't afford? How would that treatment affect inflation? How would immortals affect inflation? There is so much awesome material here for science fiction writers!

If you were immortal, you could pay off a loan over hundreds of years. Imagine a mortgage of $500K being paid off over 3 years. Suddenly, paying $1M-$2M isn't such a barrier.

It doesn't work that way -- the upper limit is still the monthly interest on the loan. So at 3%, 1M is still 25K per month. Unless I'm missing something? (I believe that there is a classification of interest-only loans currently).

Yes, your math is off. At 3% the annual interest on a $1M loan would be $30-$40K (depending on how the interest is calculated), per year. Monthly, that would only be around $2500-$3500. Principal repayment be +/- $833/month.

> How would you treat a person who was immortal because they spent $1 million on a treatment that you couldn't afford?

I'm thinking of a great Prachett-esque scene where the newly ageless billionaire walks out of the clinic and then slips on a banana (or a soylent puddle) and dies from head trauma.

You could come up with a better ironic hell than that.

They walk outside, get assaulted by an angry mob of people opposed to the rich paying to live forever, and end up with locked-in syndrome for the next thousand years from the head trauma.

I'm a terse man. Take pithy on me.

I fully intend to write this science fiction, but the fact that this COULD be reality (and I think the biology is tractable) should be sparking some sort of policy debate. There is actual capital flowing into these ventures... Speculative fiction is ten years behind where the money is.

Drew Magary beat you to it.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10673576-the-postmortal

(It's a good read)

Pandora's Star is the first book of a series that explores many of these themes as well.

As frequently happens, Bruce Sterling was there. Pick up a copy of _Holy Fire_.

"which would fundamentally alter what it means to be human in a profound and everlasting way"

This has periodically happened over the long course of our species existence. A hundred years ago the average lifespan was half what it was today. Simply because medicine improved. Treating death as a disease instead of a natural thing seems perfectly rational to me.