Re:Japanese scientists develop vaccine to eliminate cells be...
by sangnoir on Sunday December 12, 2021 @08:32PM
(#29535576)
Also, stagnation as the ruling class, politicians, CxOs, artists, singers, authors, researchers and professors have longer to propagate their outdated mindsets. Paraphrasing Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time". Death makes room for the new.
Re:Japanese scientists develop vaccine to eliminate cells be...
by throwawayboise on Monday December 13, 2021 @12:03AM
(#29536814)
A hard stop at age 72 would probably do humanity a lot more good, actually.
Re:Japanese scientists develop vaccine to eliminate cells be...
by Noumenon72 on Monday December 13, 2021 @01:08AM
(#29537153)
We'd be able to enjoy so much more of our retirement money without having to insure against living to 100.
Why would that be your conclusion? It's 10 more years of life. It's not 10 more years of better life. It's a little more of the same.
That 10 years is "experienced" as only a short increase in local time. Whereas before 33% of your life would have been 28 years old, afterwards 33% of your life would be at 31 years old. So life events would happen a couple years sooner or later but you wouldn't feel the difference.
It's not like world hunger would end. In fact we would need more food, because more humans would be alive at any point, because people are dying later. The senior citizen voting block would increase, expanding the lobbying power of senior citizens, which has a disproportionate unfair effect on the young. Which will get interesting as time goes on seeing as the birth rate has been declining steadily.
It also means your retirement would not last long enough anymore, meaning you would either have to work longer or harder or save more in order to retire. Social security dates would also have to change, and paycheck contributions may even have to increase. But corporations won't want to increase wages (as they never want to) so your money won't go as far in retirement, and inflation would act on it over a longer time, reducing it further than before. And since it would be a voluntary vaccine, as we have seen from the COVID-19 insanity, just having a life-saving vaccine available is no guarantee people will take it. So there would be controversy over whether to extend social security, and some significant amount of the population is going to get screwed over.
Finally, as the wealthy will live even longer, more wealth will get tied up in private ownership for longer, extending the wealth gap. Copyright would also take even longer to expire as it's based on how long since the creator died. There's tons of other random ways that arbitrarily extending the life of a portion of the population will not immediately lead to the greatest good that could be done for humanity.
Call me crazy, but I think we could do much more good for humanity today than just making it take longer for them to die.