Do you know this guy? His name is Aubrey de Grey he is convinced that people can live forever and he leaders a project to try to make it possible.
I found this documentary about him pretty interesting, specially because it let us enter in the discussion about the consequences to live forever or even hundreds of years.



I was thinking about a few of them:

1. Older people has a huge advantage in terms of experience respect young. In the opposite side they lack of all the strong and physical energies of young ones. In an environment where the body have a big role for subsistence, the older you are, the less possibilities to survive. But at the same time the more tricks you know about how to survive. But what about if the body does not change at all? You do not die at all? Always young and more experienced every day. The advantage respect younger will increase indefinitely and more the time passes, the more the life will became difficult for the new comers to participate in the constant race this world is immersed in. For example, imagine to be born in a society with people that have 200 hundred years more experience than others, or even more. They will become an incredible font of knowledge and inspiration for many others but at the same time if those people have bad intentions it would be really hard to even understand for the younger how much controlled they could be.
So the society would be divided in people with more and less experience. The money, the intelligence, anything can not fight against the experience and the knowledge of life. At this point there is one more questions that we can think of as obvious.

2. How much could a human learn? 100 hundred years old people are an example that an entire life is far away from that supposed limit. Many of them still remember absolutely everything about their lives and make pretty logic and have good reasoning. So if we could take away all the senility lack from their bodies those people would be able to still learn and get more experience. So where is the limit? Nobody knows. The possible limits could demonstrate one important thing in all human history. It would demonstrate, for instance, that if the intelligence, memory and everything we are, reside into the brain or somewhere else, that would mean that the brain would be us. If so, it should have a memory limit, a learning limit. As we learn new things, we forget other things. Anyway, anything can get totally lost and sometimes making some relationships we are able to remember something that was apparently totally lost. The only thing we never get enough experienced in and never forget is experience itself. Some people said that 10 years is the minimum time to get expertise in some art or technique. But what about life experience? A 100 year old person, even if he/she is terrible ignorant and had never ever get out from his/her little town, can give me a lesson of life that I would never even imagine. That learning increase year after year… Then, what if we could live forever, there would there be some limitation?

3. Population would become a big problem. Technology can help on that, just increasing the places available to live and to find ways to find all the resources we could need. Specially with a non dying population, scientists and researchers would have more time to discover other ways to support that kind of society.

4. Value of death. Actually is something accepted that people have to die someday. But in a society where death is something not belonging to any natural process, the idea of death would get a totally different meaning. The sorrow for someone’s death would become an unsurmountable lost.

5. What about religions? Almost all religions would lack of any meaning in that society and the possibility to live almost indefinitely would bring new ideas and philosophies.

6. What about economy and possessions? People could accumulate infinite resources. The meaning of money, work and inheritance would change radically. The society would need to find other ways to make people work and money won’t be more a acceptable excuse to do it.

Personally I disagree with people that disagree with the idea of Dr. Aubrey de Grey. If he can make it, all the collateral problems are irrelevant compared to the advantages.

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