The largest impact in the history of humankind will be made by those companies that work to extend human lifespan. Good to see how this whole race to increase lifespan can change Silicon Valley, moving it once again toward true innovation, truly changing the world, while other companies like Craig Ventor's http://humanlongevity.comhttp://genopharmix.comhttp://www.sens.org and http://buckinstitute.org come into to play.
I would say that lifespan lengthening is in the top tier of impactful technologies, but I think there are three equals in the top tier: strong AI, nanotech, and biotech. Of course, all of these four are quite intertwined, with some being enabled or perhaps even prevented by progress in another.
I tend to group biotech and nanotech together. Because essentially, what is life made of if not nanotechnology that is not ours, and we don't yet know how to control? The simplest way to build our own nanomachines is to start with tweaking the ones we already have around us.
"The largest impact in the history of humankind will be made by those companies that work to extend human lifespan."
True but I feel for the wrong reasons. To my mind, the single greatest challenge our species has faced in our brief history on this planet is how we minimize our impact on the finite resources available to us.
The elephant in the room is how do we curb population growth in a meaningful and humane way. What's the point of extending life if there's a diminishing return experientially?
I get frustrated when people bring up Malthusian catastrophe to denigrate the real and important work that scientists are doing in the field of human longevity. Population growth curbs itself as nations become more economically stable. Over population is not a global problem, but rather a regional one.
Even Bill Gates has written about this, more recently in his 2014 Gates letter, but also in the following essay, criticizing the doom and gloom predicted by books like The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth.
> The elephant in the room is how do we curb population growth in a meaningful and humane way.
Or, how to switch to sustainable means of energy production to secure comfortable level of life for increasing population.
It's a bit of an hammer and anvil situation - on one hand, achieving sustainability will most likely require getting rid of capitalistic economy and basically tearing the whole system apart and reassembling it into something different. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to be the one denied the right to live and/or reproduce, and allowing for this will open a huge another can of worms.
> To my mind, the single greatest challenge our species has faced in our brief history on this planet is how we minimize our impact on the finite resources available to us.
Despite that this doesn't look the greatest challenge to my mind, conquering aging and death might actually help rather then hinder meeting it.
I think it's safe to say that 'think of your children' has proved to be less effective a slogan and we might as well try 'think of yourself 100 years down the road'.
If people live longer and the fertility rate stays the same, it's an interesting question about what effect that would have on the population - if you have children at 30-40, and live until 100 rather than until 70, you're certainly not getting any exponential growth pattern as a result.
Yes you would. Growth is a result of the differential between the birth rate and the death rate. If the fertility rate stays the same, but lifespan increases, there would be a period where the death rate would decrease, at least, until the new stable lifespan is reached. In this period, the population would increase dramatically.
I'm not using exponential as a synonym for really fast, I'm using it to mean an exponential function. If lifespan increases but fertility rate remains low (as in the developed world), you get a very different sort of population growth than each couple having seven children, each of which will marry and have seven children, and so on. If fertility rate stays the same, and adult lifespan increases from 70 to 100, there would be the same number of children born over a number of generations as would have happened anyway, but they would live 40% longer. I presume that would mean a capped one-off 40% increase over the period of 30-150 years (depending on how quickly and equally the global population took up the technology, and how much it relied on preventative treatment early in life). Fertility based population growth would mean exponential increases - so for instance a doubling from 2 billion in 1930 to 4bn in 1970, then 8bn in 2010, 16bn in 2050, 32bn in 2090 etc.
I think this "filling out" sort of non-exponential growth is actually a large part of what is predicted over the next 50-100 years (from adults in middle wealth countries getting near Western levels of life expectancy), Hans Rosling talks about it in his "Don't Panic" lecture from a year or two back.
Simple answer: think how to colonize desert or build underwater habitats first. It's infinitely easier, and yet still superhard. We'll have to do all of this eventually.
As for resources, we don't need to relocate to get to them, we can bring them down here. There are companies already working on it.
Floating cities around the doldrums could also be fun. However I do think that having a functioning economy off planet helps a lot if we want to tap resources in space. Getting up the gravity well is expensive, once you are up there you might as well hang around.
What resources? There's not much useful water out there, let alone breathable air, carbon, organic matter, living things, ecosystems. All of those crucial resources are here.
Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.
Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.
Survival is an argument for getting a lot of people living off planet, not an argument for not doing so. We can try and create utopias as much as we like, but that is not going to help very much when we get hit by a big rock.
Also, personally I suspect that the real advance is not going to be in settling other planets, but building habitats out of asteroids.
Depends where you go. Lots of all that in the right places. Saturn's rings and moons; water is on the moon and on Mars; we can make what we don't find if we have enough energy.
Lifespan solves for this. If people knew they would be living long enough to experience what future generations would have to experience in terms of environmental impact, many would take on a different viewpoint toward climate issues as opposed to the "let them deal with it, I ain't gonna be alive anyway" approach.
In terms of population control, it's all about lifespan combined with more efficient discovery as fewer ideas would die with those moving them forward. Space travel will solve for moving the human race to further inhabitable planets, but not without a solution for the more important lifespan issue which is a requirement for extended space travel. We've got 4 billion years before our sun runs out and before the Andromeda galaxy will cause us a bit of trouble.
4 billion years from now, lets at least be known as the generation that began to make an impact in this area.
Even before going interplanetary, we still have a lot of uninhabited space on Earth. Colonizing various deserts would be a first step, then maybe underwater habitats will become a thing - all of this is cheaper, safer and easier to do than going to space.
We will eventually have to spread to other worlds, but for now, there is still a lot of space to use on ours, so we don't have be afraid of overpopulation in terms of land. We just need to figure out how to feed us all in a sustainable way.
I agree in part, however, sustainability requires a complex combinatorial solution as well due to it's association to the human condition related to self-interests (the list goes on of course), science, international distribution policy/policing, philosophical vs. technology GMO issuse etc.
We need to learn more about are species, we need to buy both time and food with something other than money.
You're right of course, but we won't solve our problems by just throwing away this planet and going to another (that, remember, doesn't support life by default, we need to make it do that).
We need to crack sustainability anyway, and it's best to focus on it ASAP.
I completely agree, we need to solve for this Earth first. If we continue to ruin this earth, we don't stand a chance and even worse, we'll have a horrible intergalactic reputation.
I actually wonder sometimes how much damage we did to ourselves by creating various popular science fiction shows. As people can't help but believe Hollywood ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic ), I wonder how many people feel subconsciously that space travel is easy, so if ruin this planet, we can just go and find another one.
I'm definitely not pointing at BSG. I was thinking more about Star Trek, et al. (which I absolutely love, but then again I can feel the availability heuristic working in my head when I think of space travel).
If any of our descendants ever have to worry about their intergalactic reputations, we will have saved life on earth many times over by deflecting large asteroids.
In the long run, having a technologically spacefaring species is the only way for anything other than microscopic life to survive.
