I am currently reading Homo Deus, which is triggering my thoughs like a spark to gunpowder. Usually I would constantly be talking to myself in my mind if not aloud about all kinds of interesting topics but it is way better to read about them. Also, I never thought I could agree so much with another person in (at least for now) absolutely everything.
So when I read this book and find anything interesting I would just stop reading and unleash my thoughts.
That is what I am doing at the moment, improvisating. It may not be good.


So I already heard of people who say "Death should be seen as another illnes to cure", and it is really very interesting.

Also, Harari says "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations after World War Two (It's maybe the closest thing we have to a global constitution) categorically affirms that the <<Right to life>> is the most fundamental value of humanity. Since death clearly violates this right, death is a crime against humanity and we should declare total war on it."

This is an interesting scenario. Now imagine every country in the world starts to actually try to cure it. I won't talk about if it is even possible as I know too little about how aging works. I know that aging is caused mostly by the degradation of telomeres and if we can actually stop it we could stop or slow down aging.

Well then, I already think the life with actual medicine if you don't die in an accident is long enough. In my country the life expenctancy is 83 years, not too bad for me. But I also think that if we could expand our lifespan to say 120 years it would not be a problem at all. Imagine looking like a 20 year old but being 35. Great isn't it?
But that is just slowing down aging.


Our scenario is more fictional than that.

Say we somehow succeed on our war against death and we stop aging. We could choose to stop aging anywhere we wanted to and let's not fantasize anymore. Let's go the the issues!

So all this scenario description was to ask some questions, maybe open some debate. So I will write down some questions, try to give them my own answer and I would apreaciate you for answering too, also for correcting and asking some more questions I may have missed. Here we go!


First of all, how would we introduce mortals to immortality?
Because our objective is to talk about a scenario in which everyone was immortal. Not actually unable to die but just unable to age. But we can't talk about the issues of maintaining an immortal world without knowing how would we be able to achieve it in the slightest. So I won't ask about scientific achievement of immortality (but if you want to, post your own theories on how could we do it or post interesting information, it would also be interesting) but about later on, when we already have tested it on humans and it worked.
Now we can actually launch our cure to death. But how would we do that? We just tell everyone we have it? It would generate some obvious social issues.

It might sound machiavellian, but in my opinion the solution to this problem lays in education. For me, almost every problem, especially social problems have their solution in education.

If we, for some reason wanted to make everyone want to be immortal (which is clearly not the case now) we would want to educate children to make them more open to immortality. Young people open to it, and old people either dead or just not caring at all about it (which is the case for many old people). Because of course not everyone wants to be immortal now. So we would educate the generations of children to accept it easier at the same time we investigate about the cure to death.

But this scenario isn't going to be ok if people gets to be immortal just because someone wanted them to be so.
A less machiavellian solution to this would be to just propose it to everyone. Tell our friens look we would like to be immortal, what about you? And let them decide, acclimate to the concept of immortality and if it someday becomes popular, people will start developing it by themselves.
Obviously rich people will get it faster, and if it really is so good, people will start wanting to be immortal too.


What I mean is, not only some scientist have to want it, people have to want it.

So if everyone talks about it, some people may get interested, and eventually it would be a common desire for us to be immortal (or not, who knows).


Of course, people would need a reason to want to live more, so we would have to make life so good that everyone would like to prolong it, not just some people. This means immortality will not (from my point of view) be achieved until we achieve some other things before.




"A better life in which people are immortal because they want to."


Our scenario is completely settled.

Now the real questions.



The life of a immortal humanity would be very different from ours. For example, first of all, it would be a humanity with either no love in one extreme, infertile people in the other extreme, or a lot of condoms in the middle. Because people would either stop mating and pairing, or would castrate themselves to stop overpopulation.
Because unless a pandemic or a war kills the same number of people that are born, people couldn't just have children like we do today, with people not dying and also having children the world would be overpopulated extremely quickly: in the world, in the present over 300 000 people are born each day (average obtained from the census of the CIA realized in the year 2016) . If we stop counting the deaths and set the overpopulation limit to 12 billion, also without increasing the ratio at which people is born over time (because if population increases, born ratio increases but we won't do it to simplify things) and finally setting the world population to 7.3 billion to make things easier, we get that the world will be overpopulated in 45 years, which is the blink of an eye for immortal beings. This is of course a very simple calculation, simplifying a lot of things, not a reliable source. The actual result could vary a lot but it should stay between 10 and 60 years which is very little time for a person to enjoy immortality until the world collapses.

So we need a way to maintain the population but also to make it able to recover fast after any incident or catastrophe.

Because not aging is of no use against a pandemic, if we don't even reproduce anymore, the population would decrease terrifyingly fast after some catastrophic event.

We must have everything in our plan so this scenario can be as safe as possible. It would be useless if it was fragile.

Also we have to be careful, cause you know, changing our lives so much that we don't even reproduce anymore. Most people like having and raising children. (Especialy not so young people, in my classroom there is a lor of people who don't want do have children, including myself)

The most realistic way is obviously that only rich people make themselves immortal, and time will show us if it is really good and better or if it is not. If it is, people would fancy it until finally it reaches everyone, being easily bought by anyone who would want it. This could lead to some minorities retiring and banning immortality in their communities. Which could be a social problem, we don't want to get separated in different sectors, we seek to improve equality, not to make it worse.


So one issue would be overpopulation and vulnerability to catastrophic events.

Next, what would they do? Would they do the same job all the time? Wouldn't they get bored at some point? Even if they tried every job and hobbie, eternity is long enough to make you able to get bored of everything.

For me the most reasonable solution would be to make people able to choose when to die. It would be really painful. Live a happy life until you grow wary of it. It would be the price to pay for immortality.

A solution to that would be to make life really enjoyable, and also to make us think differently about life.

Look, death is not bad, I am just proposing this interesting scenario to discuss about difficulties and beneffits of it. But as I said death is not bad because in the end, death was what motivated us to create cities, and invent things in the first place. When human race realised we all die no matter what, people started really trying to live as good and long as possible, because life is ephemeral, so you have to proffit it while you still have it.
It motivated us to do things before dying. But without that motivation people will really need to find a different motivation in life.
Humanity would need to mature, get rid of the pain of death and its memory and start looking for far horizons.
It would also solve lots of depression cases.

That is because, look, in this scientific world we live now, there are a lot of people that think "Everything is meaningles, we are just specks of dust floating in a vast impassible universe that doesn't care about us at all." That is because, if there is no god, and life and love is just a chemical reaction, what is the meaning of anything? We people need motivation to do stuff, and that thought drains many people of any motivation they could have.

So one objective would be to really find a farther horizon, something to give meaning to everything. "Fight for humanity" would be an example I can give you. Give "humanity as a whole" a meaning and make people really want to contribute wtih something. Then they would either retire to see the world get better thanks to him/her, of get addicted to improving humanity and life. It is completely reasonable, because when we humans look at our achievements we don't just say "oh that is good, now let's die or retire", we normally want more, it is in our nature to not conform with what we already have.
Combining someone addicted to the satisfaction of having helped humanity with immortality would give really productive geniuses. For example, imagine what would Einstein think if he saw all the information we have about black holes, gravitational waves, universe expansion, the big bang.... Would he just say "Okay, that is good." and just watch us investigane? No! He would run towards the most interesting lab or labs and help a lot more. And if he was immortal I'm sure he wouldn't ever stop investigating.


As you can see, this scenario has some downsides and some advantages.




So for now, our scenario looks like this:

Pre requisites:
People wanting to be immortal
Some alternate way of reproduction that can be switched at will
Make life more enjoyable
A different way of seeing life and death


Downsides:
People eventually getting tired of living, choosing to die after a long time of pain. This could even become taboo, with people hiding their will to die, and resulting in a lot of suicides. This is lessened by the third pre-requisite.
Overpopulation
Vulnerability to catastrophic events.
Minorities not wanting immortality

Advantages:
Life is more enjoyable
Prolonged productivity of geniuses. This is increased by third pre-requisite.




Lastly, forgive my english level, I am still learning.

Please, publish any reply, review, critique, or new problems this scenario would present. Also any different solution to those three problems.

Good night!