The Speculist

Randall Parker's FuturePundit blog is always interesting. If you read FuturePundit regularly you will learn things there that you are not likely to pick up anywhere else.

For example, last week Randall Parker relayed the news that resveratrol protects mice from obesity damage. Many bloggers mentioned it. But Randall also informed his readers that resveratrol suppliments are not stable, and that muscadine wine (white or red) contains something like 7 times the resveratrol of the next best red wine. That's news you can use.

That said, I have to take issue with a post Parker wrote this week, "Eternal Youth, Overpopulation, And Instincts To Reproduce."

Simply put, Randall is arguing that - all other things remaining equal - life extension technology will lead to an uncontrolled population explosion. Therefore, when radical life extension technology comes about, drastic steps will need to be made. Parker's suggestion is that we engineer offspring at birth to lack the desire to reproduce.

This seems a rather Orwellian solution for a problem we're not facing yet. It is true that if people continue to have children at today's rates, and cease to die of old age, and remain capable of having children indefinitely, and all other technology ceases to advance, then yes, we would have a big problem in three or four decades. Pass the Soylent Green.

I believe we'll see the first treatments for life extension within the next ten years. Perhaps we're seeing the first baby steps in that resveratrol research. But, unfortunately, people will continue to die from age related illnesses for many years after the first life extension therapies are introduced. Life extension related population increase will be a very gradual process.

Meanwhile, science will continue to advance in all areas. The level of technology necessary to deliver radical life extension will give us other solutions. We'll get cheaper energy, more efficient desalinization for potable water, and most importantly - exponential improvements in computation. Areas of wilderness that have are presently uninhabitable will be opened up. When space elevators become a reality many could take up residence in space. People might even choose to live virtually - essentially taking up no space.

Also, the desire to reproduce is demonstrably elastic. Even within this country there are populations that reproduce more (red states) than others (blue states). I'm sure that people in Maine enjoy a good quickie as much as people here in the South, but they are considerably less likely to allow that fun to result in a pregnancy.

Anyway, I'd guess that the desire to have sex is instinctual and inelastic while the desire to have a baby is largely cultural. Randall Parker is probably not advocating that we breed a generation of celibates, but it could turn out that breeding for celibacy or infertility may be the only ways to address this "problem" genetically. But genetics has a poor and frightening history as a tool for social engineering. Other answers will arrive.

Our culture will change dramatically when people start living indefinitely. Our whole society - all of our institutions - are organized on the idea that people are born, they grow, learn, then work, bear and raise the next generation, and then wither and die. Throw out the "wither and die" part and all the rest will be rethought. People will delay even longer starting families. Some people will find that they are perfectly happy never having children. Others will find that their perpetually young adult children are all the children they want.

Lastly, I like what one of Randall Parker's commentors had to say,

the "ultimate resource" is human intelligence. A trillion humans will mean the number of PhDs working on the hard problems mentioned above to alleviate troubles will be quite large.

No doubt.