If you live 500 years instead of 100, you haven’t achieved anything special. You haven’t cheated death. You’ve just got an extra 400 years of living.
Same for living eighty years instead of twenty.
Globally, we don’t have an overpopulation problem. I used to think we did, but we don’t. What we have is a resource overconsumption problem. We’re overloading the carrying capacity of the earth, but that carrying capacity isn’t constant, we’ve increased it in the past, and it can be increased again.
Increasing the human lifespan many times over and not developing other technology would lead to some very bad outcomes, but not developing technology that will allow us to increase earth’s human carrying capacity is almost certainly going to result in bad outcomes regardless.
In the long term, eventually we may reach a genuine overpopulation problem, where it becomes problematic to put more people on the earth even at optimal resource efficiency, but in the long term, earth is not necessarily our only habitation prospect. In the really long term we may start running up against the limitations of what our light cone can support, but that’s a problem we’ve got a lot of time to grapple with.
Same for living eighty years instead of twenty.
Globally, we don’t have an overpopulation problem. I used to think we did, but we don’t. What we have is a resource overconsumption problem. We’re overloading the carrying capacity of the earth, but that carrying capacity isn’t constant, we’ve increased it in the past, and it can be increased again.
Increasing the human lifespan many times over and not developing other technology would lead to some very bad outcomes, but not developing technology that will allow us to increase earth’s human carrying capacity is almost certainly going to result in bad outcomes regardless.
In the long term, eventually we may reach a genuine overpopulation problem, where it becomes problematic to put more people on the earth even at optimal resource efficiency, but in the long term, earth is not necessarily our only habitation prospect. In the really long term we may start running up against the limitations of what our light cone can support, but that’s a problem we’ve got a lot of time to grapple with.