Suppose a future technological trick allows our civilisation to magically size and control anything material within a spheric bubble growing at light speed: that means what we own would grow as a polynomial (2 or 3, depending on your TOE). But polynomial growth is not enough to cope with any fixed grow rate of the population (that’s exponential), so that’s why I think amortals should play on time to make space. In permutation city, Greg Egan imagine the uploaded could play with their refreshing speed. In the context of biological immortality, taking long naps could serve the same purpose.
Always glad to see Greg Egan referenced. The important thing to me is that although population growth could be exponential (for the reasons cousin_it gave), it’s going to be very slow relative to the rate of technological progress. Unless fertility rises significantly, it’s likely to be hundreds of years before population would grow by 10x, by which point we’re well into Greg Egan territory and all bets are off anyway. So population could be a concern, but we’ll have plenty of time to address it via methods that don’t involve literally everyone dying.
On second thought, strong upvote for this answer because I think it’s key to pinpoint our divergence.
You think that we will likely be well into Greg Egan territory in a few hundred years, whereas new tools in biology are so fantastic we are a few decades to, yes immortality, but I guess you see that as a direct consequence of reaching biological universality (when we can basically at will make cells do whatever one cell can do).
To me (and, in a sense, echoing Vladimir_Nesov´s comment above) that’s the contrary: not only I expect new biological limitations to show up nearly as fast as we solve old problems (like decoding the human genome was fantastic, and fruitful, but not as fruitful as I was naively thinking at the time), but I also fully expect we will taste Greg Egan territory several decades before we will fully master our own biology.
Late late late disclaimer: I’m toying with the idea of starting a series of post called Road to amortality, so you should expect me to be biased and stubbornly attached to my ideas. 😉
To fight the latter, here’s one result that would move me toward your position: if we can print or grow any complex organ within the next decade. Do you accept this criteria as fair and to the point? Would you mind thinking of some results that would make you strongly update toward my position?
Naps would handle the amount of people walking around, but would probably require some novel approaches to ownership to work properly. Or synchronization of when people wake up? With the current norms, you’d end up with empty cities, because a large fraction of the inhabitants would be asleep at each given moment. Though magically sizing stuff would also handle that issue.
After reflexion I still don’t get your point, e.g. what problems intermittent naps would make us need new approach to ownership. Say we the people agree for sustainability purpose to set a fix number A as the number of people allowed & required to be awake, and P is the total number of people, sleeping or awake. Then everyone would have a right to be awake A/P of the years, or A/P decades within each millennia, and from that we might want to trade synchronisation with Star War MCXIV release for synchronisation with Harry upcoming new biography, the way Smith intended capitalism. What am I missing?
Assume you have a population of 1000 billion people on earth (what with the hibernation tech), with most of them sleeping at any given time, so that you only have 10 billion awake. If everyone has their own apartment/house then at any given time, only 1% of the houses will be in use. This in itself is fine, as people can simply synchronize when they wake up to have empty/full neighborhoods. But it would also require either having 100x more infrastructure to handle the larger cities (or paving over the world, or more exotic solutions), giving everyone a lot less living room (e.g. pod skyscrapers) or having shared accommodations (like hotels or shared bedrooms).
My main point is that the current approach, where a house with a large garden is the default to strive for, would be totally untenable. Which in turn would require a lot of cultural changes (people tend to like having lots of room for themselves). This by no means invalidates the idea of napping, it’s just something that would have to be handled.
I’m guessing compounded interest could also be troublesome in the long run, e.g. you start a savings account now, and someone else starts in a million years—that would introduce some scary inequality. For the same reason that the older the vampire, the more powerful.
Ok, thanks for clarifying (I misunderstood « approaches » as implying new economical system). Yes, that scenario would need us to change some of our habits, for example we could share home with P/A family member, or rent it while sleeping.
compounded interest could also be troublesome in the long run
Interesting thought. On the other hand, the more sleepers, the more capital, the lower the interest rate. And what kind of bank could we trust for one million years?
Suppose a future technological trick allows our civilisation to magically size and control anything material within a spheric bubble growing at light speed: that means what we own would grow as a polynomial (2 or 3, depending on your TOE). But polynomial growth is not enough to cope with any fixed grow rate of the population (that’s exponential), so that’s why I think amortals should play on time to make space. In permutation city, Greg Egan imagine the uploaded could play with their refreshing speed. In the context of biological immortality, taking long naps could serve the same purpose.
Always glad to see Greg Egan referenced. The important thing to me is that although population growth could be exponential (for the reasons cousin_it gave), it’s going to be very slow relative to the rate of technological progress. Unless fertility rises significantly, it’s likely to be hundreds of years before population would grow by 10x, by which point we’re well into Greg Egan territory and all bets are off anyway. So population could be a concern, but we’ll have plenty of time to address it via methods that don’t involve literally everyone dying.
On second thought, strong upvote for this answer because I think it’s key to pinpoint our divergence.
You think that we will likely be well into Greg Egan territory in a few hundred years, whereas new tools in biology are so fantastic we are a few decades to, yes immortality, but I guess you see that as a direct consequence of reaching biological universality (when we can basically at will make cells do whatever one cell can do).
To me (and, in a sense, echoing Vladimir_Nesov´s comment above) that’s the contrary: not only I expect new biological limitations to show up nearly as fast as we solve old problems (like decoding the human genome was fantastic, and fruitful, but not as fruitful as I was naively thinking at the time), but I also fully expect we will taste Greg Egan territory several decades before we will fully master our own biology.
Late late late disclaimer: I’m toying with the idea of starting a series of post called Road to amortality, so you should expect me to be biased and stubbornly attached to my ideas. 😉
To fight the latter, here’s one result that would move me toward your position: if we can print or grow any complex organ within the next decade. Do you accept this criteria as fair and to the point? Would you mind thinking of some results that would make you strongly update toward my position?
Naps would handle the amount of people walking around, but would probably require some novel approaches to ownership to work properly. Or synchronization of when people wake up? With the current norms, you’d end up with empty cities, because a large fraction of the inhabitants would be asleep at each given moment. Though magically sizing stuff would also handle that issue.
After reflexion I still don’t get your point, e.g. what problems intermittent naps would make us need new approach to ownership. Say we the people agree for sustainability purpose to set a fix number A as the number of people allowed & required to be awake, and P is the total number of people, sleeping or awake. Then everyone would have a right to be awake A/P of the years, or A/P decades within each millennia, and from that we might want to trade synchronisation with Star War MCXIV release for synchronisation with Harry upcoming new biography, the way Smith intended capitalism. What am I missing?
Assume you have a population of 1000 billion people on earth (what with the hibernation tech), with most of them sleeping at any given time, so that you only have 10 billion awake. If everyone has their own apartment/house then at any given time, only 1% of the houses will be in use. This in itself is fine, as people can simply synchronize when they wake up to have empty/full neighborhoods. But it would also require either having 100x more infrastructure to handle the larger cities (or paving over the world, or more exotic solutions), giving everyone a lot less living room (e.g. pod skyscrapers) or having shared accommodations (like hotels or shared bedrooms).
My main point is that the current approach, where a house with a large garden is the default to strive for, would be totally untenable. Which in turn would require a lot of cultural changes (people tend to like having lots of room for themselves). This by no means invalidates the idea of napping, it’s just something that would have to be handled.
I’m guessing compounded interest could also be troublesome in the long run, e.g. you start a savings account now, and someone else starts in a million years—that would introduce some scary inequality. For the same reason that the older the vampire, the more powerful.
Ok, thanks for clarifying (I misunderstood « approaches » as implying new economical system). Yes, that scenario would need us to change some of our habits, for example we could share home with P/A family member, or rent it while sleeping.
Interesting thought. On the other hand, the more sleepers, the more capital, the lower the interest rate. And what kind of bank could we trust for one million years?