If longevity utopia is an L-year lifespan for some large L and longevity dystopia is a ten-year lifespan, here’s a longevity weirdtopia. Divide everyone’s L-year life into L/10 ten-year pieces separated by long intervals of “pause” or “hibernation”, and make these pause intervals so long that the group of people “awake” at any point in time is only a small fraction of the world population, with different people constantly rotating in and out. (I’m assuming here that total “awake” person-years and not total civilization-years are the limiting resource. And obviously I’m skipping over a lot of things, like procreation. But there’s a lot of room to vary the scheme in response to all the obvious objections.)
Some reasons why I find this idea interesting and not just weird: 1) it would help solve problems involving Dunbar’s number, 2) it might turn world history into something less massively parallel and more like a story, 3) there’s a “deep time” feel, 4) I wonder to what extent it assuages people’s sense (justified or not) that death gives life meaning.
If longevity utopia is an L-year lifespan for some large L and longevity dystopia is a ten-year lifespan, here’s a longevity weirdtopia. Divide everyone’s L-year life into L/10 ten-year pieces separated by long intervals of “pause” or “hibernation”, and make these pause intervals so long that the group of people “awake” at any point in time is only a small fraction of the world population, with different people constantly rotating in and out. (I’m assuming here that total “awake” person-years and not total civilization-years are the limiting resource. And obviously I’m skipping over a lot of things, like procreation. But there’s a lot of room to vary the scheme in response to all the obvious objections.)
Some reasons why I find this idea interesting and not just weird: 1) it would help solve problems involving Dunbar’s number, 2) it might turn world history into something less massively parallel and more like a story, 3) there’s a “deep time” feel, 4) I wonder to what extent it assuages people’s sense (justified or not) that death gives life meaning.