How long lives might be extended beyond about 180 years of lifespan matters less than how quickly and how widely improved medicine can be adopted for societal impact analysis

There was a debate between PZ Myers, David Brin, Eliezer Yudkowski and Eneasz Brodski about immortality. Eliezer brought up the point about different levels of immortality and had 10,000 years as a lower bound of immortality. Many of the complaints from PZ Myer and David Brin were concerns about societal effects that might accompany the change to people living a lot longer.

I would point out that any radical life extension that extended healthy living to about 250 or 300 years of age would have the same societal effect for the next 100-120 years as any life extension beyond that level. The reason being is that the oldest people are now 115 years of age. If the extension or rejuvenation procedures are successful and people are enabled to live significantly longer, the people will still be adding years of life one year at a time. There would not be people living to an aged end of life for say the first 80% of the extended life or perhaps all but the last 20 years.

This also means that extending lives to about 160 to 180 years with a moderate amount of rejuvenation would have the same societal effect for the next 40 years.

The exact effect on individuals would vary depending upon how lives were extended. However, societally it would look the same as for a number of years and decades all of the people who received treatments.




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