As someone with pretty strong libertarian-technocratic-optimist instincts I can assure you that you wasted no electrons. Your arguments are compelling. We may reach different conclusions as to exactly what it all means, but there is no denying that prosperity itself has fundamentally changed who we are. To think that radical life extension would not do the same (and likely more so) is just silly.

If I knew I was going to be healthy for another 100 years, my 11 year old daughter would be more likely to have a sibling.

John,
I'm not meaning to criticize you or anyone personally, but your attitude gives me pause. I see it a lot. People are talking about entering an astonishing world of new possibilities....and yet.....Is this the exciting thrilling prospect....the big adventure...to have ONE more child?

Where are the people who look at living an extra 100 healthy years, and start dreaming of 25 children? And five dogs and ten cats? And 250 grandchildren? And colonizing distant planets?

Something, to me, is odd here....

It certainly is the case that a spiritual crisis has infected Europe. Japan seems similarly infected. It is less obvious in the U.S., whether measured by fertility rate (your measure) or by the vitality of religion in our culture. In any case, the cause is not prosperity or democracy per se.

The Age of Enlightenment ended the age of unquestioned faith in mythic religion. It substituted its own new faith: the faith that reason would yield the most profound truths about life. It didn't (and couldn't deliver. It delivered what it could deliver: increasing levels of mastery over the material realm in areas such as medicine, economics and technology and in the realm of ideas, notably democracy, equal rights and so on. It has yielded nothing in the spiritual realm beyond dethroning the primacy of mythic religion.

But reason has proved an inadequate tool for plumbing deeper spiritual depths. And those who still believe in the primacy of reason as the highest of possible human faculties, think that either reason or mythic religion must prevail and that those are the only two choices. They are not, as thousands of years of profound mystic spiritual achievement have shown us. Yet most of the populations of the technologically advanced countries are frozen in a worldview based on the primacy of reason, or in the case of the U.S., mythic religion or some combination of the two.

Prosperity and democracy haven't caused the spiritual collapse of Europe, Japan and America's secular Left. Prosperity and democracy, on the positve side, and spiritual collapse on the negative side, have all been caused by the primacy of reason, a wonderful tool, but a limited one, particularly on the spiritual side of life. It is long past time to move past the spiritual limitations of the rationalistic worldview without regressing to the myths of yore. We can see the latter, by the way, not just among "evangelical Christians," but also among those who posit apocalyptic "eco" crises like the global warming hysteria.

I think the intellectual and psychological deterioration that usually accompanies old age is only weakly linked to biological factors. I think most of it is due to the accumulating bugs and contradictions in our mental programming resulting from a decades-long endevour to specialise yet remain adaptable at a the same time.

These two goals are ineluctably antagonistic. Specialisation increases specific capabilities but reduces the attainability of other, unrelated capabilities which may be called for at a latter time.

The upshot is mental spaghetti code which can only be fixed by designing and implementing the system afresh. That's what dying and birth are for.

Life extension risk turning humanity into a quarrelsome collection of boring, pig-headed tyrants, because that is how people turn out when they loose the ability to solve new problems.

I'm a professional in my 30s who has remained childless. I admit that this is largely because I'm unwilling to make the 20-year time committment necessary to properly raise a child.

Now, imagine that I was looking at a 500-year life ahead of me. Imagine that I remain the self-involved person I am now, and decide to spend a century working hard, amassing enough personal wealth that I can afford to live comfortably from the proceeds of that wealth. Imagine that I spend another century travelling the planet, experiencing the myriad colors and flavors of Earth's cultures.

Now I'm 250 years old, and I feel I've seen and done enough things that I'm ready to settle down and have a family. Figure I'll be 260 or so by the time I talk my wife into it. And yes, I'll certainly be married. I'd like to think it would be to the wife I have now, but surely I'd find somebody in a century's worth of travels with whom I could spend a long lifetime.

Now I have education, material comfort, wisdom, and centuries of practical experience that I can bring to bear on the raising of my children. I can afford the time to educate them myself, or I can afford to pay others to teach them. I'll have seen countless numbers of parents in dozens of cultures, and I can use what I consider the best practices from each of them in my own family. And if I have second thoughts, or if I find childrearing to be unsatisfying or unfulfilling, well, what's a 20-year committment when I still have 200 good years in front of me?

That's just my dream; others' will surely vary. But I have to confess that I kinda like my version of things.

John, I think the spiritual collapse you are referring to - and I in no way doubt that western Europe has a serious problem - is less a side effect of longer lives and better health specifically than of the complacency fostered by the rule of law and civilization in general.

Civilizations get old and fat and are bumped off by newcomers. For a number of reasons, I think our best hope is getting populations running somewhere off the surface of the earth.

"now I'm 250 years old, and I feel I've seen and done enough things that I'm ready to settle down and have a family"

As a general thing--nothing personal here---I don't think it will work. Without courage one is not ready to face 1,000 years of life's pain. If you don't have the courage to risk all your chips now (or 20 of your best years, which is almost the same thing) you won't fare well in the grand future being imagined.

These themes have been explored in science fiction for many decades. Some (oft mutually exclusive) postulations:

1) Drop in risk taking. If one's mischance risks not 20 years of life but 2000, one might avoid anything that smacks of risk. Risky behavior that put others at risk would be treated with great harshness. (Driving over speed limit, etc.)

2) Rise in risk taking. After a few hundred years, folk seek increasingly risky behavior as an escape from boredom.

3) Increase in science. The bright minds that are driven to seek answers have decades and decades of extra time to work with.

4) Drop in science. The Peter Principle loses the relief valve of mortality and eventually the politically-minded overcome the earnest researchers and block their way Poe-like ("Nevermore").

I suspect the truth would be all of the above, with the root culture of each locality playing key roles in determining which would prevail. Those with a duty focus versus those with a regimented class structure, for example, would proceed differently.

The overall situation reminds me of one story (Christopher Anvil, _Strangers in Paradise_) that featured a "want generator". The protagonists aim it at a demonstrating crowd with the setting "obey authority". Instead of following the orders of the police and dispersing, the crowd smashes through them and wreaks havoc. You see, the crowd obeyed their ringleaders, not the police. The crowd was affected, but they interpreted the "want" through their own filters, and the "authority" they chose to "obey" was not what the protagonists had expected.

I think greatly extended life would have analagous effects, culture by culture.

You started off very well, but then it seems to me you decided to be boring just take a cheap shot at the Europeans.

The vast difference you perceive between USA and Europe is all in your mind. Both societies are rather similar, with similar advantages and similar problems.

Well, I think we have been hankering for immortality and have been feeling for quite some time that it is inevitable. But will we die before it gets here?

I wrote a book, Tantalizing Times, that addresses how our wishes for immortality and god-powers have been teased for quite a while and are partly connected to some of the spiritual complaints levied about modern living.

One man's spiritualism is another man's belly laugh.

The reason for "spiritual decline" in Europe and Japan have more to do with the corrosive effects of soul-destroying Socialism than it has to do with an aging population.

jim2: 1) Drop in risk taking. If one's mischance risks not 20 years of life but 2000, one might avoid anything that smacks of risk. Risky behavior that put others at risk would be treated with great harshness. (Driving over speed limit, etc.)

Wars, even perfectly just wars, would undoubtedly fall under this rubric. It's one thing to serve your country and put the remaining few decades of your life in jeopardy. Increase that to a few centuries or millenia, and it's another thing entirely. This is why a sudden increase in life expectancy would be a boon to would-be tyrants.

Scott, this could be true, but we have lots of "soul-destroying socialism" too, and the result has been powerful anti-socialist counter movements. Movements at least an order-of-magnitude greater than anything seen in Europe.

But anyway this just begs the question. If "soul-destroying socialism" is the problem, then what's going on in people's souls? That's the question we face.

Well, "the future belongs to those who show up for it". But there are two ways to do that: by breeding, or by living a long, long time.

That's another natural experiment we have going.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment birthed the modern era, whose animating notion was that science, social science and technology would eventually tell us everything we needed to know to create a perfect world. And so those who worshiped the ideals of the French Revolution took up waiting for the End of History alongside Christians waiting for the Second Coming, Muslims waiting for the Twelfth Imam and Hindus awaiting the blissful individual extinction of Nirvana. They've pretty much all been disappointed so far, but you've got to give the Europeans credit for their extraordinary attempts to immanentize the eschaton.

In the last century, Europeans had the war to end all wars but didn't. They had social economists who were going to extinguish poverty and end the business cycle but couldn't. The scientific revolution that was going to tell us the origins of life, the universe and everything instead gave us the atom bomb. There's been plenty to disappoint.

I don't think the cause of Europe's woes are capitalism, democracy, freedom, prosperity or longevity. It's just disheartening to see Europe in the state it's in in spite of the healing these should provide. But this doesn't prove that they're the cause of Europe's problems, just that they're not a universal salve for what ails societies. It would be more appropriate to list them as the latest panaceas that proved not to be.

There's no question that a certain sickness grips much of the West. And there's no question that we're going to have to figure out more about it and what to do about it. But it's not clear whether dramatically increased longevity would increase our problems or give us time, in a single lifespan, to not only be able to but be forced to tackle some of the spiritual issues that hold back both the West and the rest of the world from becoming something better and finer.

Thanks Geoffrey,

And I see you wrote more at your blog.

Just to clarify, I did not mean that the "experiment" told us much directly about the effects of life extension. Rather, the similarities call into doubt the blithe techno-optimism of the life extenders. And, most importantly, it points to the question we should be asking. One that neither Bailey nor the critics seem to want to touch.

My first intellectual influence, Peter Drucker, taught that it is essential to figure out what the right question is, before trying to come up with any answers. That's what I'm trying to suggest here.

This is all very interesting in an abstract intellectual sort of way.

Here's what I think about: my father living long enough to see his grandchildren grow into adults; either of my grandfathers living long enough to see me born. I think about my sophomore-year roommate's fiancee, taken by cancer at 24.

My father took up downhill skiing in his mid-fifties, the same age at which his father lay dying in a hospital. Blood pressure meds _are_ life extension for millions of people, and quality-of-life extension as well. If we can justify those, why are cancer-prevention pills different? How is spirituality served by people losing bladder control? If eternity is the objective, then how is prolonging life from 10 to 15 more justifiable morally than from 40 to 50, from 80 to 100?

The way I see it, immortality through science is about as likely as that nuclear-powered car. So you'll still have Death around to help sell your side of the story.

Squid got me thinking about raising a child who would have a 500 year lifespan, or about 7 times the current lifespan. Would it then take a child 140 years to reach what is now 20, so that the terrible two's would last seven years? Or would a person not be given this age-slowing treatment until they reach 18? Who will make that decision, the parents or the state? What if the parents disagree? What if there is a divorce and the breadwinner does not want to pay child support for 100 years and demands that the "treatment" be withheld until age 18?

> So we selected nations or even whole continents and give them prosperity, democracy, peace and universal education. And along with these, longer lives, and especially, much more leisure time.

> The expected result of the experiment was that people would be happier, and would live better lives, and that we would see a continual upward trend in those things that usually indicate to us a successful civilization. What happened?

> Petri dish #1 is called "Europe." ... Are we happy with the results so far?

I question whether the problem in Europe is the prosperity, etc. or their crappy governments.

There are some problems with Bailey's response to Schaub's essay.
First he assumes that the affects on the mind & spirit of more-than-natural lifespan will mirror those of the effects of more people achieving their natural lifespan.
Second he makes the libertarian mistake of assuming that the market will solve any problems that arise. Nonsense; one can assume that the wealthy gerontocrats will use their power to make sure that their position in society is assured against younger newcomers. Biological science does not work only when a certain form of government is prevalent.
The most telling quote from Bailey's essay is this:
"“What would it be like to experience the continued vitality of the body in conjunction with the aging of the spirit?” asks Schaub. Whatever can she mean by “aging of the spirit?”"[Bailey responds].
As we get older, we become more of what we are, for good or ill, and this has nothing to do with the aging of the body. Bailey has apparently never noticed this, he doesn't even understand a reference to it.

"As we get older, we become more of what we are, for good or ill, and this has nothing to do with the aging of the body. Bailey has apparently never noticed this, he doesn't even understand a reference to it."

You are so right, Terry. And a longer lifespan will magnify all the aspects of what we are. We are condemned to be ourselves, and by no amount of struggling can we escape ourselves. Not by our own efforts. Certainly not if we refuse to even look at ourselves.

"... the spiritual collapse of Europe, Japan and America's secular Left."

Should I be pleased you carved out an exception for the secular Right?

In looking over Bailey's article again, I am taken by how urgently he argues for something that is a pipe dream at this stage of the game. Because the aim is for everlasting vitality, anyone who questions having bumps along the way must be dismissed with sarcasm. His position seems something life, "OK. Imagine utopia. Now what could be wrong with that?" I guess two can play that game. He seems as categorical as those whom he criticizes. He entertains no problems, as if to concede any threatens heaven on earth. Gee, there are downsides to everything, that doesn't mean we always say no to new things. The questions involve trade-offs. Why must the ageless vision be the proverbial unalloyed good?

Is there a point at which the libertarian Bailey pushes for government funding for super life extension research and technology? Taxpayer funded? Would there be no trade-offs? Now to be clear, he isn't pushing for it in that manner, but I could imagine many of the true believers doing so.

I've grown too old for this type of discussion.

Eventually, if they live long enough, everyone is from Missouri.

Over time, life wears you down. It hammers on your optimism, and reinforces your fears. At least that's my perception of how I've changed in my 45 years. I've become more skeptical, more reserved, and less likely to take chances on an emotional level. I still take physical risks, but am less likely to persevere against pushback. I am more stoic, and more live-and-let-live; more protective of my privacy and more likely to defend my rights and those of others. I went through my youthful progressive stage and found it superficial and mistaken; then I went through my mature conservative stage and found it unsatisfying and rudely judgmental. Neither outlook survived confrontations with coarse human nature, either my own or that of others'. So I've reached the accommodating stage, where I want to be left alone, and I want to extend the same consideration to others. If I lived 200 years, or 1000, I would expect that trend to be reinforced. Keep getting burned, and you not only stay away from fire, but you start seeing the risk of fire everywhere...

Is that spiritual stagnation, or fatigue? Or maybe a breather till I get bored and want to take on some new challenges? I tend to think the latter, because I haven't really lost my optimism, but more have had it tempered. I don't run from challenges, but I guard the application of my resources and energy. I'm not scared, but I'm more aware of the threats to life and liberty that surround me than I was when I was 21. And I think I value life and liberty more than I did then...my own, and that of others. For one evening last week, my wife wanted another baby; when the stars are aligned and our 3 teenagers are on good behavior all at the same time, such a thing is tempting. And it would be more so if I wasn't thinking about retirement planning, and college tuition. A longer life expectancy would give me flexibility. Maybe we'd adopt again in 5 or 10 years, after the house started getting a little too quiet - maybe several times. Maybe I'd go back to school, because as much as I don't like the thought of 20 more years in this profession, 200 more years would be just unbearable. With my house paid off and no need to accumulate more stuff (and no room for it), maybe I could work less and volunteer more, maybe work overseas some. Because the enemy wouldn't be death as much as it would be boredom, and lack of meaning in life.

Sorry...Guess I've already had a little too much thinking time on my hands.

John,

The techno-libertarians can be too glib about markets and technology taking care of everything. But there's also a certain dark glibness in telling sixty-year-olds that given the intractability of the problems of aging and the social planning of the cradle to grave welfare state, it would be helpful for us all if you'd be sure to pop off in the next decade or two.

As to the question of Europe's spiritual problems I don't think it's that wealth and freedom made Europe soft. Rather, wealth's failure to make Europe happy left Europe disheartened. To put it succinctly, money can't buy happiness, but we wish it could. That is, material realism was supposed to make us masters of our fate, but it only gave us control over the outside world, not our internal conflicts.

What do we do about this? As I've said, I'm dubious about achieving perfection but would like a good long life in which to work in that direction. But that's just me. Other may, indeed do, differ.

Imagine this through the prism of, say, entertainment. Do you really want to see the same damn movie stars for a thousand years? I wouldn't mind a few more Billy Wilder movies, but I was really sick of Johnny Carson after thirty years...

El Kabong....

"Over time, life wears you down. It hammers on your optimism, and reinforces your fears."

I've gone the other way. I'm 42, used to be fairly shy and introverted. I have gradually become more confident over time. It's been a long maturation. In medieval times I would probably have expired before reaching any sort of potential.

Anyway, the question is not whether we should choose to be immortal. It's what we do with it when it does happen.

Because it will happen, whether for us or for our descendants. Someone is going to face the dilemmas talked about here. The human body is an organic machine, and machines can be understood, altered and improved upon. Big job to be sure - but at the end of the day we are dealing with a finite set of problems to be solved.

The software that runs on that machine is complex, but again finite and ultimately understandable. It too can be improved upon (today - spiritually, through use of self-help books or even good advice from peers, and in the future through technology).

We are not there yet, but we will be one day. There won't be many people not demanding access to LET when it arrives. And like any technology, it will improve with age. If you are in on LET at the beginning, your chances improve of being around for the next iterations.

Whatever problems you envision will result from LET or immortality, there will be solutions. And in turn more problems and their corresponding solutions.

To not take the opportunity would be out of character for humanity.

Hmm. I'm 55; I have three daughters in their twenties, a step-daughter a step-grandson and a granddaughter. If I could roll my health and my wife's health back to say 29-35 range, we'd start another pod of children. Just thinking about that fantasy has lifted much of my christmas gloom-too many of my immediate family are just memories now.

JD

I'm going to go with Lisa Simpson on this one - when Homer becomes death and Lisa does show and tell - 'My Dad performs a very valuable service to the community'