There is always a limit. There are ways to die other than aging.
35
u/tarkinlarson
No, in short.
Your conflating many different problems.
The Earth is not overpopulated with humans and can host many more. We are just unfair, greedy and wasteful. We can feed the entire population now, but people starve because of human action or inaction, not the Earth's carrying capacity. Even ecological damage done by humans... that's our fault. Fix that before banning reproduction and you'll solve many more problems.
Demographic shifts are economic and social concerns... if you stop and eventually reverse aging... retired people become more productive again. They do not need retirement homes, pensions, etc etc. Healthcare will be less strained. All the fears that Korea Japan and other aging countries have go away.
People will likely have fewer children anyway or spread then out over longer times.
Assuming we solve cancer too as that's linked with the DNA damage from living a long time... long term soace travel becomes easier and less hazardous. I assume 99% of people will remain on Earth though.
The real problem would likely be wealth accumulation in the elderly... already a problem in many places and it would likely increase inequality to even more gross amounts unless there is a major reshift of our economy and social values.
30
u/Great-Gazoo-T800
They wouldn't even bother trying, given the amount if upheaval it'd cause.
5
u/kurtu5
Do affluent people have children? There is your answer. Aslo the planet can support tens of trillions. So don't worry about Malthus and his suicidal students.
5
u/atlvf
I think governments would have better luck simply banning immortality, rather than banning reproduction.
5
u/zCheshire
AI slop. This account is a karma-farming bot.
5
u/Low_Establishment573
There would need to be a serious cultural shift if a medical breakthrough like that became reality. Capitalism almost guarantees it’ll become messy.
The initial uses will almost guaranteed to be the ultra wealthy, further pushing the wealth inequality ratios. Those same ultra rich will also viciously protect their ability to live forever, AND make sure they’re the only ones who get it. I can even envision them “promising” that everyone has a chance to move up to their level, encouraging folks not to save for the future because there’s no need for retirement savings if you’re immortal. Savings are money the rich don’t have, and they want everything.
After the revolution and those vampire lords are “removed”, it gets more muddy. Would people be given the choice, or everyone gets “the cure” whether they like it or not? Even more complicated, who gets to decide what a good number of humans is, and which criteria is used to choose where the replacement population comes from if there are unplanned deaths? Eugenics is never great at looking for solutions objectively.
5
u/InternationalPen2072
If aging is cured by 2050, that implies a rate of technological progress that makes overpopulation and resource scarcity antiquated concepts. Aging will not be completely solved for a long time, though, and even once it has the population growth rate would max out at a few percent. We’d have time to adjust.
3
u/LookOverall
Does the method delay or prevent menopause? As far as population dynamics is concerned what matters is how many daughters each woman has in a lifetime. Longevity matters much less, as do men.
2
u/QVRedit
They are very, very, unlikely to cure aging.
At least within that time frame..
2
u/Xeruas
No I don’t think so? I think you’d have more people and more generations alive at once but I imagine a new equilibrium would be established with like people choosing to die after a few hundred years?
Also birth rates have dropped with improvements to life and resource access, humans usually invest more heavily in fewer offspring instead of having loads so maybe even if we live a long long time we’d still have on average two or less children
2
u/Bravemount
Good luck with that. That's such a massive can of worms that no government with even a hint of wit is going to attempt to enforce that.
1
u/wycreater1l11
Yeah, one would have hoped it comes just in time together with effective interstellar travel and colonisation.
I guess a less radical step before that is to get to a O’Neil cylinder building stage or something and continually expand on that front for some time. I guess there is a lot of material in the solar system that can be converted to liveable surface area.
And the step before that would be to optimise the living space and systems that sustain us on earth. Would be interesting to look into the numbers of this hypothetical demographic change (with different parameters etc) to see how much time there is until one runs into serious problems if confined to earth only.
If immortality in this sense becomes ubiquitous, I wonder if there will be a major attitude shift in humans where humans generally become more calm and collected and effectively more rational. There is not as big of rush to things anymore and rather one would generally be more careful.
1
u/AlanUsingReddit
Was convinced this was going to be about "Pop Squad" from Love Death and Robots.
You can go read the plot, but the mood is that people can live to 150 or 200, and because of this the number of children has to be greatly reduced to make space for all the old people. Unclear if this meaning is under debate online, but directly answers your question. It has some form of retort to all of your questions, although some of them I found shallow.
FWIW, that takes place in a city on Earth. I don't see what the issue even is if we are in space. This is one of several reasons we need that moon base ASAP.
1
u/ScottyfromNetworking
“Carousel! Carousel! Carousel! Renew!”
1
u/SparKestrel
Assuming the aging cure keeps people very productive (say - physical capabilities of being naturally 20 to 50 years old), I think a lot of other pressures would need to pile up to cause any strict controls on reproduction. I think 2050’s economy would have enough automation to support the population up to when we can make megastructures in space.
If the curse is only for the rich to start, then I think either:
market pressures would cause someone to eventually mass produce the thing like generic drugs
making it is so expensive due to another limitation that the biological immortals would be a small group, and you can probably have a royalty / peasantry story
1
u/Tiny_Scholar_6135
If humans stop reproducing they will eventually go extinct as aging is not the only cause of death.
1
u/Wise_Bass
I highly doubt it. The more likely impact is that after an initial surge in population for 10-20 years, it would socially and culturally "sink in" that folks have a much, much longer time to have children and the fertility rate would utterly collapse. People might actually have more children in the long run (and some sub-cultures might just keep on having children), but in any given year they'd likely have much less.
That's plenty of time to build denser cities, or off-world habitats.
1
u/Subject_Barnacle_600
You know, someone might have a more accurate equation, but I think we can actually model this easily enough as humans and other creatures tend to grow exponentially.
P=P0 * exp(r*t)
But... if you think about it, humans currently die off in x years so...
P=P0*(exp(r*t) - exp(r*(t-x)))
That is to say, we can approximately subtract off the population from so many years ago where x is the average human lifetime. Presently, we live about 75 years so...
P=P0*(exp(r*t) - exp(r*(t-75)))
As x=>∞
You might notice that second term vanishes entirely, leaving us back with just
P=P0 * exp(r*t)
So the question is, how big is that second term? Well, because it's an exponential, most of the gains are towards the end. If humans were immortal presently, you'd still be hard pressed to find anyone from 10,000 BC:
https://populationconnection.org/learn/population-milestones/
The only downside is if r grows because people just keep breeding (How many kids do you really need to raise? Can you even maintain that many relationships?!)
So, even if we don't have a decreasing population on the planet, the natural growth rate of humans as is will pretty much dictate life on said planet. If you live forever, even if a piano doesn't fall on you, you're still going to be a small fraction of the population compared to the contributions from that first term and the further out on that exponential you go, the more extreme it's going to get.
1
u/mjhrobson
Why? Modern birth rates are declining all on their own; and declining globally. Even in Africa which still has a very high birth rate (by comparison) the birth rate is declining... you don't need to help this along, it is happening by itself.
If you don't have death by old age the replacement rate would decrease from 2.1 to 0.2 (or something) because you have stopped people dying of old age, you haven't stopped people dying.
Not dying of old age is not the same thing as immortal.
1
u/JOliverScott
They'll regulate the immortality first, not the reproduction. Keep the cost of immortality out of reach of the commoners so that the wealthy and elites can continue to rule for centuries while they continue to view the rest of the population like livestock to carry out the labor. Or coupled with AI and automation and there'll be a labor revolution similar to when cars replaced horses except humans will be the horses learning they've been made obsolete. Then watch reproduction regulation begin as there's an overpopulation of idle humans draining the economic resources regardless of how long they live there's still too many of them. Heck, the elites already believe that and aren't shy about admitting they want to reduce/eliminate 80-90% of the current population. So I would expect advances in immortality to be coupled with selective breeding/eugenics policies as soon as they can get the messaging right how noble it is to sacrifice one's self for the greater good.
1
u/Eighth_Eve
Ever hear the phrase "the future is here but it isn't evenly distributed."
If humanity solves aging, most humans will die of old age anyway. The world where everyone gets it is alien to us. But i bet you would get a discount on the treatments with permanent irreversible sterilization.