Immortality And The Death Of Cultures

Personal immortality is closer than you think. Medical technology has advanced further than you know.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1522606_1,00.html
http://www.calorierestriction.org
http://www.nanomedicine.com/
http://www.imminst.org/

The science is complex but the idea is easy. Tissues and organs grown in nutrient tanks can replace worn-out organs or damaged connective tissues. Stem cells can reverse memory loss and restore mental flexibility in the elderly. Dietary supplements, hormone treatments, and simple clean living can prevent a lot of the cellular damage that causes aging. It's all pretty straightforward.

Current life-extension regimes involve weekly trips to the clinic and two hundred and fifty dietary supplements a day, but this is a beta-version. A more advanced version will probably involve one or two pills at every daily hormonal shift - Waking, late morning, late afternoon, and bedtime - and one or two supplements per meal. That's at least seven pills per day, but more likely ten to fourteen. They won't be cheap, because this is life everlasting we're talking about and the drug companies will charge as much as the market can bear. At an absolute minimum say about $.60 a pop. At ten pills a day, that's two thousand dollars a year. A better bet would be $1.50 a pill, for over five thousand dollars a year. This is the absolute bare minimum, assuming that government health insurance covers most of the costs. If there's no government coverage, triple the cost.

The weekly visit to the clinic will probably be replaced by a daily blood and urine home-test. Three times a day you'll get to piss into a little device by your toilet, and you'll probably have to clean it daily to make sure the test is valid. And once a day you'll get to draw your own blood and put it into another device. One CC every day at noon should do it. You'll visit the clinic once a month for a full day check-up - Blood work, fitness checks, hormone injections, cancer scans, rectal exams, the fun goes on. That's at least $200 a month, but more likely $500, for twenty-four hundred to six thousand dollars a year.

As for food, I hope you like greens. Lettuce, cucumbers, spinach, swiss chard, brussel sprouts, kale... A full plate of greens at every meal, no dressing, with a small side of organic fish or an egg as appetizer. No salt. The food will all cost an arm and a leg - No pesticides, no fertilizers, because those chemicals get into the food and slowly poison you - and you can't ever skip a meal because you're already living at near-starvation levels and one missed meal will cause dizziness, crankiness, and lethargy. Three hundred dollars a month for guaranteed organic chemical-free salad, thirty six hundred dollars a year for a 950 calories-a-day diet.

Don't smoke. Don't drink. You'll exercise for at least an hour a day, indoors away from anywhere an accident might possibly happen. No rock climbing, no hang gliding, no rugby, no soccer, no hockey, no, no, no... Accidents kill, and you don't want to miss out on life eternal.

Immortality is a lot of work, but it's worth it. Just think what you can do with all that time; You can watch your diet, take pills, run blood and urine tests, work out, monitor your health for the slightest sign of infection. And you can do all this while working full time, because immortality costs at least eight thousand dollars a year, but more likely it will be fourteen thousand dollars or more, all on top of your normal cost of living.

It costs a lot, and it will take up most of your leisure time. When will you find the time and resources to have kids? When will anyone from a society rich enough to afford immortality have kids? Raising a child is already more effort than it's worth in the developed world; That's why birth rates are dropping. Wealthy urban societies don't need children, they need skilled adult workers, but raising a child to adulthood is a drain on parental resources with very little reward. The only reasons people have kids in the westernized world are purely sentimental ones. Why would immortals have children? Their parents are alive, all their childhood friends are alive - Hell, all their old pets are still alive. There's no practical reason for children, and all the emotional ones are gone. Goodbye birthrate, hello stagnant population.

And it's a conservative population. They're old, they don't want to take risks, and they like things to stay the way they remember them. They vote and they put a lot of money into political lobbying, so the government's main priorities are health and safety. No one wants to join the armed forces, so the government hires a small corps of professionals from overseas.

They're rich, they're scared to take chances, and the army is mostly made of mercenaries. A perfect target for any poor nation with a lot of unemployed young men.