People to live to 1000...

Been dead, it's not enjoyable, but there's nothing there. Live as long as you can, this is as good as it gets.

The last thing you will know is pure terror.
 
The world as it is today is not ready for people who wouldn't age at all. Such kind of development will bring along deep social and political changes, not to mention conflicts.

Let's say some big corporation comes up with a product that you inject in yourself only once, and it'll fill your body with little nanodudes that'll reproduce themselves and keep fixing molecular and celular damage as they find it (something like the blood worms in Blade of the Immortal, but not as nasty). As a bonus, you get faster healing from wounds and diceases, throwing cancer and cardiac problems out from the window.

Such thing would surely cost bollocks of money, no matter how it actually costs to produce. That would make the barrier between the rich and the poor (and the not-so-poor-but-far-from-rich) massive, turning the overly rich actually able to retain their richness until someone run them over with a truck.

Even if such thing were to be accessible to many, retirement policies would need to be redone (they already need, since we have more and more elder people), or scrapped entiirely (if you won't age, why stop working?). And birth control policies would need to be way more strict than the Chinese ones.
 
Yeah, it would more or less turn society upside-down. But what do we do about it? "Don't develop it" probably wouldn't work because we can't control everyone's research, and such an attitude could exacerbate several of the problems if it does end up being a trade secret.

For such a radical set of changes I doubt that we can predict the social structure that would emerge. It seems like there would need to be a sort of framework for rewriting the affected laws and otherwise managing the transition to prevent social breakdown.
 
I personally don't think a social breakdown could be prevented, given the scale of the changes. But yeah, it would be a singularity-type event; no one can have a reasonable idea of what might happen.
 
I'm not saying something should be done about it (like not developing it). It's impossible to stop such things, and the changes that will come with it. The fact is, whenever it happens someday, it'll trigger a huge set of changes, many of which will not be so nice, due to accumulated flaws in our society that exists today.

It makes you wonder what kind of world would that be...
 
I think this technology will help developed countries most as they are the ones that need workers.

Japan is at crises point because there are now more older people than young putting enormous strains on its health and social system. If these older workers could be transformed into working ones again it would stop the country facing a possible meltdown in the future.

Most developed countries are seeing a problem like this. As for living to 1000 i dont think id really want to do it if i had to work for those 1000 years. Lets face it if this technology did become available to the retired i doubt the government would let them stay retired, they would want them back in the workforce. That means working for what seems an eternity 500 - 600 years or until you drop.
 
That means working for what seems an eternity 500 - 600 years or until you drop.

I think under these conditions, the labor force would swell to such a degree that the economics of labor as we know them would pretty much cease to exist. A lot of people would probably transition to part-time or contract work unless a new system develops.
 
Originally posted by Raijin Z@Wed, 2004-12-15 @ 05:11 PM

That's why you get a job killing people. You'd never be out of work.
That depends. If they have the technology to make people live for that long, they've probably got the technology to assemble a superhuman army. Then they won't need more or less unenhanced humans.
 
Maybe such an breakthrough would trigger a need to start the clonization of the solar system, what with more affordable space travel being possible. Who knows, maybe one day we'll have a Mars chapter of SX.

And to those who think its impossible, look at how fast technology evolves. Many of our parents can remember a time with no lasers, or microwaves or vacuums and now their commonplace. Within ou lifetime, I hold on to the hope that incredible things can and will happen.
 
How many days would it take for a message posted from Mars to the Earth forum, or vice versa, to show up?
 
As an off-the-cuff copout, I'd say that it would depend on when it is sent, since the distance between Mars and Earth varies, and because of eclipses of the line(s) of sight by Sol, Luna, Phobos, and/or Deimos could cause blackout periods. There are groups studying the problems presented by interplanetary networking, if you're interested.
 
Nah, it'd make even games of HOMM painful. Although, it would give me time to micromanage multiple heroes like never before. :ph34r:
 
Hmm, well we are doing a small LAN next week. I'd better see if we can't slip a game in between FPS and RTS games.
 
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