thefourthvine: Two people fucking, rearview: sex is the universal fandom. (Default)
Keep Hoping Machine Running ([personal profile] thefourthvine) wrote2009-10-06 09:21 pm

(no subject)

I'm curious about something, oh friends list o' mine.

Let us say there is a Magical (or Alien, if you prefer, or Divine) Device that humans, acting as a group, can activate. If we do, average life expectancy becomes actual life expectancy. (Do not think about the details. It's a thought experiment!) So, if we do this in the United States, every infant born is guaranteed to live to (roughly - please let's not get hung up on the statistics, here) 78. But in return, you're giving up any years you might have lived beyond 78. And if you're older than 78 now - or if you love someone who is - well, it's goodbye. You are guaranteed to outlive anyone who is older than you are. But anyone who is younger than you are will outlive you, guaranteed. No one will die stupidly at 20 from cancer. (We're ignoring suicide, here, for the moment.) But no one will live to be hale and healthy at 90, either. If you're not in the United States, and you're curious about what your country's cut-off will be, you can find it here (as it happens, magic/alien/divine creations are perfectly happy to use Wikipedia as a source).

Would you do it?

And, okay, now let's say we can't do it just as a country. It has to be worldwide. So everyone's life expectancy becomes 65. Again, infant death becomes a thing of the past. Those people in Swaziland and Angola and Zambia and Lesotho - people whose life expectancy is, on average, at or below 40 years - suddenly get a whacking great additional chunk of life.

On the other hand, you, if you live in a first world country (or, indeed, almost anywhere outside of Africa - there are some Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian countries with expectancies below 65, and it looks like one country in Oceania, but mostly it's Africa), and you already made it this far (and aren't currently suffering any major illness or degenerative disease or anything), could probably have expected to live longer than 65. By a lot, most likely. You are giving up - on average, though no promises are made to you personally, of course - something like 15 years of life. And you're giving up a lot more people, too. As it happens, no one I love is over the age of 78 right now, but I do love people over the age of 65. You probably do, too. The fannish community skews young, but still, we'd lose people in the worldwide adjustment - I don't, as it happens, know any fans over 78, but I do know some over 65.

You get a vote, and let's just say you know in advance that your vote will be pivotal. How are you going to vote?

[Poll #1467592]
pocketmouse: Paul McCartney holding a phone in a corn field: help? (help)

[personal profile] pocketmouse 2009-10-07 05:36 am (UTC)(link)
I saw this episode of Star Trek (uh, sort of). [ETA: It's also a bit of a creepy reverse TW: COE thing] I voted no on both counts. Also, does this Magical Device only work on natural deaths? You mentioned suicides, so what about traffic fatalities, murders, and warfare? Also, what about women who want an abortion? How will this skew the human population, which is already dangerously high? Yes, a good number of the older people will die, but how fast does the incoming rate grow? And does this affect animals, or if the population gets high enough will we have food supply problems?

It's not overthinking if those were my initial reaction thoughts, right? :D
Edited 2009-10-07 07:00 (UTC)

[identity profile] sapote3.livejournal.com 2009-10-07 04:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I was curious about the population question, since demographic booms are what happens when your under-5 fatality suddenly drops but your net fecundity is still the same. I guess if everyone knew that all of their children would live to support them in their old age, and they knew exactly how much old age they had to budget for anyway (and exactly how much illness and infirmity) it would probably lead to free-falling birth rates.

So I guess sign me up as "curious about the implications".
pocketmouse: Paul McCartney holding a phone in a corn field: help? (help)

[personal profile] pocketmouse 2009-10-07 05:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, and in addition to the question of induced abortion, you have spontaneous abortions. How would those factor in? Does the machine only take effect once someone has actually been born?

[identity profile] sapote3.livejournal.com 2009-10-07 05:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Jeez, one hopes so. (Wow, I just asked Google and I did not realize that recording stillbirths was such a fraught and complex issue across most of the world). Imagine if there was some chance to use the machine to determine when life began medically, that is, where the machine started watching out for a embryo/fetus/human. Or imagine that there is a certain stage of fetal development before and after which the machine could perceive - I imagine that would probably become the new age of viability, no matter how early or late it is, because before that you really do have a potential human life that could go wrong in plenty of ways and after that you've got sixty to eighty years of human being. But then, what would said machine do if it had limited artificial intelligence and it clearly perceived that the greatest threat to a pregnant lady's health (in a given situation, assuming that it didn't fix all preexisting conditions ever and make us genetically-similar superpeople) was her pregnancy? Would it act as a long-distance fetus zapper? Wow, this thing would get blown up in the first year it was online, wouldn't it?