Healthcare (sick care) is expensive in the hospital setting once the problem is out of your control. Preventative Healthcare is very cheap ($1/day vs $10,000/day). How do we keep people healthy rather than treating symptoms in the hospital?
Consider how much time/energy humans spend in training/development. Imagine having 30 years to get your PHD without the pressures of having to start a family in the same time frame?
It's truely a very short "maximum productivity time" we have. Possibly as little as 10 years. And in many cases it's that very time where most real progress is made.
Could you imagine if Einstein were still at work today with the mind of a 25 year old? Or Von Neumann with today's technology?
I think that most problems presented in this scenario could be solved.
c) Institute a Logan's Run policy where you get 80 or 100 years of good health and are then painlessly euthanized.
I think we can do better than c, but it's a lower bound: it avoids your concerns and is still a large improvement over the status quo.
I'd like to live forever
Curing aging doesn't let you live forever. There would still be diseases (at a much lower rate), accidents, murder, suicide, natural disasters, etc. All it would do is prevent the deterioration of our bodies and often our minds that generates large medical expenses, prevents us from being productive, and impairs our quality of life. It would also give us the option of living for several centuries longer than we do today, which we could take or not.
I think we can do better than c, but it's a lower bound: it avoids your concerns and is still a large improvement over the status quo.
I'm rather unconvinced that's an improvement over the status quo... you've just granted the government the power to euthanize people. And you just know that they're going to find a way to abuse that. They'll start by giving extensions to really valuable people we don't want to lose; great scientists, artists, writers. And then it'll be "gee, I guess politicians are pretty awesome as well, perhaps politicians should get another hundred years too..." Pretty soon it's effective-immortality for political favours. No thanks, I'll take my chances with old age.
No aging -> people still get sick occasionally -> it costs money to fix them -> it had better cost less than they earn between sicknesses, else they die
Or, at the moment healthcare is O(1), based on a lifespan of N, but if the lifespan is extended radically, it will become O(N). So, if eliminating ageing causes N to tend to infinity, then I suppose healthcare costs will also tend to infinity. But then so will the accommodation costs, food costs, toothbrush costs, internet access... Healthcare looks like capex at the moment; if we lived much longer it'll look more like a variable cost.
Please explain. The average medical expenses of a 30 year old are vastly lower than for an 80 year old, and a successful cure for aging would give you the health of a 30 year old indefinitely.
Nah. Sure, even if you don't suffer from aging you'd still occasionally get diseases, and eventually one would be fatal, but your medical expenses per year would be far less than they are today.
Careful, here: this is exactly what the argument would look like if you'd decided in advance what the right answer is, and you kept casting around for reasons why that's so until you find one that seems to stick.
Not at all I'm offering reasons - all pretty solid ones - why fixing aging wouldn't remove the cost of healthcare. The point was to show there are lots of other healthcare costs unrelated to aging.
I'd argue it is the other poster who has become set on a theory. :-)
Potentially, although I'd expect that a person with the health of an obese 30 year old would still have lower medical expenses than a non-obese 60 year old. At any rate, obesity is a relatively easy problem compared to aging. (Step 1: stop subsidizing corn syrup...)
say it costs a dollar per person each year to keep their bodies in perfect condition. without aging there is no death, no death means that the population will always grow or stagnate. $1/person/year Time becomes infinite, population is always positive there for no matter how small the cost they will always become infinite because time is infinite and population is a positive number.
Or until we find a way to stop widespread overeating, substance abuse, and sedentary lifestyles. If we could manage that (probably impossible) then total healthcare costs would be so low that we wouldn't have to worry how to pay for them.
