I have noticed that quite a few libertarian-minded folk, including the late, great science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, have been interested in exploring the ramifications of extended human life spans.
After all, if you believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then I suppose it is a natural concomitant to be interested in pushing the envelopes of life as far back as possible. Why bother to settle for three-score years and ten? And of course the demise of religious belief among many in the West – though not elsewhere – has given a certain poignant edge to the avoidance of death for as long as possible.
Extending life spans has all kinds of economic, cultural and philosophical implications. If people know they have a much greater chance of living longer than their parents, it could effect career choices, child-rearing, and behaviour patterns in the broadest sense. Extending life spans may make people more cautious and risk-averse in some ways, perhaps accentuating the current vogue for pursuit of the healthy life and increasing pressure on practises like smoking and alcohol consumption. It may also encourage positive behaviours, encouraging people to think more about the long-term effects of their actions. If you know there is a good chance of your making it to 150 years old, it may tend to affect the way you behave now.
There is a long and interesting article on CNN full of details about new scientific advances. I don’t necessarily accept all its conclusions but it has plenty of food for thought on this fascinating topic.
Here’s a random thought – intellectuals with good ideas and boundless curiosity often outlive their peers. Hayek made it to 90, Milton Friedman has just enjoyed his 91st trip round the sun and Karl Popper also made it past 90. Maybe Samizdata should launch a range of health products with the slogan – liberty for a longer life!
By the way, another author who has explored the theme of extended life spans is Iain M. Banks. The people of his science fiction universe live so long that they get bored and suicide. Except it’s not true suicide cause most download their brains into storage so they can be ‘revived’ under various specified circumstances. Their culture even considers it slightly immoral to live indefinitely.
Isaac Asimov was another who explored extended life-spans, in his Foundation series, particularly among his ‘Spacers’.
And thinking about it, there does seem to be some correspondence between political views, and whether you think long lives are good or not.
Mr Heinlein is a libertarian, and thinks long lives are good.
Whereas Mr Asimov is a socialist, and always portrayed long lives as bad. So, in his novels like ‘Aurora’, and others, the long-lived Spacers are the baddies, evil people, who can never develop anything of any use, because they’re too greedy and selfish for personal recognition, so they won’t share anything in a research effort.
Eventually, they die off, because of this individualist selfishness, except for just one planet, Solaria.
Meanwhile, once these evil long-lived individualists have been forced to let ‘ordinary’ collectivised people emigrate from the caves of steel on Earth, the ‘ordinary’ people take over the Galaxy, because they’re prepared to co-operate with each other, they share things, and so on. And why do they do this? Why are they successful? Because they don’t live very long, and need to co-operate to get anything done before they pop their clogs.
And so here lies the rub:
The long-living individualists, have an unsuccesful society, whereas the short-living communised humans, have a successful society. Because, as we all know, it is far better to sacrifice your life to enable society to be successful, than it is to live a long rich fulfilled life, which denies society its due success.
If you can ever demonstrate that slippery being known as society, of course, which as far as I’m aware is nothing other than the description of a complex relationship between individuals, rather than a concrete being in its own right.
As to Solaria, this is the only ‘Spacer’ colony which survives. Each person there (about 2,000, or so) has hundreds of square miles of their own personal territory, and tens of thousands of robots, and they never meet each other. They’ve even become hermaphroditic, reproducing without any need for anyone else.
And they are totally, totally selfish, and will murder anyone who comes within their individual domains, to ruin their perfect liberty.
And of course, let us not forget Hari Seldon, the Karl Marx lookalike historicist, who can predict the future, thousands of years off, with a calculator the size of a clip-board. Or Trevize’s choice of Galaxia, an entire galaxy of people becoming a single entity, a single organism, dare I say it a perfect society? linked by mentalics.
So, the perfect Universe according to Asimov. It’s a communist amoeboid hell.
Good points all, Andy. It has to be said, though, from what I have read, that Asimov was very good on non-fiction basic science, but he bought the collectivist-doomonger thesis fairly wholesale.
Check out Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Fallen Angels book, describing a future dystopia in which the Greens have taken over, banned modern science, and created a new Ice Age. Rather amusing to think of that with the temperature heading up to 100 degrees F. outside my air-conditioned office.
Yes, I thank Mr Asimov for explaining the Neutrino to me, and many other scientific concepts. I suppose he fell into the David Attenborough trap of Perry’s technocrats.
Thanks for the book tips.
Just wait till you see the fictional monster I’m currently cooking up. Polly Toynbee will not be amused 🙂
Any publishers out there, who can get books into WH Smiths? All advances of $20 million dollars, gratefully accepted.
I always wondered why Asimov’s robots had (though perhaps marginally) more interesting characters than the humans: the humans are nearly all collectivists!
But then, his individualist “spacers” are just as dull as the ordinary folk, so perhaps I’ll have to go back to my – much less interesting – original theory: Asimov is an abysmal writer.
As far as the effects of longevity on human behaviour is concerned, I tend to favour the optimism of Heinlein and the more positive speculations of Jonathan Pearce over Asimov’s gloom. I think extreme cautiousness may be more likely than hyper-individuality and isolationism.
On a side note, the concept of “downloading” personalities (or “mind transfer”) has become a stock device in science fiction, but the question of continuity of identity (for example as discussed in “ego theory”) is rarely addressed in the story.
I think Andy is doing a slight injustice to Asimov. The actual reason why the collective mind was chosen as the way to proceed. As I recal, the person doing the chosing hated the idea anyway.
The issue was what form of mankind could best handle and repel an extra-galatic threat from a hive entity which the Galazian’s felt was out there and expanding.
For the engagement of total war, central control of resources and a collectivist approach is probably essential. If you are trying to co-ordinate a defence on a galatic basis it might be the only course of action, which was, as I understand, Trevize’s decision.
It should also be noted that Hari Sheldon’s future history was distorted by the actions of individuals like The Mule.
Given some form of telepathy, probably the worst curse a species could have, I’m not sure how you deal with the concept of liberty.
I believe Alan Nourse, a doctor who also wrote some Silver Age sf, dealt with his theme.
Rather than selfishness, his “gotcha” with long lives was lack of urgency. “Retreads” were more likely to go back to the drawing board, wait for something better to be developed, wait until everything is perfect before proceeding — risk-averse not because of fear, but because of the sense they could be, since there was always tomorrow …
Thus, rather than pushing for the launch of a prototype starship, they kept tearing it down and rebuilding it according to this month or this year’s newest tech.
It always seemed a rather plausible danger to me.
Andy Duncan wrote:
Just wait till you see the fictional monster I’m currently cooking up. Polly Toynbee will not be amused.
Is Polly Toynbee ever amused? 🙂
Take a look over here:
Juvenon
I’m currently taking these supplements (generics are cheaper), and we’ll see the results in 20-30 years.
I think that something strange must have happened to Heinlein’s sex life 🙂 Somewhere around “Stranger in a Strange Land, he suddenly went from science fiction to adolescent sex fantasies. The long life theme seemed to emerge so he could imagine himself having sex with lots of young women (or various substitutes) forever. The creativity seemed to fade in those novels.
I found his later novels a great disappointmentThey seemed to be more the repetitive fantasies of an old man than science fiction.
Yes, and Heinlein’s style deteriorated too: I detest that bubbly girlish first-person stuff. Whereas Farnham’s Freehold and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress are surely classics. I’m glad someone mentioned the boringness of Asimov, since I never understood his appeal and found nearly all his stuff unreadable, especially the much vaunted Foundation series – truly turgid. But back to the point, someone mentions Larry Niven, surely an inheritor of Heinlein’s mantle of greatness and an author who explores longevity, not in any very profound way but with an interesting degree of speculation, as in his Ringworld series (Louis Wu is what, a couple of hundred years old and has been through several careers and several marriages..) and the one whose title I can’t remember, about a deep-spacer who returns to a barely recognisable world.
Niven sufffers now from whatever happened to Heinlein.
Ringworld is a classic, as is Mote in God’s Eye and a few others. The Ringworld sequels are just dreadful.
I didn’t enjoy Foundation but I thought Asimov’s “Robot” books and the “The Caves of Steel” were excellent.