Thought Experiment: Followup
Last week I pointed to a thought experiment over at Marginal Revolution that asked “A freak solar event ‘sterilizes’ the half of the planet (people, animals, etc) facing the sun. What happens?”.
You’d never guess who picked up the ball: David Brooks in his New York Times editorial. I’m not sure I’m super keen on Brooks’ take, though: “If people knew that their nation, group and family were doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with the preservation of the environment. They wouldn’t save or invest.”
As I was reading I got to thinking about something in particular: There is a lot of research on aging at the moment and I wonder if all resources wouldn’t move to that. All of a sudden The Methuselah Foundation (they’re working on extending human life) would have people knocking down it’s doors. It’s possible, even, that incentivized by the possibility of extended life indefinitely people from around the world would move and join the fight. It’s a sort of weird thought, but hey, it’s a sort of weird question.
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I don’t really agree with Brooks either.
For one thing, people have a tendency to want to re-build things (Ex: post-Katrina New Orleans, the areas devastated by the 2004 tsunami, etc.).
Secondly, people are, well…stubborn, and they’ll do whatever they can to try to outwit nature.
weird that no one mentioned the movie Children of Men in either of these articles, since that’s basically the premise of the film (except everyone in the world becomes sterile, not half).
It’s kind of the premise of Y: The Last Man, except all the males of every species die, save a man and his monkey.
I also don’t buy into Brooks’ take. Most people don’t think about the future as it is. They think about now. They’d care about their current kids, not about the kids that don’t exist.
I don’t think it would change people’s attitude to life extension. They don’t really think about it now, they wouldn’t think about it just because they were sterile. We know death is coming for us now, but at some obscure time in the future. If there was some disease/event that would end life in a definitive timeframe, then people would get behind finding a cure.