Редактирование: Transhumanist FAQ Version 3 (раздел)

===Will extended life worsen overpopulation problems?===

Population increase is an issue we would ultimately have to come to grips with even if healthy life-extension were not to happen. Leaving people to die is an unacceptable solution.

A large population should not be viewed simply as a problem. Another way of looking at the same fact is that it means that many persons now enjoy lives that would not have been lived if the population had been smaller. One could ask those who complain about overpopulation exactly which people’s lives they would have preferred should not have been led. Would it really have been better if billions of the world’s people had never existed and if there had been no other people in their place? Of course, this is not to deny that too-rapid population growth can cause crowding, poverty, and the depletion of natural resources. In this sense there can be real problems that need to be tackled.

How many people the Earth can sustain at a comfortable standard of living is a function of technological development (as well as of how resources are distributed). New technologies, from simple improvements in irrigation and management, to better mining techniques and more efficient power generation machinery, to genetically engineered crops, can continue to improve world resource and food output, while at the same time reducing environmental impact and animal suffering.

Environmentalists are right to insist that the status quo is unsustainable. As a matter of physical necessity, things cannot stay as they are today indefinitely, or even for very long. If we continue to use up resources at the current pace, without finding more resources or learning how to use novel kinds of resources, then we will run into serious shortages sometime around the middle of this century. The deep greens have an answer to this: they suggest we turn back the clock and return to an idyllic pre-industrial age to live in sustainable harmony with nature. The problem with this view is that the pre-industrial age was anything but idyllic. It was a life of poverty, misery, disease, heavy manual toil from dawn to dusk, superstitious fears, and cultural parochialism. Nor was it environmentally sound – as witness the deforestation of England and the Mediterranean region, desertification of large parts of the middle east, soil depletion by the Anasazi in the Glen Canyon area, destruction of farm land in ancient Mesopotamia through the accumulation of mineral salts from irrigation, deforestation and consequent soil erosion by the ancient Mexican Mayas, overhunting of big game almost everywhere, and the extinction of the dodo and other big featherless birds in the South Pacific. Furthermore, it is hard to see how more than a few hundred million people could be maintained at a reasonable standard of living with pre-industrial production methods, so some ninety percent of the world population would somehow have to vanish in order to facilitate this nostalgic return.

Transhumanists propose a much more realistic alternative: not to retreat to an imagined past, but to press ahead as intelligently as we can. The environmental problems that technology creates are problems of intermediary, inefficient technology, of placing insufficient political priority on environmental protection as well as of a lack of ecological knowledge. Technologically less advanced industries in the former Soviet-bloc pollute much more than do their advanced Western counterparts. High-tech industry is typically relatively benign. Once we develop molecular nanotechnology, we will not only have clean and efficient manufacturing of almost any commodity, but we will also be able to clean up much of the mess created by today’s crude fabrication methods. This would set a standard for a clean environment that today’s traditional environmentalists could scarcely dream of.

Nanotechnology will also make it cheaper to colonize space. From a cosmic point of view, Earth is an insignificant speck. It has sometimes been suggested that we ought to leave space untouched in its pristine glory. This view is hard to take seriously. Every hour, through entirely natural processes, vast amounts of resources – millions of times more than the sum total of what the human species has consumed throughout its career – are transformed into radioactive substances or wasted as radiation escaping into intergalactic space. Can we not think of some more creative way of using all this matter and energy?

Even with full-blown space colonization, however, population growth can continue to be a problem, and this is so even if we assume that an unlimited number of people could be transported from Earth into space. If the speed of light provides an upper bound on the expansion speed then the amount of resources under human control will grow only polynomially (~ t3). Population, on the other hand, can easily grow exponentially (~ et). If that happens, then, since a factor that grows exponentially will eventually overtake any factor that grows polynomially, average income will ultimately drop to subsistence levels, forcing population growth to slow. How soon this would happen depends primarily on reproduction rates. A change in average life span would not have a big effect. Even vastly improved technology can only postpone this inevitability for a relatively brief time. The only long-term method of assuring continued growth of average income is some form of population control, whether spontaneous or imposed, limiting the number of new persons created per year. This does not mean that population could not grow, only that the growth would have to be polynomial rather than exponential.

Some additional points to consider:

In technologically advanced countries, couples tend to have fewer children, often below the replacement rate. As an empirical generalization, giving people increased rational control over their lives, especially through women’s education and participation in the labor market, causes couples to have fewer children.

If one took seriously the idea of controlling population by limiting life span, why not be more active about it? Why not encourage suicide? Why not execute anyone reaching the age of 75?

If slowing aging were unacceptable because it might lead to there being more people, what about efforts to cure cancer, reduce traffic deaths, or improve worker safety? Why use double standards?

When transhumanists say they want to extend lifespans, what they mean is that they want to extend healthspans. This means that the extra person-years would be productive and would add economic value to society. We can all agree that there would be little point in living an extra ten years in a state of dementia.

The world population growth rate has been declining for several decades. It peaked in 1970 at 2.1%. In 2003, it was 1.2%; and it is expected to fall below 1.0% around 2015. (United Nations 2002). The doomsday predictions of the so-called “Club of Rome” from the early 1970s have consistently turned out to be wrong.

The more people there are, the more brains there will be working to invent new ideas and solutions.

If people can look forward to a longer healthy, active life, they will have a personal stake in the future and will hopefully be more concerned about the long-term consequences of their actions.

References:

United Nations. The World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision (United Nations: New York, 2002). http://www.gov.za/reports/2003/unpdhighlights.pdf