If your civilization expands at a cubic rate through the universe, you can have one factor of linear growth for population (each couple of 2 has exactly 2 children when they're 20, then stop reproducing) and one factor of quadratic growth for minds (your mind can go as size N squared with time N). This can continue until the accelerating expansion of the universe places any other galaxies beyond our reach, at which point some unimaginably huge superintelligent minds will, billions of years later, have to face some unpleasant problems, assuming physics-as-we-know-it cannot be dodged, worked around, or exploited.
Meanwhile, PARTY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MILKY WAY! WOO!
This can continue until the accelerating expansion of the universe places any other galaxies beyond our reach
If dark energy is constant, and if no-one artificially moves more galaxies together, then after 100 billion years, all that's left in our Hubble volume is a merged Andromeda and Milky Way. On a supragalactic scale, the apparent abundance of the universe is somewhat illusory; all those galaxies we can see in the present are set up to fly apart so quickly that no-one gets to be emperor of more than a few of them at once.
It seems no-one has thought through the implications of this for intelligence in the universe. Intelligences may seek to migrate to naturally denser galactic clusters, though they then run the risk of competing with other migrants, depending on the frequency with which they arise in the universe. Intergalactic colonization is either about creating separate super-minds who will eventually pass completely beyond communication, or about trying to send some of the alien galactic mass back to the home galaxy, something which may require burning through the vast majority of the alien galaxy's mass-energy (e.g. to propel a few billion stars back to the home syste...
If your civilization expands at a cubic rate through the universe
You're picturing the far-future civilization as a ball, whose boundary is expanding at a constant rate. But I think a more plausible picture is a spherical shell. The resources at the center of the ball will be used up, and it will only be cost-effective to transport resources from the boundary inwards to a certain distance. If the dead inner boundary expands at the same rate as the live outer boundary, we'll be experiencing quadratic, not cubic growth.
You know, you're right. I will change my reply accordingly henceforth - linear population growth, linear increase in energy usage / computing power, and quadratic increase in (nonenergetically stored) memories.
Seriously, why is this post being downvoted? It's a legit question and the OP isn't making any huge mistakes or drawing any stupid conclusions. He's just stating some confusion and asking for links.
I actually feel pretty mad about this.
Upvoted after seeing the comment. I thought about downvoting when I came to the thread and thought of doing so for a minute or three. The problem I had was the title's tone of summarizing once and for all what "the consequences of transhumanism are" and then doing the job really really poorly. I have a vague (but declining?) "my tribe"-feeling towards transhumanism and don't like seeing it bashed, or associated with straw-man-like arguments.
I think a title that avoided this inclination could have been something like "Is immortalist demography bleak?" or maybe "I fear very long lives lead to resources crunches and high gini coefficients" or you know... something specific and tentative rather than abstract and final. Basically, good microcontent.
One thing I've just had to get used to is that LWers are bad at voting. Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted. Whatever people see first, right after an article will generally get upvoted much more than normal. Its not because quality comes first when sorting by that, because if you look at ancient posts where the sort o...
Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted.
This. Very much this. Not a lot of my stuff gets upvoted. Yesterday I think, I had an existential crisis about it "oh my god, do I suck?". Yes that's stupid, but I often find it deeply disturbing that I am not a demigod.
LW is better than reddit, but yeah.
Another observation is that the downvoters seem to come out first. Posts (articles in discussion, specifically) that end up highly voted usually start out hovering around zero or going negative before rising. This post for example.
EDIT: Actually, I'd really like to see some graphs and stats on this from the LW database. Another thing to get more useful data is to allow people to cast a vote for which of their own comments they are most proud of, and see if this vote correlates with community vote.
This question shouldn't be being downvoted as much as it is- it is a legitimate question although would probably go better in its own set in the open thread rather than a discussion section.
Yes, this has been discussed a fair bit- the main argument in most transhumanist circles when this comes up is that everyone will get the benefits and that birth rates will go down accordingly (possibly by enforcement). In that regard, there's a fair bit of data that humans birth rates go down naturally as lifespan goes up. There are other responses but this is the most common. It is important to realize that it is unlikely that this issue will need to be seriously addressed for a long way off.
A lot of people seem to be shrugging this question off, saying basically, "Transhuman minds are ineffable, we can't imagine what they would do." If we have some kind of AI god that rapidly takes over the world after a hard takeoff, then I think that logic basically applies. The world after that point will reflect the values implemented into the AI god.
Robin Hanson has described a different scenario, that I take somewhat more seriously than the AI god scenario.
This long competition has not selected a few idle gods using vast powers to indulge arbitrary whims, or solar system-sized Matrioshka Brains. Instead, frontier life is as hard and tough as the lives of most wild plants and animals nowadays, and of most subsistence-level humans through history. These hard-life descendants, whom we will call “colonists,” can still find value, nobility, and happiness in their lives. For them, their tough competitive life is just the “way things are” and have long been.
Hanson is describing a return to the Malthusian condition that has defined life since the beginning. The assumptions seem fairly strong to me:
This reminds me. An interesting question is, assuming constant mass/person, how long until the speed of light becomes a limiting factor? I.e. given a fixed growth rate, at what total population would the colonization speed be approaching the speed of light just to keep the # humans per cubic parsec of space constant? It is clear that this will happen at some point, given the assumptions of constant birth rate and constant body mass, because the volume of colonized space only grows as time cubed, while the population grows exponentially.
Here is a back-of-...
Other physical angles:
If the economy continues to grow at roughly the present rate, using more energy as it does so, when will we be consuming the entire solar energy output each year? And if this energy growth happens on the surface of the earth and heat dissipation works in a naive way then how long till the surface of the earth is as hot as the sun? Answers: A bit less than 1400 years from now to be eating the sun, and a bit less than 1000 years from now till Earth's surface is equally hot, respectively. Blog post citation!
The same blogger did a followup post on the possibility of economic growth that "virtualizes our values" (my terminology, not the blogger's, he calls it "decoupling") so that humanity gets gazillions of dollars worth of something while energy use is fixed by fiat in the model. Necessarily the "fluffy stuff" (his term) somehow takes over the economy such that things like food are negligible to economic activity. With 5% "total economy" growth and up-to-an-asymptote energy growth, by 2080 98% percent of the value of the economy is made of of "fluffy stuff" which seems to imply that real world food and real w...
The fertility rate is far more important than mortality. You can calculate for yourself that even if humans were immortal, an average fertility below 1 child per parent does not lead to exponential population growth, while average fertility above 1 child per parent means exponential growth even if people keep dying at seventy.
What makes you think we have meaningful opinions to share on the options available to beings that are pushing the carrying capacity of the galaxy?
I think It's a biggish problem to solve.
The first thing that makes it easier is that I see no reason we ought to increase the number of people very much. I think N billion is enough of a party already. Once we all know each other, maybe we can talk about making more. (for the people who are still alive)
Of course that doesn't make the problem go away. If we want to grow as people continuously, we will eventually hit limits. Especially since we might decide that exponential growth is the only acceptable thing.
We might have to accept that there is a non-infin...
It is unlikely that society will ever neatly divide into "haves" and "have nots"- be suspicious of sharp divisions. There should be lots of boundary cases, and probably a smooth gradient.
The primary question for answering these sorts of questions, I think, is whether modification to existing agents is more or less effective than modification to new agents. It seems more likely to me that genetic engineering can radically increase human lifespans than interventions in already developed humans- and if that's the case, then there won't rea...
My essay on this (go to the original article to see the hyperclicks to some of the references, as I'm too lazy to copy them here)
...One of the most common objections against the prospect of radical life extension (RLE) is that of overpopulation. Suppose everyone got to enjoy from an eternal physical youth, free from age-related decay. No doubt people would want to have children regardless. With far more births than deaths, wouldn't the Earth quickly become overpopulated?
There are at least two possible ways of avoiding this fate. The first is simply having c
I decided a while back that the next time there's a LW census, I'm going to suggest adding a question like this: "Ceteris NOT being paribus, if you could make all the people in the world invulnerable to diseases, cellular degeneration and similar aging-related problems by pushing a button, would you push it?" I would be very interested in those results.
...How would this be achieved? Somehow limiting lifespan, or children, assuming it's available to a majority? Or would this lead to a genespliced, technologically augmented and essentially immortal
The novels Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson bring up this question and proposes an answer, offered here in a simple rot13.com cypher for those who haven't read the books yet.
Gubfr jub erprvir gur ybatrivgl gerngzrag ner fgrevyvmrq ng gur fnzr gvzr.
To me, the real turning point is if and when we learn how to precisely control our personalities - in short, reengineering human nature itself. Of course there's the nature vs nurture matter in this, not to mention all the potential factors than even go into a personality, let alone alter it. But I'm 100% against uncontrolled transhumanism, or even mere unregulated genetic modification or augmentation.
Though, let's suppose there was a way to correct obviously harmful behaviorial defects with at least a partial genetic basis, particularly behavior every so...
My essay on this (go to the original article to see the hyperclicks to some of the references, as I'm too lazy to copy them here)
One of the most common objections against the prospect of radical life extension (RLE) is that of overpopulation. Suppose everyone got to enjoy from an eternal physical youth, free from age-related decay. No doubt people would want to have children regardless. With far more births than deaths, wouldn't the Earth quickly become overpopulated?
There are at least two possible ways of avoiding this fate. The first is simply having children later. Even if nobody died of aging, there would still be diseases, accidents and murders. People who've looked at the statistics estimate that with no age-related death, people would on average live to be a thousand before meeting their fate in some way. Theoretically, if everyone just waited to be a thousand before having any kids, then population growth would remain on the same level as it is today.
Of course, this is completely unrealistic. Most people aren't going to wait until they are a thousand to have kids. But they might still have them considerably later than they do now. The average age for having your first child has already gone up as lifespans have grown. If you're going to live for a thousand years, why rush with having kids as soon as possible?
Currently there is (at least for women) an effective maximum cap on how high the age for first childbirth can grow, since once a mother's age grows beyond 35 or so, the probability for birth defects goes up radically. However, current reproductive technology has already made pregnancies over the age of 50 a real possibility. At the moment, this frequently requires egg donation, but a rudimentary ability to produce eggs from stem cells may not be that far away, certainly a lot closer than RLE. By the point that we have RLE, we'll likely also have the ability to produce new sperm and eggs from a person's own cells. Combined with an overall better condition of the body brought about by RLE, this seems like it could increase the maximum age for pregnancy indefinitely. With that, the average age for a first birth going up at least a couple of decades doesn't seem all that unrealistic.
Besides the average age for having kids going up, there's the possibility of larger family groups. Must we necessarily have a norm for children being the kids of exactly two adults? As a personal example, my best friend has a daughter who's two years old right now. I've been over there helping take care of the girl a lot, enough to make me feel like she's part of my family as well. Even if I never had children of my own, I already feel something resembling the feelings related to having a child of your own. In addition to growing attached to the children of your close friends, polyamory is also gradually becoming more common and accepted. With romantic relationships involving more than two people we also get children with more than two parent-like figures. Many have a strong desire to pass on their genes, something which can be helped with e.g. the recent creation of 3-parent human embryos.
So with both the prospect of having kids later and a child having more than two parents, I really don't think that the population problem is as hard to solve as some people make it out to be. It should also be noted that it's not like scientists are going to develop RLE one day, and then the next, blam, everyone lives forever. Rather, the technology will be developed in stages. In the early stages, there are going to be a lot of people who have grown far too frail to be helped, and it might take a long time before we hit acturial escape velocity, so there might simply be an e.g. 10-year bump on people's lifespan and then 20 years could pass before the next major breakthrough.
The treatments may also not be affordable for everyone at first, though it needs to be noted that governments will have a huge incentive to subsidize the treatements for everyone to reduce the healthcare costs of the elderly and to push back the age for retirement. A 2006 article in The Scientist argues that simply slowing aging by seven years would produce large enough of an economic benefit to justify the US investing three billion dollars annually to this research. The commonly heard "but only the rich could live forever" argument against RLE does not, I feel, take into account the actual economic realities (amusingly enough, as its supporters no doubt think they're the economically realistic ones).
So we're going to get a slowly and gradually lengthening average lifespan, which at first probably won't do much more than reverse the population decline that will hit a lot of Western countries soon. The replenishment rate required to keep a population stable is about 2.1 children per woman. The average fertility rate in a lot of industrialized countries is well below this - for instance, 1.58 in Canada, 1.42 in Germany, 1.32 in Italy, 1.20 in Japan and 1.04 in Hong Kong. The EU average is 1.51. Yes, in a lot of poor countries the figures are considerably higher - Niger tops the chart with 7.68 children per woman - but even then the overall world population growth is projected to start declining around 2050 or so.
To give a sense of proportion: suppose that tomorrow, we developed literal immortality and made it instantly available for everyone, so that the death rate would drop to zero in a day, with no adjustment to the birth rate. Even if this completely unrealistic scenario were to take place, the overall US population growth would still only be about half of what it was during the height of the 1950s baby boom! Even in such a completely, utterly unrealistic scenario, it would still take around 53 years for the US population to double - assuming no compensating drop in birth rates in that whole time.
We've adapted to increasing lifespans before. Between 1950 and 1990, the percentage of population over 65 almost doubled in Sweden, going from 10.3 to 18.1. (In the United Kingdom it went up from 10.7 to 15.2, in the US from 8.1 to 12.6, and in the more-developed countries overall it went from 7.6 to 12.1.) The beauty of economics is that like all resource consumption, having children is a self-regulating mechanism: if a growing population really does exert a heavy strain on resources, then it will become more expensive to have children, and people will have less of them. The exception is in the less industrialized countries where children are still a net economic benefit for their parents and not a cost, but most of the world is industrializing quickly. Over the last fifty years, the gaps between the rich and poor have gotten smaller and smaller, to the point where people are calling the whole concept of a first world/third world divide a myth. I see no reason to presume that radical life extension and indefinite youths would pose us any problems that we couldn't handle, at least not on the overpopulation front.
Of course, this presumes that we'll remain as basically biological entities. If we develop uploading and the ability to copy minds at will, well... that's a different kettle of fish, with the various evolutionary dynamics involved in that being a much larger potential problem. And of course, if we get uploading, we're probably close to AI and a full-scale intelligence explosion, with all the issues that that involves.
The long-lived slowly reproducing transhumans have to be willing to kill off "dissenters," long-lived transhumans who reproduce at a faster rate, or else they will be a footnote in our evolution, the Neanderthals or also-rans on the path to whereever we get. Either you out reproduce or you kill your competitors, or you lose.
It seems to me a lot of future scenarios here depend on a kind of top-down imposed control and uniformity you just don't see among intelligent competitors. It only takes a small number of escapees from the control who pick...
I might need a better title (It has now been updated), but here goes, anyway:
I've been considering this for a while now. Suppose we reach a point where we can live for centuries, maybe even millenia, then how do we balance? Even assuming we're as efficient as possible, there's a limit for how much resources we can have, meaning an artificial limit at the amount of people that could exist at any given moment even if we explore what we can of the galaxy and use any avaliable resource. There would have to be roughly the same rate of births and deaths in a stable population.
How would this be achieved? Somehow limiting lifespan, or children, assuming it's available to a majority? Or would this lead to a genespliced, technologically augmented and essentially immortal elite that the poor, unaugmented ones would have no chance of measuring up to? I'm sorry if this has already been considered, I'm very uneducated on the topic. If it has, could someone maybe link an analysis of the topic of lifespans and the like?