On Harry Potter and Life Expectancy.
What might the life expectancy of 500 years look like and how to think about it?
“And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Do our lives derive meaning because of death? Is the knowledge that we will someday perish into oblivion come in handy in a subtle and unconscious way to push us into living to our full potential? While, at first, the answer seems like a rhetorical yes, it is anything but that simple. Think about it this way, at some point or another, we all find ourselves indulging in counterfactuals about the choices we made at some point or another during our lifetimes. Heck, it is even recommended, by various faiths and modern psychology, that we do this daily so as to understand what mistakes did we make in our daily lives and how we can improve on that. So, if we are, by habit, creatures of hindsight, how do we even begin to reconcile this with the idea that it is death which pushes us into acting to our potential, when we can only assess our actions after the fact?
Well, for starters, it might be the wrong question to ask. Let’s concede that death does give a lot of meaning to our lives in ways beyond “acting to our full potential” but does that mean we should not aspire to reverse aging or increase our life expectancy to say, 500 or 1000 years? What would that even mean? Anti-aging research is often viewed as a vanity project of billionaires with cash to spare which could be utilized to fix other problems. Well, decisions regarding important resource allocations are generally made at the margin, speaking in those terms, billionaires rightly have enough cash to spare to devote it to this research and the opportunity cost of this money is quite low. In fact, the recent strides would actually suggest that it is money worth spending. So, just for fun, it is worth looking at what the idea of living for 500 years or more might look like.
We live at a historical juncture where life expectancy, over the last 100 years, has improved by leaps and bounds across the globe. And while the harsh realities of climate change, a pandemic and a return of global conflict might be reasons enough to be skeptical about how things will pan out in the future, doesn’t mean we should just stop thinking in big terms. If anything, these factors should arguably serve as more of an impetus to do so.
Source: Our World in Data.
Before we do that, it is worth asking, what would you do if you knew that you could live for at least 500 years? Well, personally, if I lived in a world with that kind of life expectancy, I would want to spend my first 100 years getting PhDs in nuclear physics, materials chemistry and economics. The second would be devoted to being a gymnast and traveling across the globe and the rest would be spent in a mix of becoming a pilot, exploring the possibility of life outside the earth and a lot of other things which I wont bore you with here. Isn’t it just fun to think about?! Won’t this actually mean that I am living to the fullest and best possible potential, among other things. And the really cool part about it would be that I would just grow up surrounded by people who are already 200 to 300 years old and have perhaps even travelled across the globe and beyond. What would familial and all other relationships might even look like in this world? All of this might just turn out to be a thought experiment and whimsy rambling but we are continuing to make progress at breakneck speed when it comes to resolving climate change and creating a world of energy abundance.
Perhaps there is still a very long way to go, perhaps things will work faster or slower than what we think but there is no real way to tell. Only, a bit of imagination and hope. When I began thinking about writing this post the idea was to communicate just how bad we humans are when forced into thinking in counterfactual terms. Good counterfactuals contain are good stories with fine attention to detail containing a whole world inside of them. They expand our capacity to think in ways so enormous than we could have ever imagined before we began. This post in itself, was a result of having read an excellent and long counterfactual i.e. Harry Potter and The Myth of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It explores what the story and world of Harry Potter might have looked like had Harry been born with parents who were scientists. How would Harry think about and grapple with the world of magic if he had already been trained to think scientifically about the world around him? It is equal parts fun, fascinating and at times, quite infuriating. But the best thing it does is leave you with lots of ideas about life, death and everything in between and beyond.
So, the next time you find yourself questioning the relevance of improving our lifespans or being so bothered to even collect data about such stuff, it might be worth staying clear of excuses like “oh, we are all going to die some day, what the hell”
P.S. If you like this and want me to continue and expand, it would really help if you could share this.