[extropy-chat] Real estate as an extropian investment

[Mike Lorrey]

--- david <deimtee at optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> > <snip>
> >
> >1/3rd-1/4th of the US population is scheduled to die between 2015
> and
> >2035, and most of them will not accept life extension or cryonic
> >suspension. 
> >  
> >
> As far as cryonics go, you are almost certainly right that it will
> not be widely accepted, but I think that if effective anti-aging
> treatments were demonstrated their use would be extremely widespread,
> very rapidly.
> 
> Vast amounts of money are already spent on just looking younger, the
> demand to actually be younger would be huge.

The thing is, the longer people live, the worse the national bankruptcy
will be. Most 90 year olds are not going to want to work their twilight
years, and they will vote that way.

This is to be expected. I recall when I was in USAF basic training, the
military had recently gotten rid of all the beer can vending machines
on bases in the US, and banned smoking in basic training. If you
smoked, they'd give you a prescription to the patch to get you to quit.
They encouraged similar temperance and quitting among the old geezers
nearing retirement, and were confused when, instead of dying an average
of 5 years after retirement, vets started living much longer. The
budget of the Veterans Administration has gone through the roof.

The future financial problems of social security, medicare and
medicaid, are all because people are living longer, increasing the
years they receive benefits by 2-3 times. When social security was made
into the primary social safety net for the nation, the average life
expectancy was 62 and the retirement age was 65. Life expectancy is now
above 75 and we have six times larger fraction of the population on
social security as back then.

Unless some drastic steps are taken now to index retirement to life
expectancy, there will not only be extremely high risk of total
economic meltdown (the DoD is expecting a global Depression in 2017),
but increased political pressure for alternative solutions: euthanasia,
and groups creating and releasing bioweapons into the population. The
best thing that could happen for the economy would be a widespread
avian flu, or perhaps a virulent mutation of EEE. They generally kill
malnourished kids and the old, for the most part. This is gruesome to
speak of, but it is economic truth.

I expect that true longevity treatment technology will be held in limbo
by the FDA and other governments health ministries until after the baby
boom is mostly dead and buried.

I also believe that cryonic suspension should be promoted not as a key
to longevity, but as a means of warehousing people, taking them out of
the resource consumption stream until after the population boom is
gone, to be revived during the population crash when there will be a
severe labor shortage. A sort of rainy day fund of people. If you don't
want to live through the inevitable chaos of the 2015-2040 period,
sleep it away in a bunker somewhere.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation:
http://constitutionpark.blogspot.com
Personal/political blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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