[ExI] Inmortality and overpopulation

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 3:23 AM, Eugenio Martínez <rolandodegilead at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Some days ago, somebody among you - Can´t remember whom exactly - said
> that, in a longeve society, a lot of the women who, nowadays, have their
> sons before 40 because they don´t want to lose their opportunity,  would
> stop having children before that age because they will have a longer
> fertile period.
>
> Still, as you may know - and I hope not to be wrong - every month, in
> women, a egg cell arises and some of them are discarded. When all the egg
> cells are depleted, there are no new ones made, but the menopauses arrives.
>

As Brent noted, if longevity is achieved in practice, that will be because
our control over biology is much increased.

It is quite likely that, by the time we get there, it will be possible to
"fix" a woman's ovaries (and related glands in the brain) to constantly
produce the right hormones without actually releasing an egg.  Fertility
only occurs when deliberate action is taken to release an egg cell.

Further, you have the mechanism of menopause slightly incorrect.  A woman's
ovaries contain thousands of proto-eggs, of which only a few hundred ever
develop.  When these age enough that they stop responding correctly to
hormones, the woman's hormonal balance is thrown off, and that causes
menopause.  Even with the pill (which tricks the brain into thinking that
ovulation just happened), that aging does not cease, so just because
they're not being released does not delay menopause.  (Though perhaps
menopause could be delayed by constantly taking the pill...)

Of course, that is the same "aging" that we intend to halt.  It is very
likely that any means biological immortality would either be preceded by,
or very quickly lead to, a way to get these proto-eggs to stop aging.  Just
a lifespan of at least 400 years, and keeping the eggs from aging (while
still viable), would extend a woman's fertile years by at least 10x (12ish
to 50ish = about 38 years; 12ish to 400ish = over 380 years).  And that's
not getting into creating new eggs, which should also be simple by that
point (or if not, well before the newly-extended fertile period is over).
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