November 15, 2009

Link dump for 2009.11.15

From the four corners of the web:

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous7:11 PM

    The comments in the article "your next body is growing in a lab right now" reminds me of something significant which I haven't seen addressed anywhere. Namely, about the idea that clinical immortality will lead to an uncontrollable population explosion. People who think that seem to have forgotten about menopause.

    Either menopause won't be cured, in which case a woman will still only have a roughly 25 year breeding period, and thus won't be spawning babies into perpetuity; or else it will be cured, in which case women will have no pressure to have children young, and career minded ones will not have their first child until they're 80 or something. And clinical immortality doesn't necessarily mean "will live forever" - only that old age and degenerative diseases are no longer a factor.

    Either way, this could still lead to a potential minor boost in population growth rates, if you ignore the fact that healthier, longer-lived people generally have fewer children and most industrialized nations already have a negative population growth rate (at least among the native-born; some still have positive growth rates, but this is usually due directly to immigration and indirectly due to the fact that young immigrants tend to have a lot of children after they arrive)

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