How An Ageless Future Would Affect Society

Highlights

• Contrary to critics, based on artificial intelligence (AI)-based calculations, the Earth could support about 132 billion people if they consume chicken and about 33 billion people if they eat beef.
• As for supposed water shortages, using new desalination techniques, where sea water is turned to drinking water, the world’s water may be able to support about 321 billion people.
• To address global warming-fueled rising sea levels and the need for vast swaths of land for agriculture, humans could potentially create floating cities for human dwellings.

If our bodies could rejuvenate indefinitely, allowing us to live longer, the world’s population would likely grow significantly. Along those lines, in a YouTube video, Lifespan News correspondent Emmett Short has said that some researchers posit that our planet may only be able to support about 10 billion meat-eating people. The reason for this is that we supposedly do not have enough available land to grow sufficient amounts of food to feed the animals we would eat.

Rather than accepting this estimate at face value, Short turned to AI-based ChatGPT to do some calculations. According to Short, ChatGPT says that if people ate chicken alone as a meat source, the world could support about 132 billion people. Moreover, if people consumed only beef for meat, about 33 billion could live on the planet. These calculations were based on the trove of literary information ChatGPT analyzes. ChatGPT then took this information to estimate the meat production possible from the amount of land currently available and then dividing that value by the average amount of meat consumed per person. Based on his ChatGPT calculations, the Lifespan News correspondent disagrees with the estimate of Earth only supporting about 10 billion people.

Technological Advancements Like Water Desalination Could Support a Worldwide Aged Population Boom

To add to his argument against the estimated maximum capacity of 10 billion people on Earth, the correspondent says that technological advancements like urban farming are already optimizing the efficiency of agriculture. Urban farming is where greenhouses in urban centers are erected and used to create ideal growth conditions for fruits and vegetables. Not only are they improving growth conditions for valuable crops but they are also cutting the cost of transportation as well as carbon emissions for a cleaner environment.

To address the issue of clean water shortages, which already plagues about 20% of the world’s population, the correspondent says we are developing desalination techniques. According to the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, desalination methods are absurdly cheap. Along those lines, taking desalination’s potential into consideration, the Earth could potentially support about 321 billion meat-eating people, according to ChatGPT calculations.

The challenges we would face today may not necessarily come from a lack of resources. Rather, they may come from logistical and strategic challenges. For example, many people in American society consume almonds and almond milk, yet it takes around 1,900 gallons of water to grow one pound of almonds. For this reason, if people choose to consume tree nuts that are easier to grow than almonds, we could conserve a lot more clean water, and the Earth could support more people.

Some environmentalists worry that human ingenuity’s ability to keep pace with a population expansion of aged people along with the use of more land would cause the extinction of many wildlife species. While these concerns may hold some validity, there are strategies being developed that may mitigate human impact on wildlife’s habitat. As an example, new, sustainable urban planning methods may minimize habitat destruction during the building of urban offices and housing developments. In this way, urban planners can design cities that have a smaller ecological footprint — causing less aversive effects on wildlife habitats and the animal species within them.

In essence, if we can solve aging, we have the potential to harness human ingenuity to keep pace with a growing population. Proposed technological advancements, such as mass-scale carbon capturing devices and vast floating cities, could enable humans to clean the environment and expand areas for housing and agriculture, respectively. Not only that but AI is already being applied in medicine to design new drugs and treatments for diseases like cardiovascular and metabolic conditions. Given the vast amounts of information AI processes and its evolving analytical capabilities, it can enhance logistical efficiency by identifying alternatives to resources, and by developing technologies to boost Earth’s capacity to support a larger population.

Furthermore, the world’s population growth rate has been declining since about 1970. In that year, the world’s growth was a little over 2%, and it has consistently declined so that Earth’s population growth was about 1% in 2020. In that sense, Earth’s population seems to be stabilizing. With ample food and water from improved land and water use as well as desalination, it appears that an aged population upsurge may be globally sustainable since the Earth’s population is not currently undergoing an unbridled boom.

Determining Whether Anti-Aging Technology Will Be Equally Distributed to Rich and Poor Alike

An important societal implication yet to be addressed is who will get access to new anti-aging technologies as they develop. If only wealthy people have access to potential lifespan-extending technologies, their wealth and political influence may precipitously increase during their longer lives. This would be due to rich people’s wealth compounding over their longer lifespans, and since wealth spurs political power, these wealthy individuals might gain more influence. Such a scenario may widen the wealth and power gap. This kind of scenario may be remedied if aging researchers and politicians could find ways to equalize the distribution of anti-aging technologies to the masses.