On 05-Dec-08 17:50, Darren New wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> Imagine what happens if people live for 200 years or more. How will 
>> the society be organized. Who will be in charge do you think? What 
>> will happen to creativity?
> 
> So, when the lifespan went from some 25 years to 40 years, then 40 years 
> to 70 years, society fell apart and became much worse for it because 
> people in charge were generally older and all the creativity drained 
> away, so nothing new has been invented in the last few hundred years?
> 
> Yes, much better to kill you, before you become uncreative. :-)
> 
This was sort of my reasoning: first 12 years or so is basic training 
then comes a period of puberty when you question everything. Then when 
begin 20s your ideas have more or less formed. You will still learn a 
lot, but the framework won't change much (with possibly a few 
exceptions). After that you enter the rat race. Some will float to the 
top because of quality but in many cases rats will fight to the top. In 
quite a few cases the rats have the best change of winning when 
everything is new. The beautiful thing with our current lifespan is that 
that period will last at most 30 years or so. After that the baton is 
handed to a new generation, often within the family (and else they won't 
tolerate another one as their successor anyway). There is a big change 
that the new generation is less of a rat, also because big rats are, 
fortunately, rare and the next generation was raised in good 
circumstances. What I fear will happen if the lifespan goes to 1000 
years or more is that there will be a lot of rats at the top that have 
all the time consolidating their power. Or dictators if you will. And I 
don't think particularly on the level of countries (though 1000 years of 
mugabe or mao zedong may not be nice) but also on the level of 
universities and companies. I think that it is good if there is a 
regular handing over of power just to keep the system stable. Of course 
I don't know whether the optimal time lifespan in this respect is 70, 
100 or 200. My gut feeling says that it is probably below 100. Feel free 
to disagree. ;)

Note that nowhere I used my personal preference for a lifespan, as I 
don't think that is relevant. Note two is that this is all without 
taking into account that the relative periods of development can also 
change. Again because I don't think that would differ that much.

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