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Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations

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Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by cthia   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 8:35 pm

cthia
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Prolong.
We all know the physical effects of prolong and why anyone would welcome it.

But what may be some of the unforseen social, economic, religious and other side-effects of this wonder drug?

Economically, on the one hand, it seems the insurance industry would greatly benefit.
People living longer and paying more into the system.

On the other hand Life Insurance policies and similar ventures would suddenly become quite interesting.
Suddenly, payouts have the potential to become astronomical.

What are some of the social considerations?
A society where sexual predators whom look much younger than they are, especially those whom naturally are younger looking, would face a whole new problem.

What effects would prolong have on crime? Suddenly, being sentenced to fifty years in prison isn't a complete tragedy.

And should the statute of limitations be revisited?

What are the effects of prolong on the educational system, which is a very loaded question?

What am I missing? Alot I am sure.
Help me fill in some of the blanks.
This is one of those considerations, as one of my professors were fond of saying, where the questions are more important than the answers.

We all know one sure effect it would have on our present system.

Social Security, what's that?

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Last edited by cthia on Wed Mar 12, 2014 9:42 am, edited 2 times in total.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by Amaroq   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 9:01 pm

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There was a large infodump in CoG about how prolong would affect marriages and fidelity and whatnot.

I think consideration of when to have children would change with a greatly increased lifespan. Technically, a couple with prolong could produce a staggering amount of kids because women stay fertile for much longer. The obvious consequences of that are large boosts in population (which is mitigated somewhat by humanity having a bunch of other worlds to spread out to).

There's also the political aspect. Think about corrupt leaders and/or politicians getting to ply their trade for centuries? Imagine a High Ridge or North Hollow wielding political power in the House of Lords for an equally long time? :shudder:

Of course, there's the flip side. For all the bad people potentially living a long time and perpetuating their evil there would be good guys and heroes exerting positive influences for centuries.
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by SWM   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 9:17 pm

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Another effect which has come up a few times but should not be forgotten is the effect on inheritance, promotions, recognition over previous leaders in one's chosen field. The current youth must recognize by now that the people currently holding the positions they aspire might still be there in a hundred years or more.
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by JohnRoth   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 9:19 pm

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cthia wrote:Prolong.
We all know the physical effects of prolong and why anyone would welcome it.

But what may be some of the unforseen social, economic, religious and other side-effects of this wonder drug?


There are no unforeseen consequences. Regardless of what happens, someone will step forward and say they foresaw it. :lol:

cthia wrote:Economically, on the one hand, it seems the insurance industry would greatly benefit.
People living longer and paying more into the system.

On the other hand Life Insurance policies and similar ventures would suddenly become quite interesting.
Suddenly, payouts have the potential to become astronomical.


As an insurance company insider, I have to laugh at this. Life insurance premiums are set by life expectancy, and with prolong the actuarial tables will change. Whole life premiums will go down, annuity premiums will be similarly adjusted.

cthia wrote:
What are some of the social considerations?
A society where sexual predators whom look much younger than they are, especially those whom naturally are younger looking, would face a whole new problem.


I'm not sure what you mean by this. You will always have predators, and they will always try to don sheep's clothing to get close to their prey.

cthia wrote:
What effects would prolong have on crime? Suddenly, being sentenced to fifty years in prison isn't a complete tragedy.
Should the statute of limitations be revisited?


How much does a society want to spend on a prison system before it starts bankrupting them? Discussions to the politics forum. :lol:

cthia wrote:What are the effects of prolong on the educational system, which is a very loaded question?


Depends on the planet. On a planet like Beowulf with a concrete population limitation policy, there would be a smaller proportion of the population in the beginning-of-life educational system at any time. The same can be said for end-of-life support, assuming that the average amount of time someone qualified for end-of-life support doesn't change. This would tend to either reduce taxes to support the system, or result in quality improvements, probably some combination of both.

I don't see what's loaded about it - it's one of the more obvious consequences of life extension and hardly controversial.

cthia wrote:

What am I missing? Alot I am sure.
Help me fill in some of the blanks.
This is one of those considerations, as one of my professors were fond of saying, the questions are more important than the answers.

We all know one sure effect it would have on our present system.

Social Security, what's that?


No, I don't know that's one of the consequences. See above, where I specified something called "end-of-life" support, which would be when someone becomes too frail to work. I do think that social security, in the sense of paying someone who's capable of working not to work, isn't the world's best idea, so if you're talking about a government-sponsored "retirement at age X" annuity program (which is what Social Security is to use the insurance industry terms) it would have to change radically or be abandoned.

Otherwise, I don't particularly want to think about the consequences since I don't see life extension as a social good beyond a certain point. There's a certain amount of truth in the saying that "science changes, funeral by funeral."

This applies to other areas. Take the POLITICS WARNING: sudden collapse of the resistance to same-sex marriage in the U.S. Polling shows that the younger generation has different values than their elders, and there are more of them in the voting pool and fewer of their elders all the time. This generational turnover has far-reaching consequences, and it might slow down, resulting in cultural hardening of the arteries with life extension.
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by TheMonster   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 9:45 pm

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cthia wrote:On the other hand Life Insurance policies and similar ventures would suddenly become quite interesting.
Suddenly, payouts have the potential to become astronomical.
How so? The face value of a term (pure protection) policy is what it is. The premiums an insurer charges are based on the average risk of the policy holders with similar demographics and health situation. Obviously, a person who had prolong treatment would be rated with a lower risk of dying in any given year than a person of the same age without that treatment, and therefore have a lower premium, but insurers would still be profitable so long as they don't reduce the premiums too much. Actuaries are very good at figuring out how much is too much.

Other forms of life insurance (whole life, etc.) would be a bit more complicated than pure term, but the same basic facts remain.

What are some of the social considerations?
A society where sexual predators whom look much younger than they are, especially those whom naturally are younger looking, would face a whole new problem.
Language nitpick: You mean "who", not "whom", because they're the subjects of the verbs "look" and "are".

Having a particularly youthful appearance would not significantly change their predations. It might cause a few naive sorts to lower their guard in the early years of prolong, but it doesn't take long for people raised with it to adjust to the new norms of "how old does he look".

What effects would prolong have on crime? Suddenly, being sentenced to fifty years in prison isn't a complete tragedy.
Should the statute of limitations be revisited?
Those two sentences have nothing to do with one another. The notion of a statute of limitations is based on the difficulty of gathering exculpatory witnesses and evidence long after a crime is alleged to have occurred. Without it, a prosecutor could sit on whatever the police had given him and wait for potential defense witnesses' memories of alibis to fade (or even for the witnesses themselves to die or move away and be hard to locate without the resources available to the government), for receipts supporting those alibis to be destroyed.

In a perverse way, lengthening everyone's lives might actually justify shortening statutes of limitations, simply because remembering that I sat next to the defendant on a plane on the other side of the planet where he's accused of committing a crime five years ago might be more difficult if I'm a hundred years old than fifty (even if the airline has records that far back).

What are the effects of prolong on the educational system, which is a very loaded question?

What am I missing? Alot I am sure.
Well, maybe when people live to be more than a century, they'll have time learn that "alot" is not a word. (There is a word spelled "allot", but it has a completely different meaning from "a lot". When you allot the cookies, if one child gets a lot and another does not, expect a lot of complaining.) If this were the first time you'd typed that, it would be easy to think you just forgot to hit the spacebar or your fingers slipped, but I've seen you do it, well, a lot. Since you brought up education, I can take the opportunity to school you on grammar and spelling.

One effect of prolong is that people are likely to work in a career for a while and then get some additional education, possibly in a related field or something completely different. In the Honorverse, we have Honor's father going to medical school on Beowulf after he retired from the RMMC as but one example.
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by pldew   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 10:25 pm

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SWM wrote:Another effect which has come up a few times but should not be forgotten is the effect on inheritance, promotions, recognition over previous leaders in one's chosen field. The current youth must recognize by now that the people currently holding the positions they aspire might still be there in a hundred years or more.


What would be the impact on Prince Roger of 200+ years as Crown Prince, and do you want that? Should the Royal Family start a tradition of planned abdication, rather then death, as the usual way to end a monarch's reign? Or how else to keep society dynamic, and not turn into another Solarian League?
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by drothgery   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 10:40 pm

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Amaroq wrote:There was a large infodump in CoG about how prolong would affect marriages and fidelity and whatnot.


FWIW, the way prolong is treated in the Honorverse has always seemed a bit off to me. On one hand, everyone in the 'first world' of the Honorverse thinks its normal universal and longstanding institutions like religions and militaries (and least in Manticore's case) have made changes in response to it. On the other, as of 1922 PD, no one's actually lived longer with prolong than they theoretically could have without it. And no one seems to mention that when 'first world' people head out to the back beyond where they don't have universal prolong (or didn't until much more recently), they ought to be as freaked out by actual old people (remember at this point on Manticore, almost no native-born Manticoran are dying of old age for another century or so; almost everyone who was too old to get prolong is already dead, and no one with prolong is physically old) as Graysons were by ships crewed by 'children'.
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by cthia   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 10:46 pm

cthia
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TheMonster wrote:
cthia wrote:On the other hand Life Insurance policies and similar ventures would suddenly become quite interesting.
Suddenly, payouts have the potential to become astronomical.
How so? The face value of a term (pure protection) policy is what it is. The premiums an insurer charges are based on the average risk of the policy holders with similar demographics and health situation. Obviously, a person who had prolong treatment would be rated with a lower risk of dying in any given year than a person of the same age without that treatment, and therefore have a lower premium, but insurers would still be profitable so long as they don't reduce the premiums too much. Actuaries are very good at figuring out how much is too much.

Other forms of life insurance (whole life, etc.) would be a bit more complicated than pure term, but the same basic facts remain.

What are some of the social considerations?
A society where sexual predators whom look much younger than they are, especially those whom naturally are younger looking, would face a whole new problem.
Language nitpick: You mean "who", not "whom", because they're the subjects of the verbs "look" and "are".

Having a particularly youthful appearance would not significantly change their predations. It might cause a few naive sorts to lower their guard in the early years of prolong, but it doesn't take long for people raised with it to adjust to the new norms of "how old does he look".

What effects would prolong have on crime? Suddenly, being sentenced to fifty years in prison isn't a complete tragedy.
Should the statute of limitations be revisited?
Those two sentences have nothing to do with one another. The notion of a statute of limitations is based on the difficulty of gathering exculpatory witnesses and evidence long after a crime is alleged to have occurred. Without it, a prosecutor could sit on whatever the police had given him and wait for potential defense witnesses' memories of alibis to fade (or even for the witnesses themselves to die or move away and be hard to locate without the resources available to the government), for receipts supporting those alibis to be destroyed.

In a perverse way, lengthening everyone's lives might actually justify shortening statutes of limitations, simply because remembering that I sat next to the defendant on a plane on the other side of the planet where he's accused of committing a crime five years ago might be more difficult if I'm a hundred years old than fifty (even if the airline has records that far back).

What are the effects of prolong on the educational system, which is a very loaded question?

What am I missing? Alot I am sure.
Well, maybe when people live to be more than a century, they'll have time learn that "alot" is not a word. (There is a word spelled "allot", but it has a completely different meaning from "a lot". When you allot the cookies, if one child gets a lot and another does not, expect a lot of complaining.) If this were the first time you'd typed that, it would be easy to think you just forgot to hit the spacebar or your fingers slipped, but I've seen you do it, well, a lot. Since you brought up education, I can take the opportunity to school you on grammar and spelling.

One effect of prolong is that people are likely to work in a career for a while and then get some additional education, possibly in a related field or something completely different. In the Honorverse, we have Honor's father going to medical school on Beowulf after he retired from the RMMC as but one example.


You are quite correct.
I use the word alot, alot.
You are also correct that it is an improper use of the word.
I get called on it, alot.
I apologize for its use, however I like the word, alot.
And I shall continue to use it, alot alot.

Actually, I missed that day in English. That was my day to skip.
Your day, was the day prior, where one learns that its ok, to be anal.
Its ok, to be retentive.
It's not ok, to marry the two.

I see alot of misspellings.
I don't interrupt a thread to point it out.
I see the improper use of to and too, but I don't interrupt a thread to point it out.
David's forum is a nice venue, but it isn't a platform of Ivy League penmanship, nor is it meant to be.
Please don't try and make it that, as I wouldn't want to discourage any persons wanting to join the forum simply because they don't know the difference between saw and seen, or lose and loose.


Contrary to popular opinion, language is not a static entity, but rather dynamic.
What is not a rule today, tomorrow is.

Such as ebonics. I shudder to ask your opinion on it. So I won't.
You probably think double negatives truly are incorrect.
You probably think the sentence "I am trying to told you, is incorrect."

You will probably continue to miss the forest for the trees.

I, however, won't miss any sleep over the fact that I use alot, yea, frickin, wassup, or quite often incorrectly use it's, its.

You, however, may very well lose lots of sleep if you continue to be wrapped too tight, oops
wrapped too tightly.

Is it so difficult for you to loosen up?
I know I know, you're quite upset that selfie was added to the dictionary, and that twerk is next.

Your knickers must really be causing you a rash.

And those two questions were not meant to be related.
They are just two questions.
I didn't have any money left over to buy a space. I used it all on vowels.

Oh yea, my net worth is 28.52 million dollars.
How is that for my education?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by kzt   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 11:16 pm

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Of course, all they have about how people actually behave at the end of prolong are projections and tests. They are conducting a huge uncontrolled experiment.
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Re: Prolong and Unforeseen Considerations
Post by Daryl   » Tue Mar 11, 2014 11:22 pm

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Good topic.
I'll throw out a controversial point regarding sexuality, in that I can't see how prolong would lead to harmful sexual predation. However in conjunction with better disease control it may lead to a much freer sexual society. So what if a youthful looking centenarian links up with a 20 year old? Reproduction will be mainly in vitro by then, diseases extinct, and hopefully guilt trips consigned to history.

Careers will definitely need managing. Even now there never used to be a problem turning over the English monarchy as the incumbent usually got a case of blood poisoning or broad sword while the heir was in their prime, but Charlie may well be 75 on beginning work.

In my personal case I was fortunate enough to be able to take advantage of existing retirement and investment rules, and retire at 58 on a good indexed income. Governments are closing off the loopholes now for future generations. I still contribute to society but as I'm a volunteer it is on my terms now.

In professional and technical fields now, education is continuous throughout your career, and with prolong that would become even more essential.
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