Donald Trump, Forever

I've been working on the book a little this week after getting some stuff settled in Seattle and finishing some travel. The outline is hovering around 40 pages or so, and I'm starting to fill in details specific to one or two areas. Right now I'm working on life extension and the Corporate Senate sections, the former much harder than the latter.

In looking at trends in human history, there are a couple that might serve as models; 1) Cheap, easy and culture shifting, 2) expensive, rare and elite and 3) for lack of a better work, genetic or evolutionary.

1) Cheap, easy, culture shifting: The model here is electricity or the phone (or these days the internet). Everyone (or almost everyone with rare exceptions) has access, it quickly dives under the cultural radar (heard any Tesla jokes lately?) and isn't news except when it's missing. Many technologies eventually go this route. However, I don't think life extension will be one of them, at least not soon. Ray Kurzweil's fantasies aside, the singularity is not as close as people think, nano technology has been Real Soon Now for decades and, well, even stuff from the '50s like cheap fusion is still (and has always been) 20 years away. I think LE is not going to be a simple nutritional supplement, but a complete re-write of your DNA, or at least extending certain parts of it into every cell in your body. This is hard, uncertain work and biology isn't physics (it's vastly more complicated). Immortality won't be coming in a pill for a long time I think, so for the next 150 years or so, I'm ruling this one out.

2) Expensive, rare and elite. Everyone has a car (in the US) but how many people have McClearens? Not fucking me that's for sure. Delorian tried but failed. I think if LE is as complicated as I suspect, the first few iterations on existing humans may only be partly successful and I expect it to be very expensive. Also, the economics of it would seem to me (a non-economist) to keep it rare, i.e. providers could charge huge amounts of money for it because absolutely everyone would want it. It's unlikely to be covered by a healthcare plan especially when these days more and more plans are getting away from expensive treatments and looking for workers who won't get sick at all.

There is an argument to be made that folks could finance their LE and pay it out of their multi-hundred/thousand year lifespan. However, for those arguments to make real sense, you a) need the first few folks to live a sizeable fraction of that to prove it actually works (medical breakthroughs have an unfortunate history of not working quite as well as planned, e.g. seen any Jarvik artificial hearts around? Not a mean criticism, it's just a hard, hard problem in a complex system) and b) you need actuarial tables for those lifespans. LE doesn't mean you can't get hit by a car, slip in the shower etc. To point b), I talked to a number of insurance actuarials about this (my job brings me in contact with all sorts of interesting folks) and this is a known problem some few folks have worked on. Assuming immorality, your mean time to a fatal accident is somewhere between 800-1500 years. This also assumes that LE confers immunity to all disease, an assumption I can't see justifying. I don't see folks financing more than a small fraction of this, say 100 years or so. Hence, not may people will be able to afford it. Trumps, Hiltons, Gates etc. maybe, but not you or I. Well, not I.
Result: Donald Trump might be with us for a long time, but fortunately we'll die and not have to watch.

3)Genetic, evolutionary. I see some home for this. If we can build genes, or better yet eggs and sperm, we could build the LE genes right in from birth. This avoids a lot of problems in 2) and gets us to 1) (or at least set up for 1)) in a relatively short time. It's comparatively simple, cheaper than doing it after the system has booted (but likely not cheap) and might be workable. I call this the Gattica option and, while personally fond of it, it means pretty directly playing god with peoples lives (or future lives). I can't see this being popular for a few hundred years until a population of Gatticans gets large enough to vote in significant numbers. Again, this won't be available to everyone, so 2,000 years from now, we all might be Gates, or Fords, or Trumps.

This is evolution in action in the brave, new world.

I'm certainly open to other arguments, corrections, or debates on why I have my head up my ass, but this is the direction I'm going to head on this.