Part of the job description of any science fiction writer who's trying to break new ground in the field — or just to turn in work that doesn't suffer from the second artist effect — is to try and brainstorm the consequences of a new invention or discovery ...



This works best when there's an immediate tangible impact on the human sphere. For example: if tomorrow we picked up an unequivocal and clearly meaningful SETI signal from the M31 Andromeda galaxy (by which I mean a radio or optical signal that clearly contains non-random low entropy information, although we might not be able to decode it rapidly), then that would clearly have a major "gosh, wow!" impact in the media, and raise all sorts of longer term questions about our place in the universe ... but because M31 is 2.5 million light years away, there would be no prospect whatsoever of any meaningful two-way communication ensuing, unless the SETI transmission encodes directions for working around the speed of light.

In the absence of such a gadget, the SETI transmission doesn't immediately change anything. But if it comes with instructions for building some kind of spooky instantaneous communicator, then all sorts of stuff happens. Stuff that's obvious: we get to talk to the 2.5 million years later descendants of the SETI signal's senders. We get much better communications with future deep space probes, and the probability of humans setting foot on Mars just drops by an order of magnitude because we can send teleoperator-controlled robots that can do real work without a half-hour control lag. And communication satellites are obsolete. With me so far? Stuff that is a bit less obvious is that we get a global stock market crash, because most high frequency trading strategies have just been rendered obsolete (they usually rely on signal latency and speed of light delays at some level). We may get another major crisis because instantaneous communications almost certainly imply causality violation which gives us some interesting strategies for tackling NP problems and oops, all your encrypted password hashes might as well be stored in plaintext. In fact, the ultimate consequences of receiving an instantaneous communicator might be highly detrimental to a civilization that's just getting ready to start expanding into space in a big way, by zapping several of the business cases for space travel and simultaneously causing bubbles and wars and depressions. One wonders if there isn't an answer to the Fermi paradox here ...

But "aliens give us ansibles" is not the thought experiment I'd like to run today.

Let us postulate, as Aubrey de Grey does, that ageing and senescence in mammals is not inevitable, but a consequence of accumulated metabolic malfunctions that are not weeded out of the genome by evolutionary selection pressure because they emerge so late that they don't typically impair the organism's reproductive fitness.

Thought experiment: It turns out that there is no single senescence "master switch", but there are three or four fairly simple genetic tweaks we can make (either via epigenetic modulation or by actual insertion of a handful of genes by way of a suitably customized virus) that (a) slow the ageing process in young adults by a factor of ten, and (b) partially reverse the ageing process in middle-aged or elderly adults so that after a few years or decades they recover physically to the equivalent of a 25-year-old. A vaccine is developed, becoming available some time between 2020 and 2030, which can be mass produced for roughly $5 a shot — one injection, and the recipient isnt going to die of cellular senescence. Note that there is some small print attached.

(Small print: This is not a magic cure-all. It doesn't cure bacterial or viral infections, cancer, prion diseases, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or neurological conditions. It doesn't enable the user to regenerate lost limbs. It does enable stem cells in adult tissues to produce more new cells, improving recovery from injury and attrition due to age (such as damage to cardiac tissue or progressive loss of cortical matter in the brain). It does not preclude the development of other treatments for the above conditions. )

What do you think the consequences are likely to be?

(I'll post my thoughts on the subject later ...)