The DesignCon panel with the descriptive title "Science Fiction…Is It Really Fiction?" organized by Leslie Van Grove of Mentor, was held in front of a packed house. The audience liked the panel not only because the panelists were "deep thinkers" but because it introduced in a conference focused only on technology a discourse about the social, moral, and political consequences of what we all work to produce. Every substantive idea deserves debate, and some of the probabilities described by the panelists can be labeled "controversial". As an example, panelist Gentry Lee, a space scientist and well known science fiction author, speculated that given the advances in medical electronics, robotics, and pharmacology, it may be possible to achieve immortality as soon as 200 years from now. Many in the audience were very eager to pursue this topic speculating on what could be possible given such life span. Surprisingly, no one thought, or at least verbalized, some of the less attractive consequences of such eventuality. Scientists and engineers call the result of their work progress, but can scientific and engineering advances alone bring real progress?

To begin with, if we all live forever, who needs children? We would not need to replace ourselves with our children. In fact, newborns would have a negative effect on society, since they would compete for resources needed by the "immortals". Therefore the societal change would have to be drastic. Birth would no longer be something to rejoice about, and no one would be fixated on having a male child to secure the survival of the family name. Immortality would see to that. Without the need for reproduction, religions will have to totally change their views on sex, assuming immortality would not mean the end of sexual relations.

Another issue that was not covered, and of course you can only cover so much in 30 minutes, is when would immortality begin. Does one get to be immortal and be in his or her thirties, or do we have a world populated by people that where given immortality at the point of their otherwise natural death? Is our planet to be populated by a bunch of old people? Does perennial youth come with immortality? Living as I do in Florida where the population over sixty greatly outnumbers those in their twenties in many counties, I am not sure I would like to live in a world where the majority was more interested in reliving "the good old days" than in solving present day problems with present day attitudes.

The more I thought about the idea, the more I got convinced that our society could not possibly be prepared for such drastic change in 200 years. Some things just take a long time. Even today we have slave labor in certain parts of the world. Slavery has been around longer than what some religious fundamentalists believes the Earth has been around! What about all the religious people that use immortality as a fundamental differentiator between themselves and "God"? Are those people ready to become godlike? Will immortal women finally have the same rights and freedom as their male counterparts all over the planet?

What about the pursuit of knowledge? When speculating on a life of infinite, or at worst, very long span, how many of us would be happy to be just the way they are, and how many would want to work, experiencing setbacks, in the pursuit of new knowledge and inventions? Projections like immortality always assume that we have a mature society that is well motivated, has learned to respect one another, has found a way to understand that wars are the less efficient way to settle a dispute. If we lived forever, would there be people willing to do the required manual labor forever? Or would we take turns at being waiters, garbage collectors, brick layers, and so on?

I am sure you can add your own personal problems with immortality. I believe that immortality is not what people seek. They seek the absence of pain, they seek to get rid of the fear of death, of that unknowable that is the "after life". All western religions are founded on the fear of the afterlife. Heaven and hell are the most powerful tools to manage a population. People are more prone to live according to what religious dictators say is "the best way" if the "leaders" can guarantee them eternal pain and suffering when they disobey. The concept of a personal God that is a vengeful judge of one's life is rooted on the need of a fearful flock governed by the need to "be good" in order to be worthy of eternal happiness.

As I said introducing the panel, our technological progress has outpaced our social, political, and philosophical progress. We are not ready today for the technological capabilities we possess, and at this pace we will definitely not be ready for what lies ahead. Scientists and engineers think faster than the average human being: but the average human being is the one that sets the environment in which our inventions are used. Inventors and developers are not responsible for the "unintended consequences" but as professionals we must be aware that they exist and that we must take as forceful an approach in helping to avoid them as we do in creating their causes.