[tigen]

"humans were far too heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers"

Science has certainly not "marched past" the issue of life (or health) extension. Knowing that it is related to cancer or whatever does not end the story. That is like saying we now know humans don't have feathers.

Regarding agency, the story the humans have no real choice in the matter because the dragon will kill them all otherwise. Ending aging would be much more valuable than ending war. Wars do not kill billions of people. Of course, it is possible to destroy all life on the planet in a war, but this is orthogonal to solving other problems.

"You are hilariously naive to think about solving one problem when there is another."

[Kednicma]

Please pay attention. I did not say "cancer or whatever". I said cancer [0], a specific family of diseases characterized by normal cells becoming cancerous [1], a state marked by unbounded growth and self-reinforcing DNA damage. Cancer and aging are intimately linked via telomeres [2], part of the structure of cellular DNA. Indeed, quoting the first sentence of [3]:

> Telomeres, the caps on the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, play critical roles in cellular aging and cancer.

On war, we lose millions of people regularly [4]. We lose about a million people to genocide every year [5]. These are people that, in Bostrom's parlance, we have put on the train to go see the dragon; we sacrificed them for nothing at all. Nothing in Bostrom's tale suggests that, having defeated the dragon, we will stop killing millions of people.

On nuclear war or other disastrous climate change, something you only allude to, the Doomsday Clock [6] is currently at less than two minutes to midnight, and has never been closer. It is widely agreed that we are on the very edge of self-annihilation and that we expend a tremendous amount of political effort simply not destroying ourselves.

I can see that you're a relatively young and inexperienced account; I hope that you do some reading and improve your understanding of biology and history, rather than continuing to lean on mystic or mythic influences for your worldview.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogenesis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomeres_in_the_cell_cycle

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

[warbaker]

You still need to explain why some whales live hundreds of years, and some trees live thousands.

If you believe that telomere shortening is the issue, we should be investigating therapies to encourage telomere lengthening.

We have access to powerful technologies (e.g. CRISPR), and we can develop technologies that are more powerful still.

[Kednicma]

Hi, to be gentle and brief: Lengthening telomeres can provoke cancerous behavior. Therefore we cannot simply lengthen telomeres by giving people more telomerase; we need a more holistic approach which understands the cancer/senescence tradeoff.

It is not a problem for a creature to live for a long time; the inevitability of cancer seems to itself be genetic and part of the human experience but not for all life. You mention whales, but lobsters are even more interesting: They do manufacture telomerase throughout their lives, and they are not killed by cancer in old age, but by being unable to molt and continue growing. Trees are interesting too; they must always grow in order to keep living, but past a certain size, the physics of water limits their ability to grow.

Indeed, if we want to understand trees and whales, my first guideline would be that, because they are so large, the rules for cellular homeostasis are different at that scale. The things which allow us or lobsters to live for long times are not the things which allow whales or trees to live for long times.