Yes. Once we dispense with the cliches that aging is "natural" and "a part of life" and actually think about what it entails, we should realize that it's a horrible thing which we should be devoting substantial resources to mitigating.
I agree with the first part, not the second. It is fine for humanity to work on aging, but I don't think it's a societal imperative.
Death and aging sucks; and that is fine. It is part of being alive. The utter fear of death many of us harbour inside is a strong force that manifests itself in many beautiful forms.
I am terribly afraid of death, yet I would not choose to upload my consciousness to a machine. I would not put myself in suspended animation. I would not like to live 300 years either. There is deep comfort in knowing that my days on this planet are limited and life is short. Better get a move on.
That's understandable. I'm concerned for my loved ones and the impact it may have on them when I go, but I have no fear of death for myself. I have no memory of the millions of years that passed before I was born and expect to have no memory, feelings or consciousness after I have died. I just won't be here any more and that's perfectly okay.
But it is natural. Preventing aging would be tantamount to creating forever kings, because like anything, the benefits wouldn't be distributed evenly throughout society. I'd rather a world where everyone has their time and everyone ages, than one in which a few people live forever. Not to mention, if you don't die of old age, what do you die of? The alternatives aren't great, unless assisted suicide becomes an option.
The solutions to the horrors of aging are psychological and social, not scientific, and entail coming to terms with your own mortality (life is fatal, your capacity will inevitably fade), and having mechanisms in place so that the elderly can live with dignity. Anything else seems like a sure path to dystopia.
The forever dictator/billionaire trope is rather naïve as I think that societal changes related to technological improvements are extremely difficult to predict, and in this case they could be more profound that what some sci-fi authors imagined.
Dictators are only a problem because the population let them take power.
They could not do anything or even stay in power without population consent, especially the aristocracy/priests caste of this particular society.
Dictators/Billionaires themselves are in practice only a very small part of our power distribution issues. (really the very visible but small tip of the proverbial iceberg)
We already see vastly different health outcomes for people of different socioeconomic statuses. Eternal life would be no different. I'm not even talking about dictators. It would the political class and entrenched wealth that would benefit the most, and quite frankly, I think that's worth fighting against. There's a certain comfort and equality in knowing that everyone dies, and that it's just a fact of life.
But we also see universal healthcare in most developed countries. The US has moved somewhat in that direction, and has been there for decades for everyone over 65.
Speaking of which, Medicare would save enormous amounts of money if it made anti-aging meds available to all of its recipients. Mass-market drugs aren't the most expensive ones, and anti-aging drugs would have to be pretty expensive to outpace heart surgery, cancer, and extended hospital stays. My mom for example cost Medicare a million dollars just for her last year. The government also pays a lot of nursing home expenses, which would also mostly go away.
Then there's retirement. The world is facing an enormous demographic crash, because it's been urbanizing and urban populations have fewer kids. Birth rates are below replacement rates, in some cases far below. China's is around one, and its population started shrinking last year. It's going to be harder for governments to pay for retirements from shrinking tax bases. If people were healthy enough to keep working, that problem goes away too.
Shrinking populations aren't great for economic growth either. Wealthy people tend to have a lot of money invested in stocks, and if they want them to keep going up, they'll support anti-aging for everyone.
There are some other reasons for them to support it too. One is that no anti-aging treatment will be perfect right out of the gate. The more people are using it, the quicker the problems will be found and fixed. If the elite keep it to themselves, they'll be the ones encountering all the problems.
And finally, if you're not aging then accidents and violence are much more prominent risks of death, percentage-wise. Having anti-aging tech and not sharing sounds like a great way to get yourself killed by the envious masses.
Universal healthcare is not a panacea, and it doesn't guarantee equitable health outcomes. In Australia, indigenous life expectancy is 13 years lower than the life expectancy for the rest of the country. That's mostly due to preventable illness in a first world country with universal healthcare. I imagine outcomes for New Zealand Maoris and native Americans are similar.
The world will need to learn to deal with shrinking populations at some point. Economic growth is not, in my opinion, a particularly compelling argument. All systems have physical limits, and the extensive collapse of the biosphere suggests that our level of population and economic growth are both unsustainable. Aside from the cultural stagnation that an immortal aristocracy would represent, it would be an absolute disaster for the planet.
As for the wealthy sharing for their own benefit: when has that happened in history, ever? Extraction continues until the peasants storm the gates. In the short term, it's cheaper to invest in better security.
The solutions to the horrors of aging are psychological and social, not scientific
Is the solution to losing short range vision in your 40s philosophizing about how literature is best left to the young, or getting reading glasses?
Anything else seems like a sure path to dystopia.
Are you opposed to researching cures for cancer or Alzheimer's? What about preventing heart disease and strokes? What about treatments to help older people preserve their mobility and short term memory? At what point does allowing people to retain their physical and mental health become a dystopia?
As I mentioned in another post, we already see vastly different health outcomes for people of different socioeconomic statuses. The wealthy already live longer and are more functional into their old age than are the poor, to the point where you can guess a person's income and education with reasonable accuracy by knowing what illnesses they have. The US is already a society where medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy, so I'd say the path to dystopia is already being walked. But preventing strokes and heart failure is vastly different to being able to prevent the aging process itself, because fixing those issues doesn't stop senescence. You can stop as many heart attacks as you like, but the person will inevitably die of old age at some point.
Stopping senescence will not be something that is equitably distributed, because modern medicine already has those same issues. There's a certain comfort and equality in knowing that everyone gets old, and everyone dies, no ifs or buts. This ride only has one exit, and you have a finite amount of time to make the most of it.
1) Instead of getting sick and feeble, enjoy your health until you've had enough, then take up free climbing or wing jumping, and enjoy that until you go out with a bang.
2) Save your money, and periodically take a sabbatical for a few years.
3) Find a job that doesn't seem worse than slowly falling apart until you die.
Don't be fooled by this idea that those individuals have any real power.
They are in a silent contract with the aristocracy around them, and the same process repeats all the way down the base of the pyramid.
The only reason it is difficult to get rid of tyrants is because a large amount of people in their countries benefits from this arrangement.
An eternal Putin might actually value life more than the current one does. Being ageless doesn't mean you're immortal. He would be even more worried about assassination than he is now.
No thanks. It would prefer to devote my resources to having a good life for myself and my family right now instead of wasting resources on aging research that might never produce useful results. It's fine for people to die of old age.
If you want to reduce the effects of aging we already know how to do that though physical activity, proper diet, sleep hygiene, toxin avoidance, etc. Most people don't care enough about aging to optimize those factors.
Hesitant agree, but we must also keep the opposite side of the coin in mind. Any meaningful cure for aging would be suicide of the species unless we also have birth control figured out and in place everywhere. We'd need massive programs to control the size of a population that doesn't age and die.
Once you start thinking just a little bit about this problem it becomes increasingly horrifying. If we cured aging today, how long before India or China enacts forced sterilization to prevent their populations from starving to death? How long before countries start to cull parts of the population? How could we possibly cope with Africa, where women have 5 kids in the hope one lives?
Famine like the world has never seen. Energy wars over the last scraps of land you can put solar on. Fresh water in the middle east would be unobtainable and spark some of the worst wars ever.
Then all the carbon emissions from an ever-larger population would destroy a climate that just barely survived the 2020s.
Curing aging creates a thousand times as many problems as it solves. Curing aging without already having a population control system in place globally could very easily destroy us.
I think we will eventually solve aging one way or another, but whether we can control the population of an entire planet I'm not so sure of.
Defeating aging would be the most significant achievement in human history. But sure, let's worry about centuries old overpopulation concerns instead, despite having demonstrated them false continually.
Yes, a 2-3°C increase in earth's temperature would be an unbearable cost for DEFEATING AGING.
Aging and death are awful. Unavoidable, currently, and so must be acknowledged and prepared for, but still unspeakably destructive.
> Is there any advancement people won't decry?
Defeating aging would be the most significant achievement in human history. But sure, let's worry about centuries old overpopulation concerns instead, despite having demonstrated them false continually.
Discussing concerns and potential scenarios doesn't have to be viewed as decrying. I would argue it's a normal and healthy way of advancing science safely.
For whom? For the dying and aging sure. For the young who want to make space for themselves in the world and make their own mark, ageless elderly could be a sentence to a life not worth living. The ability to progress career wise and find good work could be stunted. Political and social change could be halted even more than it is today.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do it if we can, but one thing that is certain is that it’s going to drastically adjust human society in a very unequal way.
It is also awful at the civilization level.
There is a huge amount of knowledge loss occurring every generation.
Our culture and technology are evolving as they are supported by language, but this is barely enough and from the societal organization (politics) we keep collectively falling in the same traps over and over.
If there were no deaths the knowledge would be in stasis due to the nature of what gets funded and the power structure inherent under limited resources.
What wisdom? On average I haven't found any particular correlation between age and wisdom. In fact, most of the advice I have received from elderly people was worse than useless.
Another aspect here is that there will be no change or evolution in society if no one dies from old age. Everything will be controlled by grumpy old men! They will look like they are 25, but the mindsets will be ossified.
Let's make it so everyone's body is 25 until they suddenly painlessly die around age 125 or so.
A cure for aging, would, of course, not be shared equally across the globe. It would be monopolized by the very rich, who would establish a permanent aristocracy. Cultural attitudes would be frozen in time. It would be a hellscape for everyone except the very top.
Not sure why you've been downvoted, because you bring up valid points.
I have one to add, let's imagine that we science our way into living much longer - our bodies may continue to live, but what state will our minds maintain? Keeping a body alive by no means guarantees a healthy mind.
We might discover that despite the healthy condition of the human body, no sense of self is able to survive over a few hundreds years before losing coherency. Perhaps the human brain just wasn't designed to contain more than one lifetime. In such a scenario we would be sitting on a whole lot of perfectly healthy vegetables who will continue to live very long lives thereafter. I for one never want to live as a vegetable. My dad told me the same thing, if ever he's a vegetable then pull the plug. I would do that for him, and I hope someone would do it for me if the day came.
I think this is extraordinarily pessimistic and Malthusian. These problems are easily solved and the benefit of having all this human wisdom around would help solve them. Indeed the most advanced populations in the West and Asia are already in decline.
Regardless of if the problems should/could be solved it seems like people will continue to work towards living forever. It just seems like enough humans share the desire to make it happen eventually.
And after all, wouldn't you like to keep your pet alive for a bit longer too?
Strangely enough, the desire to live forever is shared by many, but the actual research has been rather anemic compared to almost everything else.
Nothing close to the collective effort deployed for the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.
I think that we're simply collectively skeptical about the outcome, seems too far off, too big of a moonshot, and also the fear of death is pushing us to rationalize the situation and find solace in the status quo. (death is part of life, this is natural, god's plan or even that life would be boring without death...)
But ageing is natural and is part of life. It's not pretty, and oftentimes it's horrific, but it's both of those things. And there's a certain hubris in thinking that we wouldn't make the situation worse by trying to change it.