[orangecat]

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?

[coderenegade]

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.