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by davedx
1034 days ago
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It's a very valid point. Our past meddling with ecosystems and biologies have often produced unintended consequences to great detriment, it's not hard to imagine those from this too. Even ignoring the biological risks here, the economic risks are quite obvious - we're already in a place where many developed nations have demographic problems where ever greater percentages of the population no longer work, leading to less and less resources available to support the pensions of later generations. Imagine if all the people who are currently retired got this naked mole rat gene and lived an extra 30 years. What I do like about the article is that at least part of the longevity comes from reduced incidence of cancer. That's a medical treatment I can get behind. |
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…we also effectively eliminated hunger, whole classes of diseases, and greatly extended healthy human lifespan across the planet.
Ultimately I think this attitude stems from the premise that there's a choice of some "stable state" that humanity abandoned, some kind of safe well balanced haven that we left to "meddle with ecosystems". There isn't, "ecosystems" tried their best to kill us at every point of our history (it seems there was a moment there were just a few thousands of us, nearly wiped out by a natural catastrophe!), and the only way to avoid that is to "meddle", learning from our mistakes and becoming better stewards of the planet.
We were, are, and always will be walking on a tightrope, we are just learning to do it better.