A sad day for humanity when death, the great equalizer, gets closer to being controlled by rich people. Not that rich people not already have access to better healthcare, but still.
Why can’t we all live in caves and chase our prey across the savannah, all equal, until a broken leg or an infected scratch causes certain death, like nature intended?
Might just be me, but I don't think the world would be a better place with a separate caste of immortals controlling the world governments and resources.
It's not crazy, no one thinks that. My question is why do so many people think of and fear this as a plausible scenario, to the point they prefer to rot and die than see progress in that front. Now this is crazy.
Fortunately for everyone involved, this kind of immortality is not invulnerability, and it doesn't quite save the neurons which are slowly dividing cells, only indirectly limiting damage to them.
So you might have doddering 120 year old ancients (potential predicted life extension) with ever more brain damage.
Because if you were a billionaire who had the ability to make people live forever, why would you let the working class have it and not just keep it for you and your immediate family?
If I were a billionaire and wanted to keep it for me and my immediate family... good luck to me.
How would I be able to enforce it? By somehow keeping the costs high? By lobbying?
Nothing would work, because this would be too big for the working class to just sit there and watch, and if lots of people get really pissed, it can turn very ugly, as history has taught.
People will want it and they'll get it, one way or the other.
Where X = "Starting to rot from the inside out as soon as we hit forty, while simultaneously watching loved ones age badly and becoming decreasingly self-sufficient, at best."
Yeah, who needs "X". I won't even bother with the "the rich" stuff, because, frankly, it's too tired, pathetic, childish and naive.
It could be a flip of a coin. Craig Venter[0] almost patented what was back then the human reference genome (based on his own genome), but thankfully publicly funded efforts prevailed to taper the profiteering.
We could be in a similar situation with anti-aging drugs. Plus, with citizen science projects making ad-hoc labs more accessible than ever, there's a good chance that normal people could make their own versions of these anti-aging drugs, assuming that science journals and informatic pipelines remain accessible (the current rent-seeking of top journals lends some small but worrying evidence against this).
"That’s what I like about death, it’s democratic. It would irritate me if you could jog and live forever and I got stuck here smoking and having a good time and died over it. No, you’ll die too, you know, you’ll have thirty four more years to run up and down the stairmaster."