Life Extension Debate

Yes, there are benefits to aging. One of those benefits is that old ideas will go away faster. Another benefit is that it will slightly reduce population growth. People who want indefinite lifespan do not disagree with these points. We simply think that these benefits are not worth the destruction of 150,000 human beings per day.Replace "aging" with anything else that kills people (malaria, AIDS, cancer, etc) and people want to fix it. The only difference between those diseases and aging is t

Because it doesn't fix an issue that's otherwise out of the ordinary (like a disease, or an accident). It tries to address something that was always considered a hard limit and the perfectly natural thing to happen throughout the history of life to almost every living thing: death of old age.Pushing that back could have some devastating results on society in the long term. There are plenty of movies on this topic so no need to go into details :).

You mean increasing life expectancy with unparalleled standard of living? Why would anyone want to prevent/change that?

Mortality is the #1 bug of human hardware (with cancer a close #2). It may have been a feature a few thousand years ago, with limited resources, but it's now hampering our progress.I don't want mankind achievements to be limited by our limited lifespan. The first 20 to 30 years are wasted on learning - almost like 1/3 of a average life. But with linespans in the 200 to 300 years, that would be 10% - and these added productive years could bring so many more good things. Imagine

Extremely simplified, but scenarios you described will effectively cause civilization's progress to slow (and probably stall) because the very people that have the means to invest in prolonging their lives are the very ones that should not be living forever. For humanity's sake anyway.

Some other poster is talking about "hubris", "neopotism", or "tales from the aristocracy."Are we so focused the 99% / 1% difference that we are too blind to see we're all in the same team, team Humanity?Nothing is sadder that a live going away, knowledge, experience, etc all going to waste. Sentient creatures have a moral duty to live.Extending our lifespan is also a necessary first step for serious large scale projects. I don't think we are

I'm torn about this, I agree that in a world without death we'd view it as meaningless and tragic. I worry about what our path there would look like.Let's say we find a way to eliminate death or aging. It's expensive at first so only the very wealthy can afford it. Now you have a set of rich people in positions of control that won't age out of them. They'll live forever so they'll continue amassing wealth, if they don't give up control then a new genera

Being immortal and having a high quality of life for as long as we are alive are not mutually exclusive. In fact, don't we have longer lives and better quality of life than our ancestors already? This would just be taking it one step further. Also, having a population that never dies has many more benefits than consequences. The amount of knowledge and experience that will not be wasted because of death is extremely valuable. Also, who says people will be giving birth to children as often a

Doesn't that argument prove too much? In the past, people's lives were shorter and more full of misery. Every improvement we've gotten has been due to people rejecting your philosophy. Assuming one can live longer (without being frail and demented) why not?It seems like if most people could choose, they'd prefer to have the mental and physical abilities of a 20-something while living as long as they wanted. Eventually, medical technology will get to the point where that is

You should try to optimize for the best quality of life for the longest amount of time possible (you could consider the expected value quality * time). I'd rather live a mostly pretty good life for many years than a good life for half of those years.If the people working on aging treatments are right (and I imagine they probably are if you set a long time horizon), we'll eventually be able to live for hundreds of years without any of the effects of aging. Eliminating aging and most