Fairness
   Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)

Like, I don't have the same chances to get to 70 and still feel alright as someone born today in Bangladesh, or Zambia.

The world is already very unfair, and the only solution to that is to make it more fair, not to avoid developing treatments that, if the world was fair, would benfit everyone.

This already happens. The more affluent a country becomes, with its better healthcare, better education, and greater career opportunity, the lower its birthrate. The big crisis in 50 years will be population decline.

I'm a bit reluctant to write this, but it made me worried, so here we go :

I had a chat with a taxi driver in Stockholm the other day, and we talked about the situation in Somalia and that he planned to move back there as it's getting better there.

He had 8 kids, but wanted another wife and 10 more kids when he became my age - 40.

I mentioned that I have been married before so I have 3 kids with 2 mothers and was quite happy with that number...

He actually laughed and looked at me and said - "man, you Swedish guys will disappear."

I don't know how representative this was but looking at some societies in Sweden, I'm guessing it's not unique. It would be nice with some research.

Anyway.I'm hoping that the Somalian women will get some say in the matter, because if they don't, looking at the demography and the socio-economic mechanisms, both Sweden and eastern Africa might end up in a spot of bother.

The horror, if you would adapt to this hellish circumstances, by speeding up the cycle, creating "specialists" for each cycle stage and survived through the hard times by reducing all that makes up human society. No arts, no compassion, no creation, no school, all of these are calories wasted, instead go full zombie and walk the earth till the cycle of strife ends.

PS: Before somebody yells racism. This behavior could be seen everywhere during world war 2. So one could claim that white racists are actually the pro-zombie equivalent found elsewhere.

This will no longer be the case, so there would be no rush for either gender to have kids. You can focus on your career for the first hundred years, and then have kids. At worst, there would be a minor uptick in population while people get accustomed to the new reality.

One child per couple means that the total population caps out at double the current population (a population of 32 would have 16 children, who'd have 8, who'd have 4, who'd 2, then 1 person who's SOL - 32+16+8+4+2+1=63). A single order of magnitude is an acceptable loss, and everyone gets a child of their own.

Note: Not as in "literally force people to have only one child", just make it frowned upon like smoking generally is - most people won't care enough to defy it, and in the long term it should be enough. Although IMO families like the Duggars[1] shouldn't be provided immortality unless they start using birth control.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_Kids_and_Counting

Accidents and suicide could be handled too. Former by outlawing machines of murder (cars) and spare or artificial organs, latter by improving our understanding of neuroscience and psychology.

Death ensures adaptation. For example, climate change denying oil barons have done much damage to the world, but we can take some comfort in the knowledge that they will soon die (or at least retire) and that their successors will probably be a little more enlightened. It may be too late by then, but at least it will happen.

>Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)

One resource we are running out of is housing in economically productive areas, and it's not for lack of ingenuity, but by choice. The choice of the established, whose grip on power you propose to extend. Similarly, there is plenty of food to go around, just not enough value to trade for it in some parts of the world. What we're missing is not farming methods, but economic systems and power structures to implement then.

>You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear

The currently powerful, propertied generation is in a position to hold onto that power and property forever, via compound interest and seniority. If the current crop of 60-year-olds gets to be 600, the age of majority for voting will be 540 by the time they get there. And we will never outspend them on anything; even 20 years is a significant head start on saving and investing.

If they continue in their policies of environmental destruction and the monopolization of critical resources, like the underdevelopment of city land on aesthetic grounds, then we might not just be asking them to die, but going to war to claim those resources (and the helms of government, business, etc) for the young, to manage in different ways.

Not to get too bogged down in the specifics of particular issues, but age-related death does ensure a peaceful transition of power towards people more concerned with the present era's challenges and realities, rather than trying to, i.e., save the jobs of the last century or the sexual morality of the one before it.

Maybe age doesn't come to them soon enough to prevent the damage, but it does mitigate it.

The idea that the old have fixed bad ideas is mistaken. All ages of people can be persuaded.

The powerful, propertied generation dying and being replaced by people that look and do nearly the same hasn't cured any of the ills of which you speak so far. The rich have continued to get richer, and the poor richer at a much slower rate, death hasn't solved any of that, nor is it likely too. What you want is better marketing of good ideas, because that actually works. Wishing people dead for disagreeing with you is at least immoral.

But also: you can have people with literally double or more experience, working on your hard problems. You also have a government that will look out much further into the future, because they will see the outcomes themselves.

I think the world would look a lot more like it did 600 years ago. Perhaps more moral by some standards, but probably also unable to replicate a technological breakthrough like the eradication of aging.

Virtually every tech starts that way, though.

The societal upheaval of rich people getting smartphones a few years earlier is probably not something you can extrapolate to the societal upheaval from "you could live forever but you don't have enough money right now".

I'm not sure that would happen. Consider that they have an eternity to pay it back -- or really, a few hundred years given everyone will likely experience at a fatal accident on such a long timeline. What person couldn't pay back an exceedingly high price on an installment plan lasting a few hundred years?

Many countries are currently addicted to population growth. Their mentality hasn't adjusted to the rise of automation and the decline of demand for human labor. They still think we need to keep high birth rates to fund social security schemes.

What will happen in the next few decades is that fewer people will be needed to do anything really productive. More people will study and raise their kids. A smaller, richer population would be more sustainable when it comes to overfishing, overpolluting etc. We will turn the world into farms and hopefully plug all the holes that will result. Ecosystems will be much different with less variation, and humans will be trying to constantly keep the balance.

It is in this environment that we place advances in longevity.

Eternal life would be sort of cool but I dispute your proposition that more people automatically make more progress faster. More people increases competition which incentivizes some kinds of progress but arguably retards others - consider our lamentable record of environmental destruction.

I don't think your aspirations are morally wrong in any way but your thesis seems unproven and I could just as easily argue that your efforts are primarily motivated by your own fear of death. Having had far more near-death experiences than most people I've met. I'm broadly OK with it because my experiences suggest to me that there's a lot more to consciousness than the everyday world, and that if and insofar as life has a purpose, it may be to reach some higher level of knowledge within finite constraints. I sometimes consider that life-as-we-know-it might be like some elaborated version of a book a film or a game (similar to but not the same as Bostrom's simulation argument).

Would you enjoy a book or a movie that never ended? Obviously there's a market for such things based on the continued existence of daytime TV soap operas, but nobody seems to think those shows have much cultural value.

There are thousands of things I know I have never done, and likely never will. There are millions of things I don't know I have never done. Don't you have even the tiniest bit of regret of where your life has led you, and wondered if you did things differently, where you would be today? Wouldn't you want to find out?

It really comes down to whether you have more of a drive to be happy or to be right. On bad days I often wish I'd opted for the former, but I enjoy cultivating my inner garden and it gives me pleasure to see ideas grow over time.

I'm also not interested in the eventuality of the "treatment" being cheap and available to all. What, are we going to label people as suicidal and mentally ill if they refuse to take the treatment? The "pro-life" agenda would spiral out of control.

Taking a look at all the lives that could be affordably saved saved in Africa right now at low cost. Yet no "pro-life" agenda is currently spiraling out of control biting at that low cost. It is unlikely this more expensive and farther down the road longevity research would cause the hysteria you describe.

I reject that premise as overbroad and dismissive of historical examples of artificially limited supply (eg craft guilds) or other arbitrary constraints which nevertheless resulted in high output quality, and I could point to examples of that in nature too.

You're inborn desire to find equality is beaten by natures desire for fitness

This sounds like a very individualist approach to evolution though. I think there's good reasons to consider the idea of humans as eusocial animals that can operate as individuals but are biologically driven to group up, and that groups themselves are distributed organisms capable of collective thought.

It's not that I'm against individualism, but I'm saying that there may well be selection pressures that do favor altruistic behavior, and there's certainly research documenting its persistence in the wild. Finally, it's rather odd that you talk of an 'inborn' desire but then contrast it with 'nature.' I feel you view of this topic is a little simplistic.

Competition requires 3 things. 1. A win condition 2. A contest 3. Participants. Pretending that equality amongst creatures exists anywhere that an individual can be discerned from the masses is futile. Equality of outcome moves indirectly proportional to freedom or individuality, tautologically. Equality is the enemy of specialization. You can't win a football game with 11 quarterbacks on the field.

The group out performs the individual, its why we're multicellular. It's also why you have natural and other monopolies. Notice the diversity of organs in your body, each good at what they do and little else. Would not equality dictate perhaps you be filled with bladders for the heart has it too good?

Team good. Specialize good. Win competition good. Have fair game to not rob potential winners of chance, good. Force equality down throats so winners lose and losers win. Bad.

An interesting side effect could be that public figures would become more careful, because if you're sunk, you'd be done forever.

Plus the shift from old people retirement driven politics. Much bigger focus on handling employment.

Genius appears to decline with age. Prolonging life would not necessarily preserve genius, even if it preserves life.

I respectfully disagree. Also, the article in question, and my comment, are really pointing to prolonging life, not a cure for ageing--that may be very far off. In either case, it is not at all obvious why prolonging or curing the ageing process in life would necessarily maintain optimal neurological function.

There's also problem's outside the scientific challenge itself. One being that genius is almost always only genius after the fact, raising interesting hypothetical questions about who exactly is preserved in their genius state - a promising 20-something, or a proven 40-something?

I interpreted that as meaning that because, especially over a long period of time, preserving your life would decrease opportunity for other's to have a life.

I'm probably what you would describe as 'pro-death'. But I would never have made any of the arguments you listed.

I could just as easily frame your positions to suit my argument.

For example; 'More people make more progress faster.' (India has not made as large a contribution to modern technology as the USA)

Only if you take the statement as some immutable law and not the intended meaning as a description of a general trend.

A trip to Mars of three months in a lifetime of few hundred could be considered an interesting interlude.