The Ancient Greeks were pretty much clueless on medicine still viewing things through the lens of miasma theory, yet go search for any name you're familiar with and you'll find the distribution of ages to not be as low as you'd expect. Granted there is a bias in that people that died earlier in adulthood might not have had a chance to make their mark to the point that you'd know their name today, but I don't think that's the predominant issue. The names we know we'd still know even had they died much earlier. Aristotle was an outlier living to be only 61, yet he certainly made his name even well before that. Socrates - 71 (death by execution), Plato - 80, Eratosthenes - 82, Pythagorus - 75, Hippocrates - 90, etc, etc.
Modern medicine should certainly have enabled ancient civilizations to extend their lives substantially. What if it were possible to live the lifestyle of one such as the Ancient Greeks, yet given the availability of modern medicine in case of urgent need? And it's there that I completely agree with you. I think the goal should be to use modern medicine to supplement, not supplant, traditional life values.
There's certainly a concern of being a luddite, yet on the other hand I think people are at times too quick to forget that our level of understanding of things like human physiology is still quite superficial. We have no real causal understanding and while correlations can and do enable enormously beneficial breakthroughs, they are also subject to a never ending stream of unforeseen consequences. Decisions our species made for hundreds of thousands of years to survive were obviously not always optimal or ideal, but they did prove to be, if nothing else, sustainable and deterministic.
So I was targeting it towards the idiocy of the original author, not of those on every side that realize nuance and balance are just as important.
I grew up in the mountains, around Apache, Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi people, who I have learned a great deal from, and they recognize the vast quality of life improvements modern science, medicine and technology have brough, and embrace it. The fact they understand that though doesn't stop them from admonishing us in how most Americans treat the land and live out of symbiosis. They aren't calling for a naive luddite-esque return to the old ways, they are calling on us to use our technology to augment the benefits the old ways have, and that is a huge distinction.
Of course there are some hippy groups that naively take that position, such as the Rainbows, and then after they've destroyed a section of forest during a party they still put on their suit and tie and drive their BMW back to California or wherever. Nobody from the forest has respect for them because their views are immature and superficial, but it is a large mistake to extrapolate that type of position to all those calling for a review of how we live in relationship to the land. There is a lot of good discussion and knowledge to be had if you can get past that.
I could ramble on with some stories that illustrate what I mean, but let me summarize the position most of the native American culture from my old stomping grounds take: value community, but also value self-sufficiency within that community, because those two things make a person and a people strong and able to weather storms.
Personally, when I think about thinks like space exploration, I think that approach has much wisdom in it, and given my experience of the Internet, I think decentralization is a key strength of that viewpoint as well.
You know, most of them pretty much expect us to destroy ourselves because we don't listen to their wisdom. They say stuff like "We were here before America and unless they change we will be here after America."