A few nights ago he says, out of the blue, "Dad, if they do invent some medicine that let's people live forever, I hope they do it before you die."
"Me too", I said.
I've heard that there is a big longevity community in the valley.
Still, I bet most people would take it, and pretty quick.
Yes, there are some who would not for real, but one wonders how even they would feel five years in.
If neither of those applies, and you think SENS has a good chance of achieving their goal with sufficient funding, go for it!
Of course, and the vast majority of those who say no actually would if given the opportunity.
What would be the effect on society if death were all but eliminated?
Greatly reduced medical costs and increased productivity and quality of life, for starters. The one negative is that we'd probably have to limit childbirth for a few decades while space colonization gets going, but that's a comparatively small price to pay.
Think about it, do you really think all higher order life has this "defect" for no reason? Without aging, the youth would be at an eternal disadvantage in society. The rush to have children would all but disappear without a biological clock. Evolutionarily speaking, a cure for aging is a dead end.
That said, i could easily see it happening, so like I said, I'm terrified.
Also, humans have become so dominant by leapfrogging biological evolution with our technological evolution. This would just be one more example. It would not really be a dead-end unless we're looking at some eugenics angle.
The claim that youth would be at an eternal disadvantage in an ageless world not supported by observations in the current world. If having more time conferred universal advantage then youth today could not compete with those older than them. This is clearly not the case and demonstrated by young entreprenuers every day.
To the extent that the cellular processes active in creative, contemplative, and evaluative thinking are exposed, if it becomes common to unify those processes in the functioning of everyone's consciousness then it is possible it would give rise to a modest time advantage for those who had been thinking longer about the same things.
The more I read the news, the more I appreciate watching The Twighlight Zone :-)
The various problems that you imagine might result from curing ageing can be solved _after_ we solve the problem of hundreds of thousands of people dying every single day.
I'd do anything to live forever in any capacity. Even just to watch, how could it ever get boring?
-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Which leads to some interesting questions... if there was a drug available that would let you live to be hundreds or thousands of years old, barring accident, would you take it? What would be the effect on society if death were all but eliminated? Would our population quickly overrun the limits of Earth's resources?
Thinking about this almost feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone.