An interesting point from one of Calico's announcements is a statement that curing all cancer would only add ~3 years to the expected lifespan.

This is thought provoking - if even a perfect solution to such a problem won't give us what we want, then we do need to "make people think differently" and try to focus on a different, bigger problem than the current approach of trying to strike out separate illnesses.

By the way, allowing medicine to think about not only "how to bring a broken-person to average" but "how to bring an average person to above-average" would also require a major change in the way of thinking for the whole area. Some homo sapiens are extremely resistant for diseases, some are smarter than average, some have much lower aging damage. Instead of thinking how to fix a genetic disease by replacing a broken gene with the "average" one; we should think about what is the best that we, as a species, could be.

the difference lies in quality of living. dying of cancer is a shitty way to go.

having a massive stroke/heart attack/aneurisma? at least you pop and you're gone. going through chemo/radio for months/years to slowly, painfully wither away is bullshit.

same is true for all those diseases, parkinsons, alzheimers, etc.

fuck them all. they are the bane of our existance, literally. pure evil.

That is exactly the point here.

Its not instant death, but the process of a slow death that is the enemy.

The biggest predictor of a society's average predicted lifespan is infant mortality. Most of the gains in average lifespan over the last 100 years is from increasing the number of children who live past 2.

3 years increase from a non-infant mortality related improvement is actually pretty huge. I'd have to look it up, but I think the impact of non-infant vaccinations would be roughly a similar sized increase.

3 years increase from a non-infant mortality is pretty huge only when compared to what we have done before - but it's not huge compared to the actual lifespan.

Going from 80 to 83 (for example) is nice, but it doesn't have a radical impact on how we should live our lives - going from 80 to 160 could do that. If we want major improvements, then we either need to make sure that the other things are cumulative (say, that we can get 20 disease-cures to add 3 years each); or we need to look in completely different directions.

It depends on what you see as a goal - in the long run, I believe that we can get to lifespans measured in centuries, because it's technically possible as seen from other lifeforms. If the marginal improvements due to curing diseases can't get us there, then we should investigate other options how to achieve that, instead of treating a 5% increase as "pretty huge" and being satisfied with that.

Very good point! I didn't think the statement about curing cancer and getting back 3 years was a very thoughtful one.

To me the (potential) benefit is not life extension but healthier lives.

I agree. The goal should be to achieve the best compromise between quality and length. Pushing from 80 to 130 is good and all, but I would prefer the research to be focused on preserving youthfulness rather than life in and for itself, i.e. I would rather die a young 80 year old than a decrepit 130 year old walking corpse. Of course, even better would be to die a young 130 y.o., or not die at all.

Well, but that's exactly what anti-aging research is about. If you learn how to fix heart disease or cure cancer or cure Alzheimers, then anyway afterwards you are a frail, decrepit person with a couple more years to live; but if you delay or fix the actual aging issues, then it prolongs the time that you are healthy and well-functioning.

Take a look at, for example, http://youtu.be/qMAwnA5WvLc (TEDx, Aubrey de Grey) linked in another thread.

Changing the way people around the world think about death is pretty significant, though. It's going to rewrite important aspects of many cultures. Edit: I mean "make people think differently" is underselling it.

Landing on the moon in 1969 rewrote a lot too. I bet if you asked people back then what the future would be like, the space program would look a little different.

All we're doing today is announcing a moon shot.

A great problem is the current mindset. Many, many people think of life extension as undesirable. It's mind-boggling at first sight, but then you understand it for what it is: the Stockholm Syndrome, with Death as the hostage-taker, and all the life-extension-deniers as the hostages.

We need to get out of that hole first. Google is doing the right thing.

Thinking that death is a problem or 'a bad thing that happens' is incredibly short-sighted. Improving the well-being of humanity in general is a great goal; life extension can be a different topic entirely.

While I'd love to live a thousand years (as long as it's in decent health), the big danger to society is obviously that it'll be the very rich that will live that long, and they'll hold on to their power that much longer. It creates an even bigger division between rich and poor.

Imagine what the world would look like if the medieval elite were still alive today. It's good that the people in power die every once in a while.

Awesome novel idea.

The problem that I see with this statement, from my perspective:

If everyone died at 30, everyone would say the same thing about life extension past 30.

If everyone died at 200, everyone would say the same thing about life extension past 200.

Why does death have to be where it is now? Natural death from aging comes a little longer than a few other causes of death tend to hit, but it's still very, very soon. People's twitch thinking skills start to decline so early (even in the 20s), and while they can more than make up for it through increasing knowledge, we have so little time to build that knowledge before we have to go.