I agree that it's fun to imagine, but the realities of longevity is probably a lot more prosaic. Granted Jeanna Clement can spoke for 100 years and be fine, but that doesn't mean the rest of us won't get lung cancer 10 years in if we try it. So, at present, the real secret to longevity is either superior genes (which isn't mass distributable except over a great many generations, and even then, it means giving up a portion of our genetic diversity on a societal level), disciplined lifestyles (30% less caloric intake according to the article, which means you can kiss your gains and muscular physique good-bye), and some very tricky and expensive combination of advance medicine (which, in a world where there are people who still starve to death, seems rather out of reach). In addition, you have to avoid all accidents, which is entirely out of your hands.

In a lot of ways, the concern over mass longevity squeezing the world to death is like the concern over AI robots who become intelligent enough to eradicate all of humanity or the gays mass-releasing gay gay-marriage-spores that make all the straight people fall out of love. It's fun to speculate, write country songs about, and produce post-apocalyptic movies around, but being seriously worried about it as a social issue is a little unrealistic.

While I agree neither of those things are things to be seriously worried about as social issues (currently), I think one of them deserves some critical thought.

Those temporary social issues (and they will be temporary, just while society adjusts) cannot possibly compare to the travesty of a hundred thousand people dying every day.

Call me a "deathist" if you like, but dying of natural causes at a ripe old age is not a travesty.

That's entirely your choice, as long as you don't force anyone else to follow you.

Consider, however, whether you'd choose to die if you had an alternative, or whether you've simply accepted something horrific because you don't think you can do anything about it.

Not dying is entirely your choice, as long as you do not consume the resources that younger generations need.

If you do not die and plan to stay on Earth, then you will have a (probably very negative) impact on other people's lives. They can choose not to accept it.

> If you do not die and plan to stay on Earth,

Where else could you possibly go? Sending you anywhere else (like a terraformed Mars) might cost more resources than would keeping you alive on Earth for hundreds of years.

What about people who have 3+ kids instead of 2, while some people can only have 1? Can we choose not to accept it?

Society has a right to ban radical life extension if we judge that the social costs outweigh the benefits. Whether that is the case is what is up for debate.

I really, really hope you're being a devil's advocate and you don't actually advocate mass murder of the elderly to make room for the young.

If your society attempted to commit mass murder, your society would be removed by force and replaced by one that did not.

And if that sounds like hyperbole, so does the concept that all societies would intentionally withhold a cure to the single most deadly affliction humanity suffers from: aging.

There is a big difference between arguing that radical life extension could have serious social and environmental costs, and arguing that we should execute the elderly.

Death is not an unmitigated evil, nor is eternal youth an unmitigated good. I don't think that's a radical argument.

> There is a big difference between arguing that radical life extension could have serious social and environmental costs, and arguing that we should execute the elderly.

I agree. Discussing ways to solve those problems would be an aspect of the former, which is completely reasonable. However, at the point where you suggested that society could ban life extension, you started arguing for the latter.

Follow your argument to its logical conclusion. What are you proposing, and what would the effect be? You suggested intentionally withholding a cure for a degenerative disease (namely, aging). How else could that possibly be interpreted?

> Death is not an unmitigated evil, nor is eternal youth an unmitigated good. I don't think that's a radical argument.

It's safe to say that's our fundamental point of disagreement.

Personally, I plan to address that disagreement by continuing to donate to fund the development of effective treatments for aging, as well as the development of longer-term cures for mortality. At the point where those treatments become more widely available, arguments against them will start looking a lot sillier.

Society has the right to try, but banning things has this way of not actually working, so it's probably best to plan for the reality that if it can happen, it will.

> Society has the right to try

It really, really doesn't. Note the first item "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", or the equivalents in other fundamental statements of rights.

That's a cultural perspective. If you didn't expect everyone you meet to eventually die within a hundred years, the fact that they all were would be a travesty.

In some respect, it's no different than if everyone died at fifty years of age. That's a travesty, yet something close to that was the norm for millennia. We expect more now.

People dying is beneficial to humanity in countless ways.

People not dying is the "travesty", and preventing death is probably one of the worst things you could do to humanity.

No, death is a travesty. While it may be true that overpopulation is worse, death is awful. Painful, slow degeneration over decades as your body systems shut down and your loved ones watch.

What a gain it would be to have people continue their productive lives for decades or centuries longer.

The costs: we would give up having children. The replacement rate for an immortal race must be very low. The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.

> The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.

This sort of thinking seems to me a consequence of assuming that brains are somehow separate from the rest of the body, almost bordering on dualism.

They might be easier to shake off, and I suspect this to be the case, if all human brains are rejuvenated brains with 25 year-old physiology. It is not clear that "old people set in their ways" is a result of minds that have simply been around a long time, regardless of their physical condition (i.e. immortal or not), as opposed to a consequence of a physically aging, deteriorating human brain.

So we might find ourselves with the equivalent of a population composed entirely of twenty or thirty-somethings, except some of them happen to have many decades (eventually centuries and millenniums) of experience. We may well be much better off than now.

So do you volunteer to stop taking vaccines, treating bacterial infections with antibiotics, reject medical intervention in the case of acute injury, etc? I rather doubt it, even though we take all these radical inventions in the prevention of death for granted.

No, you see, our current medical treatments and the resulting longevity are exactly optimal given human social psychology. Anything less is backward and primitive, and anything more is scary and weird.

What about treating children that would otherwise be filtered out by natural selection? Is is also a "travesty"?

There are theories that the black death in Europe cleared the way for the progress of the enlightenment. The whole history of human civilization is about finding ways to prevent the powerful from hoarding all the gains for themselves and their children.

IT's right outside the window, it seems to me, though I'm optimistic that population growth will level off in a few years.

The other problem is economic - ownership doesn't expire so in a gerontocratic society the older members will by default end up holding more and more of the wealth.

Of course, one could argue that medical are in old age is a massive sink of wealth, and so anti-aging research has the possibility to mitigate that. But unless one proposes to make people immortal - which would entail massive social disruption - such advances are likely to just postpone those expenses.