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Engineering An End to Aging
Reason writes "Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has put forward a biological engineering plan to end human aging and co-founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize in recent years. Now he is finally getting some of the public recognition he deserves in an excellent David Stipp article at Fortune Magazine. If you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year - and how to bring about a sea change in the scientific establishment - then this is the place to start. As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"
"I wouldn't want to live forever. I'd get bored." To which the proper answer is: you can always die."
Silly, don't be naieve. The problem is NOT
"I don't want ME to live forever." but rather
"I don't want YOU to live forever."
If people begin to live to 5,000 years how long before candidates for office or CEO are not taken seriously until they're at least 3,000? And after that to be senior in a department you must have seen at least 2,200 years. And even to get past entry level you have to be 1,800 years old. To get a good tech support position paying more than $12.50 / hr you should be 1,500 years old, with at least 500 years experience, preferably consecutive. Think about it. 500 years in level 1 phone support.
Infinite lifespan could well lead to age-ism on a scale that PC whiners today could only dream of having such a case to combat. Except in 2,000 years when this becomes evident they will no more stand up to fight it than people in the USA step forward to say "We should send tech jobs to India because they really need the money!"
Further, those in charge, the old, will tire of learning new things and technology, thought, human society will ossify. Can you imagine an immortal born in the time of Jesus? By the renaissance this individual's brain would be full! He wouldn't want to hear about the heliocentric universe, and he would have no motivation to care either - he's gonna live forever anyway! Put these people in charge around the globe and see what you get.
The old will hang on to their positions of power and comfort with steadily more tenacity and caution - never to be unseated by death. Youth will be relegated to scrubbing toilets and sweeping floors for the first fraction of their lives - a fraction that goes on forever, as the total is without bound.
Man, old people suck. Without death to kill them off they would just hang around making life unpleasant for the young.
Lol, the absurdity of your misinformation leads me to beleived you are an undereducated moron. Grow up.
~ Maintainer of the Skajake Projects