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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!"
Well, ok, it could be a considerable problem if people stopped aging to death, but it wouldn't be the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that our society would collapse from corruption. It's a pretty simple formula. Powerful people maintain their power by maintaining the status quo. The more powerful a person is, the stronger their grip on the status quo. These people purposely manipulate the opinions of the less powerful people (via control of the media and other less well-publicised means) in order to do this, and we generally fall for it pretty readily.
The only serious mechanism for social change is the death of the powerful. If death stopped being inevitable, then the rich and powerful would be the first ones to get that technology.
At that point, the only means for social change would become bloody revolution. Finding and killing the methuselas would become an obscession for anyone who wanted to change things for the better (or even at all).
I think that that world is inevitable, but I don't look forward to it.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Amusing, but think about the effects of people not just working for 30-40 years, but hundreds. A person could become experienced and knowledgable in a subject to levels which we can't imagine, and who knows what they could come up with.
Or a person could spend 50 years in a career, then take 5-10 off and learn something entirely new, then start a career there. Think about all the benefits that could come from that sort of inter-disciplinary work? What might someone who's been a chef, a writer, a materials engineer, and a chemist bring to a new job?
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Does this longevity include a increased period of fertility? If not then I wonder if the biological imperative to reproduce will produce a conflict that is not so easy to "cure" and I don't mean the incresing population, I mean the deep seated drive to make offspring being tempered by teh reality that 1100 years is a lot of offspring that one almost certainly cannot actually afford to raise. It might lead to some very complex problems. Even more weird if you live for 1100 years but can only produce offspring for the first 5% of them. Might make you go made. Might be very different for men and women. Might be _very_ scary.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
5000 years is won't happen without some major restructuring of society. As we currently have things set up you have a 50% chance of being involved in a fatal accident by the time you are 300.
The anti-aging technology, if ever completed will stop the evolution of the species.
We've been messing with natural selection ever since the beginning of medicine; it's a bit late to object now.
Furthermore, this will probably only benefit the richest, not the fittest...
Maybe at first, but there was a time when only the rich, or only governments, could afford computers. In the US today, poor people have TVs that the wealthy could only dream of in the 50s. Anti-aging technology will start out expensive, but it won't stay that way--and besides, doesn't the idea of the wealthy being the beta testers appeal to your little class-warfare soul?