"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people; and so long as men die, liberty will never perish." - Charlie Chapman "The Dictator"
You're free to continue practicing the barbaric ritual of death if you want.
I think that's a pretty good description of what's going on in the last decade of a lot of people's lives. There's a huge bias toward high risk invasive procedures that have a high probability of leaving the patient debilitated even when the expected lifespan increase is fairly modest. Our penchant for hope in difficult circumstances leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering. There is plenty in modern medical practice to consider 'barbaric'. Skepticism with regard to the current crop of medical utopists is warranted, because assuredly current barbaric medical practices were developed and implemented, overwhelmingly, with the best of intentions.
The research community has only just started the transition into treating root causes, which is to say the aging process itself, the accumulating forms of cell and tissue damage that are fundamental, not caused by anything other than the normal operation of metabolism. There are initiatives, some of which have reached the stage of clinical translation, but they are only a tiny fraction of the overall expenditure at present.
This will change over the next decade or two as the first results for fundamental damage repair (e.g. senescent cell clearance) become compelling enough and widely known enough to shift the entire field in the right direction.
Anyway, Dr Dale Bredesen is now doing the second study but I have no idea when the results will be made public. Since the first study showed great results after 4 months of treatment, I am optimistic that it will be faily soon.
The treatment of Dr Dale Bredesen is very different from what the average reader may expect. It is not a medicine-based treatment, but a "general health optimization" treatment with 35 variables. In my opinion, the Alzheimer reversal treatment can be used to prevent Alzheimer, and I hope that in a number of years a study will find out if that is right.
I mean, unless our population is growing—then the older people will be competing with the young!
You can think of your death as a hard-and-fast deadline to achieve all your dreams - this is pretty motivating for some people. Steve jobs had this to say in a 2005 commencement speech[1]: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important".
Other people's death's can be a gift as well: tyrants don't get to rule forever, and out-dated ideas die with their generations. Immortality would be a good thing in a "Culture"-like society: i.e. if we manage to solve all the other human problems (like greed and poverty) first
1. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
For it to be useful as a hard-and-fast deadline, you have to know in advance exactly when it will come. Otherwise, its just knowledge that there will be a deadline at some point in the future, which is very different than a hard-and-fast deadline.
I think everyone has a rough idea on their personal upper limit of their productive time (for me it's 70). There is no lower limit, just like a project with a deadline might be cancelled at anytime.
I do not think baseline homo sapiens have the hardware required to cope with immortality or extended lives (all those memories, lack of the human condition). How bad is time compression experienced at age 7000? A week is a long time to a child, I bet the decades will just fly by. I can imagine the ennui. We would have to evolve into something beyond human to cope with this. It's not going to be in my lifetime, so excuse me for being comfortable with my mortality.
Why would you ever choose "dying" over "not dying"? If you live to be a million years old you have a million years to achieve all your dreams, albeit you don't have as much motivation to achieve them in the first 80 years of your life. If you only live 80 years, then you have a lot of motivation to achieve all your dreams in that timespan but (a) your ambitions might not be achievable in 80 years (b) whatever satisfaction you get from achieving your dreams runs out once you die anyway and worst of all (c) you lose 999920 years of life.
It stands to reason that whoever chooses "die at 80" over "die at 1e6" or even "never die" just doesn't value living very much.
First, visit a nursing home. How much is "not dying" worth? Then, visit an elementary school. Given the earth's finite carrying capacity, do you want to have a world with no children?
Not dying is hard to divorce from not aging, at least in any significant sense. This isn't an argument about a few extra years in exchange for extended morbidity. Compressed morbidity is a valuable counterpoint to modern medicine's unrelenting treatment, and luckily it's gaining momentum in the medical community. But the therapies in question have very marginal returns. Significant life extension is almost certainly only achievable by keeping us young for a very long time.
It is also critical that we remember the principal of autonomy. For all of the elderly folks who would like to move on, there are many who prefer not to, frailty and all. The fact that some would like to die is no justification for denying treatment to those who do not. Denying life extension to people who desire it, by the same argument, it is equally ridiculous.
>Then, visit an elementary school. Given the earth's finite carrying capacity, do you want to have a world with no children?
No, I suppose not, but nobody has the right to ask another to die so that they may bring a new child into the world. There are lots of benefits I might realize from taking advantage of another's suffering, but that doesn't mean I should be allowed to. There is no "right to be conceived". There is a right to life.
Throughout our history if there has been a route by which we can lead healthier, happier and more productive lives. We have tended to take it and that is the reason why anti-aging medicine will progress down exactly the same route and why the arguments against controlling aging do not have any validity at all.
Living a normal 60-80 year life is like a good book.
Living an eternity would be like taking every page from all the books in a library, randomly shuffling them on the floor, then trying to read through it. Full of people and events, certainly, but devoid of any meaning.