Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research, primarily due to the social attitudes towards it.
In Bostrom's "Fable of the Dragon Tyrant", note the line spoken by the aged king at the end: "Today we are like children again."
When the dragon is vanquished, the old are children again – but they're also the last children.
How much do you think it would cost to halt aging? Unless it’s essentially magic like “Booster Spice” from Larry Niven, this tech would almost certainly be an ongoing series of treatments and modifications, probably not cheap either. What do you think would be the reaction of the world at large when faced with the prospect of some fraction of the “1%” becoming functionally immortal while they’re still dirt poor and mortal? I don’t think humans would accept that particular inequality.
We live in a world full of nuclear weapons and other horrors, and I can’t think of anything more calculated to lead to them being used than the ultra-rich cheating death and aging. Aside from the sense of unfairness, you’d be faced with the practical horrors of immortal oligarchs and plutocrats. Control over who gets to be ageless would also be an obvious way to create a permanent ruling class.
An end to aging only starts to seem like something other than them prelude to our own destruction if we’ve solved a number of other problems first. If you just throw functional immortality into the world as it is, and has been to date, the outcome would be apocalyptic.
Freedom from aging only sounds paradisical if everyone has equal access to it, otherwise it’s just how the world ends.
I doubt very much that any viable longevity treatment will not also increase neuroplasticity like when you were young and idealistic. As such, I'm no longer convinced of the same conclusion you reached.
Many different areas of research, such as cancer research, could fit under the umbrella of "life extension."
Then bear in mind that most aging research is still purely investigational, not aimed at producing any sort of intervention. Calico falls into this category, more is the pity.
Then bear in mind that of the interventional research, most of that is focused on calorie restriction mimetic or similar stress response tinkering that can't possibly significantly extend human life span.
Then at the far bottom of this funnel, with a tiny amount of funding, is rejuvenation biotechnology of the sort advocated by the SRF, repair the damage that causes aging in order to reverse aging.
So, yes. Very underfunded.
Then if we look at cancer research, there is a different problem and effort to change the split of research strategy and allocation of dollars. Cancer research has progressed very slowly because there are hundreds of subtypes of cancer and researchers have been pursuing strategies that only tackle one, or only tackle a mechanism that cancers can evolve away from. What is needed for progress in cancer research is greater funding and attention for strategies that are general to many or all cancers, and which cancers cannot evolve away from. Such as CAR-T therapies, or a few other types of immunotherapy that are comparatively general, or have low costs of adaptation to different cancers, or interdiction of telomerase and ALT to prevent cancers lengthening their telomeres, or the like. The latter of those is a SENS Research Foundation initiative.
This seems like a very weird thing to be opposed to. I can see a personal disagreement with life extension, usually rooted in religion, but to oppose research in this area?
I guess there's all sorts of people.
The end of aging will lead to extermination/genocide in one form of another. There is no way around it.
Except that won't happen, because population growth or plateau or start falling within the next century die to spreading affluence. Native population growth in every first world nation is already negative.
The end of aging is probably inevitable, but it won't necessarily a yield a continuously growing population.
No, it's not; the US is, notably, among the first world nations with a positive rate of natural growth.
Not really. Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research primarily because it's a hard problem, with no breakthrough in sight.
I wonder, if the idea were more mainstream, if life extension funding on a large scale would be opposed by similar arguments: 'we as a society can't afford to have everyone live a lot longer, so we should put our resources towards other medical pursuits.'
Which is silly, because ending aging would save huge amounts of money. Compare the health care expenses of the average person at 30 and 80.
Death is very healthy at the species level.
(Of course, there will still always be natural selection operating, just in a new style. People/ideas that can't participate in society, at least in a way to sexually reproduce, obtain the resources for cloning / life extension, or spread their ideas, won't be selected for.)