We have many great challenges ahead of us as a species. It’s important to keep in mind our priorities and how we’re allocating our resources, even as it relates to curing aging/death.
Sidenote: I enjoyed that the CGP Grey animation of this fable cribbed off of Kennedy’s speech kicking off the space race to the Moon.
Oh, I have no doubt that the prices would eventually go down- in like a few hundred years after the cure was invented. Until then the people not able to afford it would still die in droves while a few powerful and affluent people would ascend to a kind of immortality.
Bostrom doesn't even try to think of how a very expensive panacea that cured ageing and all the ailments that came with it would be distributed to a majority of the human population that even now cannot afford basic healthcare to extend their health-span even for a few years.
How is this current state of affairs supposed to be ethical? And how can we ethically justify halting ageing for only a tiny handful of people out of the entire world population?
How do you ethically justify not pursuing such treatment if it becomes feasible? How do you justify denying it altogether, unless everyone can get it at the same time? Impossible perfection or nothing at all?
Instead of SpaceX, I'd look here at all the other medical procedures that are accessible to western citizens. No one could afford them if they were to foot the entire bill for a single-off cure. Yet somehow, through combination of private and public action and group efforts, we've figured out to make them affordable.
(Same will happen with space travel, when more companies get to the place where SpaceX is now, and if we manage to pull off the whole cislunar economy thing. Then the economies of scale and various business model magic will kick in. Note that this is what happened to air travel, to the point plane tickets are ridiculously cheap compared to the direct costs involved.)
I had no idea Boz had the patent on being very motivated. Color me surprised.