When I hear of blood transfusion and such, it also feels like a lot of these technologies are being developed by snakeoil salespeople to other nongullible but strictly egocentric humans.
Practically speaking, there are a lot of advantages to longer lives:
- Generally, it means people will be healthier, which means reduced societal burden.
- A deeper family structure can mean better education and childcare. You have more time to be with your friends and family, more time to pursue hobbies, more time to explore the world.
- Scientists, engineers and researchers can spend more time building and leveraging their expertise. If people live 20% longer for example, I suspect there's more than a 20% increase in advancement because in so many fields breakthroughs happen near the end of your career.
Of course, there will be consequences that need to be addressed.
- Does this only lead to increased inequity, where the wealthy are able to accumulate wealth and knowledge even more easily due to access to anti aging. Already there's a 14 year difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1%, imagine if that was 50 years.
- How do we adjust our social safety nets when people are living to 100 instead of 80?
- How does this change over-population and over-consumption?
That's really where the "average" advantage seems to be: if life becomes better for everyone then they live longer.