Aging might be optional but malignancy is mandatory. If you live long enough eventually cancer will kill you.
It would still be fantastic improvement to have the body of a 25-year-old for all my adult years even if my lifespan didn’t change — but while I assume [0] it would extend life expectancy, preventing aging isn’t enough by itself to prevent all illnesses.
[0] I am not involved in medicine or biology and this would be way outside my area even if I had gone down that path, so my knowledge is “watched documentaries” level
If you could hold the probability at the level of an 18 year old, that would massively reduce the incidence.
Not that you said we did, but many kind of think like that's the case, for hand wavy reasons, like "the sky is the limit", "human ingenuity is limitless", etc...
What are you even talking about? Humans have existed something like 200,000 years. In 500,000 years from now (or less), evolution will have changed us into something entirely different.
The better rebuttal is that currently it looks like we'll crash the planet's ecosystems and with them technological civilization within the next century or two, long before we've reached the point of curing all disease.
Species will evolve to thrive in the new ecosystem. Perhaps that will be a subset of humans evolving into something else, perhaps not. But life won’t disappear because we raise global temperatures.
/s
There are factors - diet - that contribute to cancer and vice versa.
Give it another 10 years or so and we will be able to target any kind of cancer cell and destroy it. A harder task might be to prevent cancer, but in the end it doesn't really matter. It will be like the common cold.
For details I recommend the Peter Attia podcast episode: "#121 – Azra Raza, M.D.: Why we’re losing the war on cancer". It's long but packed with accurate scientific information by someone at the forefront of research and patient care.