Or the hundred thousand people who died from aging in the past 24 hours: was it good for them as individuals? How about their families and companions?
In short, I don't think you've thought your position through particularly carefully.
Can you imagine being a part of the younger generation when immortality is discovered or extended longevity? Would jobs ever open up, or promotions be available? Nobody will retire at the top, so there will be extremely little turnover. How can the young hope to surpass the old if the old hold all the keys and never let go?
Sure, aging is scary, but have you really thought through all the implications of curing it? Heck, have you even thought about why it exists in the first place? There are many cancer lines that never age, so why haven't organisms evolved that never get old? If you have an answer, I'd love to hear it.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/we-age-because-th...
And the fundamental mechanisms of aging got their start in single celled life, very early on.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/02/aubrey-de-grey-5....
None of which is a good reason for suffering aging when we could do something about it: it's just the mechanistic explanation for what is.
Sure, we age because the world changes, but in case you haven't noticed, the rate of change in the human world is accelerating. It strikes me as a bad idea to bet on trends that are on a collision course by their very nature. Maybe there is a way to reconcile extreme longevity with human society, but if there is, I sure haven't heard it or found it on that website.
Advanced technology has tended to get cheaper over
time, often dramatically
That's why space travel to inhabitable planets is nothing more than an utopia right now, because for achieving the speed of light we need efficient fuel that can power a space-ship for several years. As far as this problem goes, our knowledge of the universe is not the only bottleneck -- building such a ship will also be freaking expensive in terms of material resources consumed.
You really shouldn't confuse technological advancements in silicon chips manufacturing with anything else. Moore's law is severely limited to a niche ;-)
the alternative is to slowly sicken and decay into
oblivion before you've had even a single century of
life. This should not be a tough decision!
First of all -- nobody will be able to have children anymore, since that will over-populate the planet. It's already happening since humans don't have natural enemies and we live in times of peace.
Yet as a species we feel the need to have children. Personally I would give my life just so my 1 year-old boy could live a happy life. And while it saddens me that one day he too will be dead, I don't want to rob him of one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling purposes in life -- that of raising children of his own.
Of course, this is a problem of humanity in general -- we tend to be selfish mother-fuckers.
Not oblivious to them, but social challenges are so much more fixable than being dead that it should be a no-brainer.
And in general technological problems are much easier than social ones as social problems sometimes do not admit technological fixes ;)
With the problem I outlined above, modifying humans to not feel the need for children would make us much less human than replacing our body parts with pieces made from silicon.
It is easy imagining living a 1000 happy years, but would you experience happiness at all if you were less human? And I am aware that happiness could be faked, but then what incentive would you have for living a good life and accomplishing stuff instead of living like a vegetable, as many drug addicts are doing?
And if you can't be happy, since that's the ultimate goal of everybody, than what's the point to all this?
In my humble opinion, cheating death is the easy part.
When you rephrase that to: "150,000 people die every day, and you want that to continue because changing the definition of 'human' feels a bit weird" it starts to look like less of a compelling argument.
There are lots of reasons why developing life extension technologies will cause social and economic upheavals and potentially huge ripples, but fear of possible problems is not enough to make me say "well, I'm glad people died to avoid those problems".
And I am aware that happiness could be faked, but then what incentive would you have for living a good life and accomplishing stuff instead of living like a vegetable, as many drug addicts are doing?
Am I a drug addict today? Why would I be more likely to be a drug addict in 100 years?
And if you can't be happy, since that's the ultimate goal of everybody, than what's the point to all this?
Because we can (maybe) and because if we can, it's worse if we don't.
And I'm not saying that we shouldn't fix it. Heck, it may even make us less selfish; we may end up for example actually caring about our planet.
But in order to do that, there are more hard problems to solve first -- tyrants will be the first to achieve longer lives, capitalism will not work anymore, we need won't be able to have children, yes we do sex for fun but we also feel the need to reproduce so doing sex will be a lot less common, we'll have to work for all of our lives as wealth will become static, there will be no more entrepreneurs, whatever brain we'll have will have limited capacity so we'll forget meaningless details like our childhood (the happiest period of life for many people).
Even seemingly simple problems are actually big -- for example, right now death is fair, but what will happen after living 1000 years with your loved one until one day when she'll get hit by a bus? Then it won't be fair anymore and you'll most likely go mad.
And the biggest problem I'm seeing -- once the genie gets out of the bottle, it stays out. People need to at least make an attempt to fix these side-effects before solving death, not after. We cannot then say -- oops, this is was a bad idea, we'll just revert.
I've had family members die. It's painful, but at least you can live with it. And if the problems that I'm thinking about won't get solved first, I'm pretty sure that fixing death is a bad idea.
Imagine if the few people who've been able to book passage to the ISS were instead the only ones who could afford immortality. Those are not going to be fun years.