Any second-order societal effects can be dealt with, but this is absolutely not an area where we need regulations and deliberation of "safety" when literally everyone you know, your children, and your loved ones will die without this research.
The problem of dying is a much more urgent problem than, say, overpopulation or duration of power. Those can be solved once we aren't all, well, dying.
And so is life. One thing is sure, life is much better enjoyed when you don't spend the entirety of it trying to bend the rules and worrying about things you have no power over.
If you're not fit, exercising two hours per day, eating clean food at every single meal, skipping alcohol, living in a rural area far from pollutants, &c. you have no business discussing longevity in the first place imho. It's too easy to wait for the silver bullet complaining about how death is tragic while letting ourselves rotting away every second of every day
Even then, good as fitness is, it doesn't make us agesless. We can research aging without solving all the rest of the issues first — not even maximum life duration, as 81 years where your body clock never goes past 25 is still an improvement on 81 years where you slowly wind down from 25 onwards.
Also with the food, there are often efforts to get the population as a whole to eat healthier, these get pushback that calls it "nanny state" (in the UK) or just outright denies the health impacts of the food that's being advised against (I wonder, find a "end fat shaming" headline, go into details, will you find a maker of junk food sponsored the research?)
How are you not connecting overpopulation and longevity? The earth is already straining, even with the current level of population and longevity. If no one is dying until they are 200, and increasingly consuming like the richer nations, we are going to be living miserable lives.
Perhaps the people who advocate for longevity should spend a year in any one of the third world's populated cities and experience it first-hand.
If we live to 200 and have 1 kid, population goes down.
> and increasingly consuming like the richer nations, we are going to be living miserable lives.
Tautologically false; if the worst off are empowered to consume as we do now, those lives will be *amazing*.
Also, the sustainability level of consumption depends on tech, not population. If we wound back to 1930 tech and population, we were reliant on coal and oil, we couldn't substitute other things for them — if peak oil/coal had happened in that decade, we'd have been stuck; now we're good, coal is being phased out as fast as we can build the alternatives, and we have partial alternatives for oil and are working on the reminder.
It's very easy to be overconfident where the boundary is between fairy tales and engineering, the boundary between fairy tales and science is even harder, and even domain experts can get that wrong in both directions.
But even if it was, why should we limit ourselves to evolution? Evolution did not design us to go to the moon, to split the atom, to have transplantable organs, to fly, to brush our teeth with fluorinated toothpaste, or to use contraceptives — it has only just managed to keep up with us wearing clothes and cooking our meals.
This betrays a deep misunderstanding of the mechanics of evolution. Design is literally not even part of the equation. I suspect you actually know that, but may have let an emotional response confuse your position.
Radical ideas like "let's stop dying" often evoke powerful irrational responses from all sorts of people, but it's very important to stop and consider the source of that response.
For example, I'm envious of those who would live in an age of immortality (if it were to happen), as I don't expect such an outcome for myself, but I don't want to take that away from them if it's a real possibility.