Also, don't bother with "the super-rich becoming super-genetically-enhanced" scenarios - all known genetic therapy technologies have as side effects increasing the risk of cancer.
Basically, cancer is the mythical dragon guarding the tree of eternal-life and super-gene-therapy, so while it's still alive, being super rich and having access to all regenerative medicine and anti-aging therapies will make a difference, but not such a big one, so don't worry :)
(And yeah, finding a "general" solution to the cancer problem is truly hard, maybe even impossible for the absolutely general case - ie, you'll still have rare forms of cancer that don't respond to any know therapies, and as you live longer and longer the probability of bumping into one such form will approach certainty. And getting a better and better treatment for each type of cancer doesn't seem to go much faster until we get a specific set of breakthroughs in nanotechnology that could be applied to this specific problem.)
Is this true, though?
The really old rarely die from cancer, it seems. http://z3.invisionfree.com/The_110_Club/index.php?showtopic=...
Tumours in old people grow slowly.
Anyone else read this and fantasize about the world's most ironic cancer treatment? If we could somehow speed up the aging process... (No I'm not serious...)
Anyway, I don't really see the problem with rich people living longer lives. Dynastic wealth still lingers around and ends up in the hands of incompetent people which is probably a worse outcome.
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Origins-Death-William-Clark/dp/019...
He first frames the problem. Firstly pointing out that not all parts of the human body are subject to death. Every cell in your body was alive 180000 years ago when the human race first emerged, and even 3 billion years ago when the first cells really started happening. Every cell in your body and, indeed, you yourself are part of the original cell's lifespan.
Second he goes over a lot of experiments that indeed point out the trade-off that God is making here : either you die, or you become a cancerous blob, over time. Not creating the situation where cancer will eventually win is also a no-go, for other reasons.
Thirdly, he points out, mathematically, what death is and isn't for a human. It isn't nearly as clear-cut as you might think. He also gives the philosophical reasons why death may indeed not be the end of existence (well it isn't, if you have kids, for obvious reasons, but it may also not be the end of your conscious existence for other reasons).
Really, this book will change your thinking on death a lot, and after reading it you will understand that not dieing is something that will come with massive consequences.
As to redefining things so there is only a single cell on the planet that's meaningless. Transcription errors occur all the time to the point where most of the cells in your body don't share the same DNA. Some people even contain a large number of their siblings cells to the point where DNA tests are less reliable than you might think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)
Multi celled organisms are best thought of like a country it's an agreement between a group of similar cells. As such theirs plenty of edge cases where something is both a viable single celled organism and part of an a collective. Specialization is more efficient but not really necessary. As such it's easy to see just how multi celled organisms evolve, but also how cancer is basically inevitable because breaking that agreement does not prevent a cell from being viable in the short term. It also demonstrates that sharing DNA is not really nessiary as for example gut bacteria play a vary useful role dispite sharing any DNA with their host.
PS: In the life sciences edge cases can get really strange. As in the closest genetic species to humans is a bunch of single celled organisms not monkey's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
What are these reasons?
And if you look at that list for example, you see that most of those causes of death are thing that would have been harmless to a person without cardiovascular diseases. Taking some of the examples: the long list of pneumonias is because old people that get stuck in bed because of a stroke or heart failure usually get "aspiration pneumonia" or that the buildup of fluid in lungs due to hart failure leads to a series of complications fatal when coupled with a pneumonia. The only causes from that list that were probably not related to cardiovascular disease, besides the cancers, are probably the 2 kidney failures (...if you don't assume things like renal artery stenosis due to aterosclerosys or aterosclerosys and hypertension related kidney disease). Also, things like "organ failure" are a way of describing the consequences not the cause - there was a cause for that organ failure, just that the pathologist didn't bother looking into it. And unless there is a real suspicion of criminal action, no path exams for the causes of death in old people are really conducted scientifically anywhere in the world.
Even if that were the case, someone would quickly find a way to replicate the procedure without the rare resources.
Likely the things in the way would be governments and corporations trying to profit through IP.
In that case, black market tech would be developed and you could likely go to an unregulated / 3rd world country to get the procedure done.
The dynamics of economies of scale that we are familiar with are related to chance that suppliers can lower their marginal costs if demand also justifies a fixed cost in suitable technology. And furthermore, if there is a big enough market and enough suppliers, the market price will approach the marginal cost of production.
Imagine someone wants you to make a spoon that they'll buy from you. It takes you an hour to whittle one out of a piece of wood, and you charge $100. Then they want ten more using the exact same method you used on the first one. Ten hours whittling sounds like even more of a hardship than an hour, so you charge even more per spoon. A thousands spoons painstakingly whittled? Nope.
Now imagine on the other hand, they want you to make them a plastic spoon. Making one plastic spoon is going to be a lot more difficult than whittling one wooden spoon. And yet, if they want enough of them, and you can use any technology, your costs might start to approach $0.01 per spoon.
Anyway, since we think of anything that's to become a viable business in terms of how it can scale, it's easy to reverse the outcomes of changes in supply or demand in the base case where no technology or methods are changing.
Challenge Accepted. God. /s
On a serious note, this could be charming, but still, most people die, not because they were too old., in fact a very few people hit their biological age limit which i guess is 100 ~ 130. They are still many challenges such as diseases, road accidents which are the No. 1 cause for death.
He said: "I'd rob a bank, big time."
I asked why he would do that and he said that he could give the money to a trustee and sit his time and become rich afterwards.
So your story sounds legit to me. And I just asked for 300 years. Living 16.000 years like in the movie: "The man from Earth", was way out of his graspable zone. And he started arguing about god would kill you and so on...