The goal in the research community is health assurance, so of course every aspect of aging that impacts health will be addressed. The goal of people who are in the market for health assurance technologies will also be for all aspects of aging that impact health and function to be addressed. So it seems rather unlikely outside of dystopian fiction that we'll run into a situation in which everything except aspect X gets fixed.
This is especially true because the hundreds of distinct manifestations of degenerative aging are caused at root by only a small handful of distinct types of damage [1] resulting from the normal operation of metabolism. Effective treatments will be those that repair the root cause damage, each damage repair approach (and especially in conjunction with the other approaches) being capable of treating and preventing whole swathes of age-related conditions. So it would be exceedingly implausible for any particular aspect of aging to stand alone and unaffected by repair strategies for aging.
If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generations will tend to cluster together socially, to the exclusion of another. They will have come of age with the same events. You already hear people in their 30's talking about how they don't understand what teenagers are doing (Snapchat, etc.). Imagine if there were 32 other generations to comprehend: you would have to be an expert in history to even relate to people.
People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. You would probably see different generations fighting for policy that favors them. I mean it would be hard to imagine this NOT happening.
This generational warfare meme is pushed by, among others, Stan Druckenmiller:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-gene...
You'll note that they push both sides at once. Boomers are told that millenials are feckless and lazy. Millenials are told that Boomers screwed up the economy and are hogging all the wealth.
Divide and conquer.
It's working, too.
Well then, inform the ones you know of the how and why they are being manipulated into doing that. Mr Druckenmiller would hate it if everybody turned on him instead of each other.
This already exists, since history often repeats itself as cyclical philosophy/law overlaid on technology fashion. Social groups have varying technological and cultural capacity for intergenerational memory and finance.
As media technology for influence/advocacy/propaganda has become commoditized, what may appear as non-deterministic weather patterns of techno-socio-political fashion, could also be viewed as intergenerational economic warfare. Albert Brooks novel 2030 covers some of these themes in a future dystopia.
Imagine if 32 generations were concurrently using the same words, to represent very different questions, goals, values. Imagine if one generation was unknowingly influenced by 32 past generations, all advocating to be memetically reborn. Imagine if 32 possible-future generations were advocating for the opportunity to come into sequential or concurrent existence.
> ... You would probably see different generations fighting for policy that favors them.
Historically, such fighting has been more physical than informational. The web, with sites like HN, move that balance towards the latter. If a corporation or foundation is immortal, how does the identity of that corporation change over time as constituent humans are gradually swapped out?
Here is a recent summary of policy advocacy using intergenerational financial capacity to influence single-generation humans, "..this book illuminates how elite consultants have adopted grassroots advocacy tactics for paying clients. Rather than being dismissed as mere 'astroturf', these consultants' campaigns should be seen as having real effects on political participation and policymaking", http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IO0E69E/
What could lead to problems (that is: a not changing social and political situation) would be the adaption of political mechanism for the longer lifespans. For example, now politicians have mandate that last from 3 to 5 years, then there are elections (talking about not totalitary states). Putting this in prospective, with humans having a 1000+ years lifespan, politicians mandate would grow to 50+ years. That's bad, and in my opinion will only lead to deadlocks.
Imagine a nation guided for 50+ years by the same persons. They will start demanding always more power, leading to mostly only totalitary scenarios. Everything will fall apart.
Instead, keeping the actual model could lead to even more variety (that's not the right word in this case, my apologize for it) than what we have now, and there's a reasonable chance that humanity will benefit from this.
Of course, the one described is just one of the worst case scenarios (altought not the worst at all), maybe our brain will change drastically and we will become a complete different thing.
What if we counter aging such that people never leave their peak physical condition? (25 years old?)
Will they still group by the generation in which they were born?
* http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010....
* http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-r...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R...
In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.
You seem deeply confused. If those changes happened entirely because old people changed their minds, then individual neuroplasticity has a tremendous amount to do with the changes mentioned. On the flip side, in a world with no neuroplasticity at all, we would only see change when people are born with different views.
"Young people have not had a great record of voting. So those changes you are attributing to neural plasticity are likely brought about by those old frozen minds you mention, and less so the young plyable ones if you ask me."
"Young people" and "old people" are not static sets. Imagine a world where young people change their mind frequently until 25, when they stop changing their mind and start voting. You would never see the mind of any individual over-25-year-old change, but the distribution of views in the over-25 population would still change as people enter and leave that population. If social change requires support of some proportion of that population, stopping people from leaving it will slow social change.
I have no strong opinion about just how much our world resembles that one, but your reasoning does not support your claim here. There is some evidence that neuroplasticity tends to decline as people age.
"There is solid evidence that neurogenesis (birth of brain cells) occurs in the adult, mammalian brain—and such changes can persist well into old age."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity
Here's another case cited in the same article above, "His father’s story was firsthand evidence that a ‘late recovery’ could occur even with a massive lesion in an elderly person."
Would you be okay with killing fifty million people per year, perpetually, in order to achieve some ideal vision of social progress? Wouldn't that make you worse than all the evil dictators in history, combined?
I'd argue that this isn't a position we can seriously consider while maintaining our essential humanity.
Aging is a phenomenally hard problem. I have no idea whether it will be "solved" in 25 years or 100 or 2500 or never... but I'd imagine that neural plasticity is but a small subproblem of it.
Is there documented evidence of this. Some people do better than others, obviously, but I find it hard to believe that anyone has literally as much plasticity at 90 as they did at 25.
> Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved).
Probably should be more specific than "drugs", since most drugs have no effect on neuroplasticity, and some drugs appear to actually enhance it.