In a lot of ways, the concern over mass longevity squeezing the world to death is like the concern over AI robots who become intelligent enough to eradicate all of humanity or the gays mass-releasing gay gay-marriage-spores that make all the straight people fall out of love. It's fun to speculate, write country songs about, and produce post-apocalyptic movies around, but being seriously worried about it as a social issue is a little unrealistic.
Consider, however, whether you'd choose to die if you had an alternative, or whether you've simply accepted something horrific because you don't think you can do anything about it.
If you do not die and plan to stay on Earth, then you will have a (probably very negative) impact on other people's lives. They can choose not to accept it.
Where else could you possibly go? Sending you anywhere else (like a terraformed Mars) might cost more resources than would keeping you alive on Earth for hundreds of years.
It really, really doesn't. Note the first item "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", or the equivalents in other fundamental statements of rights.
If your society attempted to commit mass murder, your society would be removed by force and replaced by one that did not.
And if that sounds like hyperbole, so does the concept that all societies would intentionally withhold a cure to the single most deadly affliction humanity suffers from: aging.
Death is not an unmitigated evil, nor is eternal youth an unmitigated good. I don't think that's a radical argument.
I agree. Discussing ways to solve those problems would be an aspect of the former, which is completely reasonable. However, at the point where you suggested that society could ban life extension, you started arguing for the latter.
Follow your argument to its logical conclusion. What are you proposing, and what would the effect be? You suggested intentionally withholding a cure for a degenerative disease (namely, aging). How else could that possibly be interpreted?
> Death is not an unmitigated evil, nor is eternal youth an unmitigated good. I don't think that's a radical argument.
It's safe to say that's our fundamental point of disagreement.
Personally, I plan to address that disagreement by continuing to donate to fund the development of effective treatments for aging, as well as the development of longer-term cures for mortality. At the point where those treatments become more widely available, arguments against them will start looking a lot sillier.
In some respect, it's no different than if everyone died at fifty years of age. That's a travesty, yet something close to that was the norm for millennia. We expect more now.
People not dying is the "travesty", and preventing death is probably one of the worst things you could do to humanity.
What a gain it would be to have people continue their productive lives for decades or centuries longer.
The costs: we would give up having children. The replacement rate for an immortal race must be very low. The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.
This sort of thinking seems to me a consequence of assuming that brains are somehow separate from the rest of the body, almost bordering on dualism.
They might be easier to shake off, and I suspect this to be the case, if all human brains are rejuvenated brains with 25 year-old physiology. It is not clear that "old people set in their ways" is a result of minds that have simply been around a long time, regardless of their physical condition (i.e. immortal or not), as opposed to a consequence of a physically aging, deteriorating human brain.
So we might find ourselves with the equivalent of a population composed entirely of twenty or thirty-somethings, except some of them happen to have many decades (eventually centuries and millenniums) of experience. We may well be much better off than now.
The other problem is economic - ownership doesn't expire so in a gerontocratic society the older members will by default end up holding more and more of the wealth.
Of course, one could argue that medical are in old age is a massive sink of wealth, and so anti-aging research has the possibility to mitigate that. But unless one proposes to make people immortal - which would entail massive social disruption - such advances are likely to just postpone those expenses.