Call me a "deathist" if you like, but dying of natural causes at a ripe old age is not a travesty.
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.