Let’s see if we make life expectancy consistently go up again before we start talking about 120. I could just as easily see it fall to 60 before going up to 120.
I see the quality of life people have when they start approaching 100, and lemme tell you I wouldn't want an extra 20 years of that. Living in the US sucks for healthcare, you're gonna be miserable if you live that long.
Living that long would break the economy. I'm retired on a fixed income, and my planning was based on living no longer than age 90. After that, my savings will be depleted, I will live on social security alone. When I imagine young people having another 30 years to pay for social security per person, it's just broken. We would need to work until age 95 instead of 65. What would be the point?
Well I, for one, would like to live for as long as I want. I understand the sentiment here, though a little depressing, is against that concept. I understand people's reticence toward extending a painful life, particularly if that comes with strings attached. Life extension would need to be paired with a basic income and the rich will need to foot the bill.
I think we can all agree that George R R Martin should be put on this regimen immediately. We're going to need 16 or more years for this dude to finish the series.
Shit, I didn't want to hit 12 much less 120, and now I'm in my 40s. If some jerkass figures out life extension even for the poor, I'm gonna give that a hard pass. Just because I've chosen not to kill myself doesn't mean I have to drag it out one day longer than necessary.
Putting aside world inequality and the grim future that awaits us for a sec, medical science keeps moving forward... It took us 13 years to even sequence all the human genome (which was a tremendous effort done by many universities and researchers). Predicting the structures of proteins was an immense problem in biology that was finally solved with AI like 2~ years ago. mRNA vaccines were a super theoretical thing many years ago, but served us to fight covid. There's a growing number of scientists (like david sinclair) that aren't afraid of openly taking immortality as an academical challenge and publish research without fear of mockery
People forget technological progress is driven by an exponential growth, seeing all the things we have discovered in the past decades I can't help but be optimistic about treatments or medicines available for the general public that slow down aging
I gave up on it when it turned out one of the figureheads of anti-aging researched ended up being a huge creep and everyone involved rushed to defend them. 💀 It's like, nah if these are the kinds of people who are going to be prevalent in a post-death world, i'd rather die.
That's not even accounting for those doing eugenics pseudoscience injecting baby penises into their faces thinking it will make them live forever. No thank you. It's a good thing that shit has a zero% chance of working and has a not-zero% chance of doing the opposite.
I think the term is deathist, people believing that death is inevitable so they come up with lots of clever schemes to justify not wanting to live longer.
Ageing is just the body wearing down over time, with regular maintenance we can be healthy for however long we like to. Or until that proverbial piano drops on us.
I think it's fantastic, ageing is the biggest risk in Alzheimer's, in Cancer, in Dementia, Cardiovascular and lots of others... and who doesn't want to have a youthful healthy body?
Check out sens.org if you're interested in where science is today and what should be done tomorrow, but the first real treatments are probably around the corner already (like senolytics) so it's quite exciting too IMO!
You're assuming humanity is going to survive the next 30-50 years. Unless we do some major course corrections right the fuck now (and that's not looking likely at all because most of it has to do with the rich and powerful who will never change), climate change and/or our own hatred of each other is going to make us extinct or at least endangered and very unhealthy.