Arguments against ending aging and why they're wrong
As I'm sure you can tell, I'm feeling very passionate about the potential for a longer human lifespan. Yet, oddly to me, many people don't feel the same. A Pew Research poll on the attitudes of Americans towards the possibility of living longer found that only 38% would want to live decades longer, and that 51% thought it would be bad for society. Though curiously, 68% thought that most other people would like to live longer.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/
Now it's time for me to lay into those arguments against longevity research. I got obsessed with searching them out. This comments section of this Daily Mail article on Laura Deming raising funds for longevity research is even dumber than usual.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7393159/Meet-25-year-old-mission-outsmart-ageing-doesnt-involve-drinking-blood.html
Dunking on Daily Mail readers is picking some very low hanging fruit, so I'll also link the following .
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652797/
It may be more highbrow, but the arguments are no better. Why are they no better? This entry is getting long enough already and I don't have the time to take them apart in detail (what, we're still near the begining? well I started writing at the end of this entry and worked backwards). So I promise this isn't just a cop out and comment asking me if you really do want to know!
Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. I could just link to the following rebuttals which I thought was good.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/overcoming-9-common-arguments-against-fighting-aging-sergey-young/
But I'm also getting lazy, and who really has the time to check out every link on some random LJ post. So to avoid this entry becoming a long list of links to other articles, I shall now list my own rebuttals to common arguments against longevity research.
It's not natural
The old natural = good fallacy. Disease is natural. Predation is natural. Half of all humans not making it to adulthood and woman reguarly dying in childbirth used to be very natural.
You know what isn't natural? Vaccines. Antibiotics. Anasthesia. Contraception. I don't care whether something is natural. I care whether it can help me live a healthier and happier life.
Most people who fall back on the 'it isn't natural' argument are quite happy to embrace all other manner of technological achievements, and to lecture you on what isn't natural via that most natural of phenomena, the internet.
Longevity treatments would cause massive overpopulation and destroy the planet
This is a valid concern, and one that a few months ago I would have brought up as the most likely problem to arise from everyone living longer. But it's a problem that I think is managable.
How serious a problem this might be depends on the country. In much of the western world, and especially in Korea, birth rates are well below replacement level. Any method that keeps their population living and working for longer will be a huge benefit.
For countries that still have high birth rates, then yes, keeping high birth rates coupled with adopting longevity treatments is setting them up for trouble.
Initially, there would likely be a population spike after longevity treatments were introduced, though it's not quite as dramatic as you might initially think. One thing that the history of population demographics has taught us is that a decrease in mortality rate is a generation or two thereafter followed by a decrease in birthrates. In a world where people were aging slower or perhaps not even aging at all, birthrates would soon drop dramatically. Children would be a rarity, and treasured all the more because of that.
'What kind of world are we leaving for our children?' is a common refrain of the environmental movement. But if we started living radically longer, we instead have to consider 'what kind of world will we ourselves inherit in a few decades time'. Long lived humans will have to take environmental issues seriously, and will have many more years of healthy life in which to concentrate on them.
I have previously said that a lower human population on this planet would benefit the rest of this planet's lifeforms. And I still hold by that, but there are other ways to limit our impact on the environment. Embrace nuclear and renewables instead of fossil fuels. Live in denser cities instead of sprawling out. Avoid meat.
I'm an adaptable guy. If it takes rapidly reducing the recources and space I use up to fit into whatever new society is coming, I'll gladly do that if it enables me to avoid the horrors of aging.
Could overpopulation be an issue? Sure. But if you think it's unethical now to allow people to die of disease, starvation or war even though it could help with overpopulation, is it any more ethical to allow people to die of aging if that too can be prevented?
The math of it just doesn't add up. In order to avoid a hypothetical disaster where thousand or even millions could possibly suffer and die, should we really stick with the situation now where billions will definitely suffer and die?
Taking care not to have a huge increase in the human population only applies for as long as we're restricted to Earth. I'm in favor of limiting population growth because it inevitably encroaches on the habitats of the myriads of other unique species that call this planet home. I'd guess there will be a few centuries between the longevity revolution and the one that colonizes our solar system, so we'd have to be careful with population during that time.
But once utilising the rest of this solar systems resources and moving off planet becomes easier, then no worries. Billions more people. Trillions more. Why not?
I read one commentator sneering that 'we've already ruined this planet, why ruin the rest of the universe?' Frankly, it's fashionably cynical bullshit. It's just dead rock out there. What is there to ruin? If we ever discover planets with their own life then they should be left well alone. Otherwise, go for it!
Only the super rich would benefit
The first longevity treatments, as with any new medical treatments, are likely to be both experimental and expensive. So yes, I think that initially there will be some years between the first people getting access to longevity treatments and them becoming accessible and affordable to most of the worlds' people.
But the idea that they'd be limited to only the super rich and powerful indefinitely is just dystopian fantasy. I have seen the movies where that happens, but a story where longevity treatments work out nicely for everyone is more difficult to inject drama into (though I may have a go at writing one someday), hence the profusion of stories that tell us this will work out badly.
Even presuming everyone involved is utterly selfish the 'only for the rich and powerful' fears don't add up.
First off, gaining medical knowledge is not like hoarding gold or diamonds, where if you give some away you are left with less yourself.
Any politician or business leader who was visibly staying young and yet refused to share the knowledge of how they did so would be utterly loathed, and constantly having to check over their shoulders for an assanation attempt. The larger the pool of people to whom longevity is denied, the larger the mob who will one day break down the gates of the mansion. What surer way to gain political poularity than to promise a longer life to everyone! If one country's government attempts to prevent such treatment being avaliable, it's population will flee en mass to somewhere it is.
Sure, companies sell their drugs for a profit, so why limit that profit by setting the price so high that only a fraction of Earth's population could afford them? The more customers you have, the more money you make.
And who will pay for this all? Any longevity treatment would pay for itself. Having to pay out pensions and fund the medical care of the elderly is a costly business. But a healthier longer lived population is one that can spend more time in work, adding hugely to the economy.
We'd be bored if we lived longer.
Seriously? Think of all the places on Earth you could visit. All the people you could meet. All the food and drink you could try. All the careers you could try out. All the skills you could master. All the things you could create. All the books, movies, games and music you could enjoy. All the technological marvels you could live to see. The average eighty year lifespan only gives me time for a fraction of the stuff I'd love to see and do. The idea that we'd grow bored with longer life reveals an incredible lack of imagination.
But for anyone who really grew bored with a longer life, they could choose to opt out if they wished, and euthanise themselves only when they were truly ready to leave this world.
Everyone should have the chance to die when and how they want, not to have that death forced on them by aging whether they wish for it or not.
Death gives life meaning
This is so transparently bollocks it's surprising how many people think it holds some sort of wisdom. I think the real reason some subscribe to this is just as a coping mechansism, but I'll get to that later.
Meaning requires conciousness, and death, removing all consciousness, removes all meaning. Does it add meaning to the years that we do live? I suspect that it adds not meaning but urgency.
To truly know whether death brings meaning to life, we would have to compare the mindsets of those in our current aging society to those from a society in which aging had been defeated, and ofcourse as no such society yet exists it's impossible to know. But consider this. How often do you ever hear this from an elderly person facing the end of their life today. "I've had a full life, but you know what would have really given it more meaning? If I had instead died twenty years ago from a disease modern medicine has since vanquished."
My own belief is more years of life will simply give us more time in which to experience meaning. And if not, those that truly find it meaningless will have the option to exit their lives on their own terms. For future generations who feel longevity is not for them, they have every right not to take it. But they have no right to deny the chance to others who wish for it.
Older generations need to die so that society doesn't stagnate
I was a little worried that my 'aging is a disease' take could be construed as being ageist, even though ultimately curing it is for their own good. But the idea that the elderly need to die so their terrible ideas die with them? Yikes.
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2023/04/12/the_real_problem_with_radically_extending_human_lifespan_893286.html
I really don't buy this. First off, people can, and do change their minds about very significant issues. I know I have. I also believe there can be benefit to having both old and new minds in a society. I really don't think the older generation will lose the will to explore or create if given many years more of life.
And can anyone even define what a stagnant or atrophied society would look like? So long as its citizens are happy and healthy, I don't really care too much.
Ironically enough, the idea that old people need to die so that society can move forwards is itself one of those terrible backwards ideas that needs to die out. The beautifully ironic thing is that those who hold to this view will inevitably die out themselves, or be proven full of shit when they opt for longevity treatments.
Wanting to defeat aging is vanity
I wasn't going to include this originally as it sounded like a joke. Then I discovered this article.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/rebecca-seal-ageing-youth-rapamycin
Call it vanity, or being superficial, or whatever. People feel good about looking good, and that's nothing to be ashamed of in that. The cruel fact is we rarely look better with age, and who of us would opt to get gray haired and wrinkly if we could choose not to?
But the article is also a fantastic exercise in missing the point. What's so bad about aging? Because it kills you! If you don't believe longer healthier years are for the best, then why even bother visiting a doctor?
That's covered the main arguments, but if you can think of any more I'll try to give them a good kicking too!
I just don't buy into the idea that we have 'no right' to extend our lives for as long as possible. As though we have to ask god or nature for permission to do so first. I don't believe in god. And as for nature, nature will do anything to survive.
Also, all medicine is about giving us as many more years of healthy life as possible. There is no reason why it should be a noble and ethical thing to extend the life of an individual by a decade by treating the cancer or heart disease that would have killed them, but extending their life by directly treating the aging process is something we have no right to do. An argument against new treatments that extend our lifespans would logically necessitate being against any new medical treatments at all.
'Suffering and death are bad' is such a banal statement that it's surprising just how many people don't apply the same logic when it comes to the potential of longevity research.
'Society isn't ready for us to reverse the aging process' one article was pontificating. When will it be ready? When everyone alive now is dead? That does us no fucking good! So what if we have to deal with some societal change. People have always had to deal with societal change. When the alternative is literally 'we all just die' then I'll happily deal with whatever societal change is coming!
Daniel Callahan's ending remarks on the following article are deeply ominous.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna12916099
"If this (ending aging) could ever happen, then we'd better ask what kind of society we want to get. We had better not go anywhere near it until we have figured those problems out."
Or in other words, unless we are all in agreement as to how a longer loved society should function (and we're never all going to agree on the details anyway) we should just let everyone on Earth suffer and die instead of searching for a cure for their ailment.
Suffering and deaths from famine, covid, war or extreme weather. These are the sort of tragic deaths that we should be getting upset about. But the even larger amount of suffering and death caused by the aging process, no that's just default suffering and death. You're not meant to get rid of that.
So far there's not much in the way of serious opposition to longevity research (most articles I found suggest it would on balance be a positive thing), so this is hypothetical for now. But imagine a future where a politician seriously manages to block research and development into longevity medicine. Such a figure could end up responsible for billions of deaths, far more than the worst of history's tyrants!
Why do some argue this way? I think it's a coping mechanism. Up until this point in history there was really nothing that could be done to avoid death. So we told ourselves stories that helped us accept it. People attached nobility or meaning to the process of biological aging. They told themselves that, like some bitter tasting medicine that actually helps us, there is a reason that senescence occurs and that human society couldn't function without it. To accept old age was seen as a sign of wisdom and maturity, and to rail against it a sign of weakness or hubris. I've even heard it described as 'aging is beautiful' or 'aging is a blessing'. Having many years of life can be seen as a blessing. But the physical decline that comes with it? Nonsense!
So much of what humans tell themselves to justify the presence of the aging process is bullshit, but so long as it helped some people to feel better about it, it was useful bullshit. But the instant it looks like our knowledge of biology has advanced far enough that we stand a chance of doing something about it, those coping mechanisms no longer help us but get in the way of finding a solution.
Scanning the pages of reddit I found someone who articulated this far better than I am, so I'm just going to post what they had to say about it below.
Ingemar Patrick Linden wrote a whole book on the ethics of longevity, titled The Case Against Death. I've yet to read it, but his following essay makes a lot of good points.
https://upworthyscience.com/reverse-aging/particle-1
It's all very well worth the read, but the last paragraph puts things beautifully.
'The Wise View provides us with a feel-good bromide for the anxiety created by the foreknowledge of our decay and death by telling us that these are not evils, but blessings in disguise. Once perhaps an innocuous delusion, today the view stands in the way of a necessary societal commitment to research that can prolong our healthy life. We need abandon it and openly admit that aging is a scourge that deserves to be fought with the combined energies equaling those expended on fighting COVID-19, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, stroke and all the other illnesses for which aging is the greatest risk factor. The fight to end aging transcends ordinary political boundaries and is therefore the kind of grand unifying enterprise that could re-energize a society suffering from divisiveness and the sense of a lack of a common purpose. It is hard to imagine a more worthwhile cause.'
I'll leave this entry with a thought experience created by Andrew Steele. Imagine a society that has never suffered from senescence. Can you imagine any scenario so bad in that they would decide to invent the aging process? I truly can't. Even in the most extreme example that resources were stretched so bad that society had tried absolutely everything and had finally settled on 'we need to kill some people so the rest of us can survive', you still wouldn't choose aging as a way to kill people. It's a very slow, cruel and costly way to die. It would be preferable that people just live on in youthful health and be killed instantly and painlessly at the end of their allotted time.
Whatever 'well actually, have you considered the social implications of blah blah blah' gets trotted out as an argument against longlevity research is never as bad as the current rate of suffering and death that is the staus quo we already have. Once longevity treatment becomes mainstream, future generations will be baffled that there was ever a debate to be had.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/
Now it's time for me to lay into those arguments against longevity research. I got obsessed with searching them out. This comments section of this Daily Mail article on Laura Deming raising funds for longevity research is even dumber than usual.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7393159/Meet-25-year-old-mission-outsmart-ageing-doesnt-involve-drinking-blood.html
Dunking on Daily Mail readers is picking some very low hanging fruit, so I'll also link the following .
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652797/
It may be more highbrow, but the arguments are no better. Why are they no better? This entry is getting long enough already and I don't have the time to take them apart in detail (what, we're still near the begining? well I started writing at the end of this entry and worked backwards). So I promise this isn't just a cop out and comment asking me if you really do want to know!
Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. I could just link to the following rebuttals which I thought was good.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/overcoming-9-common-arguments-against-fighting-aging-sergey-young/
But I'm also getting lazy, and who really has the time to check out every link on some random LJ post. So to avoid this entry becoming a long list of links to other articles, I shall now list my own rebuttals to common arguments against longevity research.
It's not natural
The old natural = good fallacy. Disease is natural. Predation is natural. Half of all humans not making it to adulthood and woman reguarly dying in childbirth used to be very natural.
You know what isn't natural? Vaccines. Antibiotics. Anasthesia. Contraception. I don't care whether something is natural. I care whether it can help me live a healthier and happier life.
Most people who fall back on the 'it isn't natural' argument are quite happy to embrace all other manner of technological achievements, and to lecture you on what isn't natural via that most natural of phenomena, the internet.
Longevity treatments would cause massive overpopulation and destroy the planet
This is a valid concern, and one that a few months ago I would have brought up as the most likely problem to arise from everyone living longer. But it's a problem that I think is managable.
How serious a problem this might be depends on the country. In much of the western world, and especially in Korea, birth rates are well below replacement level. Any method that keeps their population living and working for longer will be a huge benefit.
For countries that still have high birth rates, then yes, keeping high birth rates coupled with adopting longevity treatments is setting them up for trouble.
Initially, there would likely be a population spike after longevity treatments were introduced, though it's not quite as dramatic as you might initially think. One thing that the history of population demographics has taught us is that a decrease in mortality rate is a generation or two thereafter followed by a decrease in birthrates. In a world where people were aging slower or perhaps not even aging at all, birthrates would soon drop dramatically. Children would be a rarity, and treasured all the more because of that.
'What kind of world are we leaving for our children?' is a common refrain of the environmental movement. But if we started living radically longer, we instead have to consider 'what kind of world will we ourselves inherit in a few decades time'. Long lived humans will have to take environmental issues seriously, and will have many more years of healthy life in which to concentrate on them.
I have previously said that a lower human population on this planet would benefit the rest of this planet's lifeforms. And I still hold by that, but there are other ways to limit our impact on the environment. Embrace nuclear and renewables instead of fossil fuels. Live in denser cities instead of sprawling out. Avoid meat.
I'm an adaptable guy. If it takes rapidly reducing the recources and space I use up to fit into whatever new society is coming, I'll gladly do that if it enables me to avoid the horrors of aging.
Could overpopulation be an issue? Sure. But if you think it's unethical now to allow people to die of disease, starvation or war even though it could help with overpopulation, is it any more ethical to allow people to die of aging if that too can be prevented?
The math of it just doesn't add up. In order to avoid a hypothetical disaster where thousand or even millions could possibly suffer and die, should we really stick with the situation now where billions will definitely suffer and die?
Taking care not to have a huge increase in the human population only applies for as long as we're restricted to Earth. I'm in favor of limiting population growth because it inevitably encroaches on the habitats of the myriads of other unique species that call this planet home. I'd guess there will be a few centuries between the longevity revolution and the one that colonizes our solar system, so we'd have to be careful with population during that time.
But once utilising the rest of this solar systems resources and moving off planet becomes easier, then no worries. Billions more people. Trillions more. Why not?
I read one commentator sneering that 'we've already ruined this planet, why ruin the rest of the universe?' Frankly, it's fashionably cynical bullshit. It's just dead rock out there. What is there to ruin? If we ever discover planets with their own life then they should be left well alone. Otherwise, go for it!
Only the super rich would benefit
The first longevity treatments, as with any new medical treatments, are likely to be both experimental and expensive. So yes, I think that initially there will be some years between the first people getting access to longevity treatments and them becoming accessible and affordable to most of the worlds' people.
But the idea that they'd be limited to only the super rich and powerful indefinitely is just dystopian fantasy. I have seen the movies where that happens, but a story where longevity treatments work out nicely for everyone is more difficult to inject drama into (though I may have a go at writing one someday), hence the profusion of stories that tell us this will work out badly.
Even presuming everyone involved is utterly selfish the 'only for the rich and powerful' fears don't add up.
First off, gaining medical knowledge is not like hoarding gold or diamonds, where if you give some away you are left with less yourself.
Any politician or business leader who was visibly staying young and yet refused to share the knowledge of how they did so would be utterly loathed, and constantly having to check over their shoulders for an assanation attempt. The larger the pool of people to whom longevity is denied, the larger the mob who will one day break down the gates of the mansion. What surer way to gain political poularity than to promise a longer life to everyone! If one country's government attempts to prevent such treatment being avaliable, it's population will flee en mass to somewhere it is.
Sure, companies sell their drugs for a profit, so why limit that profit by setting the price so high that only a fraction of Earth's population could afford them? The more customers you have, the more money you make.
And who will pay for this all? Any longevity treatment would pay for itself. Having to pay out pensions and fund the medical care of the elderly is a costly business. But a healthier longer lived population is one that can spend more time in work, adding hugely to the economy.
We'd be bored if we lived longer.
Seriously? Think of all the places on Earth you could visit. All the people you could meet. All the food and drink you could try. All the careers you could try out. All the skills you could master. All the things you could create. All the books, movies, games and music you could enjoy. All the technological marvels you could live to see. The average eighty year lifespan only gives me time for a fraction of the stuff I'd love to see and do. The idea that we'd grow bored with longer life reveals an incredible lack of imagination.
But for anyone who really grew bored with a longer life, they could choose to opt out if they wished, and euthanise themselves only when they were truly ready to leave this world.
Everyone should have the chance to die when and how they want, not to have that death forced on them by aging whether they wish for it or not.
Death gives life meaning
This is so transparently bollocks it's surprising how many people think it holds some sort of wisdom. I think the real reason some subscribe to this is just as a coping mechansism, but I'll get to that later.
Meaning requires conciousness, and death, removing all consciousness, removes all meaning. Does it add meaning to the years that we do live? I suspect that it adds not meaning but urgency.
To truly know whether death brings meaning to life, we would have to compare the mindsets of those in our current aging society to those from a society in which aging had been defeated, and ofcourse as no such society yet exists it's impossible to know. But consider this. How often do you ever hear this from an elderly person facing the end of their life today. "I've had a full life, but you know what would have really given it more meaning? If I had instead died twenty years ago from a disease modern medicine has since vanquished."
My own belief is more years of life will simply give us more time in which to experience meaning. And if not, those that truly find it meaningless will have the option to exit their lives on their own terms. For future generations who feel longevity is not for them, they have every right not to take it. But they have no right to deny the chance to others who wish for it.
Older generations need to die so that society doesn't stagnate
I was a little worried that my 'aging is a disease' take could be construed as being ageist, even though ultimately curing it is for their own good. But the idea that the elderly need to die so their terrible ideas die with them? Yikes.
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2023/04/12/the_real_problem_with_radically_extending_human_lifespan_893286.html
I really don't buy this. First off, people can, and do change their minds about very significant issues. I know I have. I also believe there can be benefit to having both old and new minds in a society. I really don't think the older generation will lose the will to explore or create if given many years more of life.
And can anyone even define what a stagnant or atrophied society would look like? So long as its citizens are happy and healthy, I don't really care too much.
Ironically enough, the idea that old people need to die so that society can move forwards is itself one of those terrible backwards ideas that needs to die out. The beautifully ironic thing is that those who hold to this view will inevitably die out themselves, or be proven full of shit when they opt for longevity treatments.
Wanting to defeat aging is vanity
I wasn't going to include this originally as it sounded like a joke. Then I discovered this article.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/rebecca-seal-ageing-youth-rapamycin
Call it vanity, or being superficial, or whatever. People feel good about looking good, and that's nothing to be ashamed of in that. The cruel fact is we rarely look better with age, and who of us would opt to get gray haired and wrinkly if we could choose not to?
But the article is also a fantastic exercise in missing the point. What's so bad about aging? Because it kills you! If you don't believe longer healthier years are for the best, then why even bother visiting a doctor?
That's covered the main arguments, but if you can think of any more I'll try to give them a good kicking too!
I just don't buy into the idea that we have 'no right' to extend our lives for as long as possible. As though we have to ask god or nature for permission to do so first. I don't believe in god. And as for nature, nature will do anything to survive.
Also, all medicine is about giving us as many more years of healthy life as possible. There is no reason why it should be a noble and ethical thing to extend the life of an individual by a decade by treating the cancer or heart disease that would have killed them, but extending their life by directly treating the aging process is something we have no right to do. An argument against new treatments that extend our lifespans would logically necessitate being against any new medical treatments at all.
'Suffering and death are bad' is such a banal statement that it's surprising just how many people don't apply the same logic when it comes to the potential of longevity research.
'Society isn't ready for us to reverse the aging process' one article was pontificating. When will it be ready? When everyone alive now is dead? That does us no fucking good! So what if we have to deal with some societal change. People have always had to deal with societal change. When the alternative is literally 'we all just die' then I'll happily deal with whatever societal change is coming!
Daniel Callahan's ending remarks on the following article are deeply ominous.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna12916099
"If this (ending aging) could ever happen, then we'd better ask what kind of society we want to get. We had better not go anywhere near it until we have figured those problems out."
Or in other words, unless we are all in agreement as to how a longer loved society should function (and we're never all going to agree on the details anyway) we should just let everyone on Earth suffer and die instead of searching for a cure for their ailment.
Suffering and deaths from famine, covid, war or extreme weather. These are the sort of tragic deaths that we should be getting upset about. But the even larger amount of suffering and death caused by the aging process, no that's just default suffering and death. You're not meant to get rid of that.
So far there's not much in the way of serious opposition to longevity research (most articles I found suggest it would on balance be a positive thing), so this is hypothetical for now. But imagine a future where a politician seriously manages to block research and development into longevity medicine. Such a figure could end up responsible for billions of deaths, far more than the worst of history's tyrants!
Why do some argue this way? I think it's a coping mechanism. Up until this point in history there was really nothing that could be done to avoid death. So we told ourselves stories that helped us accept it. People attached nobility or meaning to the process of biological aging. They told themselves that, like some bitter tasting medicine that actually helps us, there is a reason that senescence occurs and that human society couldn't function without it. To accept old age was seen as a sign of wisdom and maturity, and to rail against it a sign of weakness or hubris. I've even heard it described as 'aging is beautiful' or 'aging is a blessing'. Having many years of life can be seen as a blessing. But the physical decline that comes with it? Nonsense!
So much of what humans tell themselves to justify the presence of the aging process is bullshit, but so long as it helped some people to feel better about it, it was useful bullshit. But the instant it looks like our knowledge of biology has advanced far enough that we stand a chance of doing something about it, those coping mechanisms no longer help us but get in the way of finding a solution.
Scanning the pages of reddit I found someone who articulated this far better than I am, so I'm just going to post what they had to say about it below.
Ingemar Patrick Linden wrote a whole book on the ethics of longevity, titled The Case Against Death. I've yet to read it, but his following essay makes a lot of good points.
https://upworthyscience.com/reverse-aging/particle-1
It's all very well worth the read, but the last paragraph puts things beautifully.
'The Wise View provides us with a feel-good bromide for the anxiety created by the foreknowledge of our decay and death by telling us that these are not evils, but blessings in disguise. Once perhaps an innocuous delusion, today the view stands in the way of a necessary societal commitment to research that can prolong our healthy life. We need abandon it and openly admit that aging is a scourge that deserves to be fought with the combined energies equaling those expended on fighting COVID-19, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, stroke and all the other illnesses for which aging is the greatest risk factor. The fight to end aging transcends ordinary political boundaries and is therefore the kind of grand unifying enterprise that could re-energize a society suffering from divisiveness and the sense of a lack of a common purpose. It is hard to imagine a more worthwhile cause.'
I'll leave this entry with a thought experience created by Andrew Steele. Imagine a society that has never suffered from senescence. Can you imagine any scenario so bad in that they would decide to invent the aging process? I truly can't. Even in the most extreme example that resources were stretched so bad that society had tried absolutely everything and had finally settled on 'we need to kill some people so the rest of us can survive', you still wouldn't choose aging as a way to kill people. It's a very slow, cruel and costly way to die. It would be preferable that people just live on in youthful health and be killed instantly and painlessly at the end of their allotted time.
Whatever 'well actually, have you considered the social implications of blah blah blah' gets trotted out as an argument against longlevity research is never as bad as the current rate of suffering and death that is the staus quo we already have. Once longevity treatment becomes mainstream, future generations will be baffled that there was ever a debate to be had.