> The problem is not that we don't live long enough, the problem is that most people don't have the freedom to do the things they want to do in the time they have. That is a much more tractable problem, and it is the one we should be working on, not extending life spans.
We as a species can do both without either slowing down the other — biotech researchers aren't the same skillset as politicians.
> If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
Disagree, that requires a personality which gets bored quickly. Expertise comes from having the passion stay for long enough to get really good — despite the meme this isn't exactly 10k hours, but it's still long enough that you can fail to grow sick of living after properly mastering just fifteen things in a century.
But even if you did, being ageless doesn't take away the opportunity to cease to be. If it's really all that dull, people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.
> If it's really all that dull, people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.
That, or... I know that'll sound crazy but... not everything has to be an adrenalin rush. Just let go, stop taking your keep-me-alive-forever medication, have a peaceful death during your sleep, contemplating the fact that you'll make room for new humans to have the chance to discover all the things you also had the chance to discover during the last 231 years?
That may sound like a punch line, but it is actually a serious point: our existence has externalities that need to be taken into account. If you're going to argue for the value of potential experiences that will never be had by old people because they die, then I think you also need to consider the value of potential experiences that will never be had by young people because they are never born since all available resources are being used in perpetuity by the lucky generation that came along just as the longevity technology matured.
Arguing for the potential future of young people who won't be born, is a thing that some do.
Not me, I think there's a hyperbolic discount to unwritten futures¹, and that we should live in the present with a view to the foreseeable future — a future which is, IMO, currently "about 5 years"², because there's too many things changing to see further than that anyway.
Perhaps one day things will calm down, and we can be confident of what our experiences will be a millennium into the future; or perhaps that future, being filled by other humans just like ourselves who are themselves all making predictions of what will come, will be inherently chaotic beyond our own ability to forecast.
And a millennium is what you want for starters if you are to explore the stars, as space dust becomes dangerous well before relativity makes a huge difference.
> I think there's a hyperbolic discount to unwritten futures.
And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing people.
BTW, it's not just about the actual unborn, it's all the existing people who want the experience of having and raising children who won't be able to. Personally, I am happily childless by choice, but I am given to understand that some people find it a very fulfilling experience.
> And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing people
I can personally experience aging: Every change to my body after the mid 20s sucks. A life of the same length without aging is still an improvement. Unwinding the last 15 years of aging on my body would still be an improvement, even if aging continued normally and lifespan wasn't increased as a side effect.
I have no problem working towards improved quality of life, but I think we should start with the low-lying fruit of improving the quality of life of poor young people rather than old rich people. But either way that's very different from working to extend longevity.
We as a species can do both without either slowing down the other — biotech researchers aren't the same skillset as politicians.
> If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
Disagree, that requires a personality which gets bored quickly. Expertise comes from having the passion stay for long enough to get really good — despite the meme this isn't exactly 10k hours, but it's still long enough that you can fail to grow sick of living after properly mastering just fifteen things in a century.
But even if you did, being ageless doesn't take away the opportunity to cease to be. If it's really all that dull, people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.