Methuselah Foundation volunteer Kevin Dewalt has penned a couple of good posts in the past week or two. You should head over and take a look:

Bad Reasons to NOT Cure Aging 1 - Foundation:

Ultimately we will figure out a way to undue this accumulated damage and prevent the diseases that will kill 90% of us. Whether we solve this problem in time to save the lives of our parents, us, our children, or our children’s children depends on how difficult these problems ultimately prove to be and how hard we work to solve them.

So with this foundation, it seems that we really don’t have to continue the debate unless you believe that solving this problem will create other problems that are both (a) Worse and (b) Unsolvable.

Although this reality can seem surprising at first, that’s basically it. If you strip away your emotional reactions to this issue - your cognitive dissonance - you’ll see that this discussions are rather silly. Reversing aging solves a huge, horrible problem, and it makes every sense to pursue it as fast as we can to make sure that we and the people we love will be able to take advantage of it.

Bad Reasons to NOT Cure Aging 2 - Overpopulation:

Ok, reversing aging may cause new problems. We just need to evaluate whether these problems are (1) worse than the horrible death of 100,000 people a day and (2) unsolvable.

I’ve been trained by our education system and media to worry about the dangers of human population explosion. I’ve been told that we will soon have billions more people than the Earth can support. Humanity is an inevitable time-bomb of exploding population that will outstrip our available resources.

Fortunately, like most doomsday predictions, the facts don’t support this conclusion. Human overpopulation may well be a total myth. Consider how we could choose to use the Earth differently, and I think you’ll conclude that how we use the available resources at our disposal is more influential than the total number of people using them.

I am absolutely of the school that overpopulation is a myth, a grave and unfortunately widespread misunderstanding of economic reality. Poverty certainly exists, thanks to human selfishness, bad governance and the inhumanity of man unto man. The Malthusians will call poverty a lack of resources per person, but it is always, always poverty in the midst of potential plenty - ample resources squandered, wasted through inefficiency, or left untapped.

Posted by Reason at November 12, 2007 3:54 PM | TrackBack (0)