Another One From The Pro-Death, Pro-Aging Contingent

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I ran across a particularly egregious pro-death, pro-aging op-ed just a few days ago and thought I would share it.

People who live a healthy lifestyle should be rewarded with a long life. Millionaires who can afford the costs of Klotho gene therapy should not have an advantage over the common man. Each person has a certain period of time to make his or her contributions to the world and for that period of time is granted the use of Earth's resources. To fester in a realm of impoverishment is not the key to the success of the human race.
One of the purposes of science is to make life more enjoyable by reducing the pains of cancers and diseases, but prolonging life doesn't necessarily make it more enjoyable. We aren't meant to be Methuselahs. I'm with Billy Joel on this one. Only the good die young.

Where to start with something as outrightly ridiculous as that? I do think that the editorial as a whole serves as a good, albeit exaggerated, example of a certain class of knee-jerk reaction to healthy life extension, but beyond that it's the response of someone who fears change and inequality more than personal pain, suffering and death. There are far too many people like that in the world, and we must win them over as a part of broadening support for longer, healthier lives; both change and inequality exist regardless of fear, and neither is necessarily a bad thing. Malthusian fears are nothing more than fears, for example - human ingenuity has risen to best greater challenges in past decades.

It seems self-evident to me that the challenges of an ageless, disease-free world would be trivial compared to the challenges posed by this ongoing plague of suffering and death that claims tens of millions of lives every year - but, sadly, not everyone thinks that way. Mistaken Malthusian ideas on overpopulation and resource depletion, repopularized again and again despite continual proof to the contrary, cast a long shadow yet, as do the politics of envy and spite.

Technorati tags: life extension, advocacy