Recycled Nonsense
What motivates people to write columns mocking those working towards reducing pain, suffering and death by developing medical technologies to extend healthy life span? I can't visualise these humorists writing a column to deride the cancer research and advocacy community, or to cry out that everyone should just get Alzheimers, suffer, die and be done with any attempt to avoid that fate. Yet there is no fundamental difference between seeking a cure for any specific age-related condition and seeking a cure for all age-related degeneration. It's all about preventing suffering and death ... I think you have to lock yourself into a particularly blank mental room to avoid that truth.
Worse, this column in the normally - at least moderately - sensible Wired simply regurgitates the old, tired disproven, debunked, plain old wrong arguments against healthy life extension. Malthusianism on resources, the prospects for boredom, economic misapprehensions and false extrapolations, accusations of hubris. The hubris thing always annoyed me - since when is it hubris to visit a doctor, to seek a cure for a medical condition, or to support medical research and better health?
I can't help but feel that many of the people opposed to healthy life extension simply don't like living all that much - why else would they want to die? Life is what you make of it; if you're not making anything of it, there's always the option to leave. But please let the rest of us attempt to improve things - medicine, science, longevity, the works - unmolested.
Or at least work on developing some new, un-debunked, non-disproven talking points with which to take your cheap shots at people attempting to better the human condition.
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