Opposites, Radical Life Extension at Catallarchy

A conversation on concepts and views of radical life extension - and the steps to get us there - is underway over at one of Catallarchy's opposite days:

Shaky analogies seem to abound. [Radical life extension] is not like a ladder to the moon, because there's demand for it - once you've admitted that it's a tractable engineering problem and that people would pay a lot to get it, you're basically only quibbling over the timeline. [Radical life extension] is also not like [general artificial intelligence], because our understanding of intelligence is nowhere near our understanding of cellular biology - and I think you'd be hard pressed to contend that the former isn't a much harder problem than the latter.

In any case, you put the question correctly, almost: "whether we know enough now about human biology ... and have the technology or some outline of a possible realistic future technology to 'defeat' mortality." The only thing that's wrong with this is that last part. We don't need to "defeat" mortality in the next 60 years, just push it back far enough that some people alive now will then live long enough to see the day when it is effectively "defeated." It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical that this will happen for people alive today, but it's also unreasonable to dismiss the possibility out of hand.

Make sure you read the lengthy comments, and feel free to dive in with your own thoughts on the matter. It is very gratifying to see more people intelligently discussing actuarial escape velocity, squashing the ever-dreadful Tithonus error along the way. As more folk talk around the issue, knee-jerk, mistaken viewpoints will fade and diminish as obstacles to advocates and fundraisers. Education is important for efforts to generate large-scale funding for anti-aging research, and like almost all important things, it works so much more effectively as a distributed, self-organizing process.

I rather look forward to the day when the cultural conversation on healthy life extension has grown so large and enthused that I could lay down this keyboard and no-one would really notice. We've a way to go yet, but that day is much closer than it was even a few short years ago.

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