Better That Billions Suffer and Die than We Have to Even Slightly Rearrange Our Lives
From the Huffington Post, an example of ill-thought opposition to working to defeat the suffering and death caused by aging: "Rapid turnover is nature's way of making sure that a species can keep up with changing circumstances and survive the long haul. But since humans have gone beyond basic biology, why not re-engineer ourselves for a lifetime without an end point? Or at least for one where we outlast the Roman Empire? Well, it turns out there are problems... even beyond the tedium of boorish men. Let me first state that if we can pull this off - cure death - it's self-evident that we'll also obliterate the debilities of aging. You'll be healthy to the end. Nonetheless, there are countless gotchas for any descendants that have made themselves as indestructible as zombies. First off, they'll need to engineer a major societal revamp. You can't have kids every two years forever: we don't have the real estate. And of course, marriages would have an expiration date. A myriad of other social structures would also have to be rejiggered: Imagine the frustration of waiting for a tenure slot at the local college which, even after millennia, is still stuffed with its original faculty. Other difficulties are neither obvious nor tractable. For example, today more than 30,000 Americans die annually on the roads. That means you have a 50 percent chance of being taken out in an auto accident if you live for 3,600 years. So if we extend our lifetimes to thirty or forty centuries, using a car becomes an existential threat. You won't do it."
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-shostak/living-forever-not-a-good_b_783958.html