Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

Summary of pro death arguments re: longevity progress

  Fairness
    Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)
    Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)

  Bad for society
    Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
    Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)
    Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
      Stop having kids
      Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
    Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)

  Bad for individual
    You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
    You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
    You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
    Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)

More people make more progress faster. I'm glad my parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without me in it. Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc, still alive and productive would be nice. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer sucks, we'll know 100 years from now, and decide then. First 220 year old in 2136 unless you know how to make one faster than 1 year per year? And that's if you added 120 years to a 100 year old person starting TODAY.

Man up, save your family, save yourself.

Disclaimer: I'm half way done with a book on this topic. Mail me if you're interested. Scivive on the most popular email service.

P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horribles comes true, even earlier.

Thanks so much. I don't know why news headline writers are so insistent on bullshit, when they could have taken a cue from you and said 'gene therapy increases mouse lifespans by 30%,' which would have been just as short and interesting but vastly more honest.

> Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)

Virtually every tech starts that way, though.

The societal upheaval of rich people getting smartphones a few years earlier is probably not something you can extrapolate to the societal upheaval from "you could live forever but you don't have enough money right now".

This is a bit of a straw man technique. You've framed the argument to suit your counterpoint.

To my knowledge no such report exists. The only answers you'll find will come from reading dozens of articles like this one over a long span of time, mixed with reading "primary sources" (put in quotes because as often as not those sources may be trying to sell you something).

While I am not qualified to put together a comprehensive report, I've been following this subject with some interest for a while, first as a skeptic, and now as someone who believes that not all of these people are completely full of hot air.

Even with my change of heart, I'd still bet against anything in your list other than crispr having any quantifiable impact on longevity in the next decade, and even then the first applications will be specific to particular age-related diseases.

Something resembling a more full "maintenance approach" to preventing aging and age-related disease may be within reach within 20 years, but I'd bet against that, too. Sticking my finger in the air and guessing, I'd say that such a complete overhaul of medicine is at least 50 years away. Although I should stipulate my guess is only that pessimistic because I'm biased towards thinking that such advances won't be made in my own lifetime because, hey, it rarely hurts to be a pessimist.