I’ve been excited for about the past 5 years, because it seems like there’s some potential options that will become available within our lifetimes for slowing or even reversing aging.
I don’t think that it’s going to be the ethical dilemma people think. People in the first world are reproducing less and less anyway, and so the growth in the number of people is slowing. I expect that if people knew they could live for much longer, there would be a lesser need to reproduce quickly. The economic discussion over importing a bunch of people relies on the fact that most old people aren’t contributing to society any longer and need specific help to live, so if we could snap them back to their prime, suddenly a huge burden is removed from the world economy, and a huge benefit of an entire workforce of experienced people of all kinds are re-activated.
I’d be really interested in seeing the effects on intellectual thought: Imagine you get a bunch of people with the wisdom of an elder and the powerful mind of a teenager. Rejuvinated learning ability and memory and raw processing power, paired with a pre-existing data set. It could lead to a new enlightenment.
I agree, it is quite exciting. I am particularly interested by the fact that a lot of the research that is going on appears to suggest that there might be some “low-tech” solutions to aging. If this happens to be the case, then this is something that will be accessible to most people regardless of wealth and social status. The alternative - high tech solutions - could have a controlled supply such that only the selected few elite members are able to access them.
