I don't know Callahan's religious background, but I'd be curious to know if he believes in an afterlife. I'm both a libertarian and an atheist. While my support for the right of others to develop and use radically life-extending therapies is rooted in my libertarianism, my desire to use these therapies myself is rooted in my atheism.

Where will you put them, what will you feed them, and what on Earth will they be doing with their time once they've aged out of their chosen professions under your term limits?

I don't want to die, and I don't want those I care about to die, but I can see no functional world without death. Indeed, most of the hysteria that plays out in our culture as agressive self-righteousness is an unexplored fear of death.

Sign me up for another 200 years.

I'm having fun.

And, although I'm a theist and all, I agree with my Dad: "I think there's a heaven, but lacking verifiable reports, I'm not that eager to test the matter."

I gather there was a rather dour Greek myth on the subject

I have never heard anyone say it is a tragedy that Socrates, Shakespeare, George Washington, and Albert Einstein died and are no longer with us.

Over Christmas, I was reading David McCullough's "John Adams."

That got me to thinking about an idea for a movie wherein George and Martha Washington (or possibly Thomas Jefferson) get transported forward to the present time shortly after his first inauguration.

How would they react to the present social, technological, and political situations? It led me to thinking about the plot line of what Washington could do in 2008? And it led me to realize he'd be a helluva president even today. (I wonder if he'd be interested?)

P.S. If anyone from Hollywood is reading this, feel free to run with it. As Michelangelo said (to Shakespeare, in Monty Python's Beethoven skit), "Don't worry, I won't sue."

I think what they mean is for countries not like the U.S. For example, Castro has pretty much given up in Cuba, and death can't be far off. He was only in power for 30 years, and, frankly, we couldn't wait for him to kick the bucket.

I agree that this would be more of a problem in totalitarian states. However, some conservatives argue that it would be a problem even in the US and other democracies. See Diana Schaub's contribution to this same symposium. As for Castro and other dictators, I would hope that we can deal with them in other ways - without foregoing life extension for all the rest of us.

Where will you put them, what will you feed them, and what on Earth will they be doing with their time once they've aged out of their chosen professions under your term limits?

The term limits I suggested are for powerful leadership positions, not for all jobs. Leaders who are term-limited out of their current positions will have lots of other career options, just as ex-presidents, ex-governors, ex-university presidents and law school deans, and others currently subject to term limits do today. Moreover, if a complete career switch were necessary, a person who could live for hundreds of years would find it much easier to do it than one with today's lifespan. If you expect to live another several centuries, getting a second or third graduate degree would be a worthwhile investment. Not so for most people who live to be 70 or 80.

About a century ago, influenza was sometimes called the old man's friend. Of course, the old men in question would have been debilitated to some extent. I have not idea whether it reflected a common notion or an aberrant outlook or something in between.

As for ancient life spans, barring trauma and disease, there was no reason a person could not live to seventy years in the first century of this era. But disease and trauma ended most lives well before they reached that age. We have not greatly increased health-span so much as we have greatly reduced that factors that have ended life prematurely.

Social Security is already in serious, possibly unfixable trouble. Imagine how ingrained it will become when the elderly are a majority.

If healthspan could be increased, those "elderly" people would be more than capable of continuing to work and supporting themselves. Even if they could not, the result might well be beneficial, since it would put pressure on the federal govt to cut Social Security benefits (at least for the nonpoor) and give people more of an incentive to save for their own retirements.

This is the Akallabêth all over again. You people need to read more Tolkien:

But the King said: 'And does not Eärendil, my forefather, live? Or is he not in the land of Aman?'

To which they answered: 'You know that he has a fate apart, and was adjudged to the Firstborn who die not; yet this also is his doom that he can never return again to mortal lands. Whereas you and your people are not of the Firstborn, but are mortal Men as Ilúvatar made you. Yet it seems that you desire now to have the good of both kindreds, to sail to Valinor when you will, and to return when you please to your homes. That cannot be. Nor can the Valar take away the gifts of Ilúvatar. The Eldar, you say, are unpunished, and even those who rebelled do not die. Yet that is to them neither reward nor punishment, but the fulfilment of their being. They cannot escape, and are bound to this world, never to leave it so long as it lasts, for its life is theirs. And you are punished for the rebellion of Men, you say, in which you had small part, and so it is that you die. But that was not at first appointed for a punishment. Thus you escape, and leave the world, and are not bound to it, in hope or in weariness. Which of us therefore should envy the others?"

And the Númenóreans answered: 'Why should we not envy the Valar, or even the least of the Deathless? For of us is required a blind trust, and a hope without assurance, knowing not what lies before us in a little while. And yet we also love the Earth and would not lose it.'

Then the Messengers said: 'Indeed the mind of Ilúvatar concerning you is not known to the Valar, and he has not revealed all things that are to come. But this we hold to be true, that your home is not here, neither in the Land of Aman nor anywhere within the Circles of the World. And
the Doom of Men, that they should depart, was at first a gift of Ilúvatar. It became a grief to them only because coming under the shadow of Morgoth it seemed to them that they were surrounded by a great darkness, of which they were afraid; and some grew wilful and proud and would not yield,
until life was reft from them. We who bear the ever-mounting burden of the years do not clearly understand this; but if that grief has returned to trouble you, as you say, then we fear that the Shadow arises once more and grows again in your hearts. Therefore, though you be the Dúnedain, fairest of Men, who escaped from the Shadow of old and fought valiantly against it, we say to you: Beware! The will of Eru may not be gainsaid; and the Valar bid you earnestly not to withhold the trust to which you are called, lest soon it become again a bond by which you are constrained. Hope rather that in the end even the least of your desires shall have fruit. The love of Arda was set in your hearts by Ilúvatar, and he does not plant to no purpose. Nonetheless, many ages of Men unborn may pass ere that purpose is made known; and to you it will be revealed and not to the Valar.'

"The years of our days are three score years and ten, or if by reason of strength they are four score years..."; in other words, that long before modern medicine, people died of old age at around 75.

Presumably the KJV's editors knew how long people lived and were comfortable with this assertion.

Yes, if you were VERY lucky and everything went right (you didn't die of famine, infectious disease, etc.), you could live to be 75 back in the ancient world. If you're similarly lucky in the modern world, you can live to be 100. However, the vast majority of people were not so lucky, and so it was considered perfectly natural for most people to be dead by the time they were 35 or 40, as most in fact were until the 19th century.

I recently read of work by a biologist on the number of heartbeats in a lifetime. He said that most mammals live for 1.5 billion heartbeats. Small animals with very rapid heartbeats expire after 1.5 billion in a few years. Slower beating hearts last for more years. Humans, however, are getting about 2 billion.

I can't be the only one here who's read Vonnegut's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", can I?

Three score and ten was probably not bad guess for folks who had then lived to full adulthood and evaded the 50% chance of dying while young (whooping cough, diptheria, etc.), or of dying in early adulthood from warfare or complications of bearing children, etc. A person who made 40 in the pre antibiotic days had a decent chance of hitting 70, nevermind the majority who never made it that far.

I for one would give a lot to have had my father around, who grew up on the Arizona frontier and knew things that we moderns will never see (ranching, seeing the Hindenberg fly over the open frontier while sleeping outside an adobe shack, being in WWII, fighting racism), or my father in law (WWII, depression, and he was such a scholar in languages) or my former wife (mediieval studies, did dissertation based on studies in the Secret Archives of the Vatican). Their experiences make my own seem quite minor. Compare theirs to the experiences of so many that hardly seem to have earned the right to have been toddlers.

It is important that people like Callahan be allowed to die off of natural causes when that is their choice, and be prevented from forcing the rest of us to go along with him.

If people like Daniel Callahan think that their opinions will stop or even significantly slow down progress toward significantly longer lifespans, I think they're mistaken.

People like Aubrey de Grey and others will determine the rate of progress. This is just one more example of social conservatives trying to stop inexorable trends.

It is demonstrably false that life extension is good in and of itself. If I ask you for reasons to support your assertion of inherent goodness you will respond with other things that you consider good which are dependent upon being alive. Additionally, it is possible, even likely, that for some people living longer could be a burden. The only inherent good in extending life is forestalling death but in The Apology Socrates himself tells why we should not fear death.

There's also the potential Malthusian problem which would result from our birth rate continuing unabated while our death rate takes a dramatic downturn. It is Pollyannaish to aver that advancing technology would save us from ourselves.

Also, who is going to get these life extension treatments? Even if it is cheap enough that most Americans can afford it, over a billion people live on less than $1 a day and nearly three billion live on less than $2 a day. Most of the world's population will be denied life extension and you can bet that would become a huge source of resentment.

You wonder what great works would have been produced if people like Shakespeare and Einstein had lived longer but true creativity is a young person's game. Most scientists and mathematicians have all their original ideas by the time they are 30 and spend the rest of their careers either refining those ideas or resting on their laurels. Authors too frequently decline as they age. That has nothing to do with the decline of aging but is a result of the end of the development phase of the brain. Could we extend the development phase longer? Perhaps, but our longer brain development is thought to be associated with higher incidents of certain mental illnesses.

Very few people actually want to die but we should be wary that our understandable desire to live doesn't become greed and hubris.

K Parker

would there be any room for ... Arthur Miller
Yes, yes, go on--what of the downside?

The hazard of using examples, I guess.

For example, critics worry that without relatively short lifespans, there will be no generational succession in powerful leadership positions, and therefore important institutions might stagnate under leaders who have become moribund. I think that most such arguments are weak. The generational succession problem is easily addressed by instituting term limits for leadership positions - policies which already exist for many key offices in both the public and private sector, including the presidency.

Actually, there's a much simpler reply to this argument: Fine, if everyone lives ten times as long, then the same guys will be heading institutions for ten times as long. But my lifetime's longer. It balances out--if the leaders live ten times as long but I live ten times as long too, I'll be seeing as much change in leadership during a lifetime as I would without life extension.

By contrast, Callahan's argument really does represent a deep moral chasm between us. If taken seriously, it implies that little or no good was achieved by extending life expectancy from the "natural" average of 35 or 40 that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution to today's 75-80.

On the contrary, that does not follow from his argument, as the vast majority of that increase in average life expectancy was the dramatic decrease in infant and child mortality.

Rather than the problem of long-lived elders not making way for the next generation (a problem, true, but probably minor), I think the bigger issue would be the dramatic population explosion that would occur if people stopped dying but we still had as many children as we do now.

So, what you're saying is . . . the only reason we die . . . is because we accept it as an inevitability *waaaaahhhhhhhhh*

In a different direction: perhaps the "conservative" side here is sufficiently religious to believe in a rewarding afterlife. I don't know if I'm making a fair portrayal of Christian beliefs here, but if the important part of "life" is an everlasting existence in Heaven rather than its first part here on Earth, then indeed death after a reasonably good life is not such a great loss.

Nate F:

I can't be the only one here who's read Vonnegut's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", can I?

Very possibly you are. But since all of Vonnegut's novels can be summed up as "Oh, crap," we can pretty much guess how it goes.

I think there is something more to the aging process than just mere physical deterioration. There seems to be a psychological curve whereby people tend to get "set in their ways" so to speak.

My father, once an intelligent, savy man with an engineering degree, recently asked me how to rewind a dvd - as in, I just finished watching this movie and now I need to rewind it before I take it back to Blockbuster.

I'm amazed on this libertarian/conservative blog the large number of posters who have trouble conceiving of invisible hands, changing prices, and shifting market equilibriums as ways of dealing with most of the gradual changes that would accompany radical life extension.

So it seems that Ilya and most commentors concede a fundamental, if semantic ( I tend to think Rush Limbaugh's words matter maxim understates the obvious and I live by my own more redundant truism: semantics matter), difference between deGrey's effort and improved sanitation and prenatal nutrition. Thus I think it wrong to declare Callahan as opposed to those developments in the context of arguing about radical life extension, even if he quotes Seneca in the earlier context of the world at the dawn of the christian era.

This is only to say that while the same ethical questions arise, the answers might not be identical or metaphorically derived from the obvious demonstration the Malthus (and Lester Brown) were wrong about the dilemma's posed by increased population. But I largely tend to think the question also divides into one not raised by any commentors( at least in my skim of all the responses )- the extent to which government or coerced common effort might be enlisted in such an undertaking. This question supports a 'cui bono' inquiry. It is, of course, possible that private action might still beget envy, but that is true of many existing cultural institutions that have proven lasting and worthwhile despite breeding envy (property comes to mind).

I think it amply reasonable to argue that public funds or commitment to such a goal are questionable on many levels. As far as urging a public bar on private efforts in this vein, the arguments are weaker, verging on non-existant. But we have been lead through the stem cell debate and the whole man on the moon paradigm to believe that only government can do this kind of stuff - thus buying into the idea that a public ethical debate is controlling rather than informing of these efforts. DeGrey's purpose in this vision (and I haven't studied deGrey enough to know if this is personally true, I mean this as an actor in the paradigm I lay out) is simply to mainstream the concept of life extension research until government picks it up.

In the sphere of philosopohical discussion that might guide private action through prevailing in intellectual argument it is useful to have ethical concerns growing out of our nature as historically - that is to say conservatively understood. That Callahan seems to hold to an absolutist conviction in this arena does not illuminate the full range of conservative response to the question.

Malthus (and Lester Brown) would certainly have foresworn even the advances to date based on their understanding of science and the ethical dilemma they imagined in consequence of their predictions. But 'progress' - reasonably and somewhat universally recognized as such - has largely mooted their arguments. While the improvements of which we speak ubiquitously in the west have not disseminated to the entire world, the development of these technologies largely offer the prospect of their manifestation in virtually any society willing to abandon feudal envy.

My own ethical view is that the developed world that has benefited from these technologies does not owe their implementation to the developing world, but rather that it necessarily offers the less developed world a short cut to higher standards of living. The import of these technologies cannot be hidden. Just because it isn't up to the western world to erect cellphone towers and buy every earthly inhabitant a cellphone doesn't take away the two hundred year struggle from the invention of electrical telegraphy to the present day. Across the range of materials technology and invention these advances represent a beacon of the possible and attempts to reconcile a global regime of intellectual property, while subject to reasonable criticism -- Tom Palmer being a notable font, e.g. "Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified?: The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects," with who I nonetheless disagree on the ultimate conclusion of intellectual property -- are far from some kind of blight on the third world's taking up these innovations. Even if forced to pay 'western' prices, these prices are set in present markets with understanding of marginal costs for current technologies that largely supplant rather than pass on the costs of previous technolgies.

To the extent that this process has been ethically or otherwise transformative of the human experience, it has taken place under Burke's organic maxim of conservatism that suggests that the status quo is not the absolute of Callahan but still should be regarded as a literal inheritance not to be lightly disregarded or frivolously spent:

Thus by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.

This is a far cry from the hidebound ethos attributed to Callahan. Interestly, although Blade Doc suggests Callahan's opinion is regularly solicited by the "government" (don't know if this is a reference solely to the Bush administration or not) Callahan appears no where in this recent account of the central figures in the Bush Stem Cell decision.

It is certainly worth a read as, whether sanitized or not, it suggests a decision making process far more in line with Burke than Callahan.

Finally, I am slightly perplexed by another anonVCfan's suggestion that aethism motivates his desire to use these life extending technologies. While the simplistic level scan might suggest theists wanting to get to heaven earlier, e.g. suicide bombers and the numerous promised virgins, it is not clear why signficantly longer lifespans, per se, incompatible with a vision of afterlife or immaterial purpose. Indeed, suicide bombers deliberately check out early in some objection to current material conditions arguably mixed with the belief that significantly shortcutting the currently conceived reasonable lifespan will lead to immaterial gains, but they do so to -- in their minds -- improve the circumstance of the mortal coil for their compatriots who will continue to inhabit it to the fullness of thier days.

Don't know why the same logic wouldn't apply just because lifespans were longer. Infinite lifespan might pose a different challenge as Tolkien and Vonnegut reasonably reflect, but that seems an outlier to the current discussion.

And for those interested in continuing the discussion on the role of aethism, I want to retract my concurrence with the logic of the proposition that: "atheism is a religion the same way not collecting stamps is a hobby".

That is only so if aethism is conceived as believing there is no evidence of a god, but the concept is largely defined as believing there is no god. The former conception of atheism is compatible with the aforementioned aphorism but not the latter. It depends a bit upon one's definition of religion at that point but the call is much closer.

Brian

Socrates is a particularly bad example, since his martyrdom to socialism is his main claim to fame

Now that's just silly. Socrates was famous enough during his lifetime to be satirized by Aristophanes in the Clouds. But the point that life-extension technology wouldn't have helped him still stands.

Sophocles, for a better example, not only lived to ninety, but was still writing great plays when he died: according to one story, when his son tried to have him declared incompetent to manage his own property, he defended himself by reciting bits of the not-yet-finished Oedipus at Colonus (which was only performed posthumously).

Oh, and the Greek myth someone referred to is that of Tithonus: but his problem was being given eternal life without eternal youth -- without increased healthspan, so to speak. So he just kept becoming older and more decrepit eternally, until, if I remember right, he became a grasshopper.

People are notoriously bad at predicting the effects a new technology will have.

When Bell was demonstrating the telephone, there was much skepticism about the need for the contraption. One person however, seemed to get it. He was very impressed and said that he could imagine the day when every town would have a phone.

When Whitney invented the cotton gin, did anyone predict what it would lead to?

How about the tranistor? Or the turing machine? There's alot of science fiction and distopian fiction that includes a centralized supercomputer (ala the mainframe). No-one anticipated the effect that wide networking would have.

Ilya may be right about what would happen to social security and tenure. More likely, he is wrong. With a technology that goes so deeply into the heart of the way that people live, the only thing that I'm sure of is that no-one can accurately predict the effects that it might have on societies.

Porkchop: As I recall, it was pneumonia that had that distinction, because it caused a relatively painless death.

Since I was quite certain in my memory that "old man's friend" described influenza, I Googled it. First ten references were to pneumonia. Porkchop gets the point.

Something that people favoring life extension need to deal with is that the quest for eternal life on Earth has been a source of evil in countless stories, fables and in reality. Callahan's arguments are mute in a way, if we suddenly had a 200 year life-span, the world would adapt. But what is considered evil is making life-extension the primary goal.

I suggest renting the movie Groundhog Day. It deals with the topic of the meaning of life.

Finally, what could render the whole argument mute is space colonization. I don't see how we get one without the other, actually, what depends is the order. If life-extension came first, there would eventually be overpopulation leading to a violent confrontation between those who wish to procreate and those who wish to stop them. Will men be willing to die for eternal life?

I favor deGray's research by the way, in case the above questioning leads you to beleive otherwise.

I'd love to live longer, and I think the effects of life-extension technology will be on balance good. But I think "term limits" are a weak answer to the fear that hidebound elders will hoard leadership positions. As I've sometimes heard it expressed, the worry is not just about well-defined institutional positions, but also in general strong concentrations of power and influence which may give their holders gatekeeper abilities in one or more spheres of society. Regardless of how it's constituted, the "old-boy network" may be that much harder to break into when its members have been in it an order of magnitude longer; etc.

And, accumulating such a concentration of power and influence may be correspondingly more attractive (and hence deliberately sought-after) when you can expect to live much longer. Spending a few decades installing yourself as dictator-for-life in a banana republic has an iffy payoff now, when you can only expect to enjoy the position for a few decades afterwards. But with 10 times more life?

And retrofitting term limits on existing institutional positions, once it becomes clear (to whom?) that lifetime positions are a problem, may be no trivial task. The benefits of a longer lifespan in the same position are highly concentrated, the costs to society quite diffuse.

Excercise for the reader: outline the effects of the first notably successful advances to be widely referred to as "healthspan-extension" technogies on next supreme court confirmation debate after their introduction.

Two questions:

1.) When I'm 499 years old, am I still going to be able make it occasionally with a gorgeous 19 year old redhead in the back of my Chevy Van (or anywhere else)? And if not, then what the Hell is the point of being alive?

2.) Isn't the 'tragedy' [sic] of not having Washington, Einstein, etc. around more than offset by the benefit of not having Stalin, Mao, etc.?

1.) When I'm 499 years old, am I still going to be able make it occasionally with a gorgeous 19 year old redhead in the back of my Chevy Van (or anywhere else)? And if not, then what the Hell is the point of being alive?

The only realistic way for people to live to 499 years is by remaining reasonably young and healthy for 499 years. Since it is organ failure which brings "death of old age", living for centuries in a failing body is an oxymoron. So the answer is: yes, you will still be able to make out occasionally with a gorgeous 19 year old -- or more often, with a healthy 219 year old who could pass for today's 39 year old.

2.) Isn't the 'tragedy' [sic] of not having Washington, Einstein, etc. around more than offset by the benefit of not having Stalin, Mao, etc.?

Stalin and Mao could do what they did because people believed in them. People living indefinitely will have much less need "to be part of something bigger than themselves", which is what makes Stalins and Maos possible in the first place.

Isaac Asimov contemplated what would happen when people have several-century life spans. In his stories, the people gradually stopped taking risks, became extreme germ-phobic, and their societies stagnated.

David Drake:
Really? Not even Aristotle?

If people lived to 200, many would not move out of their parents' home until their 40s or 50s. The resulting increase in the murder rate would eliminate any worries of a population explosion.

Duh, it's fiction. But the premise is plausible. Once life gets REALLY long, will people be willing to take the same risks they do now when young?

This is great in the abstract but think of millions of senior citizens clogging busy highways while the poor wage slaves who are going to have every last penny sucked out of their paycheck are trying to get back and forth to their snetences - I mean jobs - I'm with Lisa Simpson on this one - when Homer becomes Death and she has him in for career day - 'He performs a valuable service in the community'

"Our children and grandchildren need us to die and get out of the way so that they can take their turn."

This presumes a zero sum game where there are a fixed number of opportunities, and people have to wait their turn. History doesn't agree. Look at the number of opportunitis availble in the US in 1900. Compare that to the number available in 2000. There was a vast increase. Why should the number become static? At what point would it stop growing?

David Drake:

When philosophy makes advances, it stops being philosophy and becomes something else. Remember, Newton et. al. were natural philosophers. Anyone thinking about the brain and mind pre-Freud was a philosopher, but not anymore (although whether the psychologists are scientists may be debatable). Same goes for logic and math.

What's left for philosophy are the riddles. And yes, there isn't much advancement on riddles.

At best, any of us reading this can be of last generation that knew people who died. As a non-Atheist (actually the only belief that matters here is that there is something beyond this world) there are already quite a few people (two of whom I last saw in 2007) that I'm looking forward to seeing again after I die.

To avoid the problem of a declining death rate, I propose we execute all those who want to prevent me from obtaining life-extending technology. I know this probably won't fix the "problem" as they see it, but it would raise this question:

If I live to 200 and nary a bioethicist is alive to complain, have I still commited an ethical violation?

Also, who is going to get these life extension treatments? Even if it is cheap enough that most Americans can afford it, over a billion people live on less than $1 a day and nearly three billion live on less than $2 a day. Most of the world's population will be denied life extension and you can bet that would become a huge source of resentment.

Isn't there already a huge disparity in life expectancy and quality of life? I guess I don't understand how this changes the dynamic much.

Extending life expectancy would greatly decrease my aversion to economic risk and greatly increase my aversion to risk of bodily harm.

If I knew I could live to 500 barring accidental death or disease, I'd almost never travel in a car above 35 mph, or require greatly increased safety equipment.

I've seen this attitude often enough over the years that it no longer surprises me, but it still shocks me. Who _wouldn't_ want to live for centuries or millennia? I want to see the future, dammit. And there's only one way to do that. The Malthusian arguments leave me cold; we've seen them punctured by reality too many times (cities waist deep in horse ****, worldwide starvation, etc).

Sure there will be problems. It's not like today's world runs smoothly, and the past sure had problems. But why is it that so many people seem to get so scared by the idea of living indefinitely? Because that's what we're talking about. Everyone will still die eventually, from accidents or illness or homicide--but barring those things, you will no longer be burdened with a "use by" date.

The biotechnology advances that cure aging will also allow for robust regeneration (regrowth of limbs, etc) from accidents and what not. So, there will be no reason for increase physical risk aversion any more than financial risk aversion.

The people who question the personal desire to live an idefinitely long youthful lifespan simply lack the imagination to live "outside the box" (e.g. I lived as expat in Asia for 10 years, I do not live the conventional life-cycle life).

As for resources, this is a joke. There is nothing here than technologicla innovation and free markets cannot solve. Its a matter of imagination. Besides, creative minds are the only real resource and the only way this can be wasted is by not using them.

I wrote:

People like Aubrey de Grey and others will determine the rate of progress. This is just one more example of social conservatives trying to stop inexorable trends.

"Dangermouse" responds:

Ah yes, the argument that "this is inevitable so quit your griping."

I don't mind if people like Daniel Callahan "gripe." I don't think he's good for much else. Again, this is in contrast to people like Aubrey de Grey who are actually working to solve problems.

Nice use of the word "progress" there too, to describe a dehumanizing mechanization of nature.

Heh, heh, heh! Yeah, it's "dehumanizing" to work, as Aubrey de Grey is doing, to allow humans to live healthy lives for many more decades than they currently do. To preserve healthy human life is "dehumanizing." The Ministry of Truth has spoken.

If the technology is granted to everyone on the planet, then suicides will radically increase as people find their lives to be without meaning. Go ahead and say I'm wrong, but even if you can extend human life, you can't change human nature.

Not only will I say you're wrong, I'll say you don't have a clue about human nature. (But I'll bet you've got elves, dwarfs, and orcs down pat!) Tell me, what percentage of people over 70, 80, 90, or 100, who are in good health, commit suicide because they "find their lives to be without meaning?" Perhaps if you read less fiction and more non-fiction, you'd know a little bit more about how the world actually works.

As for the rest: contracts to say how long a person would live? Did any of you learn ANYTHING in law school?

No, I didn't learn ANYTHING in law school, because I didn't go to law school. I'm an engineer. I'm not a lawyer. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. ;-))

Lawyers can be so stupid sometimes.

Yes, everyone can be so stupid sometimes. Even "dangermice."

If anyone of you egomaniacs actually gets the technology to extend their life, would YOU adhere to such a contract? Oh, I'm sure when your contractually appointed time arises, extenuating circumstances will arise...

Yes, it's true that people who reached 200 would probably want to live even longer. (It appears even you don't believe your own nonsense about old people killing themselves because they see their lives to be without meaning.)

I raise the scenario of a binding contract to commit suicide at age 200 if one has 2 children simply to show how trivial the "overpopulation problem" is. I'll bet most people would be willing to give their right arm (literally) to live to be 200 today. So all this fuss about the "overpopulation problem" could be solved simply by limiting people to 2 children and 200 years old...if the "problem" even is found to exist in the future.

Modern eugenics brings out all the freaks, I guess.

An interesting comment from a man who posts under the name "DangerMouse," and quotes ad nauseum from Lord of the Rings.

Welcome to 2008, "DangerMouse." Try reading some non-fiction this year. ;-) (I recommend Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near.")

Callahan isn't a conservative, at least as that term is usually used in American politics. He's a liberal Democrat. That's how Leon Kass got away with bringing him to the White House when Bush asked to hear a different political perspective on stem cells. Of course, in this case, the conservative Republican (Kass) and the liberal Democrat (Callahan) think the same way. Left and right aren't very useful categories.

OK, so now i've read the CATO debate in its entirety and I was right to expect that the 'libertarians' as such are somewhat euphemistic about who would pay for all this. Ironically one of the 'pro-mortalists' (who believes in the grandeur of such government projects as NASA) is the only one to address the issue and the very final comment so there was, unfortunately, no response from Bailey or de Grey.

excerpts are in order from the debate and despite de Grey's putative appeal for mutliple $25,000 charitable contrib utions to his effort, there seems to be little question that he is trying to create a statist appeal for his project and see it taken on by government.

Aubrey DeGrey:

... they point to the clear consensus of public statements of biogerontologists, which indeed centers on the feasibility of modest life extension but the infeasibility of defeating aging. When reminded that biogerontologists would say that, wouldn’t they (since they are funded mainly by taxpayers, who suffer from the pro-aging trance that conservative bioethicists work so hard to perpetuate), they reply that the existence of bad reasons to say something doesn’t imply the non-existence of valid reasons.

When thoroughly cornered on the question of whether the defeat of aging would be a good thing, geronto-apologists generally turn as a last resort to the cry “Okay, but first things first!” The fact that efforts to postpone human aging will definitely not bear much fruit for at least a few decades is held as a reason to deprioritize such efforts in favor of combating already preventable problems.

In his opening essay, de Grey suggests derisively that biogerontologists who throw cold water on his ideas are all largely in the employ of government. It seems to me then that he should be seeking to dissociate medical advances from the state if he thinks the state brings a jaundiced eye to the problem, Instead he makes euphemistic appeal to alter collectivist priorities. But no one is forcing de Grey to alter his own priorities, he simply is not being afforded a state funded Manhattan Project to accomplish them.


Diana Schaub:

I must admit that I don’t find persuasive de Grey’s attempt to silence potential doubters and dissenters by brandishing the specter of age-discrimination and insisting on “our duty.” If the powerful desire for self-preservation, coupled with the fear of death, is not enough to fill the anti-aging ranks, I don’t think calls to duty will do it.

I think Schaub is correct to deride claims of duty and discrimination as some kind of argumentation in favor of life extension as a statist prerogative.

Ron Bailey:

Frankly, I am not persuaded by the implied argument that everyone must continue to die before age 100 in order to avoid the possibility of millennial tyrants. Must we really surrender to the tyranny of aging and death in order to prevent human despotism? Wouldn’t a better strategy be to focus on preventing the emergence of tyrants, either of the short- or long-lived variety?

I'm not sure, given our general lack of success in 'free nation' building that longer lifespans would augur better results. I think a stronger argument is the specter of longer subjugation could be thought to breed a stonger will to resist tyrrany but I do think it is a reasonable fear that the enormous power gulf in tyrranical circumstances would be difficult to overcome even with increase motivations - although it is largely unlikely that the loosers in life's tyrrany lottery would be able to avail themselves of medical treatments to prolong age anyway.

Dan Callahan

Healthy, affluent people even now usually want to retire from work, not continue indefinitely, and poor people whose work is drudgery want it even more. But they would be forced to continue working unless society and their children were prepared to support them for hundreds of years.

I think this is useful criticism and subtlely different from the point that current social security is not up to the task of our own lifetimes never mind radically extended ones. Many commentors on this thread have been quite pollyannish about their economic, educational and leisure prospects under radically extended lifetimes but seem somewhat vague on how they expect the new economy to pay for all the leisure preoccupations they imagine, e.g. Guest 101:

If I could plan my life in terms of centuries rather than decades, I'd put off having children for another 30 or 40 years and go back to college for another decade or two to learn about all of the things that interest me but that I've never had time to study formally, interspliced with quite a bit of travel and living abroad.

While the upper middle class has done a pretty good job of epitomizing the very lifestyle described in this quote, I don't think the evidence holds that all those working in service industries can afford the same approach. I'm not suggesting that is right or wrong, but it is pretty easy to imagine what a wonderful thing radically extended life would be for those who create and retain a measure of wealth, but for those with lesser prospects, I think Callahan's cautions - especially about the ubiquitous or universal appeal - of life more or less without end is a worthy point. It might be that life extending would be a function of economic success and so this would be a non-issue. That in turn creates a wider class gulf. This is possibly not insurmountable. We have class divisions already and plenty of sellf-haters who are quite happy to be of the upper economic strata while complaining about it. I don't see the class argument as any kind of bar to life extension but simply almost a necessary outgrowth of a belief that such technology would not be universal (albeit marginal costs of some innovations could make them available across a wider economic spectrum) and that even should prolongation cut across class divisions more than I imagine, the economy will not produce equal results in terms of living standard and leisure for beneficiaries of these technologies. I just don't think you can argue away general questions of the psychological impacts of perceiving somewhat eternal drudgery as the rewards of 21st century medicine by suggesting it will be cured by tourism.

Aubrey Degrey:

It is trivial to outline any number of ways in which the structure of the economy could be adjusted to maintain turnover of personnel within a given industry by sufficiently incentivizing retraining and adult education.

So, in answer to these concerns de Grey proposes statist mucking about with the economy-- alright not explicitly -- but if he doesn't propose explicitly that the invisible hand will take care of it, it is difficult to read "restructuring" as some emergent or self actualizing expectation on his part. Rather this is an appeal to government recalibration. Perhaps one can make the case that the necessary recalibrations would more likely be market friendly than not, although I don't see that on the surface. As it is now, government seems to think it is their responsibility to send every neer do well to college. IF we need periodic retraining, is it somehow imagined that reference to restructuring to acheive that is envisaged not to dwell upon the perceived statist place in education and "incentivizing retraining". It is not logically inconceivable that industries looking for new blood could provide the incentives, but language like incentivizing in our present discourse means government almost by definition.

Ron Bailey:

The fact of near-ubiquitous human yearning for longer healthier lives should serve as a preliminary warrant for pursuing age-retardation as a moral good.

But to whom is it a warrant. Again, a warrant implies a duty to act in accord with it usually by a government actor. Without defining this, Ron is placing himself, willy, nilly, amongst those who want to shift the priorities of the National Institute of Health towards publicly funded research in this area. If this is really whay Ron means he ought to say so, e.g., 'if we're going to have the government funding all our basic medical research, it is a potentially inefficient or ethical fault in reverse to fail to seriously include de Grey's approach amongst the major batttles funded. If his concern is really for as yet untendered legislation to bar such research, I would certainly be interested to know, but I am left in the dark.

Diana Schaub:

Ronald Bailey closes his reaction essay by accusing a group of “well-meaning and intelligent people” (thank you, Ron) of wanting “to stop biomedical research.” So far as I know, no one has called for a ban or moratorium on anti-aging research. I know I did not. There are types of biomedical research that I regard as morally wrong (for instance, research that exploits vulnerable classes of human beings for the benefit of other, usually more privileged, human beings); however, I would not put anti-aging research in that category. If folks want to respond to the Methusaleh Foundation’s passing of the plate and become one of The 300 (whose $25,000 commitment will “beat back not just an army, but the Grim Reaper himself”) that is their business. For my charitable dollars, I would prefer to remedy the malnutrition and childhood diseases that deprive so many of their full “three score and ten.” These are scourges that we have some hope of beating back. For my health-care tax dollars as well, my vote would go to the urgent and the doable. (This is not to say that there is no place for noble and daring government-funded undertakings such as the space program.) Refusing to put my money in the pocket of messianic immortality-seekers does not constitute an attempt “to stop biomedical research.”

This seems to be the most libertarianly cogent argument in the whole piece and it is delivered by the pro-mortalist Schaub -- albeit I'm not saying I think the pro-mortalist position falls on the libertarian or alibertarian side of the ledger -- but de Grey strikes me as no libertarian. Further there are statist consequences to the general approach that might not be fatal but should be acknowledged, e.g. James Huges, executive director of the Institue for Ethics in Emerging Technologies uses de Grey's work to argue for universal health care of the government voucher or single payer model in his socialist utopian take Cover Everyone and Cure Aging: Counterintuitive answers to healthcare inflation

Universal healthcare systems and antiaging medicine are precisely the means by which we can control healthcare spending in the coming decades, ensure top quality health care, and keep our parents and ourselves alive.

I would love to live a hell of a long time and don't worry much about the prospect of filling a millenial existence but I would be damn careful in promoting my interest to dissociate myself from an attempt to get 'society' to take up the cause. Hughes embrace of de Grey makes me think about a slight change to the old aphorism along the lines of

"The friend of me enemy is ....."

another anonVCfan:

read and acknowledged, but I think it is actually not correct to say that they are promortalist simply because they offer arguments for consideration in opposition to societal/government commitment to de Grey's ideas. Rather I think they are saying to pro-infinites, go ahead and do it and we'll consider the consequences as the emerge and see if we'll jump on the bandwagon. One supposes that if there were then serious consequences in the eyes of some they might actually proposed to ban certain aspects of the approach, but they don't appear to be proposing any prior restraint.


Brian

Curing human aging will save 100,000 people a day from dying at the end of a period of prolonged suffering. Will saving this many people create other problems? Maybe, maybe not.

But the onus is squarely and firmly on those opposed to saving the lives of old people to give me a rock-solid argument why we should not pursue these therapies as fast as possible. I have yet to see it.

These 'ethical' debates are important to raise awareness of Aubrey's work and the goals of the Methuselah Foundation, but the reality is that these technologies WILL ultimately happen. The relevant discussion is WHEN.

Will the therapies to reverse and end human aging be here for us, our parents, our children, or our children's children? The answer largely depends on the resources and will we apply towards developing them. Every day we debate and delay we lose another 100K lives to the diseases of aging.

Well I for one am not going to debate the inevitable but will instead do what I can to bring the future here as soon as possible. I urge those of you in agreement to join me in supporting Aubrey and the Methuselah Foundation. If you don't want to donate your money, consider taking my YouTube challenge and donating some of mine.

I do not want to live forever, nor for an extended period. I will cheerfully die soon if I can die for a worthwhile cause.

One possible worthwhile cause is killing those greedy egomaniacs who wish to live and smugly lord it over the earth for extended periods.

I am willing to die for MY belief, but those who want to live forever obviously cannot be expected to die for THEIR belief.

I do not see anything but failure for the cowards wanting to die a thousand deaths for a thousand years while the brave taste of death but once.

"I am willing to die for MY belief, but those who want to live forever obviously cannot be expected to die for THEIR belief."

Sounds like a win-win istuation.

Ilya Somin:

"Yes, if you were VERY lucky and everything went right (you didn't die of famine, infectious disease, etc.), you could live to be 75 back in the ancient world. If you're similarly lucky in the modern world, you can live to be 100. However, the vast majority of people were not so lucky, and so it was considered perfectly natural for most people to be dead by the time they were 35 or 40, as most in fact were until the 19th century."

To supplement Herb Sorenson's comment about Roman mortality, life expectancy in 18c England at birth was 30-40 years, but a 15-year-old had a 50 percent chance of living into their 60s and a 25 percent chance of living into their 70s. So statements like "it was considered perfectly natural for most people to be dead by the time they were 35 or 40" are highly misleading.

The most significant change in mortality has been the virtual disappearance of childhood mortality after age 1. Once it was common for children to be swept away by epidemics; today, if everyone had the mortality rate of an 11-year-old, life expectancy would be several thousand years.

Changes to adult life expectancy have been marked but not revolutionary. Then, you might well reach 70, but probably not; now, you probably will, but it's hardly a certainty. Then, it was rare to be healthy and active in your 80s; now, it's merely uncommon.