1) You are putting words in my mouth. I never said that. My stance on this is that if the new problems aren't bigger than the problems we have now of having about 150k people die each day, mostly after long periods of suffering, affecting whole families and losing humanity lots of knowledge and expertise, draining our resources into losing battles against diseases that are fatal, then we should do this. Everybody's already in favor of curing other diseases, so why not those of aging? It is also not up to us to decide for everybody that this shouldn't be developed (you can make a personal choice to refuse such therapies of you want - and we might have to chose between low birth rates or high death rates), just like if the creators of hygiene, antibiotics, better crops, vaccines, or whatever had decided that they shouldn't do what they did because "it might have bad consequences". Our current world is very different from the world a thousand years ago, and I'd rather live now. Maybe in a 100 years we'll look back and think that it was such a waste that young people died at 80, like we now think that dying at 40 is terrible (but it was common once upon a time).
2) Please be specific about what you think is "stupendously bad engineering". Thanks.
First off, I plead guilty to putting words in your mouth. My comment was an accurate description of what annoys me; I leave it up to the reader to decide whether it's an accurate description of your agenda.
1) If there were no aging, everybody would most likely spend all of their time playing WoW and never leaving the house for fear of being hit by a bus. All of those slogans about how life is short become pretty impotent when it's actually not.
2) In engineering we generally make incremental changes to society, test them and either back away from them or put in place feedback mechanisms to keep them in check. "Wouldn't it be great if we abolished death by natural causes (and everything else stayed exactly the same)" is about as far as you can get from this. See Billy Vaughn Koen, Discussion of the Method, pp. 233-236.
1) I don't think that argument has much weight. Considering how little healthy people think about death, and how the incredible extension of the average lifespan didn't seem to have catastrophic effects like that, I doubt we'd turn into some kind of sci-fi distopia where everybody doesn't do anything. You live one day at a time, and if you are healthy and like your life today, you'll want to live tomorrow. And so on. Doesn't matter if it's for 40 years, 80 years, or 120 years. Most people who say they want to die are frail, sick and suffering, and what they want is not death per se, but for the pain to stop. You don't see many healthy 20-30 years old wish for death unless they suffer from severe depression. The cliché about "death gives meaning to life" is just rationalization, trying to convince ourselves that something we think is inevitable is actually a good thing. But if there was no death from the diseases of aging, we certainly wouldn't invent it or miss it, just like we wouldn't invent smallpox or malaria.
2) I'm calling it the engineering approach because that's what it is (http://sens.org/sens-research/what-is-sens/engineering-solut...) as opposed to the gerontology approach or the geriatry approach. It is about simply repairing damage, the same way you maintain a vintage car or an old house for 10x longer than it was designed to last without necessarily having to understand exactly how that damage is created (by metabolism or physical and chemical reactions, etc), and without having to know how to cure all diseases (you repair damage before it becomes a pathology).
If you want to learn more about the biology and details of the proposals I'm talking about, check out the links I posted in other comments here. They have detailed plans for the 7 types of damages that accumulate from the operation of metabolism. Otherwise, your criticisms aren't specific, you are just attacking a vague idea of what you think this is about.
2) Please be specific about what you think is "stupendously bad engineering". Thanks.