Yeah if people can live 1000 years they will probably become more risk adverse. I don't buy the argument at all; I think we'll end up with just as many elderly people --- or maybe even more person-years of infirm-but-not-dying. And while I don't think this has to be bad for society, I think it will be unless we fix a bunch of problems first.

The individualist myopia with all things life-extension is staggering.

I am not saying anything negative about life extension, I would love to avoid aging. Someone is going to be that cautious simply based on their personality. However, someone isn’t everyone more importantly even healthy 70 year olds are at increased risks.

Let’s push things to a 1,000,000,000 years theoretical lifespan. At that point freak accidents are extremely deadly. Essentially your arguing people will 1:1 become more cautious as lifespan increases. Further, that caution will make a difference, you can play it safe that’s not going to prevent terrorist bombings etc on those timescales.

I do agree there is a point where accidents will predominate, but one simple drug doesn't seem like something that would get us anywhere near that, no?

I agree and would be extremely excited if it added even 10%. On the other hand I also doubt people would stop speeding because a cheap drug extended healthy lifespan by say 10 years. It’s an obvious thing to take, but people don’t seem to care that much. Just look the effort it took to get people to use seatbelts.

It’s complicated depending on what we mean by slowing aging by 1/10th. Arguably it means the odds of death at age X are now the equivalent of the old odds of death from someone 1/10th your age. That’s the assumption I was working as a middle ground.

However, even if you take the most beneficial version where the odds of a heath issue killing someone by age X is the equivalent of dying from a health issue by 1/10th your age that doesn’t stop accidents. If your risk of car accident at age 30 is X the slowing aging by 1/10th still rolls that dice 10 times by the equivalent of 31. As such people’s odds of reaching the equivalent of 65 still drop as you slow aging.

On top of this stuff like smoking cares more about the number of years you smoked than your age. A 50 year old with 30 years of smoking isn’t that likely to die before 51. However, someone that started at 200 and tries to smoke for 300 years isn’t going to make it to 500.

Thanks for sharing this. I didn't think of what "slowing aging by 1/10th" meant either and the idea of "odds of death at age X are now what odds of death were at age X/10 for health reasons" is a good definition.