A few winters ago, I took a 20-year-old car into a shop. The guy who ran it diagnosed and fixed a problem the dealership had missed. I asked him about the status of the car. Well, he said, cars are like people. You can be in good shape for your age at 70, but that's not like being in good shape for your age at 30.
The noteworthy distinction is we can rebuild a car from scratch - a great many human "parts" are irreplaceable.
I hope we're really considering the effect of widespread longer life might have instead of barreling toward longevity - people living 10 years longer on average could have a pretty devastating effect on a lot of things. And I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but we should be really thinking about how we'd mitigate that impact.
Maybe we could stop freaking out about keeping birth rates high? "Devastating" carries a negative connotation. If the quality of life for that additional 10 years is good, I'd call it a positive. If it's 10 years hooked up to machines where your brain's working at half capacity, then yeah, that's a negative.
Well, if it turns out to be such a big problem, then we can just kill everyone at a specific age.
That's sarcasm, of course, but IMHO saying that we shouldn't prolong life because of possible consequence X is morally exactly equal to saying that we should kill old people to avoid that consequence X.
For every X, either X really is so bad that it's worth killing people for it; or X shouldn't be considered as a valid argument against longevity.
Could you give an example of how to be proactive as such? I agree that being prepared is good, but I don't personally know enough about old-age care / geriatrics / Social Security to really be in favor of or against any particular policy changes.
> people living 10 years longer on average could have a pretty devastating effect on a lot of things.
Could you say a bit more about what problems you foresee? Are you talking about over-population, because I don't think we are at all close to that point. Other than medical costs and systems built around an expected retirement age I don't see any problems.
