Submitted by Phoenix5869 t3_118mr8z in Futurology
Before i start, i just want to say that we absolutely should get rid of aging and all age related diseases. However, there are some potential issues that need to be addressed.
Overpopulation - The first and most obvious one is overpopulation. There are 8 billion people on this planet, with 10 billion expected by 2050. That’s assuming there is no life extension available by then, which chances are there will be. We are struggling to sustain our current population as it is, so if we, say, increased the average lifespan to 135, that would be an extra 55 year’s worth of resources per person that we would need to come up with. Not only that, those people would have 55 extra years to have children, and those children would have 55 extra years, etc. How is this sustainable? We would have to impose strict limits on how many children we could have, which would probably involve sterilising everyone and having an application process to be temporarily unsterilised to have 1 or 2 children, then being resterilised.
Cultural Stagnation - this is basically the idea that without old people dying off and taking their old fashioned ideas with them, and young people taking over with new ideas, society would stagnate. And i fail to see how that concept is wrong. Imagine if slave owners from the 1800s were still around today, voting in pro slavery candidates? Once you get to a certain age, your opinions are set and it’s hard to change them. The way i see this one being avoided is if the brain was somehow restored to a young(er) state in order to allow for greater neuroplasticity.
Unequal Access - this is the third issue i see talked about a lot. Some people like to think that everyone will have access to the literal holy grail of modern medicine. Well i’m sorry, but that’s just wishful thinking. Diabetics are dying left and right because something as simple as insulin is so expensive, and people expect the LITERAL CURE FOR AGING to be affordable? Not only that, there have been quite a lot of technologies that didn’t and still are not affordable for the average person, such as high end smartphones, cars, and solar panels. I don’t know how this one can be solved, so please tell me in the comments.