Fight Aging!

Some thoughts on hostile attitudes towards cryonics from Depressed Metabolism and Mark Plus:

One of the mysterious things about cryonics is that some of the arguments that are invoked against it would be considered ridiculous, or even insensitive, if they would be raised in the context of other live-saving technologies.

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Why do we call engineering efforts to solve a hard problem which haven't worked so far "failures," while some people call cryonics' attempts at intervening into the death process "denial?" The difference seems to involve a double standard. We don’t call other efforts to save human life "denial" when they don’t work in some cases, and not just in a medical context. The effort to rescue those trapped miners in Chile may not work, for example; but nobody I know of calls the rescue project "denial," wants to stop it as a waste of resources, and admonishes the doomed miners to "Get over yourselves," as one of Ted Williams's relatives has said to cryonicists.

The same goes for medicine in general. How would we react if authority figures scolded us for seeking health care for serious illnesses or injuries, saying that we should instead deal with our "denial" and "fear of death" issues through, say, strength of character, rather than trying to stay alive and functional through modern medicine?

Sadly this prevailing double standard is also in force when it comes to life science research aimed at reversing aging and thereby greatly extending the healthy human life span. When listening knee-jerk reactions against engineered longevity and apologism for the suffering and death caused by aging, it's helpful to imagine the objecting person transported back in time to 1800 or thereabouts, and spouting the same nonsense about accepting the longevity we have - in an era with a far lower human life expectancy.

A person who ages to frailty is no less suffering and no less dead in the end than one who dies through accident or disease at a younger age. So many people are instinctively hostile to the prospect of anyone managing to live longer, just as they are instinctively hostile to those who make far more money - and this jealousy is, sadly, an important aspect of human nature. We primate hunter-gatherers are hardwired to hate and stamp out inequality wherever we see it, a tendency that isn't helpful at all in this day and age of great cities and complex economies. When acted upon, these urges help to hold back improvement for all:

Life is unfair, make no mistake. People are unequal in opportunity, capacity and the hand they were dealt at birth. To think that this truth can be removed in any way, shape or form is to betray a profound ignorance of economics and the human condition. You cannot make life better at the bottom by tearing down the top; the top is where progress happens, progress that lifts the quality of life for everyone. Punishing success in order to reward failure has predictable results - more failure and less success. The wealthy of 1950 were far worse off than the poor of today precisely because progress brings economic rewards to the successful.