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have the right to determine when their own lives are no longer worth living, and choose suicide
when it is a way to escape great suffering.
But if we extend our lives by fighting the effects of aging, then any extended life should come
with a similar quality of experience as the healthier years of contemporary human lives. Imagine
a 100-year-old playing a game of tennis, a 120-year-old climbing Mt. Fuji, a bi-centenarian
competing in the Olympics.
This will surely seem somewhat fanciful and perhaps it is. But surely 100 years ago any number
of ideas and inventions were unthinkable and fanciful that are now a part of our daily lives. Is it
so hard to think we might develop significantly powerful anti-aging and life-extending
technology over a long time-scale? And if it's possible, why not start now?
Some argue that there are more important causes to focus on. But aging is one of the few
conditions that effects nearly everyone, which gives us egalitarian reasons to prefer fighting it.
And while it's undoubtedly true that any successful treatments would be provided first to the
wealthy and the powerful, this is also true of many other globe-changing technologies, like cell
phones, that eventually become ubiquitous even among the global poor. Good future policy
choices could ensure that anti-aging technologies provide benefits as diffusely as possible.
And since many of the diseases that are both the biggest killers or demand lots of funding, such
as cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's, are all, at least in part, symptoms of aging, a greater
focus on anti-aging research might still provide treatments and cures for these diseases and more.
With some luck, it might get us closer to preventing these diseases from ever occurring.