I just watched Aubrey de Grey's TEDX talk...

I'm sorry, but I don't feel questions like these should be dismissed because the asker "can't work out what they would do" - after all, the promise of a cure for aging is to end up giving people a lot more of it, whatever life is to them, and if they happen to live in uncertainty or sadness, what you are offering is giving them a heck of a lot more uncertainty and sadness.

I think they should be dismissed at a general level, because they don't matter except on an individual level: if someone doesn't want to live longer, or is suffering from unhealable uncertainty and sadness, they don't have to live longer. These are not objections to a concerted effort to provide the option for life extension, but personal dilemmas.

I think people would largely find that they don't really have a problem finding things to do; you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn't try to heal themselves from an illness, and if life extension is an option, that's the basic gist of it as well: you choose to go on until such time as you no longer want to. You don't need a plan for forever; all you need is the desire to continue living for the moment.

You say you would reject attempts to extend your life, and that you've thought about this a lot; I believe you, and I think it's noble and admirable that, unlike most people who don't personally see themselves as wanting to extend their lives, you accept and even encourage the option for others. But, at the same time, I don't think you'd reject an attempt to fix a health problem... but that's also a life-extension intervention. So what do you reject, exactly? There's not really a way to say "this is the thing that was 'supposed' to kill me", just "this is the thing that would have killed me at X time in history", perhaps.

Once it becomes a question of "how long am I 'supposed' to live?", the answer to that depends on what interventions you draw the line at: will you take antibiotics? Will you undergo surgery? Will you let your heart be restarted after an MI?

His proposal strikes me as the goals of a human terrified of death and seeking to avoid it at all costs.

That's the classic aspersion you can cast upon anyone who wants to seek longer life, but a more charitable interpretation is that he's a human in love with life and seeking to extend it at all costs.

/r/Futurology Thread Parent