It is a big frustration that almost all of my contemporaneous accept death as inevitable and that a cure for ageing would only bring more problems.
They can’t see past their current mental idea of what is correct and accepted in this time. They bring cliche arguments such as “there will be no resources available” or “why are we going to live more or even forever? To work even more?”.
First of all, the problem of lack of enough resources now and even more so for the future already existed. That means that it is not the cure for ageing that will create the problem of lack of resources. It may however intensify it, but this problem needs to be resolved by itself either way, even if we weren’t to find the cure for ageing, this problem would still persist and therefore curing ageing or not it will not affect the real necessity to resolve this issue.
Actually, finding a cure for ageing, or at least, in the beginning, a way to retard the ageing process, can contribute to the resolution of many of the problems that humanity and planet earth suffers today. Experts in their areas of field, either be biology, sciences, math, technology, economy, and so on, if they live longer (or perhaps, forever), they can further continue their researches and new discoveries can even be faster. Humans spend a lot of time in the whole process of losing mental flexibility and coordination with ageing - dying - teaching new children all the knowledge that previous humans knew - and then restart all over again the research, for them to end up dying again and starting again this cycle.
I strongly believe that the tendency for humanity is to continue improving their life, including the discovery of cures for diseases such as cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer, etc, and naturally, also discover what really causes our cells to start losing the properties that they initially had, and find a method to retard that or even stop it. It is a natural consequence of research to eventually one day we discover it. Unfortunately, most of the people can’t see past the present, and they should have learned by now in History, that most of the genius of the past (Galileo, Copérnico, Ignaz Semmelweis, Mendel, and so much more), they all got either ignored or heavily criticized, only to end up years or centuries later recognized. That’s one of the reasons I really believe in the researchers today, such as Aubrey de Grey and João Pedro De Magalhães, that their work is important and should be given credit for.
For me, the worse is when my contemporaneous bring arguments such as “they shouldn’t be studying how to stop ageing when there are a lot of people dying in africa!”. Oh, the hypocrisy! What does scientific research has to do with Africa? I completely agree that we need to solve the problems of Africa and other continents, but please, don’t use those arguments to criticize other important work that is currently being done and should be. Whenever people want to criticize a new idea or technology, they always bring the cliche argument: “we shouldn’t be doing this, look at Africa! The society doesn’t care about Africa!”. The hypocrisy in those statements are surreal. They criticize the society like they were “the others” and not themselves. The society starts by us. The person who said this is a computing engineer working in a normal consulting company. How is he solving the problems of Africa? He is not solving or caring any more than the scientists who are studying how to stop aging. And he is certainly not complaining about the comfort lifestyle and he has with all the technology that our society invented such as smartphones, laptop, vaccines, medications, and so on. He (and many like him) can’t even see their own hipocrysy, and worst of all, they can’t correlate many discoveries and traditional way of thinking in the past and how it has been changing according to each era with how our times will also change, and the problems today can and will be solved in the future, and they shouldn’t want to stop the evolution of the new discoveries. They will happen. It’s only a matter of time. The same way that we look back at medieval times and think “oh, we are so luck to be born in this Era, where we won’t die at a young age and where we can explain many things that they didn’t know before”, the future people will look at us and say “oh, we are lucky that we were born in an Era where people don’t get old and die because of it, actually, thinking about ageing is strange and odd”. I wish I was born later...
