Why Hasten the End of Aging? By Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Methuselah Foundation Chairman and Chief Science Officer

Because saving lives is the most valuable thing anyone can spend their time doing, and since over 100,000 people die every single day of causes that young people essentially never die of, you'll save more lives by helping to cure aging than in any other way.

The rest of this page is a rebuttal of some of the more common reasons people give for not buying the above argument. If you aren't convinced that I'm right by the time you leave this page, I encourage you to with your reasons. If you are convinced, email me too -- that way we can work together to make the best use of your talents (including, perhaps, improving or adding to the arguments presented on this page). Which means that if you don't email me, you think it's OK not to work to cure aging and it's also OK not to be able and willing to say why it's OK. Don't forget that.

Have a concern that's not addressed here? Have a look at the full FAQ on the SENS website.

You're not talking about saving lives, you're talking about extending lives

There's no difference between extending lives and saving lives. When we save someone's life, we give them the opportunity to live longer than they would otherwise have had the opportunity to live. Period. If you think you can state a clear-cut distinction between saving and extending someone's life, . And don't forget that the life that rejuvenation therapies will allow is not one with extended frailty at the end of it, but one with no frailty, even at the end.

I'm too old to have any chance of benefiting

So what? Are your children too old? All lives are valuable. Consider the passengers on flight 93, who overpowered the hijackers. They can't have thought they had much chance of saving their own lives. They must have acted as they did because they knew they were going to save a great many lives on the ground. Did they know whose lives? -- clearly not. And they didn't care.

Curing aging is so far away that our actions today are irrelevant: serendipitous future discoveries will determine when aging is cured

No short answer to this could be persuasive; my answer is strong by virtue of its attention to detail. To learn why I claim that we are likely to cure aging within 30 or so years if we start trying, see my detailed science pages, starting with this one.

Overpopulation ... boredom ... only for the rich ... immortal tyrants

There are two types of answer to these and other reservations about curing aging based on possible social consequences. One is to examine each such reservation in depth and construct a detailed argument for how we might avoid the scenario in question. I think that's a valuable approach; I adopted it myself here and many others have done the same, often better than me. But I also have a more general response, which among other things avoids objections of the form: "Well, yes, that's a strategy, but what if it fails?". Namely: pay attention, people -- we're talking about lives here, 100,000 lives a day. What do you do at the moment if you're bored? -- kill yourself? I didn't think so. Society has always had problems and doubtless always will, and it works to minimise and solve them, just like technological problems.

Aging really is barbaric. It shouldn't be allowed. I don't need an ethical argument. I don't need any argument. It's visceral. To let people die is bad.

Pretending that we will be so unable to cope with future problems that it's better to condemn indefinite billions to the puny lifespan of their ancestors is a sick joke anyway, but even sicker when we consider how implausible it is that such problems would be any worse or harder to tackle than those that we've tackled in the past. It's not as if the problems we have successfully tackled in the past seemed less daunting, either. For example, who would have thought in 1850 that society would be willing to submit to the indignity of wearing absurd rubber contraptions every time they had sex, just to arrest the population explosion that followed the near-elimination of infant mortality? Yet, that's just what happened throughout the industrialised world, with no coercion other than the simple fact that children who are still alive are very expensive.

One social argument is perhaps worth singling out, however: the idea that we would have difficulty paying all those retirement benefits. Retirement benefits are for frail people. There won't be any frail people. Also, people who still (or again) have the vitality that they had in their 20s and 30s will not want to play golf all day forever, even if we did have the money to let them do so. (This is not to say retirement will cease. Rather, it will be a voluntary, periodic thing -- maybe ten years every 50, two years every ten if you prefer.) This is one of the most tangible and unambiguous benefits of curing aging: far from being increasingly consumed by the elderly (as is happening with the pension situation today), wealth will be actually contributed to society by all people, of whatever age.

Finitude gives life meaning .... the natural order is best

This type of "ethical" argument is possibly the most absurd of all -- a strong statement, I realise, given the stiffness of its competition -- because of the enormity of what it overlooks within its own scope. To stand back and (by one's inaction) cause someone to die sooner, when one could act to let them live a lot longer at no (or even at some modest) cost to oneself or anyone else, is arguably the second most unnatural thing a human can do, second only (and then by a very small margin) to causing someone's death by an explicit action. (Of course, there is plenty of departure from these ethics in the world, but that's not the point -- abandonment of the law of the jungle is what most fundamentally defines humanity, and also what defines civilisation.) Thus, to ask humanity to accept the "naturalness" argument against life extension, and on that basis to delay the development of a cure for aging, is thus to ask it to transform itself into something as un-human as can be imagined. Even if such concerns were to turn out to be valid, it is for those who experience this diminution of their existence to act to restore it (e.g., by rejecting rejuvenation therapies that are on offer), not for us to make their choice for them.

I do other things that save lives; I can't do both

If you're saving lives at all, you're in a small minority; but before you reject the possibility that maybe it would be even better to cure aging, do some arithmetic. Saving of lives should really be measured not in number of lives extended but in aggregate number of life-years added. If you've seen my timeframes page you will know that I think people who are around long enough for serious rejuvenation therapies will live indefinitely: the cusp between the development of the first generation therapies and the attainment of "escape velocity" will be very brief indeed. Putting this in concrete terms, the first 1000-year-old is probably only five or ten years younger than the first 150-year-old. (The question we can't yet answer, but can influence, is how old they are today.) Also, let me emphasise again here that these extra years would be youthful -- our physical and mental functions would be maintained in as good a state as when we were young adults, right up to the time when we make a serious mistake crossing the road. Even if we don't become a lot more risk-averse as a result, that means such people will have a life expectancy (i.e., average age at death) of around 1000 years, by virtue of being only as likely to die in any given year as we currently are to die at the age of (say) exactly 12 if we don't die before that. So that means that if you accelerate the process of developing a cure for aging so that it happens even one day sooner, you'll add an average several hundred years to the lifespans of over 100,000 people -- so you'll be adding about 100 million person-years to people's lives. (It's worth stressing here that the same applies to work targeted to making rejuvenation therapies widely available as fast as possible once they are developed, which will be a lot more successful with a bit of forward planning.) And that's just one day; given the rather small number of people currently working actively to cure aging as soon as possible, each newcomer to the cause will surely do better than that, whatever their talents. Can you really come anywhere near that number in any other way?

Have a concern that's not addressed here? Have a look at the full FAQ on the SENS website.