Life Extension Changes the Game, Part 2

I am most definitely not one of the top three run scorers in this class, so I'll go ahead and do this. Last time, we covered life extension and how it changes the whole bioethical conversation, especially in regard to body modification, speciesism and cryonics. To recap: 

Cryonics: Would become unpopular, possibly to where nobody does it. 

Speciesism: If it would help and not hurt, we have no reason not to. 

Body Modification: Would be cool, although our bodies would become a commodity like a car. 

While these are valuable and interesting things to consider, I feel like there's one other topic that would change as a result. It's a hot topic nowadays, currently illegal in 53 U.S. states (Hawaii legalized it recently), and it's something that I think won't stop being discussed, but will change in nature: 

Life Extension and Euthanasia 

Current wisdom holds that doctors must do everything in their power to keep someone from killing themselves. Everyone, however, has their own "gotcha" scenario that runs counter to this wisdom such as being fully immobile, being diagnosed with a terminal illness or suffering brain damage that basically makes you into someone else. There's at least as many counter-arguments as there are argumnets, but I think that living for an extra 620 years or so would change what both sides say about euthanasia. 

500 year old man added for visual flavor. Music image created by Pressfoto - Freepik.com

One of the effects of Aubrey DeGrey's theoretical treatment is to basically prevent aging, making it so that you'll still be in your prime at 20, 120 and even 620. One of the conventional arguments is that when a patient is old, there's no point to bring them back, if you can even take them off life support. After all, grandpa'd only be around for another ten years at best anyways, why break our backs to prolong his suffering until then? But if life extension works as proposed, that argument becomes less applicable. The part where they're stuck on life support holds water, but there's a much smaller window that can be considered "too old to bother".

Sorry, grandpa. Speaking of euthanasia...

Something that I'm concerned about is the fact that there's little wisdom to go on for coping with 700 years of being alive. There is some comfort in scaling up current wisdom about living a long time, but at best it's a circular peg for a bigger, square hole. Even if it happens to fit in, it doesn't fill out the proverbial corners. Most older folks dealt with the fact that they got old, but after age extension a lot of people are dealing with awful things while still young and while they're still fully capable of acting. In that event, it's a lot harder to wait for better times. Add in unnatural deaths you deal with for potentially hundreds of years, I think a lot more people might start feeling that they lived too long. If you can fill your life by 80 already, what do you do with the other 620? 

Oh yeah, become a cool cyborg.

This is barely even scratching the surface as far as I can tell, but I only have so much room to work with. I'm all for age extension, but I believe that we, as a society, need to be ready for the massive impact it will have. Heck, there's still the elephant in the room that is overpopulation, alongside medicalization and the unequal distribution of medical care around the world. 

There's a lot we need to know before we can safely live for centuries, but ultimately the wheel of time has already started rolling. You can't roll that back without sacrificing a lot, so the best you can do is keep ahead of it.