[extropy-chat] the (scary) future of pro-death bioethicsandlegislation

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Spike wrote:

> Ja, I agree with all of this.  My notion is much more narrowly
> focused however: governments will be no help at all in the pursuit
> of life extension.  Good chance they will be rather a hindrance,
[snip]

Not completely true spike.  The Chinese are throwing money at
stem cell research as a result of their fear of an aging population
and not enough children to care for their aged parents.

> for governments pay out pensions to the elderly, and may perceive
> life extension as a threat to stability.

I believe that the Japanese have slowly begun to raise the age
of retirement to deal with this problem (though this should be
verified).  The U.S. of course has yet to deal with it.

> The second biggest problem is that industry, with its collective
> money and science behind it, is not particularly interested in
> life extension. [snip]

See: http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Aging/AntiAgingCompanies.html
We are at least an order of magnitude ahead of where we were a
decade ago.

> But the biggest problem is that very few people are interested
> in life extension. [snip]

But time is on our side -- as the numbers of aged people grow
the politicians will have to deal with the needs of that voting
block.

Robert