Aging affects more than just the homeless. It affects everyone universally, poor or rich, homeless or royalty. It also manifested itself in any number of ways from decreased mobility to cancer. Nobody is immune to it. It is literally the biggest health challenge in the world and the biggest killer of mankind.
The homeless opioid addict while in some way much more acute, but can be solved the next day should we decide to. It is a political problem, not a technical problem like aging is.
But given that a universal cure for aging necessarily requires universal distribution of that cure, isn't it worth asking if you're putting the cart in front of the horse here?
You say the homeless problem "can be solved the next day should we decide to"; but we haven't decided to. So either this isn't a simple political problem and there are practical concerns we haven't figured out yet, or there's a worrying gap between what is possible to do and what we're willing to do. And if there is no mechanism to close that gap, then you just can't solve aging universally. At best you can only solve it for a very small select few, at which point you might be doing more utilitarian good by just helping the homeless right now.
The current lack of universal housing, universal health care, suggests very strongly to me that curing aging is not in fact an effort that "affects everyone universally"; because I don't believe that universal distribution of a cure is simple or a straightforward question of political will, and I wonder if it actually does have massive social/political/practical complications behind it that are going to be very difficult to solve, and I wonder if (under a strict utilitarian perspective) solving that problem of universal access to basic resources is not the more important priority.
If we're all just working on our own stuff in parallel, fine. I actually think the utilitarian way of looking at this is kind of nonsense, and I would encourage people not to use this lens. We should not be ranking social problems in this way, it's fine for some people to focus on technical problems and its fine for some people to work on social problems. But if we are going to use this lens and we are going to rank problems, it seems like fully solving the aging problem is almost strictly dependent on solving the political problems first.
But given that a universal cure for aging necessarily requires universal distribution of that cure, isn't it worth asking if you're putting the cart in front of the horse here?
Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare.
However, a cure for aging will not be solved tomorrow, maybe not even a decade. It is a long term investment.
The solution to the homeless isn't economically complicated. It doesn't require us to keep at a problem for ten years. It is strictly a matter of political will.
It isn't even a matter of practical concerns, because we live right now is unsustainable economically and financially.
> Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare.
Okay, but don't you see the disconnect here? Because we don't even have good preventative care right now in the US, and that is also economically a no-brainer. Being economically advantageous overall turns out to be not enough of an incentive to introduce political change.
So you have this theory that once death is solved, naturally it will be in everyone's best interest to distribute the cure, but that doesn't match up with what we see in the world today. Again, going back to homelessness, if this isn't economically complicated, and we still haven't solved it, that to me suggests that it's not going to be simple in the future to distribute a cure for aging, even if you're right about the incentives. Figuring out how to bridge that gap between economic incentive and political will might be a giant, equally difficult problem to solve.
Doesn't it worry you that fixing these kinds of problems today would clearly reduce overall health care costs on the system and yet the problems still exist? How are you so confident that aging will be different?
> Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare.
Sure, it might be economically a no-brainer, but I don't see this happening. Why would the people in positions of power to implement this give it to the masses when they can have it and keep their power forever while the plebs have to continue to age and die?
The homeless opioid addict while in some way much more acute, but can be solved the next day should we decide to. It is a political problem, not a technical problem like aging is.