Rejuvenation on the Horizon

From the Progress-in-the-Universe Department here at QC Plaza (with apologies to Click and Clack):  In two posts today, FuturePundit notes that (i) we're starting to see the same power-dive of costs in biotechnology as we did in electronics, and that this is going to lead to unimaginable improvements in medical capabilities, including the ability to rejuvenate aging bodies — along with other consequences such as a rising retirement age:

[From here:]  Genizon has used improvements gene chip technology to speed up their genetic studies by more than an order of magnitude. ... [Researchers] can now collect more data and more quickly. These boosts in productivity are going to produce discoveries and effective treatments for diseases which have long been incurable.

[From here, quoting junk bond king Michael Milliken:]  In 1974, it cost $100 million to sequence a gene. Today, it cost $3, and by 2013, it will be 3 cents.

... The electronics revolution is being repeated in biotechnology.

Just as the discovery of antibiotics made many infectious diseases suddenly curable the same will happen with diseases aging.  Got a bad heart?  Grow a new one or send gene therapy in to instruct your cells in how to repair themselves.  Bad liver or bad kidneys?  Again, grow replacements or fix them.  All the problems that must be solved to reach that point are solvable. Therefore we will solve them.

People who do not see this biotechnological revolution in rejuvenation on the horizon are akin to someone in 1965 saying that of course computers must take up whole rooms and that we'll never have desktop computers which are many orders of magnitude faster than 1965 mainframes.  We are going to gain the ability to manipulate cells and genes on a level that will allow us to repair our aged bodies.  There's nothing about the nature of physical reality that precludes our developing the ability to do this.

Some traditionalist Christians think humanity is "depraved" and that we live in a "broken" world.  I'd like to see their explanation for this.

Comments

[bls]

What will happen, D.C., if people can repair their aged bodies in perpetuity?

Won't they then resist dying forever, and won't the world fill up pretty quickly? Is this a good idea? Why should the wealthy aged in the West - who've already lived full and privileged lives - attempt to prolong them in this way? Will people even have children anymore? Why would they need to?

And isn't this sort of a bad idea, especially at a time when the world's oceans are being completely fished out and there is drought and famine elsewhere in the world, and global warming is becoming an issue in many places?

Just a few questions to think about.

[D. C.]

Sure, there will be problems; eventually we'll figure out how to solve them, like we always have. I can't shake the feeling that this is (one of the ways) how God works in the world.

[bls]

I don't know. I've been thinking about this for awhile, and it sure seems to me that the prolonging of life indefinitely (or semi-indefinitely) could really be a disaster.

No one would ever agree to die if they didn't have to. Think about the population problem in that case! And what about the relationship between the generations - if "generations" even existed anymore.

I think this is going to be a huge future problem, in fact.