The article is by William F. Harrell, and it can be found at BP News, or Baptist Press. I don't know much about Baptist Press, and I intend no disrespect of their site or their beliefs. I merely intend to use the public words of this author to illustrate a point. To start with:

[Aubrey] de Grey is simply trying to do something that is impossible he is trying to solve a spiritual problem through medical and mechanical means. He is trying to do what man has been trying for thousands of years to do -- and that is to get back into the garden of Eden relationship with God. All of human history attests to this desire of man. ? Mr. de Grey is trying to restore the eternal life characteristic to man?

Harrell tackles de Grey's efforts to extend lifespans, by pointing out that de Grey is trying to do what people want, just in the wrong way. And it is what people want. Just about everyone wants Eternal Life, however they define it. But as Harrell so deftly points out, while most people may want Eternal Life, they don't want to live longer:

I have posed this question to a lot of people: Would you like to live to be say, 300 years old? You might be surprised to learn that even though people in general fear death, I have not found a single person who answers "yes." Nearly universally, they say they would tire of life at extreme ages. They cannot imagine dealing with the growing problems in the world, which surely will get worse. To them, the thought of outliving everyone they know is depressing. Most people say they want to live a normal lifetime and then die peacefully.

Okay, so people don't want to live longer. But is that really true? Here we see four of the same old fallacies exposed again: the Tithonus Error, Malthusian Doomsaying, the Lonely Old Man, and Logan's Run.

The Tithonus Error

The Tithonus Error is the first and most common response. As Harrell put it, "Nearly universally, they say they would tire of life at extreme ages."

People assume that living to 300 means continuing to decay into frailty and debility. In other words, you age normally but can't die, so you continue to get weaker and weaker muscles; ever brittler bones; more and more wrinkled, discolored skin; hair thinning to white wisps, then baldness; bad or missing teeth; blindness and deafness; and of course, senility and dementia. Actually, the way most people envision living to 300 reminds me of the death scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when the Nazi guy drinks from the false grail and ages into a corpse.

I suppose living to 300 would mean staying alive right up to the moment when an autopsy and an annual physical exam would be indistiguishable. But is this really what living to age 300 means? Think about it. People don't die because they're old; they die because they're frail.

Living longer won't mean just pushing the bounds of how old and frail our bodies can become, until we reach that day when we can keep corpses on life support and then claim we've conquered death. That would be a losing battle, and one that, as Harrell points out, no one would want to fight for.

Rather, living longer will mean postponing and even reversing the frailty that comes with aging?not just the frailty of brittle bones, weak muscles, poor eyesight, and dulled memory, but the frailty of hardened arteries, dysfunctional cells, failing organs, a weakened immune system, loss of stem cells, and a rising tide of cancers.

By postponing or reversing the frailty of aging, we not only allow a person to live longer, but in better, more youthful health. No one wants to be 90 years old in a body 40 years more frail than an 50-year-old's body. But what if you could be 90 and still have the body of a 50-year-old? What if you could live to 120 and have the body of a 60-year-old? Looking further down the road, when rejuvenation therapies really mature, would you mind being 180 years old, or even 300 years old, if you could have the body of a 25-year-old, and hence do any of the things a 25-year-old could do?

Malthusian Doomsaying

The next big error is to assume that the world is going hell in a handbasket. And of course, no one wants to stick around long enough to see that happen. As Harrell put it, "They cannot imagine dealing with the growing problems in the world, which surely will get worse."

But with an unaging population, Malthusian arguments are made to seem even worse. With no one dying, we'll have overpopulation. With overpopulation, we'll run out of resources even faster, and instead of dying from old age, we'll have just an many people dying from plagues and famines caused by the overpopulation. With dwindling resources, the nations' ecomonies will fail, and the world will fall apart. On and on it goes...

But think about it for a minute. Would overpopulation really result? Their are two very simple numbers that control population: the birth rate and the death rate. Whenever someone is born, you add 1 to the population, and whenever anyone dies, you subtract 1. It isn't any more complicated than that, at least not at the global level. (Locally, immigration factors in.)

And here's another interesting fact. The birth rate is controlled by the number of people in their child-bearing years who decide to have children. Well, just who are these people? Do you think an 80-year-old great grandmother, if rejuvenated to the body of a 25-year-old, would decide to start a new family? Maybe the eccentric few would, but the majority wouldn't subject themselves to another 20 years of limited options and increased bills, requiring her and her rejuvenated husband to work longer hours and take fewer vacations. Face it, a rejuvenated 80-year-old isn't going to be adding to the birth rate side of the population equation.

And births are what push population up. Birth rates are already dropping below 2 children per couple in the developed world, and look to continue decreasing. Each generation will have fewer children than the generation before, meaning that rather than an exponential explosion of population, the birth rate will decline exponentially and population will level off.

The Lonely Old Man

The lonely old man is another favorite myth of mine. As Harrell put it, "the thought of outliving everyone they know is depressing." I admit it is depressing, but it misses the rather obvious rebuttal: is this lonely old man the only person who will receive rejuvenation treatments?

The wealthy will be first in line as guinea pigs for experimental rejuvenation medicine, and as such, they'll either get a headstart on the rest of us, or they'll die in the name of science and progress. Given the market for rejuvenation therapies (basically, anyone over age 60, which is an already huge and rapidly growing segment of society), rejuvenation therapies will rapidly drop in price to the point that they are available to almost everyone.

Sure, the therapies won't be cheap, but when faced with a choice of a few more years in poor health with all your money, or decades of good health with less money, which would you choose? And it will be a choice. No one will be forced to accept expensive rejuvenation therapies.

Perhaps this is why people think they'll be lonely at 300: everyone else would have decided to keep their precious money and die of old age at 85. This is like the Prisoner's Dilemma, but instead of two prisoners, we're talking about 20 closer friends and immediate family members.

Imagine, you and twenty of your closest friends and family are placed in separate rooms. You and each of your friends and family members are told that you could live to 300, or die at 85. If you choose to live to 300, and all your friends and family do not, then you'll be alone. And each of you is told that all the others are given the same options. None of you is allowed to discuss this with the others, and you have but one minute to make your decision.

Rather than risk being alone, each and every one of you decides to die at 85. The thought, so it would seem, is that the other friend might also choose to live to 85, and that would leave you alone. Sure, the other friends might choose life to 300. But if not, then you'll end up alone for over 200 years. Why risk it? Why not just die?

It's a cute image, but it misses a very important point. We're not in the prisoner's dilemma. We can discuss issues like these with our friends and family, especially our closest friends and family. We can make plans to see each other's 100th and 120th and 200th birthdays, to stay in contact with each other and take vacations together. We can choose life and not fear that we might be the only ones.

Over the decades and centuries, eventually people will die, despite medicine's best efforts. But with the youthful vigor and vitality of a 25-year-old, do you really think you'll never make the occasional new friend? Do you really think you'd end up alone, in perfect health, with nothing to do and no one to spend time with? The idea is silly.

Logan's Run

The Logan's Run myth is my favorite. As Harrell put it, "Most people say they want to live a normal lifetime and then die peacefully." If you don't recall, in Logan's Run, everybody is scheduled to die at age 30 (or 21 in the book, so I've heard). Hence, no one ever gets frail. No one suffers the debility and indignity of old age.

But everyone is struck down, suddenly, in the prime of their youth. A big push in aging research nowadays is to extend lifespan and "compress morbidity". The goal, in other words, is to add healthy years to the middle of lifespan, and to subtract unhealthy years from the end of lifespan. Taken to its logical conclusion, the goal is to live in perfect health to, say age 120, and then to drop dead suddenly and unexpectedly. In fact, when combined with the Malthusian Doomsayers' argument, we could even see government-mandated upper limits on lifespan.

I suppose the reasoning behind this is that no one wants to live 300 years. The thought of living to 300 may seem daunting. But ask yourself, are you ready to die in the next year? If you answered no, then you already have what it takes to live to 300. Next year, if you were in as good or better health than you are now, with as good or a better financial position, the answer to that question should not change: it should still be no. Ten years from now, if you could have even better health and more wealth, would you decide, "You know what, I think this year is the year!"? Of course not.

Living 100 more years, or even 20 more years, can seem daunting. But 99, or 19 years from now, you'll only have to live another year to get there, and if you're in better health with more wealth, why then decide to die? Once again, the idea is silly.

Embrace Life

Do not fall sway to the myths of the problems of extended lifespans. The biomedical programs that Dr. de Grey advocates will extend healthy years, giving people back the vitality of youth that aging currently robs them of. Living longer lives will be a net benefit to society, preventing 100,000 pointless deaths, deaths of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, siblings. Healthy life extension will put the wisdom of age, combined with the vigor of youth, back into the economy and into the fabric of society.