“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
That’s poetic, but oddly terrible advice as we can actually build ships.
Longer lifespans is already a goal, but aging is unlikely to be “solved” in in the next 100 or even 1,000 years. People took much longer than that to figure out how to fly and we have been trying to solve aging for as long if not longer.
Consider buildings age as do diamonds. To fix aging we need to get bodies to do things like regrow teeth and replace the circulatory system. Growing extra lungs to replace lungs being filled with junk etc etc. When we start syncing redundant brains, that’s when we can start ending aging.
And at that point (and I'm venturing into philosophy here so sorry about that) am I still me?
If my brain has been downloaded (for lack of a better word) into another, am I living on in that other body or does someone else have my memories?
I've often wondered this about Star Trek-style teleportation. Are those red-shirts really moving instantly from one place to the other or are they being incinerated on a coloured circle and cloned somewhere else?
are you the same "you" that you were last night before you went to sleep? for all practical purposes, yes; if a perfect clone woke up in your bed this morning, it would make no difference to the rest of the world, and your clone would still have all the same problems and goals.
but the best evidence you have that you are the same entity as yesterday's "you" is that you remember some events from the day. the teleportation paradox is no harder to resolve.
And I'm really creeped out right now. I was about to type this example too and then didn't at the last.
As a side note - My mind tends to race at night. Life has me so busy during the day that when I'm trying to sleep is the only time I get to do much thinking. Thing is, because I'm already tired I never remember much of it the next morning other than "I had a really good think about something last night". Given that I'll not remember, and no-one else will have known, it does seem philosophically compatible and biologically possible that the current me is in effect "dying" every night to make way for a "rebooted" version tomorrow. This is not inconsistent with what we know sleep to be.
The only difference is that there's still only one me.
With the transporter analogy, though, the physical matter is reconstructed at the other side from different matter, which means its a copy. The film "The Prestige" covers this difference brilliantly if you've ever seen it.
Finally, if this comment makes no sense, it's because I'm in bed and my mind is racing.
All attempts to cure aging have been magic/religion-based until very recently. Also it's not like we "learned to fly" as if cavemen could have done it had they only known the right wing shape and arm technique. It was only possible because of an accumulation of industrial and scientific knowledge.
Significant life extension will likely be built off the same accumulation of knowledge, not some rainforest frog extract the ancients could have refined. The only way I can imagine we don't have this in 1000 years is if someone's nuke finger gets twitchy.
Want to accelerate research? Make "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" required reading/watching for all schoolchildren: https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY (That this might be controversial is itself interesting.)
Yet, for the first person to ride a hot air balloon took ~2000 years in 1783. Some of this came down to advances in material science, but far less than you might think.
What will happen is that you will have a bunch of very rich centenarians who will own just about everything simply for having a couple of decades head start on the newcomers. The same thing is already happening today. Unless you want to cap wealth and property this is not going to end well.
It's already at the point today where real estate and other relatively scarce resources are much more available to and owned by the wealthy who then use this to extract rent from the younger generations. Give those people another 80 years or so to do play the game and we will all end up in hock to them. You'll be born in debt to someone who was born a century or more before you.
If we're imagining a world with immortality why not imagine one with space colonies, or some other form of growth? The new people could get the new stuff, same as it's been since the end of feudalism.
Even if I don’t live forever, maybe my kids will. That will meet my success criteria.