You'd be surprised. Heart disease, for example, is one of the deadliest age-related diseases, but it's by no means exclusive to the wealthy. See for example the World Health Organization's statistics[0]; they report that three quarters of deaths from cardiovascular disease occur in low-income and middle-income countries.
The Buck Institute [0], featured in this article, is a pretty outstanding organization -- they're unique in being a sizable research center devoted to researching aging. I'm excited to see their idea of age-related diseases as biological maintenance problems gaining some traction.
I'm not entirely sure where the interviewer was going with this statement, though.
> There’s a lot of Silicon-Valley buzz about longevity and many startups working to develop immortality pills.
I've yet to hear of a startup working on an "immortality pill."
Surely the projections cited in this article aren't accurate.
> Already operating in 191 countries and 34,000 cities, analysts at financial services company Cowen & Co predict that, by 2020, Airbnb hosts will be taking 500 million bookings a night, rising to a staggering one billion by 2025.
If the population of the world is about 8.2 billion in 2025, which is the UN's expectation [0], that'd mean one Airbnb booking a night per eight humans on Earth. Perhaps they mean yearly, not nightly?
Much of this article (and all of the images) was taken from a WWDC 2015 talk [0]. If you're interested in typography, that video is definitely worth a watch.
A few years back, Bill Gates said that he'd be working in biology if he were still a teenager [0]. There's a lot of exciting work happening in the field, and if anyone finds this sort of thing particularly inspiring, I'd encourage them to read up on bioinformatics -- there's plenty of programming work to be done in the biosciences.
In contrast, I believe that reversing aging would likely also improve a person's quality of death. Death by aging can be a horrifically prolonged and painful process. In the case of Alzheimer's, you slowly watch your mind and identity slip away. In the case of cancer, you may submit to vomit-inducing therapies to prolong your life; whether or not you do, you may end up dying slowly and painfully while bed-ridden and utterly exhausted. Spending years in a nursing home while someone else wipes your bottom isn't exactly a glamorous, graceful way to go. On the other hand, the "brutal" deaths you complain about involve what -- something between a fraction of a second and a few hours of physical pain? When my time comes, sign me up.
As an ancillary point, there is no such thing as "aging in good condition". Aging is the process by which your body gradually fails to function until it can't function at all. It can be better or worse, but not good.
So, supposing for the sake of argument that scientists had discovered a way to allow humans to live healthily and happily until the age 200, how would your position change? Surely you wouldn't want to murder everyone at the arbitrary age of 80, because those eighty-year-olds are so darn 'ignorant' and incapable of change?
From there I ask: how great or small is the moral difference between preventing such technologies from coming to fruition, and killing people off once those technologies have been developed?
Antibiotics are a Good Thing. So is having doctors wash their hands. If we can use science to buy some more time for humans to live, all the better. I know it's hard to believe, but maybe not having people literally lose their minds and decay to the point of death between ages 70-100 would be kind of nice.
I'm a full-stack junior web developer, more experienced in the front-end but equally excited to work the back-end. I have a genuine aptitude and love for code, and would be thrilled for the opportunity to demonstrate that by completing any given exercise, sample project, or contract job. My portfolio is at www.danielkimbel.com, and my GitHub is at www.github.com/techowl. I also love learning new technologies, and have most recently been playing with famo.us.