I was reading through this post, Science of Aging: Recommended Reads and Serious Speculation - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board, and it got me thinking.
I want to find out what peoples opinions are on the following: If you had some way of halting the aging process indefinitely, what would you do with it?
Let’s say that the method you have discovered is almost costless for you to implement and that you can perform the procedure on someone else without revealing how it works.
Would you perform the procedure on yourself?
Would you perform the service (for large amount of money) for anyone who can pay for it?
Would you do it to yourself only and then use your extra time on this earth to amass a vast fortune/empire?
Would you give away the secret to the world because you believe that something like this should be shared?
Would you not do it to yourself, and no-one else for the matter, and let your secret die with you?
Let me know your thoughts.
I’d patent it if possible and if not give it away. And if I did patent it my prices would be quite low; I wouldn’t jack it up to “what the market will bear”.
I wouldn’t use it, and I’d let it die with me. Aging and death suck, but it gives life meaning. Dying and thereby fueling new life (as I am fueled by death in the form of food I consume) is only fair if I am grateful to have lived.
Besides, I wouldn’t feel comfortable charging for it, so everyone would do it, and the world would soon be a hellhole of starvation and overcrowding, since living forever doesn’t eliminate the sex drive and desire to procreate.
And if you only used it on yourself/select others and told no one else, you’d have a hell of a time living in the modern world, with birth certificates and social security numbers. Unless you were already really rich and didn’t own a home/work/do anything that requires proof of identity, you’d be charged with fraud for obviously stealing a dead person’s identity. How else could you be 300 years old? And then you’d be roundly mocked here on the SDMB as one of the stupidest criminals ever.
Or if you stood your ground and proved your improbable age, you’d be subjected to a bazillion medical tests and possibly kidnapped by the government to discover what’s different about you if you insisted you didn’t know how it happened, and if you did admit you did it to yourself, your refusal to share the secret would probably get you hanged by a mob. It’s a no-win situation.
I would give it away, and then join the army.
I disagree; IMHO they give life less meaning, they make it worth less.
That probably wouldn’t happen; people would still die from accidents and disease and violence and so forth; IIRC it’s estimated that eliminating aging would only extend the average American lifespan to about 200. What it WOULD do is greatly increase people’s quality of life until they did die.
The world is already overpopulated, and a lot of lives are being artifically prolonged too much as it is. Aging and death are the great human equalizers. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without them, nor would I want to live forever. I’d destroy such a fountain if I could.
Der Trihs: Would you hold those beliefs even if it meant Strom Thurmond could’ve stayed in the Senate another 100 years? 
(Hopefully you understand what I’m getting at here. With your political beliefs, I’m curious how you balance these impulses.)
Well, sacrifices are going to be made either way, and I rather prefer the sacrifices that involve people living.
That brings up the interesting question of just what the effect of permanent youth would be on the conservatives of the world. Old age and conservative tendencies are notoriously linked; but how much of that is due to older people being born a long time ago, and between the physical degradation of the brain due to age? What would an old mind in a young flexible brain really be like?
What I would like would be something that allowed me to remain at age 30 for 40 or 50 years and then kick off.
But a genuine anti-agathic would be a disaster.