Those resources could be directed to other methods of life extension.
None of which happens to work now, despite propaganda I’ve heard since the 1970′s about imminent breakthroughs in superlongevity. The people who say we’ll have 150 years life expectancies or whatever by some randomly postulated year in this century don’t understand what “life expectancy” means. We determine life expectancy retrospectively from statistics gathered about populations of individuals who have already died, and we don’t know until a significant number of people have died past the age of 150 to see if they constitute a trend, or instead represent statistical noise. Clearly we won’t have the ability to gather those data in this century—I would have to wait until the year 2109 to see my 150th birthday—and I think all these “immortalist” obsessives like Ray Kurzweil just waste money and possibly damage their health by ingesting their “life extension” quackery.
By contrast, we can conduct experiments in brain cryopreservation which generate useful data in a timely fashion, like most other scientific experiments. If you want to see research into something which could show tangible returns for your survival, cryonics has some advantages over chasing after an anti-aging breakthrough which won’t arrive for many decades, if not centuries.
None of which happens to work now, despite propaganda I’ve heard since the 1970′s about imminent breakthroughs in superlongevity. The people who say we’ll have 150 years life expectancies or whatever by some randomly postulated year in this century don’t understand what “life expectancy” means. We determine life expectancy retrospectively from statistics gathered about populations of individuals who have already died, and we don’t know until a significant number of people have died past the age of 150 to see if they constitute a trend, or instead represent statistical noise. Clearly we won’t have the ability to gather those data in this century—I would have to wait until the year 2109 to see my 150th birthday—and I think all these “immortalist” obsessives like Ray Kurzweil just waste money and possibly damage their health by ingesting their “life extension” quackery.
By contrast, we can conduct experiments in brain cryopreservation which generate useful data in a timely fashion, like most other scientific experiments. If you want to see research into something which could show tangible returns for your survival, cryonics has some advantages over chasing after an anti-aging breakthrough which won’t arrive for many decades, if not centuries.