Of course all this assumes that we will alter our behaviour in order to deal with the population issues. Rather than letting nature take it’s course. It’s a reasonable supposition, but people have sometimes done unreasonable things too.

The net effect was great stability but also great stagnation.

But in genetics, as in other sciences, the devil is in the details. Stopping aging completely may not be possible at all, as aging may turn out to be more of an inter-relatedness of very many complex processes going on in the body, instead of a single binary switch mechanism.

And the meaning derived from death is, I think, colossal. If you have been around half-a-century or more, you have seen your own viewpoint on both life and death change quite a bit. When I was younger death seemed very far away. I was willing to do far more dangerous things than I would now, simply because it didn’t occur to me that I could die by such risk-taking. Stuff like holding your breath until you pass out – driving a curvy mountain road as fast as you can just for the hell of it, seeing how much beer you can really actually drink in one night – all that kind of thrill seeking stuff that appeals to youth.

Death has given great meaning to my life.

At my age I can say this: death no longer seems like a negative to me. Existentially it is negative: death is the ultimate ‘”NOT”. But in terms of how it affects me emotionally, I will say that now it gives me great energy, it increases my appreciation of life, increases my compassion, my tolerance of others and of society in general (with all it’s problems).

Whatever wisdom I have, I cannot say for sure (not even close to certainty) that without death I would have acquired the same wisdom.

If death is truly the flipside of life, then a real question is whether, even genetically/biologically, it is possible to have life without death.

You could say that some single-celled organisms, since they just divide, then technically, they have life without death. I’d argue that the bifurcation is itself a death of the one that existed before the split.

As for not aging, a civilization that always looks 18, or whatever age is considered the most desirable, I think would soon transform into a civilization quite unlike anything we have ever had before. Since only suicide and accidents would cause death, you’d have people everywhere – the population explosion would dwarf even what we are seeing now in Africa and India.

Perhaps disease plagues would occasionally wipe out large swaths of people, but still, you’d see population expansion rates far beyond anything we have today.

I think that civilization is pretty much unimaginable to most of us.