If you’ve hung around here long enough, you probably know I have two pet peeves: ageing and money. If we assume the saying ‘Only two things are certain in life: death and taxes’ is true, then we’re forced to conclude that I advocate for the (indirect) elimination of the only two certainties in life. So, if you came here looking for certainties, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place.

I’m (mostly) not joking. Lately I’ve been working a lot on the Answers to objections section, which together with a few discussions I’ve had on the Internet, got me thinking about the point of rebutting objections to rejuvenation. Generally, when I discuss the subject with somebody who’s not at all sold on the idea of rejuvenating people, I get the feeling they expect me to prove beyond doubt that nothing can possibly go wrong, either along the way between here and an ageless world or once that world has been reached. If my feeling is correct, opposers to rejuvenation may expect that my rebuttals are meant to prove that neither a post-ageing world, nor the journey to it, will present any problems or challenges.

This expectation is utterly unrealistic. It’s actually worse than that—it’s completely wrong. There’s no way in hell I (or anyone else) could guarantee that we won’t have a dictator ruling a nation for six centuries, or that environmental problems won’t be exacerbated, etc. The reason I can’t promise none of the above will happen is the very same reason why rejuvenation opposers can’t promise any of the above will happen: Nobody can actually predict the future.

Arguments against rejuvenation only sound reasonable because they appeal to our fears and to the blame-the-humans attitude of so many people. If you trust only your gut feelings and don’t bother examining facts and data, anti-rejuvenation arguments can easily seem obviously true. Accepting an anti-rejuvenation argument requires far less mental work than understanding why the same argument isn’t as sound as it appears, but that doesn’t make anti-rejuvenation arguments any more ‘obviously true’ than their rebuttals. It is impossible to know for a fact whether or not rejuvenation will cause any given problem before we get there.

Proving that no problems will arise as a consequence of defeating ageing is not the point of rebutting objections to rejuvenation. That’s not what any of my answers does. All they do is showing that objections to rejuvenation rely more often than not on fallacious reasoning, ignorance, fears, misconceptions, and wrong assumptions taken for established fact. In short, what we do when rebutting objections to rejuvenation is showing they aren’t valid reasons to let ageing continue crippling and killing us. At the same time, answers to objections show why all those predictions of doom and gloom aren’t as likely as they may appear. There’s no certainty to be found anywhere, but this doesn’t really matter—had we refrained from doing anything that wasn’t proved to be 100% risk-free throughout history, we’d probably still be living in caves.

Remember: Objections to rejuvenation are about hypothetical future problems that are far from being certain. Ageing and all the suffering and deaths that come with it are a very tangible fact, happening here and now. This alone should be sufficient to forget about objections altogether and focus only on putting an end to ageing. However, rebutting objections has also another purpose: It fuels discussion. Apart from raising awareness of the problem of ageing and the feasibility of its defeat, discussion prepares us to face the new challenges an ageless future might bring. The way to a world without ageing is still long, which gives us all the time we need to prevent eternal dictators, overpopulation, and all sorts of dystopian scenarios from ever materialising.