We are failing to sufficiently fund longevity research, and the basic science and engineering needed to enable it.
We are spending a ton of money on healthcare (analogous to the trains), and almost nothing on the root cause of most of these health problems.
The reason the fable is effective is that it frames aging as an adversary, which makes it much easier to understand the necessity of spending resources to defeat it.
Bostrom would say that your concern that aging and cancer are intertwined is akin to a scientist seeing that the scale is impenetrable to all known materials, and then giving up.
Somehow, whales live hundreds of years, and trees live thousands. What's different about their biology that accounts for this? Why aren't their bodies wracked with cancer?
We are spending a ton of money on healthcare (analogous to the trains), and almost nothing on the root cause of most of these health problems.
The reason the fable is effective is that it frames aging as an adversary, which makes it much easier to understand the necessity of spending resources to defeat it.
Bostrom would say that your concern that aging and cancer are intertwined is akin to a scientist seeing that the scale is impenetrable to all known materials, and then giving up.
Somehow, whales live hundreds of years, and trees live thousands. What's different about their biology that accounts for this? Why aren't their bodies wracked with cancer?