I don't see how humanity could handle something like mass distribution of a magic treatment that allowed people to live to 1,000. The world would quickly get over crowded, resources would dry up, world wars would follow, and who knows what else.
Everyone was worried in the 1970's that the 1990's would have massive overcrowding and famines, but it didn't happen. Instead, the world population growth rate has begun to level off.
Why? In affluent countries, people no longer have children out of necessity, but of desire. In fact, many first-world nations are actually now undergoing population contraction (Japan, much of Europe).
If you eliminate aging across the world, the necessity of children will go away. People will only have children if they want them.
We'd end up with government controlling the number of children, possibly even a lottery system. The overcrowding worries of the 70s and 90s were not because of a 1200% increase, rather a 10-20% increase.
And it would, if you knew you'd live that long most wouldn't tie themselves down with kids while they're still young, they'd wait much much longer and go out and live life.
As it stands now, if you don't have kids by the time you're 30 you risk not being able to have them at all and having to suffer though months of fertility treatments and such just to try.
People could want kids for a variety of reasons (to pass on their genes, the utility of having children, etc) and you'd have to maintain that you could only have two children max at one point in your life to effectively replace yourselves and not increase the population.
Not to mention if you'd want to have kids 2 or 3 times over, now that they're growth is only a small percentage of your total life.
Death is wasteful and it’s monstrous. Those problems you mentioned seem like small obstacles compared to the much bigger problem of death.
Anyways, while death from old age is sad, I think premature death is worse. The 5 year old kid with leukemia, the car accidents, wars. There are tons of things that kill people before they can live a "whole life" which I think we should work on first (not that we can't do both).
Hopefully with some of these aging technologies, quality of life for the 'elderly' would also improve. I would hate if I couldn't play sports for 90% of my life.
I absolutely do agree with your last line. We shouldn’t just add years, we have to increase quality of life.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
But even if you could? Shakespeare as a Hollywood screenwriter makes for an intriguing idea, I admit. But I think we would get sick of even him.
I don’t know how productive Newton with hundreds of years to live would be, nobody really knows. It’s just that losing perfectly good brains to death (or disease) seems like such a waste to me.
We developed pretty good methods of storing some brain content for posterity (writing still seems like the dominant one) and just look at what kind of leverage that gave us. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants but it sure would be damn cool if the giants could still be among us.
We gain a lot by standing on the shoulders of giants, but we also gain a lot by having fresh eyes look at their work. Slow the rate of population churn and you slow the rate of fresh eyes. Newton was the man, but wasn't it awesome to have Lagrange come along with a fresh eye and make things a little easier and simpler? I think we get a lot more work done in 200 years of science if we have more generations of scientists, not fewer.
All that said: Then if that happens, war will happen. I predict population will stabilize still (remember, accidents and unsolved diseases and violence and suicide will still kill). If it doesn't happen then we condemn the whole world to die.
I for one am for giving the chance for us or our children the chance to make it work, and find it overwhelmingly arrogant to think we know well enough to judge they won't handle it.