Well, that partly depends. There's some talk - I don't know how accurate - that scientific thought is actually updated when the people holding the old views start dying out... If that's really true, and we wind up holding on to the same wrong ideas for 500 years instead of 100, I'm not sure we'd be lots further along. Of course, we might well have noticed the problem and done more about it, or something... or the effect may not be real (or particularly strong) in the first place.
Didn't Albert Einstein and his generation lived through two revolutions in physics?
The problem with your idea is that history is changing constantly(and more so these days). What we come to believe in one decade will probably change drastically in the next decade as we accumulate new experience.
Yes. Although I am in favor of life extension, I worry about the consequences for politics if people like Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il were to live for 500 years. Or for that matter, for tech if Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison lived that long.
Here is a short piece on the immortal dictator argument that shows up from time to time as one of the reasons given to continue to let billions die of aging: "But what if, the critics continue, you had a dictator who could live more or less for thousands of years? Wouldn't it be a good thing if he was guaranteed to die at some point and the people he oppressed had a chance to start anew? Wouldn't the sacrifice be worth it? No, it wouldn't, and here's why. Basically, we're being asked to give a potential means of extending our life spans so we can be sure that just a small handful of people and their cronies would be dead at some point in time. We can't always kill them or depose them, so we'll be outsourcing the assassination to nature. Anyone see the problem here? Of the over seven billion people who aren't dictators, who do we think is expendable enough to die alongside our targets for the sake of the anti-dictator cause? If I may reach for a little hyperbole, how different is the logic that all the billions who will die in the process are fair game because their death helps the cause from that of all terrorist groups who believe that civilians of the countries they hate can be on the hit list because killing them hurts an enemy and may force him to retreat? This is a rather crass way of saying that the ends justify the means and I doubt that they really do in this case. We could take this logic further and cast all modern medicine as being a dictator enabling technology. Maybe last week Assad would've tripped, fallen, hurt himself, then got his wound infected and was soon dead from septic shock, helping to end the civil war in Syria. Does this mean we must now give up our disinfectants and advanced medical treatments to make sure bad people die easier?"
This is not quite addressing the point, I think. The appropriate thing is to bite the bullet - it's probably true and unfortunate that some dictatorial regimes would last longer. It's not a very hard bullet, though - if we are viewing aging as a weapon against dictators, it's a pretty poor one; a nuclear ICBM strike on Pyongyang would be, by comparison, surgical.
