There are, in fact, some (very primitive) organisms which don't appear to age. They're just not very complex, or large. Which is probably not a coincidence, a

There are, in fact, some (very primitive) organisms which don't appear to age. They're just not very complex, or large. Which is probably not a coincidence, and suggests that ageing is not (in humans and other complex species, anyway) only normal entropy, but rather an adaptation. Telomeres, for example, put an upper limit on how many times a cell can divide; much of the anti-aging work is focused on getting around this limit. But, telomeres are an important anti-cancer adaptation. The fact that they limit how many times a cell can divide, and thus how long the cell line can persist, is not a bug, it's a feature, and in fact the primary feature. If you managed to disable them, you would not become immortal, you would probably die sooner (of cancer) than you would otherwise. It's also not uncommonly the case that changes in society come from the younger generations, who get power as the older ones die off. If Stalin's generation had lived forever, the Soviet Union might still be shooting people who tried to leave. Actually that wouldn't have happened because we would probably still be living under the god-emperors of the ancient empires. But, a society next door that did NOT have agelessness, which was therefore more able to innovate, would eventually come across the border and kill off the ageless.