Well, we're getting there, it seems.

At least, if we believe some of the most prominent guys in the anti-aging field such as Aubrey De Grey and David Sinclair. According to them, we're inching real close to either turning back the clock (De Grey) or considerably slowing it down (Sinclair).

Cause for hope and celebration, right?

Not so for some people, particularly those who are really into "the Earth", and don't want the Earth suffering from overpopulation. Sentient humans can suffer from decades of ill health and slow death in the old age, but the Earth shouldn't.

So let's address overpopulation.

The first answer to this concern is that birth rates outside of sub-Saharan Africa have been on a steady decline for decades now, and are set to continue declining due to increased urbanization and female education worldwide. So whatever near-term increase in the global population will be short-lived and will soon start reversing.

The second answer is that even these (currently low) birth rates in the developed world are actually artificially higher than they otherwise would be. What's propping them up? Child benefits that virtually every developed country has some form of. The extent to which these benefits increase births is debatable, but there's no debate whether or not they do. There's little doubt, for example, that, if Canadians didn't receive their monthly $500-900 per child, they wouldn't be as keen on having as many of them, which is not many begin with.

As to the third answer, it would be simply an extension of the second one. Meaning, just as governments can use wealth transfers to encourage births, they can do the same to discourage them. In practical terms, it would mean that people who remain childless would get money from the government, and people who don't wouldn't. And given that birth rates are currently low even with pro-natalist policies, they, in all likelihood, would completely crash if those policies would, instead, make procreation a lot more costly.

For these reasons, I am not all that worried about handling a potential overpopulation problem if people were to live some 500 more years. And I say "potential" because it's not all clear at which point the Earth — or various individual countries — would start "running out of stuff" for their respective populations; that is, at which point the number of people actually becomes a problem for practical reasons.

So, as you see, here, I'm not even getting into the enormous societal (as opposed to personal) benefits of curing aging. The main one being the accumulation of knowledge of people not retiring after forty years of work that can only lead to greater innovation and wealth-creation. Just imagine what Einstein would've been able to achieve and come up with for the rest of us were he to live 300 years.

But I'll leave that for another day.

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See also:

Part II: Old-Age Suffering

Part III: A Much-Richer Society

Part IV: The Personal