Could you please provide a link or two to examples of this 40% increase in the maximum life span of other species, as distinct from a 40% increase in life expectancy? That’s something I’d be curious to see.
Also, do you think that you could allow a human being to have four arms instead of two by interrupting or changing a specific signal that was sent to the body? I’m aware of homoeotic genes generally, and specifically how they affect polydactylism (love those Hemingway cats). But for systems that don’t depend on homeotic genes to regulate the number of a body part (like eyes or stomachs, as opposed to fingers or toes), there’s no mechanism to interrupt or signal in order to create “extra” fully functioning eyes or stomachs.
It’s not trying to maintain the status quo, It’s changing the status quo. Isn’t that the whole point of the argument you’ve been making - that aging is the natural result of genetic programming inside the body, and not the accumulation of external environmental factors? The status quo is that you age, just like the status quo is that humans only get two working arms or will be less than eight feet in height. If you want to change that, you have to make a change to the body - and that change is probably going to have to be pretty radical.
You used Ozempic as an illustrative example, but it’s not a very strong one - because it was very well established prior to Ozempic that humans can have more moderate appetite. There are countless individuals who naturally have that trait, and there are countless conditions and medications that cause humans to lose their appetite (or moderate it). It was entirely foreseeable that there could be a substance (or range of substances) that could cause humans to have reduced appetite, because there already existed lots of things that caused humans to have reduced appetite.
Nothing like that exists for pushing humans to a longer-than-extant lifespan. Unlike reduced appetite, we’ve never encountered anything on earth that can cause a human to live 150 years - no substance, no disease, no mutation. We’ve had the opportunity to observe billions of humans in the more-or-less modern era, where even pretty rare mutations or abnormalities or weird outcomes can get disseminated. No 150-year-olds, though - which really reduces the likelihood that there’s some feasibly interruptible signal that can simply be stopped to prevent aging. Doesn’t preclude it, of course - but it makes it more likely that the current outliers of “normal” agers (between 110 and 120) are the outer limit until we develop tools that can more radically change human biology than a mix of CRISPR and AI is going to be able to do in a few decades.
I’m not thinking about aging that way at all. I totally agree with you that aging could very well be the result of a genetic signal telling cells to slow down their metabolism - that’s why I used the examples of puberty and menopause above. If that “signal” is coming from a particular “place” or gene or small set of genes, we would potentially have the tools to interrupt it one day as a foreseeable extension of the cutting edge tools we have now. But if it’s not, if it’s more akin to the genetic framework that establishes how tall you’ll be and isn’t the result of a singular or discrete thing that can be interrupted, then those tools probably won’t be adequate to the task.