They go hand in hand. Any reasonable path to eliminating mortality will entail eliminating aging and degenerative conditions.
Often, when people first imagine living much much longer, they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of age that also end up killing you.
If the pathway to where you're looking to go runs mostly through a fight against age-related degeneration, why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept?
Who's out there handwringing against fighting, just to pick a random example, dementia?
> why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept?
There are both drawbacks and benefits to the controversy of "ending death".
You have mentioned the drawbacks, but the benefits are that it attracts the interest of the individuals that care about the most important problem in the world, which is specifically this problem of ending death.
That's the idea behind marketing campaigns like "healthspan". It's a trade-off. It's very easy to get dragged into a pivot that focuses on one specific condition rather than mortality and age-related degeneration in general.
Often, when people first imagine living much much longer, they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of age that also end up killing you.