Here’s a new BBC documentary about scientists who are trying to conquer death:
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I would love to live 500 years if I could be healthy for that long. Would you?
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I’ve never wanted to live a real long life,course i deal with depression so that may color my thoughts on it but i don’t even wanna live 50 years let alone 500..
500 years of this crap? No thanks.
Probably. I think Asimov postulated a great caveat in Robots of Dawn.
Minor spoilers.
People with long lifespans value their life too much. Progress stagnates.
A scientist with 400 years to go can conceivably complete whatever grand scheme they are working on in their lifetime. So, where an 80 year lifetime encourages sharing and group progress, 500 years discourages it.
Risk taking also declines. To die with 20 good years left is sad, but 420 years?
Yes nonagenarians are notorious for much riskier behavior than teenagers.
I’d like to live as long as I was healthy. I’d take 500, but if it was 5,000 or 5,000,000 all the better.
“People with long lifespans value their life too much. Progress stagnates. ”
People say this a lot, but I have yet to see anyone defend the idea with any evidence. People just don’t think this way. No one ever evaluates risk against remaining lifespan. In fact, the opposite happens. Young people tend to take a lot of risk, while older people become very risk averse.
Plus, it assumes that these people wouldn’t know that they were unintentionally making their lives more miserable by valuing ‘them too much.’
As soon as they could identify the problem, presumably, they would be able to take corrective action.
If their society sucks, they have to live with it that much longer, so the converse could also be true: there would be a huge drive to make the world better, so everyone would cooperate more.
I can’t imagine anything worse than another 470 years of grinding poverty, but maybe that’s just me.
I’ve been terribly broke before. My wife and I started out living in a one room shack with (no lie) cardboard walls and eating ramen every single night for months at a time.
But, we snuggled under blankets when the weather got cold and read each other books we got for 5 cents at the thrift shop and it was wonderful to be alive.
The only thing I can imagine making life unbearable is constant excruciating pain. And I mean bad. I have an ankle that’s been broken three times, and it hurts quite a bit quite often, but even that isn’t enough to make me not want to wake up in the morning.
But I love life with a passion. Every piece of it. I want to learn more than I will ever be able to in this life. I want to go everywhere. I want to try every kind of food. I want to see what gets invented in the next century, the next millenia. I want it all, baby. 500 years wouldn’t be nearly enough.
I wouldn’t mind living a long life as long as my health held out. Would others that are assholes be allowed to live as long also? When would I be able to start drawing retirement? Would I have to work the first 450 years of 500? Would we limit the number of kids people can have? Think how many people would be at family reunions and that would be pushing for creationism to be taught in schools? Yeah I know I thought of some of the more negative aspects of extended life.
“I would love to live 500 years if I could be healthy for that long. Would you?”
On the face of it, it seems like a nice idea. But if it was boring – or I just wasn’t happy – it would soon become a nightmare.
Have you ever been bored enough you wanted to be dead?
I haven’t.
Actually, I have. Some years ago, I almost felt like Marvin from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Brain the size of a planet but chronically depressed. Thankfully though – after recognising my atheism – I pulled through it. Realising I only had one, short, life – I stopped drinking too.
Yay! Praise atheism :)
Seriously though: I do think an extremely long life would fast become tedious.
That is so outside my experience, I can’t even imagine it.
I fill all my time with interesting things. More time would just allow me to do more things. Though, I admit I’ve never had any trouble with depression, and that may change a persons perceptions quite a bit.
It might stagnate progress a little [though Asimovs spacers were individualists and didnt cooperate] but it should also cut into short term short sighted politics.
If you are going to be around to deal with the consequences they might matter more.
It’d just substitute it for medium/long-term short-sighted politics.
Seriously, I think if everyone lived up to 500 years, the only difference it’d make is that we’d adjust to a lenghtier scale of time.
I frankly don’t care. I live everyday like I’m immortal, anyway. I just don’t think about tomorrow (except in vague terms) or about the past. It’d be neat to live a hundred, but it’d be just as neat to live a year.
Maybe I’m just blasé about life, but that’s how I am.
only if other people would live that long too. it would suck to make friends and have a family every 60 years because they keep dying.
If everyone alive now lived for 500 years, and we continued to reproduce at current rates, none of us would live to be 500 years old.
I realize that’s sort of nonsensical, but I think it’s actually a pretty fair assessment.
I would happily trade away free reproduction in exchange for a much longer life span.
I kind of don’t give a rat’s ass about propagating my genes. I’d much rather have this particular iteration of my genes continue functioning.
+1.
Hey, they could always just include a chemical castration agent in the ‘fountain of youth pill.’
It’d be a trade off.
I’m not sure about 500 years, but being able to virtually eliminate senescence and be able to live comfortably for just about as long as you want sounds pretty good to me. I’d definitely need an ‘out’, though. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t handle immortality.
Super long life would almost certainly amplify the differences between the haves and have-nots. Not everyone will be given the opportunity to live 500 yrs. Do you really think you will be above the dividing line?
If that was a possible benefit of being above the line, then yes. I’m extraordinarily capable of success when I think it’s worth doing. I’ve walked away from jobs, out of boredom, that other people spend their whole lives trying to get.
If life extension had been a perk, I’d have stayed.
I don’t know if I’d want to live 500 years, but if they could eliminate debilitating diseases and dementia, I’d count that as a plus.
Of course, that’s no question. There is so much to see, so much to learn, so much to experience…
“Of course, that’s no question. There is so much to see, so much to learn, so much to experience…”
Co-sign. I would like to live as long as possible, especially knowing that this is almost without a doubt the only life I’ve got.
Yeah, knowing that there’s (most probably) no alternative can be quite the motivator :D
Aubrey de Grey did a TED talk on aging a little while ago. He makes the argument that it’s a moral imperative to do everything we can to stop people from dying, and that aging is the biggest cause of death. Our bizarre cultural revulsion to the idea of conquering death is totally inappropriate.
At least, that’s what he says. He’s also a bit of a quack.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYpxRXlboQ
Definitely yes.
There better be some hellacious birth control…