Friday, July 27, 2007

Living Forever?

Have you ever thought about living to be 1,000 years old? Have you ever thought that it could be really possible? Probably not. But what if I told you that it was possible, even probable.

Now that sounds like an enormous jump in technology, doesn't it? The good thing is that we don't need to do it all at once. Let me explain. Biologists in the field believe that in the next fifteen to thirty years we will be able to implement in people moderate age reduction techniques now used in mice. That means at minimum, a life expectancy increase of 30 years. Not preserving an old person for 30 more years, but being physiologically 30 years younger. On the exponential scale of technological advancement, this gives us the jump start we need to stave off aging indefinitely. Within that 30 years of life science has bought us, we will have found better ways of putting off the aging process, giving us an even greater lifespan. Soon enough, our life expectancy should rise more than a year, every year, effectively meaning that we will not age. Of course we can still die by a host of other means; accidents, violence, global catastrophe, certain diseases (although it's worth mentioning that 80% of diseases affect us in old age, and this same technology that is fighting aging is also fighting these other diseases).

Don't believe this is really science? Check this page out.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

Now we have to ask ourselves, should we live forever? What about overpopulation, immortal dictators, the starving poor in Africa? Wouldn't it be boring to live so long? I think these are good questions, but I don't think they weigh as much as the fact that aging kills one out of one people that are not killed by something else first. Whats worse to me, is that it is a very slow, painful, and sometimes degrading death. These years are the ones I fear the most in life, all my friends dying around me, loosing my faculties to do the things I want, and knowing that it is only going to get worse until you die. So for me, dieing is not the scary thing, but being old. Personally, I would love to live to be a thousand. Then I could be the renaissance man that I always wanted to be.

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