Life Extended. Is this something you want?

In Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley, hedge fund manager Joon Yun is doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation. According to US social security data, he says, the probability of a 25-year-old dying before their 26th birthday is 0.1%. If we could keep that risk constant throughout life instead of it rising due to age-related disease, the average person would – statistically speaking – live 1,000 years. Yun finds the prospect tantalising and even believable. Late last year he launched a $1m prize challenging scientists to “hack the code of life” and push human lifespan past its apparent maximum of about 120 years (the longest known/confirmed lifespan was 122 years).

The Guardian, UK

I, for one, am read for a break.


Life, and medical condition of being a human being, is nothing but endless trials IMHO. Trials that heavily impact the mind, the soul, and the body. Sure, make life better through making the body impacts far less severe and a detracting force to the quality of life.

But what about the relentless march of change? Some may live for this. I am a creature of habit, due to a rather sincere lifelong battle with GAD, general anxiety disorder. Change, is something that is rather uncomfortable to me. It tweaks my anxiety and has always been the probability factor of oncoming panic attacks. When everything is squared away, it greatly eases my anxiety.

Death. Death of loved ones. The death of love, which overtime, fade if not die outright.

Becoming jaded, due to life based observations. Growing up to take pride in our nation and society, only to find out you were in a sugar induced high.



Some will retort that when we fix the bodily problems we will also fix much of the emotional pain and scarring. What, are we talking a magic pill "that makes all the pain go away"? Are we talking a scenario not unlike "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"? These are not panacea like queues for being a fix to me. I see it as a band-aid, a pharmaceutical sugar pill.


Truthfully, as it stands, I am alive because of the pain it would cause my loved ones were my life to end. Is this something you wish to see extended by a few decades?


Personally, I don't.



-NF

Me? No. I'd be shocked/disappointed if I made it past 50-60. I only have a .01% chance of dying before my next birthday?

a reply to: nullafides

Id love to live forever...there is so much to learn...and basically in 1000 years I want to go back and find every bastard that argued with me on here and say "hahah I was right!" or....be happy they aint around to tell me I was wrong.

One day we will be able to live for hundreds if not thousands of years...it will change humanity completely but also our mindset.
Maybe If our lifespan was a thousand years we would think of the future instead of destroying our kids future.

a reply to: corvuscorrax

So you're 25? I'm 56 and I am glad I am still around. I guess when I was your age I thought more like you, but now that I'm here, I still feel the same as I did then and I want to live!

To OP, I would personally like to live that long because I have so much I want to learn and do. I figure it would probably take a few hundred years to master some of the things I want to.

a reply to: nullafides

Would I live forever? As opposed to rapid molecular entropy? Oh hells yes.

I have already outlived my expectancy according to friends and family.

Do I want to go on to a ripe old age of 250, 200, 300? Hell no!

With where we're at right now I really don't want to see another 20 yrs.

Peace

a reply to: nullafides

How would the problem of population growth be dealt with I wonder. I am like you... and I can't understand the people who want to make it to 100, the older people get the more miserable they are so why does everyone want to live a long time.

a reply to: Char-Lee

If you could stay at 25 I dunno...maybe having to work for a few hundred years would make us even more so lol.
We would have to bring in one kid and then the snip law I think...unless by then we are reaching to the stars and other planets.

originally posted by: boymonkey74
a reply to: Char-Lee

If you could stay at 25 I dunno...maybe having to work for a few hundred years would make us even more so lol.
We would have to bring in one kid and then the snip law I think...unless by then we are reaching to the stars and other planets.

I think you are right but with too long of a life even one kid would eventually be too many unless we did move off world.

Still I agree with the OP no matter how you look at it healthy or not, life=pain. People would still have accidents and murders and child abuse and animal abuse and so on, people are not getting nicer as far as I can see!

Life Extended. Is this something you want?

No thanks. I'm looking forward to moving along and being free of being stuck in an organic body. And I can't see how the planet could sustain people living longer than they already do. This place is overpopulated and our resources are running thin as it is.

a reply to: FlyersFan

Does it have to be organic?.
What If we can transfer our minds into a computer and that into a spaceship I would love to spend thousands of years flying around discovering new worlds etc .

I'd take immortality. My deepest desire is to stand on the bow of a starship, looking out at the stars. It may sound a bit crazy, but there is a small part of my soul that aches, knowing it will never happen.

Living longer brings about new problems. Namely, where are we going to put all these people? How are we going to employ and feed them? At the rate that humans have babies, each generation would be exponentially increasing the population ever greater, all the time. The prospect of humans living any longer than we do currently is terrifying.

I think you ARE jaded, just as you say. Facts are when we have that chance we'll take it. However, there'll be so many changes which come along with it that if we knew precisely what would happen many of us wouldn't want it. Ask a deeply religious person 500 years ago if they'd want to contribute to the world of today, for example, knowing how liberal and non-religious it can be? What if in the future there're clones and mind reading devices and strict policies controlling our behavior from the time we're born to the time we die? What if people are having sex with robots or holograms or what-have-you? Maybe pedophilia is legal, or something like it? Can't you imagine something which would repulse you and will surely happen? How about babies being born outside the mother's body because it's deemed somehow healthier for them? Or what if the Earth has no more large lifeforms, and all that's left is a genetic data bank and an enormous biological sciences program, who's only purpose is to both better understand alien biological lifeforms and to better understand our history, not necessarily bring it back? Or maybe all our current religions are drastically changed or completely abandoned to history. Maybe the religions which replaced them are a nightmare! Maybe there're no set genders?

I mean, Star Trek TRIES to challenge. No money! There's a woman captain in STar Trek Voyager! Oh noes, the captain in Deep Space Nine has dark colored skin! There's a robot which tries to be human! You get what I"m saying? The REAL future will probably repulse us in ways Star Trek or other similar shows can't even approach, since it has no respect for our current values and/or culture and isn't trying to teach us - like TV shows might.

originally posted by: boymonkey74
What If we can transfer our minds into a computer and that into a spaceship .

Nope. I want to be etherial and free to go where ever I want at the speed of thought ... with nothing to break down or hurt ... with no need for others to be doing 'upkeep' on me. Just free. I wouldn't want to be confined in a body of any kind any longer than necessary.

I want to live as long as possible, because I don't believe there's anything after this existence.

I'm just trying not to outlive my: 1) money, 2) mind, and 3) body.

originally posted by: TheArrow
I want to live as long as possible, because I don't believe there's anything after this existence.

I mostly agree, but we all have our limits. There're things I can't cross. There're things you can't cross either. Everybody has a breaking point. Lots of stories/movies explore this theme.

I don't believe there's anything after death, so I want to live as fully as I'm capable of, but there're things I won't or can't do.

Living a longer life would be really nice. If we were not stuck in a constant loop of terror, lies, and "wound licking" If there is one thing I have learned in my short life, and even shorter military career. Its that as long as we continue to choose this path of constant change and human disconnection we are going to continue to see problems with people trying to take advantage of an already corrupt system. So as of now, no. 60 years of government lies and living in poverty is enough for this guy!