Would you like to live to be a 120 years old?

[Tyler]

Hell yeah - especially if I can collect my public servant pension at age 55!

[Huntingwhale]

No way. If you were one of those 38% who said yes, you would watch most of your family die. You'd better win the lottery or have the most amazing job where you can support yourself for that long.

And yes, as someone said, it only makes sense if you get those extra years when you are young and they prolong your youth. Most people who are 75+ start to look/act real frail. I wouldn't want to live the next 50 years of my life like that.

[Enoch Root]

Originally Posted by Huntingwhale

No way. If you were one of those 38% who said yes, you would watch most of your family die. You'd better win the lottery or have the most amazing job where you can support yourself for that long.

And yes, as someone said, it only makes sense if you get those extra years when you are young and they prolong your youth. Most people who are 75+ start to look/act real frail. I wouldn't want to live the next 50 years of my life like that.

Why do people keep saying this? Seriously, if there is medication/technology that can help you live longer, I highly doubt that you'll be the only one that gets to use it.

Everyone's live expectancy would be enhanced. It really isn't that difficult of a concept.

Also, enhancing life expectancy doesn't mean adding years at the end when you are bed-ridden. It means keeping you healthier longer and PUSHING BACK the process of aging.

[CaptainCrunch]

Lets say that you could extend your lifespin by 40 years or so, but the price that you pay is that the last two weeks of your life is unrelenting pain on an unimaginable scale and insanity but the treatment won't let you take the easy way out and die.

Would you still want that extra time.

Or what if immortality was offered to you but every day was pain, not major pain, but that throbbing stubbed my damn toe on the coffee table pain.

Would you want that immortality?

[Enoch Root]

Let's say that, in order to post on a message board, you have to be a prison bitch for 2 hours a day. Would you want that?

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

Let's say that, in order to post on a message board, you have to be a prison bitch for 2 hours a day. Would you want that?

How is that even comparable?

Posting on a message board is not life. I doubt anyone would come to this board if the price was daily prison rape with salad tossing on Sundays.

[Dion]

Originally Posted by Huntingwhale

No way. If you were one of those 38% who said yes, you would watch most of your family die. You'd better win the lottery or have the most amazing job where you can support yourself for that long.

And yes, as someone said, it only makes sense if you get those extra years when you are young and they prolong your youth. Most people who are 75+ start to look/act real frail. I wouldn't want to live the next 50 years of my life like that.

You must be of the younger generation who has never given death a thought. I've lost my father, uncle and a few friends to Cancer and it caused me to look at my own mortality. I don't want to die anytime soon and I hope my health stays good for many years to come.

You'd be surprised at how many active 75+ year olds there are. My own golf course is filled with them who play on average 5 games a week. I hope to god that when I reach 75 I will be as active as they are.

[Dion]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

Let's say that, in order to post on a message board, you have to be a prison bitch for 2 hours a day. Would you want that?

It wouldn't happen as I wouldn't be dropping the bar of soap

[Enoch Root]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

How is that even comparable?

Posting on a message board is not life. I doubt anyone would come to this board if the price was daily prison rape with salad tossing on Sundays.

The poll wasn't about extended, but unhappy, pain-ridden life - it was about extended life.

[Dan02]

It's a moot point, the way I abuse my body I doubt i'll make 75.

[Flames_Gimp]

every minute of life is amazing, I'd love to live that long

[Pontine]

Depends on how useful I would be at that age. If I'm basically a vegetable, then no. I wouldn't want to be a burden to my family.

[DF616]

To hell with that idea... I can barely tolerate the world at my age now...

Having to tolerate people to that extent and at such a length of time would be a nightmare.

[Dion]

Food for thought

If resistance to life extension is based on the assumption that the extra years would be frail and painful, look out. That resistance will dissolve in the face of contrary evidence. If modern medicine learns how to slow aging, making the average 90-year-old feel as good as a 70-year-old feels today, people will recalibrate. Those who in our time would have preferred to die at 80 might be happy to live to 100.

There will always be folks who think it’s unnatural to live longer than what’s normal today. But what’s normal has already changed. Sixty-three percent of the Pew respondents, when asked whether life-prolonging medical advances “are bad because they interfere with the natural cycle of life,” reject this view, concluding instead that these advances “are generally good because they allow people to live longer.” Yet among this pro-longevity majority, 51 percent say that treatments extending life to 120 years “would be fundamentally unnatural.”


That’s blatant equivocation. How long can it be sustained? Why would these people, who already accept a 75 percent rise in life expectancy in the last century, balk at another 50 percent increase?


They won’t, of course. They’ll be long dead, leaving the new normal to their descendants. I think.

http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...ve_longer.html

[CaptainCrunch]

If it involves draining the life essence out of innocent victims leaving then dried out husks that turn into dust at the slightest touch then I'm in.

[Daradon]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Lets say that you could extend your lifespin by 40 years or so, but the price that you pay is that the last two weeks of your life is unrelenting pain on an unimaginable scale and insanity but the treatment won't let you take the easy way out and die.

Would you still want that extra time.

Or what if immortality was offered to you but every day was pain, not major pain, but that throbbing stubbed my damn toe on the coffee table pain.

Would you want that immortality?

As far as the last 'what if' goes, I'd probably take that. People get used to things very fast, you probably wouldn't notice that pain after a while if it was constant and/or in the same place and not major as you put it.

Plus if you're immortal, you could just self medicate to the gills for those days you really want to block the pain out.

[troutman]

Is the human brain equipped to handle more than 100 years of memories and experiences?

[Huntingwhale]

Originally Posted by Dion

You must be of the younger generation who has never given death a thought. I've lost my father, uncle and a few friends to Cancer and it caused me to look at my own mortality. I don't want to die anytime soon and I hope my health stays good for many years to come.

You'd be surprised at how many active 75+ year olds there are. My own golf course is filled with them who play on average 5 games a week. I hope to god that when I reach 75 I will be as active as they are.

I guess 75 was a stretch. My grandfather lived until he was 94 last year and up until a couple months before his death, he was still active. I guess all I was trying to say is that IMO it just seems like if you were to prolong your life that long, all you would be doing is stretching out the amount of time you would spend being old and frail. I would have no issue prolonging my life if I got to prolong the years where I was young and energetic. But I just woulnd't want to be old and frail for an additional 30 years. Sitting in my walker for an extra 30 years? An extra 30 years of not being able to physically take care of myself? That just doesn't appeal to me.

[Daradon]

Originally Posted by troutman

Is the human brain equipped to handle more than 100 years of memories and experiences?

Actually that might be the biggest issue surrounding longer and longer life. I think if you are asking physically, the brain is equipped. If healthy it can always make new memories, and old ones are often forgot.

But the big thing is how we perceive time as we age. Ever notice how summers used to last forever when you were a kid? It took forever for your birthday to arrive. Waiting the last two weeks of Christmas was torture. Whereas as you get older, your birthday seems to show up just a month or two after it passed. You constantly wonder where the time went. Everything flies by faster and faster. There's more to it than changing priorities, or the excitement of childhood. It's because your brain is actually recording time differently.

The basic idea is simple. When you're five, waiting for your next birthday is waiting a full 20% of your life. When you're fifty, it's only 2%. It's not just a mathematical way of looking at it. Scientists are proving it actually makes a big difference in how your brain looks at, evaluates, even records things. Actually the way you 'experience' time.

So if we were to get into the really big numbers, 120, 150, even further, it would be really interesting to see how our brains, and as such, our values and even our personalities actually evolve. Considering we are healthy enough to be able to be aware of it of course. Life would seem like it's just flying by. It might be hard to attach importance to things anymore. Get excited about anything anymore. Even differentiate between more recent years with accuracy. Life might started to get really jumbled up, even with a healthy mind. (Actually, that does kinda fit into your question, but I'm kinda thinking of the more emotional problems with it). We may be kinda robotic just living from one day to the next because time has less and less meaning to us as we age making it hard to put the past in context and hard to plan for the future.

Course all this is assuming we would be healthy enough to be that introspective, which is probably impossible anyway. It's doubtful we'd just be able to add these years and still have a healthy body up to the 1-3 years before we die. As the ages gradually increase so would our relative health. So instead of infirmity being from 70-80, it would be from 86-100, or whatever the correct ratio would be. I'm assuming that even though the average age gets longer, the basic periods of life would remain around the same ratios. Especially if it is true that our brains experience time the way they suggest.

Sorry for the babble, had a hard time explaining that concept and then my ideas and feelings on it. Hope it made sense.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by Daradon

Actually that might be the biggest issue surrounding longer and longer life. I think if you are asking physically, the brain is equipped. If healthy it can always make new memories, and old ones are often forgot.

If we discard all our old memories, do we lose who we are? Do we become another version of ourselves, similar but distinct? Version 1.0 may not be recognizable to Version 5.0.