Sure, I’d like to live longer, another 100 or 200 years would be great, but if everybody lived to 1,000 or longer, what would the world population be like? We’d need to move to another planet or space to accomodate the massive amount of people on this planet. As humans already are living longer it is impacting the total number of people in the world. Considering most of the world is covered with oceans, I’m seeing sardine cans in the future. And that’s not even getting into the environmental concerns of a world with humans living to 1,000 or more.

When we get these therapies, we will no longer all get frail and decrepit and dependent as we get older, and eventually succumb to the innumerable ghastly progressive diseases of old age.

Living a century is a good life. It’s sad when people have their life cut short and while these futuristic age treatments — which the article suggests might be available in my lifetime — will do nothing to counter accidents and murder, I think living a century is a good, fair amount of time. Cheating the death clock has so many layers of complexities to unravel, discuss and debate. Would I take a treatment to live longer? Sure, I would. Who wouldn’t?

That’s the problem. The movie Bicentennial Man probed with a robot played by Robin Williams that artificially prolonged the life of the woman he loved. I wouldn’t want to see my children and grandchildren and others die before me. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work, is it?

One depressing reality about life is when you finally amass the money to retire and relax and enjoy life you typically have the fewest number of years to enjoy these fruits of labor. But I’m not sure having some elixir of prolonged youth is the best answer.

Part of what makes us human is that we die in a somewhat predictable order. Parents die before children. Children die before grandchildren. Sometimes the order is upset and death is tragically early, sometimes we live longer than we should, but a centuy is a good length of time, isn’t it? If we can’t accomplish everything we want to do in this life in 75-100 years (or possibly more), how much more time do we need?

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