OpEd Piece on Extended Life Expectancy

daksis writes "CNN has posted an OpEd piece from the New York Times that raises some interesting issues. With the current advances in biology, we as a society are facing the real possibility that "immortality" could some day be the norm. What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?"

Comments

Re:population

[Transcendent]

and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement?

No one... that's why they're not going to retire for 240 years, but work for at least 200.

Imagine the type of skilled labor you could obtain over 200 years... More and more people will become highly (and i mean highly) trained specialists in whatever they do. This would allow for ever-increasing advanced in science, medecine, and technology which would appear to "boom" in the first century of this kind of "immortality".

I, for one, would love to see this kind of thing happen.

Perpetual Copyrights

[Tussinator]

"What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?"

Perpetual Copyrights. Life of the Artist/Author plus 969 years, once the Methuselah Copyright Extension Act is passed.

Re:population

[YetAnotherAnonymousC]

Imagine the type of skilled labor you could obtain over 200 years... More and more people will become highly (and i mean highly) trained specialists in whatever they do.

There's the optimist! And here I am worried that my specializations won't be relevant five years from now... =)

A basic assumption so far

[anzha]

Looking at the posts that come before my own, it seems that there is a basic assumption that there would be a 'forever young' situation: no aging and always in your 20s or 30s. Is this necessarily the case?

Look at those -now- that have lived to be over 100. Their quality of life is piss poor. As a matter of fact, most people's quality of life past 70 is pretty bad compared to their half century younger versions of themselves or quarter century younger versions, for that matter. That's just their physical health. Then shall we, the /. community, start discussing how many seniors begin losing their minds to alzheimers, senility, etc.?

If it means living forever, but being an invalid the whole time, um, forgive me, but count me out. The winter of my life will hopefully be blessedly short and my mind intact through it all as it stands. If they come up with UberYoung Disney Magic Drug(tm), then, maybe, if they have the comparable medical regeneration, we'll talk about immortality.