A couple of nights ago I had a dream in which I was very old. I don't know exactly how old, but my face looked like that of an unwrapped Egyptian mummy. Everyone I'd known in life was already dead and had been for some time. It freaked me out.
So I'll pose this question: What's scarier, a life too short or a life too long?
When you are younger, the thought of life too short would be horrible. When you are old and feebler??, the opposite might be true.
ReplyDeleteGuess we are getting to that age.
Ed
I would have to say life to short.
ReplyDeleteIt's possible that we're within a handful of generations of having lifespans which are not limited by age. If so, there's a chance some people now alive will get to that time.
ReplyDeleteIt's not clear that society will survive that transition, but if it does, imagine the possibilities! Would you like to walk on Mars? Tour the moons of Jupiter? Vacation just outside the rings of Saturn? All of those might be possible.
A friend of mine calculated that with only current technology, humanity could span the Milky Way Galaxy in as little as 20 million years. Already, astronomers have cataloged hundreds of planets in our "local" neighborhood. Extrapolating to the rest of the Milky Way, there are likely in excess of 100 billion planets in this galaxy. Many will be much more spectacular than anything in our neck of the woods.
It's hard for me to imagine being bored for at least a couple of billion years. Unfortunately, if I make it to the time when my lifetime isn't limited by age, my retirement savings aren't going to last nearly long enough! :-)
What I said might sound nuts, but there are people seriously working on such things. See, e.g.,
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html
Scarier is worrying about it. In the whole scheme of things we don't have much say on the subject. Dying had earned such negative publicity in the west. And if the galaxy thought we could expand our boundaries, would it let us?
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