Live Long ... and Prosper?

How would you like to live to be 500, perhaps celebrate a millennium?

Silly question, right? Nuts really, because no one, biblically famous forefathers aside, lives much beyond that famous three score and ten, do they?

The good folks behind 'Life Extended', as seen on the Documentary Channel, beg to differ. They feel we might be able to live essentially forever. One day we will figure out how to stop aging in it's tracks, and then it will be just a matter of avoiding accidents and violence, and we can each be a modern day Methuselah. A span of a million years was mentioned, and not in jest. (At least I think not in jest. The film is Swedish and I can't detect Swedish humor. Are there Swedish comedians? But I digress ..)

The show did reveal a few downsides to life extension, the main one being overpopulation. After all, if no one is dying, then we'd better not have too many being born or else - disaster.

Another worry is worry itself. If we lick aging, and control disease, leaving only accident and violent attacks to fear, won't we become a bunch of paranoid shut-ins? The show's writers seem to believe we will become adept at avoiding mayhem, but it seems all too likely we will avoid it by just not getting out of bed.

One the documentary didn't mention, but comes readily to mind is - boredom. Will there be anything on TV 1000 years from now? And will we immortals even care? What will excite us after even a piddling 200 years of life? And if a smidgeon of interest is still left by then, how about when we reach 5oo? It's hard to imagine being surprised, interested, pleased, or moved by anything after 1000 years, and impossible after a million.

Of course, one thing bored people do to pass the time is have sex. Which will make solving overpopulation more difficult. Unless after 1000 years even sex is boring. (Nah ...)

And there's another problem: living forever means living with yourself forever - with how you look, how smart you are, how talented (or talentless) - you get the drift. What if you aren't really your cup of tea? Will body remodeling and genetic re-jiggering become an essential part of life? If so, will we all become homogenized and boring? One thing for sure - there's no way I want to spend a million years as Me. (A couple hundred, maybe ...)

Luckily, science moves too slowly for me to ever face the problem of immortality. From what the documentary insinuates, though, our grandchildren might lead active lives into their mid-100's, and their grandchildren just might make the double-century.

Will they be happy with their long lives? Or will they be miserable, self-loathing, agoraphobics, living in mirror-less houses and playing endless games of solitaire; surprised by nothing, moved by nothing?

The folks behind 'Life Extended' harbor no real fears. They - or rather the characters they introduce to us, believe we will make it. And we'll all be better off with an end to the scourge of aging.

On the off-chance they are right, maybe I'll have myself frozen. Spend a few hundred years head down in a vat of liquid nitrogen, until the methuselah technology is perfected. Then they will thaw me out, fix me up, and off to a thousand years of motorcycle rides and scuba dives I'll go.

Wait, that's risky stuff. An immortal could die doing those things.

Better stay in and do something less dangerous: Maybe they'll have surrogates by then, or at least some really cool video games...