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Comment by pawelkomarnicki | Hacker News Reader

I dont' want to live 120 years, do you?

I'd be happy to live as long as the Sun, longer if we start colonising new planets. As long as I can die before the heat death of the Universe.

No way! Give me then a few mirrors and I'll start trapping far-red photons to restart the Universe again.

You're going to have to construct your mirrors from far-red photons, that's sort of the problem. Without stable matter you're not going to be doing much of anything (or even be much of anything).

And I'm happy to worry about this problem for as many trillions of years as it takes.

No, that's far too short.

I'd say that assuming good health, which is kind of the point of the article, any fixed number of years is too short. Every human should be able to die by suicide at the moment of their choice.

"Now the population doubles every ten years --"
VJ-23X interrupted. "We can thank immortality for that."
"Very well. Immortality exists and we have to take it into account. I admit it has its seamy side, this immortality. The Galactic AC has solved many problems for us, but in solving the problems of preventing old age and death, it has undone all its other solutions."
"Yet you wouldn't want to abandon life, I suppose."
"Not at all," snapped MQ-17J, softening it at once to, "Not yet. I'm by no means old enough. How old are you?"
"Two hundred twenty-three. And you?"

"I'm still under two hundred."

From Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question", http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Disease and ill health are not the only causes of death. It has been calculated that if disease and ill health were abolished, then the average lifespan would be ~1,000 years.

Absolutely, ideally way longer than that too.

Yeah. Why wouldn't you?

Because I don't want to live so long that I spend a large portion of my life in ever increasing pain and feeling my mind slip away from me. Just give me a short sharp shock around 80, if you can please.

Of course, that's what I think now at 36. Maybe by the time I'm 80 I'll be thinking, "reckon I can handle a few more years...."

Generally when people are talking about extending human lifespan, they're talking about extending the active, healthy lifespan. Obviously, what we did until now with medical advances is prolong old age and delay the inevitable. If it's possible to slow aging, then being 80 doesn't mean anything per se, it's just a number if you're biologically like a 20 year old today.

I think most people would prefer a scenario where they live to the age of 80 at the kind of physical peak they attained in their 20s to one where they live to 120 in a state of ever increasing decrepitude.

Put another way, the dream is to give you 5 decades of being 25, not 5 decades of being 85.

I think the idea of the anti-aging drugs from the article is you're supposed to remain youthful well into your elderly age.

I do. But it depends how long you can remain young.

I want to live until I decide that I no longer wish to.

I don't want to be immortal. Constant conscious state . It would be so boring.

boring... compared to what? Being dead?

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