Live a Thousand Years?

[JackLuis]

Here is a review of a book about scientists in England who are think about this, Seriously!

Is a 500-Year Human Life Span Just Around the Corner?​

With unprecedented leaps in human longevity over the last century, are drastically longer lives within our grasp?

Sensationalist headline, and a tickler of a tag line, pretty good so far.

A tavern stood across from that church tower in the year 1353, with beer for three gallons a penny -- with shops and markets up and down the street, then as now, and around the corner the spires of the University of Cambridge, pointing at the same cloudy English sky. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, the tavern was called the Eagle and Child. Elizabethan scholars would have stared up at its gently swaying signboard and (gently swaying themselves) remembered the myth of Zeus, who swooped from the clouds in the shape of an eagle, caught a child named Ganymede, and flew him off to Mount Olympus to serve as the gods’ cupbearer, one of the immortals.

Suddenly you realize the author is paid by the word.

In our corner of the Eagle that afternoon, the prints that hung on the wall just above Aubrey’s head showed two jolly drinkers with tankards raised. Those gentlemen’s powdered wigs and red coats would place them in the time of King George the First, Second, or Third. Back then, the tavern on this spot was called not the Eagle but the Post House. Horse-drawn coaches came rumbling into the cobbled courtyard every day to deliver the mail. By the Eagle’s courtyard gate, you can still see the markers that guided in the coachmen -- the old stone posts. Life expectancy in Georgian days rose toward forty years in England, less in its thirteen colonies. “When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years,” said Samuel Johnson. In reality, men and women were growing older and dying just a bit later each century; but by so little that Johnson was right to laugh.

Oh good back to the point.

It's along article but ends well and discusses several aspects of longevity. I imagine the book is controversial in Cambridge.

The whole thing is filled with bunnies if you think about it.

 

[mynameisben]

A 500 year life span sounds pretty good to me, actually. I figure if I get a really good paying job real soon, work as hard as I can and scrupulously squirrel away every last nickel I can live without, then with a little luck I'll be able to retire when I'm 490 or so.

Go Science!

 

[Stella_Omega]

I would be happy with a modest 200 year lifespan. Die young and leave a beautiful corpse-- or at any rate a less decrepit one...

 

[rgraham666]

My thought on the subject.

 

[TxRad]

Off and on, I have been working on an alien story. Kind of the reverse side of the X-files as a parody. The aliens are long lived and that takes some thought. If you lived seven or eight hundred years, when does puberty start? When does childhood end? How do you keep from getting bored?

The questions are endless and the plot bunnies thick.

 

[djserani]

I've often thought I'd love to be long-lived, I mean really long-lived, but that does make me wonder just how bored I'd bed. I love history, so I can say *now* looking back that it would have been cool to see, but there's no guarantees that I would have even seen them. I think I'd prefer to be able to time travel (as long as I couldn't affect the time I visited. Of course, that brings Schroedinger's question into the mix and we start talking about all sorts of fun stuff.)

Suffice it to say, I think I'd get tired after a while. Even if money and that sort of thing wasn't an issue.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

On the used book market there is a volume called Reversing Human Aging, Fossel. In it he puts out that even if aging were a curable disease and all infections cured, the law of averages would guarantee that a safe would drop on your head by the time you hit . . . oh, around 1300. So we'd never be immortal but as Stella says, "less decrepit" would be just fine. As to boredom? Hell, now that I'm retired I've got even more to do than when I was working!

 

[Belegon]

One thing I have often looked at and wondered about is the connection between longevity and how we value human life.

Non-scientific observation seems to indicate that the more likely we are to have long, healthy lives -- the more we value them and the less we tolerate things that cut them short or make them less bearable. Not only in ourselves, but in others as well.

This could, of course, be a false positive. It could simply be that the two developments have been parallel but unrelated.

On one hand, it would seem that if you have less of something than it should be valued more. A person with only $200 in the bank finds it far harder to spend a dollar than a person with a balance of $2000.

But it doesn't seem to have been the case, historically. When lives were shorter, they were also less precious. And an early death was seen as less tragic, not more so...

 

[R. Richard]

My scifi series, Second Chance, deals with a man who discovers a method whereby he might live forever, or at least a very long time. He starts as an old man and gets younger. However, the series inspects the way that he gets younger and the effects on his life. Check it out.

 

[squarejohn]

I'm 69 and I've had enough.