There are 6 choices, 8 votes for Weydon's debate

Live to be 1000?

A biologist believes he may have found a way to alter our aging genes, allowing humans to live more than 10x average life expectancies--and that he will achieve this within our own lifetimes. His theory seems "semi-maybe-plausible" to most of the scientific community he challenged to disprove him in order to bring light and funding to the project. Granted, it's hard to completely disprove ideas in their extremely hypothetical scenarios, but it does seem to have at least the slightest bit of merit to it.

Personally I always believed that one day scientists would be able to REALLY tap into our natural decay, and "cure" it. I always assumed it would be much further in the future, perhaps coincidentally in time for when our race would be exploring and colonizing the universe more.

Thoughts? Surely many of us wouldn't mind a little more time, especially time being younger, but it does present issues of overpopulation and perhaps stagnating the gene pool.

Either way, I think advancements like this, even if only hypothetical, are pretty exciting stuff.
  • Hmm sounds cool
    Yeah I would not mind to live for a while longer, especially if health was guaranteed. I'm quite looking forward to the future, I think we are goign to live in some interesting times- especially with regard to technology. However I have no real problem with the thought of dying and if I had to be kept alive in a weak and feeble condition I would rather just die.
    25%  Voted for by petethemeat, ScorpioBlood.
    View 1 comment
  • :

  • People need to die.


    Can you imagine living 1000 years? The odds of having to change or lose life partners, the lack of further personal advancement, the inevitable boredom, the strain on society?

    I think I would like to live to 100 - have kids, gran kids, maybe great gran kids... a career, travel, etcetera. But 1000 years is just too long.
    25%  Voted for by sca, NeferMaatNetjer.
    View 2 comments
  • :

  • OOps
    Here's a link to an article about it:

    http://www.nysun.com/article/65695
    Voted for by Weydon.
    View 2 comments
  • :

  • Bitter and spiteful
    Why do you think a large proportion of older people become acrimonious?


    Voted for by ditchtheloser.
    View 3 comments
  • :

  • Definitely
    My first thought is that many people don't understand what it means if everyone lives for a thousand years instead of 100 or fewer. Not only would no one die of old age, but many people would be concerned about their health - the difference between a smoker and nonsmoker may be 500 years instead of 5.
    I do not believe that we will have apocalyptic problems if we live to be 1000. Our lifespan determines the speed in which we live our lives - get educated, get married, work, have children, retire, die. We are able to perform each of these stages for a certain period of time in our lives - it is a life cycle. If this cycle changes, I believe that pretty much everything in the world will change, from the way we do things and the thoughts we have to our ideals of peace and order. Everything would change monumentally - but, I think, for the better.
    Increasing the population will increase the chances of progress. A brilliant doctor will be able to make ten times as many discoveries as he would have been able to make if he could live to 1000. I would personally like to see how everything plays out.
    However, don't think that it'll be that wonderful to live for a thousand years - even this is a relatively small number - we would get used to it, and after the adjustments society would again function normally, and with no doubt, after we've lived like this for a long enough time we will be looking for ways to live for 10,000 years, or a million years, etc. In that time, with the number of people we would have alive and able to work, we could build our own planets to live on, thousands of them, and engineer our own immortality.
    Immortality, however, is not achievable. The individual mind itself is limited.
    To sum it up, increasing our life expectancy by some significant coefficient will significantly change what it means to be human, but there will still be problems, as with all things. Perfection can only be found in that which we are trying to avoid, death itself.
    Voted for by Supplyer.
    View 3 comments
  • :

  • It's not that I don't like life
    but i do not want to wait 1000 years to see my niece, or My friend Steve, or Rhonda, or my garandparents, or any other of the dozens of people i know who have left the world of the living. I want to go too, when my time comes, and no later.

    In fact, I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to play guitar with Frank Zappa, compare poetry with Robert Service, learn to fly from Manfred von Richthofen, and act in a play directed by William Shakespeare himself. I'm going to have a wonderful afterlife when I die, so don't weep for me! I'm just serving out my time here on Earth. the real fun begins at death.
    Voted for by NeferMaatNetjer.
    Add a comment
  • :

    •  

    None of the choices fit your opinion?  Add one →