Mark Walker is requesting comments on an early draft of a paper on superlongevity and boredom. Take a look and see what you think:

As usual, comments welcome. Here is the abstract:

"Superlongevity" may be thought of as doubling (or more) the human lifespan through the use of technology. Critics have argued that superlongevity will inevitably lead to boredom, while proponents have denied this claim. Rather than attempting to resolve the debate through theoretical speculation, I argue that allowing persons to become superlongevitists can be construed as an experiment to decide this issue. Further, the moral benefits of conducting the experiment greatly outweigh the moral costs of not running the experiment.

A conclusion I wholeheartedly endorse. Run the experiment!

The idea that a far longer, healthier life somehow implies a doom comprised of boredom - and that this renders the whole exercise pointless from the outset - is one of those oddly widespread and utterly silly kneejerk objections to healthy life extension:

Even active, inventive, happy people often assume that longer healthy lives will bring boredom through repetition, however. Ask someone you know how long it would take them to run out of new things to do and become bored if they could live in good health forever. Your friend will give you an outrageously low number of years, I'll bet. If you stop to think about it - rather than just going on instinct - you'll soon realize that you are never going to be any more likely to become bored of life than you are right now. There is simply too much to do, too many different things to think, feel, do and accomplish. In fact, the advance of technology means there is always more to do with each new passing year. New possibilities, activities and enhancements to the quality and variety of life are constantly opening up.

If you enjoy healthy life, you'll most likely enjoy more healthy life - if you put in the effort to make it interesting. That's your responsibility; no-one else is going to help you make a life you like. So put in the effort! Don't let yourself be conned into accepting age-related suffering and death by those who haven't thought seriously about the issue. Or by those who couldn't care less about your welfare.

We live in a unique time: on the cusp of a biotechnology revolution that could deliver the keys to greatly extended healthy longevity and cures for age-related frailty and disease. But it won't happen in time for those of us reading this today if we all shrug our shoulders and fail to speed progress towards these worthy goals.

Technorati tags: life extension

Posted by Reason at June 19, 2006 8:00 PM | TrackBack (2)