|
You know, I think Ray has a valid point when discussing the "outrageous extreme" issue. For me, the "outrageous extreme" is physical immortality, pushing beyond the the mere cusp of escape velocity to the actual escape: a finite probability, hopefully greater than 1 in a 1000, of never dying, where "never" means just what you think it means. Never. A googolplex years, unfathomable to the current human mind, would be a mere blink of an eye in the existence of post/trans/meta-humans.
So what's the reasonable middle ground for me? What is it that I contemplate realistically? Living a few hundred years, maybe a couple millenia.
Why so short? Statistics. (I'd elaborate, but it's really not the point I'm after.)
For the average person, on the other hand, the outrageous extreme is living to 130. What's the reasonable middle ground? Five to ten extra years of a frail existence at the end, or five to ten extra years of health in the middle if you're really lucky.
Ray's right. As soon as we can make 1,000 years seem like a credible, even if currently unpalatable, possibility to the general public, we can expect resistance to 130 year lifespans to diminish greatly. Once we can make "half-life"'s of 500 years or more seem reasonable and credible, where someone has an infinitesimal but non-zero chance of living to a million years, then resistance to 150 or 200 or 500 year lifespans will diminish.
But right now, the only thing that's credible as an extreme seems to be the 130 year lifespan, so we get stuck with expectations for, with concomitant limits of, a five to ten year extension of healthy lifespan.
I like the Methuselah Mouse Prize because it allows a small segment of the population to push our own agenda, up to legal limits, without the need to acquiesce to the "reasonable" middle ground expectations of the voting/purchasing public, with their respective controls over politics and economics.
[Posted by: Jay Fox at December 30, 2004 5:20 AM]
|
