A great article from the Times examines the concept of escape velocity in healthy life extension and aging research: "Sally's life prospects are optimum for a human child in 2005. According to current projections, she can expect to live well into her eighties. But it's not going to be like that, because Sally is not going to die until 3194." As the author - and Aubrey de Grey - point out, plausible, working anti-aging medicine will bring great changes. "Almost any of the traditional answers would be dismissed as deluded mythologies - attempts 'to rationalise this tragedy as a good thing' - constructed in the face of what we took to be the inevitability of death. If death is not inevitable, all such mythologies becomes meaningless."
Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-525-1522606-525,00.html