"Pay Death to Go Away." A different author could have done so much more with that article seed than this effort at Forbes. It starts promisingly enough:

Nobody wants to die--but what if you could pay the piper with cash, instead of your mortal soul?

People have always been willing to spend money to try to pay off the Grim Reaper. But modern would-be immortals know that old-fashioned cure-alls, like the ground mummy dust to which hopeful aristocrats turned in medieval times, were only so much quackery. And modern medicine has done a great job of extending our lives already. In the past 100 years, the human life span has increased 65%, to 78 years.

Sadly, it misses the point thereafter. An opinion: the most boring, prosaic thing you can do with your wealth is to buy what already exists. Why even strive for wealth if that is all you will do? The only real difference between those who get by and those who have built up deep pockets is that the latter group has far greater leverage to change the world - to buy what does not yet exist.

There is presently no way to pay age-related degeneration and death to go away. A hundred thousand people end years of age-related pain and suffering in death each and every day: they would pay if they could. Calorie restriction is most likely the best available option today to obtain any sort of modest healthy life extension, and taking up that lifestyle choice will almost certainly reduce rather than increase your expenditures.

There is, however, an option that apparently didn't occur to the author of the Forbes article: devoting your resources to plausible longevity research, thereby helping to create medical technologies that will allow people the choice of paying death to go away.

If you have built wealth of any stature, use some of it to fund the medical research that will change the world; you'll benefit far more in the long run.

Technorati tags: activism, advocacy, life extension