Who wants to live forever?

A researcher at Cambridge University who runs something called the Methuselah Mouse prize for lengthening the age of mice (Motto: Because the world needs more crotchety old mice.) told the BBC recently he believes the first human to live to 1,000 might already be 60 years old. I imagine this will come as wonderful news to people who hold out hope of seeing Michael Vick play another professional football game.
Geneticist Aubrey de Grey, who appears to be shortening his own life expectancy by devoting considerable energy to maintaining a beard massive enough to hide an Olsen Twin, told the BBC he believes lifespans will increase dramatically in the years to come as new technologies evolve to fight the effects of aging. I don't claim to have a strong science background, but as I understand them the reasons for de Gray's beliefs boil down essentially to, because. Come on, though. If we can't trust science geeks with crazy-ass beards, who can we trust?
De Gray argues the technology to combat aging already exists in preliminary form, which sounds a little like arguing scientists are on the verge of building a working time travel machine because Doc Brown slipped on the toilet and invented the flux capacitor.
Still, de Gray is confident. He believes the technologies in question will be in use in mice within 10 years — finally bringing life to the dream of nigh-immortal super rats whose only natural enemies will be super-old cats — and in humans within a decade after that. Once that happens, we can kiss good-bye the frailty that currently comes with old age. Science, de Gray says, will correct all the wrongs that nature and millions of years of evolution have decided are a good idea. After that? Forget dying of old age and start watching out for passing trucks.
Seriously, getting hit by a truck appears to be de Gray's choice for leading cause of death in the anti-aging future. He mentions it at least twice. I see things a little differently. I see the number of deaths attributed to fights started over stupid little things that happened three centuries earlier skyrocketing. Alternately, I figure we'll all slowly starve to death as the population of undying humans and super-mice slowly grows too large for our natural resources to support.
Mostly, though, it's going to be the stupid fights between two 964-year-olds about whether the Timberwolves were stupid to trade Kevin Garnett or who got a raw deal in a fantasy football trade back in 2142.
Face it, if we're going to live to 1,000 we're going to have a lot of free time on our hands. And a lot of time to hold stupid grudges.
De Gray seems to think this eternal life deal is a good thing. I'm not so sure. I know plenty of people I wouldn't want to have around for 10 minutes, much less 10 centuries. I don't think I want to live in a world where I have to spend the next 967 years getting news reports of a centuries-old Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan beamed directly into my brain by the soon-to-be-invented neural-news networks. You think it's hard to get away from stupid reality shows now? Wait until everyone on the planet is all connected at the brain.
Hasn’t de Gray seen the movie Highlander? That was one unhappy immortal Scotsman.
Living for 1,000 years without a significant decline in mental or physical ability would presumably mean 1,000 years of getting up for work every day. These days people are worried about putting away enough during their working years to live comfortably from 65 until their death, which with current, non-made-up science, is likely to occur sometime in the 35 or so years that follow (runaway trucks notwithstanding). You think your 401k contributions are going to be enough to last you more than nine centuries?
And, ultimately, there's the whole natural resource thing. If global warming is a problem now, what's going to happen when we can legitimately count body heat from the undying hordes as a contributing factor?
Actually, I might have a solution for that last problem. By de Gray's beard-influenced logic it may already exist in preliminary stages. It's called Soylent Green, and I hear it's delicious.


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