Escape Velocity (You Wanna Live To Be A Thousand?)

   Many, many years ago, I wrote something (a poem?) in which I postulated that ours was the first generation in the history of the world which had any sort of expectation of living forever.

   I stated this simply because of all the medical advances which (at that time) had been made and not because I was privy to any scientific knowledge which wasn't already available to the masses.
   Last week, as I was rooting around on the internet in an attempt to find out some info on Masters athletes, I came across websites which described terms such as "escape velocity", "actuarial escape velocity" or "longevity escape velocity". They were used in reference to the aging process and described the point at which the speed of the advancements in the medical treatment of age-related deterioration exceeded the speed of the deterioration itself.
   One website quoted well-known biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey as theorizing that the first person to live to be 150 has already been born and that in another 20 years the first person to live to be 1,000 will have been born.
   I found this both staggering and fascinating at the same time.
   It throws the world as we know it way out of whack.
   Not that we consciously think about it throughout our everyday life, but we run that same life under the assumption that we're going to die some day relatively soon.
   We set aside money for retirement, write wills, seek adventure and change relationships.
   What would you do differently, though, if you knew you were going to live for a thousand years?
   Because I am under the assumption that I'm going to die sometime soon, I am also planning my retirement and have begun to "count the days". With a lifespan of a thousand years, though, would I then be looking at working for eight hundred of those years? Think about that for a moment and tell me if you find that appealing. Exactly how would you spend a thousand years of your life?


Typical weekend at the beach?

   Back that many years ago when I talked about our generation looking at the possibility of living forever, I also envisioned bodies lacking in vitality. Aubrey de Grey, however, believes that medical advances will make the human body quite viable, giving way to the prospect of being actually able to enjoy our greatly increased lifespan.
   What then concerns me most, though, is what kind of a world will there be to live in?
   Our world, in many parts of it, is a nasty place and is becoming nastier all the time. We also live under the constant threat of terrorism and what seems to be the increased risk of nuclear conflict. Should these threats ever come to full fruition, I think the world will not be a place you'd want to live in, particularly for another 800 years!
   I like the idea of longevity. Part of the deal with "escape velocity" was that you need to be healthy enough to live until these medical advances become available. I personally just wanted to be healthy until the end of my life, say in my mid-eighties or so. I never figured on living anywhere from 150 to a thousand years. I was never aiming, and still am not, to attain "escape velocity".
   Think of a world where no-one dies a natural death. If nothing else, think how crowded it would be. At some point we would at least feel as though we were all shoulder-to-shoulder. You would have the opportunity to meet your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren but how familiar would you be with any of them and how could you possibly play a real role in their lives. So what would be the point?
   I strongly suspect that, given the opportunity to live several hundred years, we would choose death at some point. When there were no new things to experience and the world was closing in on you, death would be the only thing left that would seem like both an adventure and an escape with a velocity of its own.