From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Mar 17 2003 - 23:00:29 MST
At 08:28 PM 3/17/03 -0800, Spike wrote:
>After talking to a lot of people about life extension,
>and occasionally about cryonics, I see a disturbing
>pattern. Few are interested in either, but not
>because they believe methods will not work, but
>rather because they generally aren't having enough *fun*.
That's *exactly* right. People seem by and large to be having a fairly
awful time, especially as the aches and poor vision and bad sleep and poor
digestion of later years start to seep in. `What, more of *this*?'
The world gets murky. Doing the simplest thing becomes a hassle, and the
joys to be had from it are lessened.
Many of the posters on this list are too young to know from the inside how
tedious and dispiriting that is. Trust me. If older people get the idea
(mistakenly in the longer term but valid right now) that life extension
means *more of this crap*, it isn't at all like a healthy young adult
foreseeing decades or centuries more of raves, waves, delirious sex, mind
bending transmitteri, movies and books you haven't already seen in essence
a hundred times... It's like going to grey work on a Monday morning in
smog, with aching teeth and a cold, for the rest of eternity. That's on a
good day. Luckily I'm not at that point yet (except on a *bad* day), but I
can empathize all too readily.
We have to sell the idea of extended or recovered *youthfulness*. On the
face of it, that's about as plausible as Jesus Saves or Qi Energy
Saves--less, though, because it lacks the misty supernatural pizzazz escape
clauses of faith. To the extent that we sincerely expect scientific
advances to produce these benefits, we have to back up our
good-times-are-coming spiel with sober evidence. That's hard.
Damien Broderick
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