Final Project: Life Extension Changes the Game

This semester has involved, among other things, asking a lot of questions about what is ethical and unethical. My focus was on the potential for life-extension technology and why it could be a good or bad thing. What I only realized upon listening to the other presentations was that the whole conversation changes when you live for 500 years on average instead of about 80. I suppose the best place to start would be the ones I think are simplest and move to the more complicated ones.

This is partially my best idea for a blog post and a jumping-off point to discuss problems. Discuss!

Life Extension and Cryonics

As I understand it, the whole point of cryonics is that you delay death until science improves enough that you can be revived and whatever condition you are suffering from can be cured if applicable. The only real difference I see here is that a lot of us might live to see the process for reversing cryonics be invented, giving us a guarantee that at some point we can be unfrozen. Although we may very well live past the point where cryonics becomes irrelevant due to other advances, such as body-swapping.
Probably won't have any effect on the space travel aspect of cryonics, but I highly suspect there's much better ways to make ourselves human cargo than shoving us in the freezer.

 Although I suppose stuff like Futurama could still happen.

Life Extension and Animals

As I see it, life extension brings a lot of good potential when it comes to animals and how we treat them. Maybe not for foodstock, given they live to die anyways and the aging process is vital to certain kinds of meat. For pets it would mostly just maintain status quo for their lives compared to ours, given what results for mice revealed; our pets would either have very short lives compared to our own that we need to treasure, or they would be living heirlooms our grandchildren will need to take care of. For them, however, this does carry the benefit that they will young and healthy until they are dying instead of getting old, and in some cases, they'll be chipper and happy until they're right up at death's door. Although the recent death of my oldest cat makes me wonder if life extension actually will protect against cancer and organ failure...

If she would have stayed healthy and pain free, I'd have extended her life in a heartbeat.

Life Extension, Body Alteration and Body-Swapping

Let's face it, a lot of us don't want to be us for a few hundred years. One of the ideas behind life extension is that when you get bored of being a doctor after fifty years, you still have something like 300 years of youth to go be something else. However, there's only so much you can do with your first body before you get bored, even when it doesn't break down after fifty or so years. I know that, personally, I would get really tired of being my normal, heavy-built-yet-absurdly-sturdy self and might want to consider other options even when I am as healthy at 64 as I was at 18 (I say 18 because I might be developing arthritis already at 23. FML). It would certainly assist my change of pace to be able to trade in my body for one with a lighter, more athletic frame; or a much shorter body to see the world in a new way; or even somehow shoving myself and my memories into a cat.

I suppose this would introduce some kind of societal change where our bodies become like cars for out souil. "Hey, check out that '95 Heavy Caucasian Male that guy's got on! It's a classic, although I prefer my '80 Medium Punk Female. That's a body you can have fun with! Better than that 2000 YouTube Idol model, that thing is super overrated. Most of those are just reproductions, 2040 or 2050 at the latest. If I wanted a new body, I'd get a 2066 Athletic Venusian Both, now there's a sports body!"

Although nothing beats the this old custom 1965 Austrian Bodybuilder!

Life Extension and Assisted Suicide

I feel like this is the whammy, the big one, the grand problem...so I'll wait until the next installment. I want to make sure I have all my thoughts fully in order and my audience not already fatigued by my other opinions.