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Comment by reasonattlm | Hacker News Reader

The words, even fine words, of men set to rationalize the span of years they knew they had are no longer relevant in this day and age. The difference between Seneca and us is that we can toil to turn money into additional years of life. Scientific research and medicine.

Of course, given that we are on the cusp of this new era of longevity science, rejuvenation of the old, and greatly enhanced life spans, we look around and see only the past. It takes a bold, one might even say entrepreneurial, soul to recognize what might soon be, were people to put their shoulder to the wheel.

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I respectfully disagree with you. One must be wary of the modern cult of technology as just another way to bypass the human condition.

Even if you live to be 2000, you cannot bypass suffering and you cannot stop change. Our attention span is between 5 and 15 seconds and you will have to share that present, that moment with all other human beings, just the same as if you only had six months to live.

The point is not how long you live, but how well.

As Marus Aurelius says in his Meditations:

"For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing."

I don't know. Imagine an earth filled with up to 2,000 year old humans. Many (not all) of them would be amazing in a huge variety of ways. They'd have had the time to spend 10 of our lifetimes learning how not to live well, and another 10 learning how to live well.

I see a planet of profoundly bored and weary 2000 year olds. But with 100 years of productive youth without a corresponding increase in time spent being very young or too old to work effectively, there would be outsized productivity gains.

For all you or I know such long lifespans might produce nothing but cranky sadists who are too jaded to find pleasure in anything but stripping folks like yourself of their naive enthusiasm.

I'm not especially enthused about the prospect of major life extension. Gerontocracy is already far too common and in the US the older demographic seems oblivious to the fact that the generations following behind are going to be stuck with an absolutely massive bill so the boomers can enjoy their retirement. At least Japan is trying to address the problem by developing better robots, while we are heading for spending 20% of GDP on health care.

We might be being a little premature on being on the cusp of a new era. All this technology and science takes time. For example, the war on cancer started almost 40 years ago. We are from a cure. We have so much more to learn before we can really extend life or "cure" death.

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