FWIW, I'm in the "Why wouldn't you want to live forever?". Think of all the things to do and learn and experience and relearn. Ask me again in 10,000 years though.
Plus, I'm kinda developing an intense curiosity about what's after death. Maybe just the void. Maybe wakeup in a simulation to some dreary existence. Maybe float around on clouds with a harp. I have no idea and it drives me crazy sometimes! (not to curious, because what if the afterlife is awful!)
A couple of items that shifted the readers' perspective were the 28 year old character who misstated her age as 104 to make herself seem more interesting, and that many people in the 400-500 year-old range picked up high risk sports as out of growing boredom with multiple careers and pursuits...
(if anyone recognizes and remembers the story, it'd be great to know what it is!)
I'd also argue that another factor in the "explore vs exploit" strategy is fear (which encompasses fear of death). If you view your world as dangerous then it makes sense that you should focus on an exploitation strategy over an exploration strategy. The world is becoming far safer (despite American perception) and I think this is helping accelerate this cultural change too. I'd expect that if we lived to 200 we'd treat people in their 50's/60's like we do people in their 20's now, and I'd expect them to act similarly too (under the premise that health degrades in this new age system as our current age system).
Though honestly we'll never know until we do it. I do think fear of trying it is dangerous though. One of our advantages as humans is the fact that we tend to use an exploration strategy more than many other species. We've also gotten pretty good at mitigating risk while exploring dangerous territories. But that's how we push forward technological advancements.
I figure it'd take 10,000 years to gain enough knowledge to know what all your options are!
If the DO ask in 10,000 years, you should ask them what they are doing there and tell them not to bother you for a few hundred thousand years while you try a few things out.
Check us out on YouTube—“Omni Artisans”. If one could reduce the amount of effort it takes to accrue knowledge and drive powerful experiences, would one need to live forever per se?
It’s a shame that so many people think about death in a personal way, forgetting that before you die, you will have to watch the last generation whom you know and love go to the grave.
Several parliamentary democracies have weighted voting, but thats usually in favor of corporations ie. City of London and Hong Kong
The problem here is that you would be brushing off the concerns of an older group by simply asserting that "they're old and holding us back" without considering that perhaps someone who had been around for 500 years might have far more insight and quite literally had already lived through whatever political experiment some twenty-somethings want to vote for. Not criticizing you specifically but I've seen this mentality before w.r.t. old people and voting.
A healthy democracy needs the young for new ideas, and the old to warn them about the experience with those "new" ideas.
It's like software. The new guy just gets 'er done. The old guy says "your quadratic algorithm won't scale. did you encrypt the password database? did you make a backup? did you set aside money for the tax bill?"
(And for my part, I'll always take those extra 40 years, no matter the condition, because that's 40 more years for medical science to advance and solve more of those problems.)
Will it? I don't see why it necessarily will do so.
And even if it does... if it gives you 10 more healthy years, and then 20 more bedridden years, for a net gain of 30 years, is that really a gain? Or do the 20 bedridden years make the 10 healthy years not worth it?
And yes, of course it's a gain. You could always choose not to take those extra years, if you really don't want them. It's good to have that possibility available.