Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” -Genesis 6:3
Imagine the world 120 years ago in 1900. The airplane hadn’t been invented. Cars were still a novelty. Special Relativity hadn’t been discovered.
My grandma is 105 years old and is pretty much waiting for it to be over. If you live a full life it's not about how old you get, 90 is more than enough to experience the world and see your grand child grow up.
it’s not living 120 or 150 or 200 that matters. it’s the quality of your life. i think working to improve that vs some arbitrary number (that by the time you hit you see death as a release) is what we should target. the term for this is healthspan vs lifespan.
There were plenty of people in their 60s and 70s riddled with cancer and decrepit old bodies from back breaking labor before our lifetimes that probably were waiting for death too.
Now that's the age of retirement and a time to explore hobbies and the world for large portions of the population.
Personally the one thing I fear is that it will be discovered that it's possible to pause/slow aging but not effectively reverse it. If you start taking the aging pills in your 20s maybe you look and feel 50 when you're 100 but if you start the pills when you're fifty maybe you're feeling like a current 100 year old by your 150th birthday.
I'm curious - are those her words or yours?
Of course, that's assuming our species doesn't suffer a biotech apocalypse before then.
space and space colonization? really hard with the current tech and even if the tech was there only a few people will get to do that. the costs will be absurdly high and we also have physical constraints that we cannot bypass.
biotech? in the first few waves it’s gonna be a rich person game. money is literally going to buy you more years.
We have science.
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Edit: I really don't understand the downvoters. This specific passage was written 6000 years ago, give or take. It's from a religious holybook that has no bearing on technology, medicine, or science. Germ theory was nonexistent, most forms of medicine were in their most rudimentary levels. They didn't even have the technology or know-how for basic ironworking.
If you're an adherent to a religion, good for you. Its simply that - a mythology, a belief.
And we should be bearing no credence to the writings of religion in our sciences, unless it stated physical fact (think anthropology, geology, architecture - sciences), or if you're a religious historian and trying to understand how human religions change.
I thought we worked with sciences here, not superstition.
However, as with any information, bias hurts any analysis (in any form data is presented). A quote is just that, a quote.
No matter your beliefs, information is neutral and should be inquired for curiosity purposes in HN, not personal opinion.
In our world, it's trivially easy to get hold of any major religion's works, and only moderately difficult to get hold of smaller religion's works, primarily due to translation issues.
And in light of context, you weren't comparing the writings or showing different religions' thoughts on human longevity - you were implicitly stating that your choice of religion was the right one, by stating it matter-of-factly.
Going ham on religion/myth/worldview isn't the scientific approach at all
Had nothing to do with lifespans.
(Biblical characters — contemporary with when the passage was written — were living past 120.)
You can argue that Noah was "grandfathered in" since he was born before the 120 year rule. But..
"And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters." - Genesis 11:13