[With apologies to The Ramones.] The story Human Immortality: A Scientific Reality? was on digg today and got me thinking. Sure, you can make a lot of jokes, but consider it seriously for a moment because you’ll likely be there someday too. It’s not just that longer lifespans are being achieved, more people are accomplishing it. The average lifespan for men and women 20 years ago was about 72 and 76, respectively – give or take a year or two.
So what exactly are our seniors going to do after normal retirement years? No one is going to survive on Social Security until 120-150 years of age, which is the possible lifespan range for Baby Boomers. That means people of Generation X, Y, Whynot, and Next are going to live even longer. They’re not going to be slinging burgers at that age, and many companies won’t even hire new employees over forty, without putting them in the proverbial mail room. If today’s citizen is expected to change careers 3-4 times in their life, what happens to someone who’ll live to 120?
If you’re less than thirty today, that could very well be you. Even people over thirty could reach an age of, say, ninety. Do you really want to be going through the interview process at that age? Probably not. What’s left for you? Blogging. Documenting your life experience in a usable fashion.
Why not? The 80s were called by some as the beginning of the information age, but as far as I’m concerned, the information revolution started when blogging started. Not the diary blogs, though they have their places, but the informational blogs that educate, that document life.
Potential niches for grandpa and grandma bloggers? Education and tutoring, Get Things Done, Productivity, Relationships, Personal Finance, Health. Do I need to go on? Good blogs can and do make money. And with municipal wireless networks sprouting up all over, grandbloggers can do it while they vacation.
Originally posted on February 16, 2007 @ 7:38 am
The transhumanist goals for humans are: longer and healthier lives, greater intelligence, and better control of emotions–all by means of the fruit of research in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and informatics.
These goals may be laudable, but surely the ethics of ‘radically’ increasing healthy human lifespans will be fertile ground for discussion.
Might I suggest that on our pilgrimage to ‘drink’ from the real Holy Grail–the fountain of eternal Life, that we stop along the way to consider more immediate strategies to obtain longer, healthier lives:
1)reduce our per capita consumption of animal protein
2)eliminate saturated-, polyunsaturated-, and trans- fats from our diets
3)make a conscious effort to exercise more, even in ways as prosaic as parking farther from the mall entrance
These simple measures alone would be a great boon to the quality of life for so many people in the United States, and might even result in a per capita increase in the length of their chromosomal telomeres, ensuring a longer, healthier life for almost anyone willing to make the effort.
All this could be done without the ‘benefit’ of dealing with the ethical consequences of perhaps too-long human lives. Besides, if Social Security is headed for a train wreck on its present course, what the hell will we do if the rich are living to be 150?
I have no doubt that a sesquicentenarian George W. Bush would call for lowering their taxes.
I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.
–Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA Contest
It would be nice to blog forever I have to admit that.
I believe in an afterlife, and I picture it as a place where we have infinite time to do all the things we didn’t have time for or that it wasn’t possible to do at all here.
Perhaps having a conversation with Voltaire, or attending a recital by Mozart, or even listening to a humorous performance by Mark Twain.
But bloggers wouldn’t need to blog anymore, because we’d all be telepathic. ;-)