But after enough time has passed, we will have experienced everything that we, as individuals, find stimulating. The former is a contingent, the latter a categorical, desire. A life devoid of categorical desires, Williams claimed, would devolve into a mush of undifferentiated banality, containing no reason to keep on going. Born in , Elina drinks an elixir that keeps her biologically speaking at age 42 forever.
However, by the time she is over years old, Elina has experienced everything she wants, and as a result her life is cold, empty, boring and withdrawn. There is nothing left to live for. Accordingly, she decides to stop drinking the elixir, and releases herself from the tedium of immortality.
Imagine that the natural biological lifespan of a human being was 1, years. In that case, in her s, Elina would have died comparatively young. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed even if usually unknown time limit.
We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death. In turn, Scheffler argues, everything that we value — and thus can coherently desire in an essentially human life — must take as given the fact that we are temporally bounded beings. Sure, we can imagine what it would be like to be immortal, if we find that an amusing way to pass the time.
A desire for immortality is thus a paradox: it would frustrate itself were it ever to be achieved. You might think you want to live forever, but reflection should convince you otherwise. But is it quite so clear? What is interesting in this regard is that, when we return to wider popular culture, instances abound of immortality being presented not as a blessing, but a curse. Initially thinking that these must be the happiest of all beings, Gulliver revises his view when he learns that Struldbrugs never stop ageing, leading them to sink into decrepitude and insanity, roaming the kingdom as disgusting brutes shunned by normal humans.
It seems, then, that both philosophers and popular culture keep trying to tell us the same thing: you might think that you want to live forever, but reflection should convince you otherwise. And yet, if this is ultimately true — as philosophers and popular culture seem to want to say that it is — then another question arises: why do we keep needing to be told?
There is something both deeply and persistently appealing about the idea of immortality, and that cannot be dispelled by simply pointing to examples where immortality would be a curse.
To see this, we have to think a little more carefully about what a desire for immortality might in part be about. O n the face of it, a desire for immortality most obviously seems to be a response to the fear of death. Most of us are afraid to die. If we were immortal, we could escape both that fear and its object. Hence, it seems, a desire for immortality is simply a desire not to die.
In the face of this, what philosophers, poets and novelists remind us of is that there are fates worse than death. Immortality might itself turn out to be one of them. If so, we should not desire to be immortal. No sane person, after all, wants to be a Struldbrug. But when we look more closely, we see that fear is not the only important response to the fact of death.
In the second set, the life-extension tech is way better, and everyone lives to 1, which Davis believes would be the median life expectancy if we could remove all age-related diseases. But if we tighten our belts a little—say one child per every two women—things start to level out at a one-third increase after a couple of decades, then starts to decline. The same happens in the second scenario after years. But Davis proposes that only those who opt-in to life extension would need to be restricted.
We should prepare ourselves to make this decision—or at least prepare our children to ponder. Even the most interesting person can only fill so many hours of days. John K.
Davis admits we have no frame of reference to postulate how living into a fifth century will affect our mental health, but he feels that negative outcomes could be mitigated through life changes and medication, much like they are now.
But beyond all the arguments of extending our lives on Earth, one day our planet too will die. All other things equal or ignored, the only way we will survive is if we explore the vast distances of space and colonize other worlds. And for that we will need to find a way to live long enough as individuals or as a species to survive centuries-long trips to other galaxies. That fact presents maybe the best case for life extension: that in order to fulfill our desires to see the stars and become an intergalactic species, we ourselves must live on a galactic scale.
Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas qz. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. From our Series. Harry Fortuna. Published January 24, Last updated on March 5, This article is more than 2 years old. Whitson says that this result makes sense: A healthy young person can produce a rapid physiological response to adjust to fluctuations and restore a personal norm.
Measurements such as blood pressure and blood cell counts have a known healthy range, however, Whitson points out, whereas step counts are highly personal. The fact that Pyrkov and his colleagues chose a variable that is so different from blood counts and still discovered the same decline over time may suggest a real pace-of-aging factor in play across different domains.
The authors pointed to social factors that reflect the findings. But a long life span is not the same as a long health span, says S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved in the work. And the question is: Can we extend life without also extending the proportion of time that people go through a frail state?
Treating diseases in the long run is not going to have the effect that you might want it to have. These fundamental biological processes of aging are going to continue. The question of whether this will have any impact on the fundamental upper limits identified in the Nature Communications paper remains highly speculative. But some studies are being launched—testing the diabetes drug metformin, for example—with the goal of attenuating hallmark indicators of aging.
In this same vein, Fedichev and his team are not discouraged by their estimates of maximum human life span.
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