1. Would you take a pill that allowed you to live forever?

Without hesitation, provided there were no moral or ethical dilemmas surrounding the source of that pill (like they could only be made by irradiating brain-dead children and extracting the drug from their excised glands (as in _Bug Jack Barron_ by Norman Spinrad -- ugh)).

Why?

Because I want to choose how and when I wish to die. Being forced to age against my will, as things stand at the moment, does not fit into that plan.

Why not?

I might not take the pill, if, as stated above, there were other considerations besides the primary effect of the drug. If it made me infertile, I would still take it. If it reduced my mental capacity to that of a two-year-old, I might not.

2. How would you deal with the mortality of loved ones if they chose not to
take it?

I would deal with it the same way I do now. People die every day. My girlfriend could be run over by a car tomorrow. My best friend could commit suicide next month. My mother could die from cancer a year from now. My elderly grandmother might not see the end of the decade. I deal with each death as they happen -- as people have done for hundreds of thousands of years -- and I'd go so far as to say that I would feel happier about them if I knew that the deceased had a say in the way or the time they went. As things stand at the moment, there's nothing my grandmother can do but grow old. If that was her choice to do so, fine; if it's not, that makes me sad.

3. Would you take a pill that would allow you to live to 150?

Yes.

Why?

For the reasons stated above. If 150 is the best we can do now, I'll take it. Maybe some time before 2117 there'll be another pill that will finish the job.

Why not?

For the reasons stated above.

4. If not, how would you imagine life to be if everyone else was taking it?

I would hope that, were I to not take this drug, that I would do so with full the understanding that I would die a natural death as a result. If that is what I truly want, how can I be resentful of those who chose to live longer?

5. Should we do this. By doing so, are we avoiding what it is to be "human"?

What is it to be "human"? The answer to that question has changed dramatically over the centuries. Beyond eating, sleeping, and reproducing, every society has created different expectations for its members. Who are we to say that we know what is appropriate for our species, when we are stuck in our own narrow world-view (that of affluent, early 21^st-Century westerners)?

It's my opinion that having access to extreme longevity will inevitably change what we think it is to be human, and that this is a positive. Learning and change are good things, but there's only so much of it you can do in 80 years -- especially when the brain's ability to learn and change is in decline for more than half that time. Given access to more time, we can explore every option open to us. We can really get to know ourselves and the people around us. Only then, with a few centuries under our collective belt, will we really be qualified to have an opinion on what it might be to be human.

6. Will we be the last mortal generation?

Possibly. I hope so, although I assume that some people will choose to remain mortal -- or will become so again -- in the centuries to come.

7. Do you think the mind could cope with that much memory?

We would find a way. Problems like these are just matters of engineering. If we want to remember more, someone will work out how to do it. The same if we want to remember less. (If a mechanical rather than conceptual problem exists, someone will solve it. That's what I mean by engineering.)

Besides, we forget more things than we ever could remember as it is, and it doesn't bother us too much now. Many of our "memories" are actually remanufactured from tiny fragments stored haphazardly in our brains, and are quite often incorrect as a result. We seem to manage well enough despite that, and I'm sure we'll continue to do so (until someone finds a better way, of course).

8. Wouldn't you get bored?

Why? The world is an extraordinarily rich place as it is (forgetting the wider universe I hope to have access to one day). How long would it take to do everything you've ever dreamed of doing? Personally, I want to try my hand at parachuting, web site design, caving, computer games, painting, sculpture, mathematics, music, cooking, travel, archaeology, Russian, astronomy, hang-gliding, gardening, and particle physics -- and there are bound to be new things we can't even imagine on the horizon (low-gravity tennis, anyone?). Without living for a long time indeed, I won't get to do more than a fraction of these things. Achieving longevity is the only chance I have to get it all done.

Besides, we get bored at times right now, but no-one is advocating shorter life spans, are they?

9. Would you have children?

Sure, if I wanted to, and if I could. Why not? And they might have children too. It'd be a hoot to know that one of my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids had stepped on an alien planet, or invented anew flavor that no-one had ever tasted before.

10. How would we deal with the baby boomers NEVER giving up their day job?

That problem's pretty much with us, whatever we do. :-) Engineering, again. See my answer to question 12. (My hope is that we will not only have longevity but freedom from "work" as we know it as well.)

11. Would you suggest enforced death on people who "don't know when it's
time to leave?"

Definitely not. (Again, who would suggest that now? Only those in favor of the death penalty, I guess.) I'm advocating not the right to live forever, but the right to choose when and how we die. That could be never, but it could also be next week. This means that I'm for euthanasia as well; longevity is just the opposite side of that coin. Personally, I don't think you can responsibly have one without the other.

12. What about the implications of over-population etc?

That's an engineering problem, and a very tricky, very serious one. I suspect that we are already over-crowded and that the cost of this problem has yet to be paid. The 21^st Century could be quite dire, no matter how long we expect to live. But that assumes that nothing else will change, which strikes me as slightly limiting. If numerous other "extropian" projections also come true, we -- everyone on the planet -- could soon have access to surplus energy and unlimited food production, as well as longevity drugs, so what problem is over-crowding then?

When I say "engineering", by the way, I don't just mean medical science or technology. A certain amount of "human" engineering will be required, and will probably be inevitable, on the social and personal levels. Once you give someone an unlimited life-span, they are going to want an assurance that the place in which they are living is going to be habitable for as long time. The world governments' fixation with short-term solutions to long-term environmental problems (like pollution and species diversity as well as overcrowding) will inevitably have to change. This sort of social change will only benefit our species as a whole, and is long overdue.

It might even be possible one day to choose to have the more "primitive" impulses of our psyches -- anger, territorialism, sexual desire, etc -- removed in order to make our lives more harmonious. That sort of human engineering is not really part of the discussion here, but is interesting to contemplate.

13. Should the "pill" be available to prisoners?

I regard the right die at a time of one's choice as just that: a right. So to deny it to anyone would be a crime, and no less a crime whether it is perpetrated by an individual or a state. Also, I hope that the ability to rehabilitate criminals, rather than simply incarcerate them, will become standard practice in the future.

14. Would life become less valuable?

More valuable, if anything, in the sense that an unplanned death would be an even greater tragedy than it is now. Suppose we die in an accident today, or cause someone else to die. The most we have lost is a few decades. If, on the other hand, you or that person had hoped to live 100 years -- or 5,000 or 1,000,000 or potentially even more -- then the loss of life (in the sense of time spent living) is so much greater. If the value of life can be equated to the loss brought about by death, then it can only go up.

15. Could you ever say "I do" and mean it?

Can we now?

16. Do you think this is the natural phase of evolution anyway?

What is "natural" evolution? We're as much a part of nature as anything else, and our actions are "natural" whether we like that or not. There is no right or wrong in the process we call evolution, as I think the question above implies. Evolution is not a progression with an underlying meaning or destination. It's just one change after another -- and if it's us making the changes rather than an asteroid impact or fluctuations in the Earth's atmosphere or a change in the sun's energy output, that makes no difference to "correctness" of the end result (ie. it's not relevant).

I think the time has come when we can take steps to bow out of the cosmic (but still essentially random) lottery that has brought us to this point in our evolution. We are close to being able to choose what comes next, instead of being victims of it, and I think it's good that we're considering in advance the consequences of such decisions -- but we should do so rationally, trying to see beyond our present capacity and not assuming that the limitations we have today will be around forever.

For instance, many of the problems people bring up as arguments against longevity already exist. Centuries of attempts by short-lived humans have failed to solve them. Maybe with increased lifespans and (one would hope) increased maturity we will, finally, be able to free ourselves from such shackles. Using the existence of the shackles as a reason not to even try to escape from them seems to me to be self-defeating.

At the same time, however, I'm not so naïve as to suggest that immortality won't bring a whole new raft of problems, many of which we will be unable to anticipate. What to do about them is impossible to consider, when we don't even know what they are.

17. Do you think you would miss the lessons your mortality has to teach you. Do you think they are necessary to be "human"?

We'll be mortal for a while yet. If I took the pill then fell off a cliff, I'd still die. Eradicating the threat of accidental death will take a lot longer than eradicating the inevitability of dying of old age or disease. As a result of this, we will all at some point in our lives confront the Abyss. What we learn from it is up to us -- as it is now. There are some people today who don't seem to take the possibility of death seriously at all (smokers come to mind, but they are a picked-on demographic). I hope that having the ability at any time in our lives -- tomorrow, next week, next century -- to say, "That's it. I'm tired of all this. It's time for me to die," will force us to have a deeper, more personal understanding of both life and death. It's one thing to survive a car crash and say that it changed you. It's quite another to live every day of your life knowing that you can die any time you want. That, I think, will free us more as a species more than any other advance you could name.

18. What else would you like to say?

The issue of death is a very personal one for most people in our culture, which is why the immortality debate can become so heated. It's not about life at all; it's about "cheating" death. Some people think we owe a death to God or country, or to some other abstract concept, but I think that's a self-imposed constraint. We choose to think that way, and being told to think otherwise can be quite confronting.

The issue of religion and death is one I find fascinating, because many people believe quite happily in some life after death state in which they will be at one with their deity and/or their loved ones. When asked what this "life eternal" will be like, few people can answer. "Only God knows," we're told. Or, "We don't have the capacity to know." Well, I want to know. I want to have that capacity, and medical science, plus several centuries of experience, might give it to me.

Oddly enough, the same people who espouse an eternal life after death are often the same ones who are most resistant to the idea eternal life on Earth. Why that should be, I don't know. But I assume that these people would be even less likely to approve of immortality in a non-physical form -- via computer processing or some such thing -- and that makes me wonder where the line is drawn. Are we afraid to take the possibility of immortality seriously simply because it is different?

We're not a species comfortable with change, even though it is essential, to some degree, to ensure our well-being. My greatest fear is that we will refuse to consider the possibility with the seriousness it is due until it is too late. On the (hopefully not too distant) day when longevity drugs deliver the promises we're hearing now, most people won't know how to deal with it -- emotionally, socially, legislatively. One thing I am sure of though, is: given the chance, via a pill or however, to not die until they want to, most people will take it. Who wouldn't?

What reservations do you have, as in what do you think might happen that we haven't foreseen?

Science fiction author David Brin once said: "Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humour is just stupid."

I've probably stuck my neck out enough already. :-)