Following on from Ted's post... although I believe I would greatly enjoy sleeping between two virgins, there is a lot of work going on regarding life extension. If I were in reasonably good health, I do believe I would be pleased to keep on truckin' as long as I could.
Life expectancy has risen from 47 years of age in 1900 to just about 80 now. That's quite a feat, and there seems to be no sign of it stopping--we apparently are adding 3 years of life expectancy every decade.
The beginning work was all about removing causes of death for the young, and basic hygiene did a lot of the work in that area. The invention of antibiotics was another big help in getting us to that three score and ten.
But now, we are focusing more on getting from 70, to 80, to 90 and on to 100. I personally think that someone born today who takes decent care of her/himself and avoids traffic accidents has a pretty good shot at reaching 100.
So what will get us there? First, each other--but after that, a lot of technology. It seems pretty clear that within the next 10 years we will be using cloned organs from our own cells for transplants. No waiting lists, no tissue rejection. How about getting a younger version of your own heart just because your current model is wearing out?
Our ability to look inside the human body and brain is improving dramatically every year. This will mean earlier and better diagnoses of diseases that currently carry us off because they are not caught in time.
We are not yet close to understanding cancer, but as Churchill might have said, we only need to understand how to kill it, and we're making progress on this front. Nanotechnology can deliver such silver bullets as are available right to a tumor cell, and nanotechnology will be heavily involved in the silver bullets themselves. But what I want to see is nanobots cleaning our bloodstreams, scouring hardened arteries, eliminating free radicals, etc.
Traffic and the other causes of fatal accidents will continue to become less lethal, due to better communications technology and more and better safety features in the rest of the physical world.
Lots more technology that will help us. Regarding the above, I'm pretty certain that, even if I don't benefit from any or all of them, I will live to see them introduced--if I can avoid playing in traffic.
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