My Life Blog

I’m reading a book called Fanstatic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever by Ray Kurzweil who always has interesting views of the future.  I had previously enjoyed his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, so I thought I’d give this one a try.

The basic premise is that if you do all the things to take care of yourself now, you can live long enough to take advantage of life-extending advances in bio-tech, and then you can live long enough to take advantage of additional life-extending advances made possible through nano technology.  In short, you have to cross three bridges: 1) survive now through diet, exercise, and proactive health diagnostics and follow-on prevention, 2) bio-tech, and 3) nano-tech.

The premise is intriguing and I don’t doubt that we’re on the verge of increasing our life expectancy as a human race.  It seems we glided along with a low life expectancy and then medicine raised it.  Now we are trying to kill ourselves with our poorly managed lifestyles.  And eventually, it seems we’ll be able to insulate ourselves from our lack of discipline.

So how long does Kurzweil predict we might live with all of this help?  I was astounded by his estimate of 5000 years!  And that is really the point of this post.  I run my life based upon an 80-90 year life expectancy.  However, I’m 40 now and in pretty good health, so with the amazing advances in technology, what should my life expectancy really be?  I doubt its 5000 years, but it might be 100-110.

So this leads me to the question: if my life expectancy is materially different than what the accepted norm is, what should I be doing now to account for that?  What absolutes in my life must now be questioned?

I told Suzanne that if I live 5000 years, I’ll probably have to leave her for another after 1000 years or so.  I mean come on, shouldn’t we redefine commitment at that point?! 

But seriously, what about savings?  Social Security is already projected to fail within mere years.  Imagine several thousand years of retirement!  But then, I’m going to guess that if we live that long, we will be capable of working much later in life.  But can you imagine going to work to the same place for hundreds of years? 

And that leads me to the next point.  I think a lot of people do what they do for a living because they think they received one opportunity to play their hand.  They got their education then they started earning money and now their lifestyle prevents them from reverting back in order to start over.  But if you knew you were going to live thousands of years, you might take 20 years and work out a better more rewarding existence.  Something to think about.

And lastly, for you procrastinators out there, I’m glad I was able to make your day!