OK, my turn to play devil's advocate. What follows is more to provoke thought and discussion than anything else. How do I feel? When the anti-aging pills come out, I'm first in line, and nothing is more important than my kids getting to have kids of their own ad infinitum...
Let's face it. In exploring these fascinating tomorrows, all of us are eventually going to run across one that includes our own personal death. At that point, the last day of our life starts ticking away. The day after that, humanity and the universe (presumably) goes on - just without us. As John Donne said in Meditation XVII, the bell tolls for us; this bedrock reality we all must face is the reason to gather ye rosebuds while ye may. At least, that's the personal philosophy I try to adhere to...
Now, there's a lot of promising work going on about personal life extension that may very well be successful, and if you think there's a long line for Viagra pills, you ain't seen nothin' yet (tho with my luck, they'll be announced on the day of my wake and somebody else will have to post the news here on SciScoop). But...have we REALLY thought about the implications of a drastically expanded personal life span? I think not. Will we have 100% divorce rates or 100th wedding anniversaries? Retirement ages of 200? Politicians on their 50th term in Congress? Skyrocketing populations as one end of the Natural Balance gets askew? Millions dying as infants in Africa while millions of North Americans and Europeans live to 500? To roll out a favorite quote from another British philosopher, Arthur C. Clarke: the truth, as always, will be far stranger. And if that truth ever includes true immortality with no personal death, then I submit that homo sapiens will be extinct and replaced by something else that is not us. We will not be the species we are today if we ever truly leave death behind tomorrow.
Individual humans have evolved with a number of ingrained behaviors, among them a remarkable flair for violence and a deep urge for sex. Both of these have been absolutely essential survival tools for millions of years. Yet in the past 5000 years these ingrained behaviors have been imperfectly leashed by civilization and laws to support a "higher social good." Nobody today seriously questions the inherent "rightness" of this path, even while we all subconsciously acknowledge the precarious artificial nature of such a path by our fascination with apocalyptic scenarios like Mad Max.
Self preservation is another highly evolved and deeply ingrained human behavior along with our penchant for violence and sex. Now, if we all acknowledge and support the current desirability to substantially restrain these latter two evolved behaviors, then in my opinion we should at least consider the possibility that "civilization" requires restraint on the former one, too. And in fact humans ARE moving in this direction, by ways that vary in method and acceptability by culture. Coal miners and convenience store workers and cops all go to work knowing there are safer jobs they could be doing. All military training / boot camp / "following orders" is as much about dulling self preservation instincts as it is about sharpening the skills of violence. Parts of the current Arab culture have distilled this mentality down to yield Palestinian suicide bombers and Ground Zero in New York City. China has adopted a one-child policy that is directly at odds with self-perservation instincts on several levels. The debate about assisted medical suicide in America is not about to go away anytime soon; kevork has become a verb for a reason.
If the basic human instincts of violence, sex and even personal self preservation are in fact negotiable currency to create the kind of world we want, then I believe we should at least consider that group survival may be as well. Today we talk and worry about biowar and asteroids and nukewar and gamma ray bursts from space and novas and a hundred other possible doomsday human extinction scenarios. We talk about space colonization and arms races and research programs as ways to ultimately prevent human extinction, which we all have a gut feel is The Ultimate Evil.
Let's face it. The palentological record shows that mass extinctions happen, just like personal deaths happen. Our initial response is to resist this, just as our initial response to traffic jams is road rage and our initial response to pornography is to become aroused and our initial response to heights is to step back. We go on to build highways and sexual harassment legislation and roller coasters anyway. Perhaps we should go on to build an analogous positive something in our psyche to deal with probable eventual human extinction as well? Interplanetary, interstellar and even intergalactic colonization is one such construct. Dreams of such colonization are more about species survival than lebensraum, otherwise we'd have colonies on Antarctica, a place more hospitable that the Moon will ever be. In many ways religion is also such a construct; certainly Christianity has eventual human extinction on Earth as an immutable core tenet.
What's the alternative - we outlast nuclear war and novas and galactic cannibalization and even the big crunch itself? That sounds like sci-fi to me...
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