The Million Year Life Span, Revisited
An old Fight Aging! post is dusted off, rewritten, and published at h+ Magazine: "I'm not going to try to convince you that the foreseeable future is a wondrous place: either you accept the implications of the present rate of technological progress towards everything allowed by the laws of physics, in which case you've probably thought this all through at some point, or you don't. Life, space travel, artificial intelligence, the building blocks of matter: we'll have made large inroads into bending these all to our will within another half century. Many of us will live to see it even without the benefits of medical technologies yet to come: growing up without the internet in a 1960s or 1970s urban area will be the new 1900s farmboy youth come 2040. Just like the oldest old today, we will be immigrants from a strange and primitive near-past erased by progress, time travelers in our own lifetimes. A century is an exceptional life for a human, but far greater spans of years will be made possible by the technologies of the 21st century. I'll plant a flag way out there on the field and claim a million years ... Despite being out there, the million year life span is not an unsupported pipe dream. Living for a million years is a goal that can be envisaged in some detail today: the steps from here to there laid out, the necessary research and development plans outlined, and the whole considered within the framework of what is permissible under the laws of physics, and what the research community believes can be achieved within the next 20, 50, or 100 years."
Link: http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/08/19/the-million-year-life-span/