Be careful what you wish for.
Trying to achieve "immortality" or significantly longer lives through science is an interesting subject.
However, living to an extremely old age has its down side, which was a subtle subtext to the movie The Green Mile, in which various characters were murdered, and legally executed.
The principal character, a jail guard, was shown to live to an age where all of his contemporary friends and acquaintances died, and generations of his new friends had died as well. These losses were painful to him. He appeared to long for death himself rather than experience more of these painful losses.
This causes one to reflect on how long a life is desirable. I have already outlived almost all of the roughly seventy-five deputy sheriffs who I worked with in the 1960s.
|