Nature seems to find new problems for us continually. I raise the following question:

If we cure the effects of aging, we will basically be prolonging the state of our bodies at one point in our life cycle. Wouldn’t that clearly open a huge niche for bacteria, viruses, and parasites that are currently held in check by the aging process or whose population is controlled in part by the deaths of older generations?

Jenn Northington of breathe books in Baltimore considers the potential for extraordinarily long life spans in light of a loved one’s recent health scare.

Visit the breathe books Facebook page between July 26th and 30th as Jenn and breathe’s proprietress Susan Weis facilitate a discussion of Long for This World.

Something shifts at about 50, I think—you stop ramping up and begin to see the other side. At least that is my experience and that of many of my friends who are over 50. (Not that I am way over 50!) The thought of going on for 500 years sounds exhausting. A lot of my paintings these days are about straddling the line between this reality and the spirit world, if you could call it a line. This one is called Equinox.

Equinox, 2010, oil, powdered Pigment, wax, litho and ink, 30 x 30

[Editor's note: See more of Molly's work at her official site. And read more about her technique ("encaustic painting").]

Q. If you could stay healthy (“biologically young, chronologically old”), how long would you want to live?

As long as I can sustain belief.

It depends a lot on how long the people that I care about could live. Would I want to watch other people die? And how flexible the definitions of identity, relationship, and self are. Already the myriad of experiences at my fingertips have made me question my gender, my roles, my nationality, my everything.

Life is hard when we have to navigate competing narratives—as an individual, and as a society.

Monogamy? Family? Citizenship?

And resources—would I have resources to sustain myself? Would my quality of life be tremendously different? Would I choose to own less and do more? Would I hoard, or would I give?

Would I still taste pomelos? Would coffee still wake me up? Would I still have an orgasm? Would there be anywhere new to see?

Would everyone choose heroin? Or would we stop smoking?

There would be so much to foster in this modern culture…so much minutia—how would we handle all our memories?

Could we plug ourselves into a hard drive and download a bit? Would we have to sleep more? Or sounder?

Would communication become less linear? Would everyone segue between thoughts, concepts, and metaphors with fluidity? Or would we have inadvertently created one language, with less unknowns—and less romance—less heritage?

How would our culture(s) handle so much more? Would we have more specialist knowledge? … Eccentrics with experiences that were so myriad that they prohibited each from creating sound relationships with others? Or would there be a greater unity buttressed by the overlapping experiences of so many people?

Would people choose to die more? And would that be acceptable?

Would they find lack of change increasingly oppressive? Would they take greater risks?

Or would the idea of losing 500 years of life in a single day begin to outweigh glory and fame? Would we ALWAYS choose safe sex?

Would we revere age and wisdom more? Or continue to celebrate youth and shapeliness?

In a world where resources have never been limitless, would society choose which people were worth most and allow them greater years? And could that ever be anything other than arbitrary and without nuance?

Q. If you knew that you had an extra 50 years in front of you, how might you change your life?

I would live it exactly as I do now. And I would choose to live as long as I can—because daily we have the opportunity to choose life, or not. And daily we struggle to accept change and trudge forward.

Q. Would you wish a 500-year-life on your kids if you couldn’t have one, too?

I would wish my children to make their own choices. The day my son was born I wept because I realized I wouldn’t know him in his old age, because I wouldn’t always be there to protect him, and because I realized that I could never be everything he needed.

Parents have to make peace with that from the beginning. The day you begin to love, loss looms large.

Who’s to say that advances in gerontology would inspire people to take better care of themselves, and thus reach a more enjoyable old age? We’ve already done amazing things to prolong life. And yet, are we really any better to ourselves? I look at supermarket shelves, rates of smoking & alcoholism, the never-ending race we run as capitalists…. and I think, not so much.

I’m just as concerned about how science will preserve our brains as our bodies. For the sake of argument, I think the edge can be pushed pretty far. Assuming quality of intellectual and emotional life can follow the same curve as physical life, I see no reason why we couldn’t hang around on the planet for 100, 200 years, maybe more. I’d like to think humanity might get a little smarter about its politics if this were the case.

April
Columbus, Ohio

[Editor's note: Today we present the first in a series of submissions from online readers. Keep the conversation alive by commenting in the space below this post—or submit your own response. Find guidelines here.]

 
I have already set my goal for my lifespan. It is currently at 125 years, and may go higher given future developments in health care, neuroscience, and spinal cord repair research, among other items. I intend to be the world’s oldest living person when I die, and I hope that will be more than 72 years from now.

I chose this target when I heard about Mme Jeanne Calment, who died at the age of 122 in 1997. She was born in 1875 and there was absolutely no reason why she should have lived to such a tremendous age, given what she had to survive: two world wars, poor harvests, and the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19, just to name a few catastrophes.

I was born almost exactly 40 years before Jeanne Calment died. Being a Canadian by birth, I have had tremendous advantages in longevity enhancement that Mme Calment did not have.

I have had easy and pretty much cost-free access to high quality health care since before I was born. My education was also top-notch; I am a university graduate with post-grad certificates. My curiosity about life, people and a universe of other subjects knows no bounds. I read about 5-6 books a week, along with two weekly newspapers and magazines.

Many of my friends are young people, among them the nine students I have tutored this year, along with many of my past students from an international college in Toronto, so I don’t expect to be lonely.

I have maintained a healthy lifestyle, with limited alcohol consumption, never smoked, and still walk 10 to 20 km a week just for the fun of it, or to do errands near my home. I work from home, so I have no risks in daily traffic to get to my job. I don’t own a car; my mom is happy to drive me anyplace I need to go within 20-30 km, and beyond that I take a commuter train or bus. I choose to fly by airplane to leave the continent at the moment. I am investigating cruises for general transport around the globe as well as for specific holiday destinations and periods.

There are scientific, historic and social anniversaries coming up in the next 50 to 75 years that I don’t want to miss: 2061 sees the second passage of Halley’s Comet in my lifetime (and I want to see the darn thing this time! I advised 14 other people about where to look for it, and they ALL saw it); my country’s 200th birthday will be in 2067, when I will turn 110; and 2069 will be the centennial of the first walk on the lunar surface by humans. I hope to have been to the moon myself once by then.

There is no reason at present that I should not be able to live to be 125 years old, provided I continue with my current lifestyle.

Best wishes to every other would-be centenarian-plus out there. My advice is to set a target and start taking care of yourself NOW, today, to reach your longevity goal.

Carol
Oshawa, Ontario Canada