[Jimbozu]

Well, to give everyone some insight into how likly imortality and what it might look like...

We have already isolated the exact cause for aging in the human body. When DNA Telemorase (I think, I'm in a hurry and can't look these things up right now) "unzipps" your DNA a small part at each of the ends is broken off. Now the DNA molecule is big. FUCKING BIG. The ends don't have any useful information on them, but for some reason when you cut them off you start aging. It shouldn't be that difficult to fix this, so that you no longer age. Hypothetically, if we were cure aging, you could biologically age to about 25, go to a clinic, and have it turned off, living purpetually as a 25 year old.

There is a question as to how long you could possibly want to live, but if your eternally youthful, it isn't as big of a question. Whenever old people speak of welcoming death, its because their lives a miserable. All their friends a dieing off, they probably have some form of disease which is really painful, and they're weak and decrepit. If you were 90 and were still out clubbing, you wouldn't welcome death you wouldn't even be contemplating death...

This is also assuming that the species doesn't migrate to a post-physical reality of the mind before too long. At the rate that computer technology is advancing it wouldn't be a surprise that a post-physical "transcendence" happened before we started traveling to the stars and such. Kurtzweil says it's going to happen in the next 50 years, I would say in the next 500 but still rather soon.

Edit: I forgot to mention that theres really no reason that death should be permanent. Resuscitation techniques are already getting to the point they could be called miraculous, and the more we learn about the human consciousness, the more likely it will be that we can make a backup copy, in case something happens to the original.