Out of Pod Experience

Equal rights also means women don't get first dibbs on the lifeboats too.

They always keep the debate about stem cells focused on fetuses, to make it a media circus that goes nowhere, but in actuality even adults produce stem cells that can be harvested and used to repair their own bodies.

You can bet it's already being taken advantage of behind closed doors, they just don't want to share.

I swear I posted this so, if I end up double posting, I'mma be a little upset.

Anyway the concept of immortality is something I used to talk about a lot with friends (because we were going through that phase of "Oh god, we're going to die some day and that's terrifying").

Like 6 or so years ago during my senior year, we watched a documentary about scientists efforts to extend our average lifespan. I don't remember the title, so you'll have to trust me, it was a thing. We've actually already been doing a great job and have more than doubled our life expectancy, and it's only getting better. These scientists predicted that within our life time we would figure out the whole self renewing thing necran described as well as eliminate the cause of the toxin build up our bodies have, effectively "curing" aging. Now if they're correct, then it's possible we could see people living well into their hundreds. Several hundreds.

Now seeking immortality itself isn't really an obscure thing, there are lots of groups dedicated to making that happen, and already apply methods such as specific diets and hormone therapies to try and slow down aging, and they have many more ideas that either aren't yet possible or aren't perfected enough for humans to undergo.

If such a thing is devised and offered, my circle of friends and I, the bright young know-it-alls that we were and still are, decided that a fair approach to this would be the sterilization of a person who wants that, in an attempt to stem the whole overpopulation thing. Then again it's entirely possible and even probable to say that such a thing would be horribly abused and we'd all be left worse of for it.

But meh, haven't though about it much since then. If anything the acceptance of my own mortality kicked my butt into high gear when it comes to accomplishing what I want in life, and maybe even defined it. In my opinion there's just so much to do and not enough time.

so you're telling me women who smoke... will stop visiting their parents and die in their fifties saddled with a mortgage payment their ex-husband won in the settlement, and child support payments for children the ex-husband had with other women?

women should definitely quit smoking.

Funny how one of the keys to longevity is to fit a good buffer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

Oh wow, we have those too here in Latinamerica

Poop Derail!!!!

You mean a media circus in the US.
Here in Europe we kinda kept at it.... we're getting pretty good at it.

Actually, what we've mostly done is eliminate excess childhood and infant mortality. A person living in medieval times who lived to see adulthood could expect to see 70.

Extraordinarily high childhood/infant mortality is what skewed 'life expectancy' in the past. The average of 1 and 70 is 35, but that doesn't mean the typical person died at around age 35.

Rather, people mostly died between the ages of 1 and 10, or 65 to 75, but not so much in between.