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by torben-friis 2557 days ago
> Can physically and emotionally healthy people actually view death as a relief or escape?

I obviously don't have the experience of living an "overextended" life, but I'd imagine that it would depend at least partially on whether longevity extends to the people around you. Seeing the people you knew and love die is brutal, living that through several generations might get you to a point where you don't want to keep experiencing it anymore.

1 comments

If life extension is technological, it's pretty hard to imagine how it wouldn't extend to the people around you. Technologies almost always get much, much cheaper and available to the masses after an initial period.

In such a scenario, you're going to see some people you knew and love die, but usually because of things like accidents, not old age, so it'll be entirely random, unlike now where elderly people have to watch all their friends die off around them, something they didn't experience that much in their younger years.

The kind of biotechnology we are talking about will be more like a cocktail of drugs and gene therapies. The price of entry will be in the millions, and maintenance in the tens of thousands per year. It will take many generations to be affordable to the masses
Oh please. Dentistry involves extremely personalized care, with crowns custom-made for every patient (these days by automated machines) and work done by highly-paid specialists on an individual basis, yet the masses are generally able to afford it. Once stuff gets out of the patent phase (20 years), it's going to become very cheap with tons of competition.