[benpbenp]

Here's something I like to point out any time the subject arises. Let's use 39 per 100,000 population as the current accidental death rate[0]. Perhaps you have reason to believe it is lower for you (you don't have a dangerous occupation, you aren't clumsy, etc. etc.) but that is hand-wavey and anyway you can consider it a rough order of magnitude.

Raise .9996 to 10,000th power and you find you will have a 2% chance of living 10,000 years. Raise it to the 100,000th and you get something very very close to zero.

You should also consider all the thousands of different rare diseases that we won't have figured out how to cure even if we do cure "ageing".

Long story short, you should be prepared to die at some point.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/leadingcauses.html

[randallsquared]

I think this assumes that technology improvement for all these things stops immediately upon stopping aging. At some point, we should be able to back up and restore brain state, which might raise the average anticipated[1] lifespan considerably, even if accident rates didn't change.

[1] wording this to avoid arguments about identity, if I can.

[kayoone]

Thought about that too, thats why i think the approach should be finding a way to transfer the human consciousness onto machines, or find a way to backup your mind. That has a whole different set of other ethical implications of course.

[CmonDev]

I say we should go as far as it's possible: multi-body eventually consistent minds distributed across galaxies.

[kayoone]

NoSQL would be the obvious choice to implement this!

[CmonDev]

We will have something even less structured providing that the trend carries on. Perhaps one huge concatenated comma-separated string for everything?

[michaelochurch]

The idea is that the accidental death rate will also go down.

I'm not fully a believer. I think mind uploading is ridiculous and that death of the whole brain will always mean what it does now. However, I also think that-- especially if indefinite healthy lifespans become feasible-- accidental death rates will go way down over the centuries. Those numbers aren't constant.

I could see, 10000 years from now, people storing their neural tissue in extremely safe repositories and interacting with bodies remotely.

[dennisgorelik]

I already interact with your body remotely -- over Hacker News.