duckInferno's Journal: This is required

Work is... well, work. But a lack of work is even more work. Here I am, bored and whittling away the hours staring at my cheap dell monitor while my eyes punish me by sending little pain signals to my brain. An hour of boredom is worth two hours of work.

I come across all sorts of things in my online adventures, well, what the work filter allows me to come across, anyway. For example, Jane Elliott is inspiring and makes me long for the inevitable days where children will be taught using memory imprinting technology, the subject matter being programmed in by only the most skilled and learned of tutors. Where teachers (who I guess would now be labelled memory imprinters) are an elite few, forged by centuries of experience and learning (I'd imagine clinical immortality would come first), the social elite of humanity. Ahh to be able to live to see those days. /pine

According to some[who?], extending one's lifespan will be possible within the next century, possibly by only ten years, but that's enough to entertain my childish (and definitely against-the-grain) longing for a ridiculously long life. If a ten-year elixir of life is invented when I'm alive, I'm sweet. Within that ten years, further developments will undoubtably happen (assuming the world doesn't descend into a giant religious war, with one side pro-clinical-immortality, and the other side pro-die-because-its-is-natural-and-im-taking-you-with-me) which will extend it a little further, and so on until the science catches up with the human genome to such a degree that manipulating it is trivial.

What happens then? Well, personally, I haven't a fucking clue. But I'll be happy to live as long as I can get. Human society would be impacted hard however; I'd imagine there'd either be pushes for population control, or we'd be at the point where massive colonisation is not a problem. This actually brings up something I haven't thought about before.

Would human life go down in value as you might expect in such a situation, or would it infact gain value? There'd be a ridiculous amount of us of course, but you'd think twice about making a decision that involves loss of life when everyone involved has celebrated their thousandth birthday and is a font of knowledge and wisdom. I'd imagine even the dimmest criminal of our time would match Einstein's intellect by his or her thousandth birthday, assuming such an attribute is malleable. Or perhaps the two would cancel each other out, and we'd attach no more or less value on any individual's life.

Someone in their thirties would be considered a child in such a society. They'd feel like a child, too. Imagine having the petty squabbles of today... abortion, homosexuality, religion... within earshot of millenials. You may or may not feel a sense of inferiority, but I'd imagine the millenials would just be facepalming repeatedly.

But yeah... work.