“There is hope, but not for us.” - KafkaThere’s bad timing, and then there’s this: Instead of a day late and a dollar short, most of us are a day early and … well, money doesn’t even play into it, because we’re gonna die.
Nothing revelatory there, of course. People have been dealing with awareness of their own mortality ever since the first stone-age hunter and/or gatherer — or maybe even his pre-homo sapiens ancestor — figured out what was in store, and began working frantically at constructing a set of beliefs that would allow him not only to continue on after death, but to do so with perks denied him in this mortal, saber-tooth-tiger- and annoying-brother-in-law-infested coil.
But a lot of us alive today are likely to really have our noses rubbed in that vexing mortality thing, because it’s looking more and more as if nanotech-boosted medicinal biology is going to make “life extension” an everyday term. Nanobots will be able to repair the slightest defect arising from defective genes, a detrimental environment, and even, yes, aging. In short, people are going to live forever.
Not you, however, unless you’re pretty young, because immortality is still a ways over the horizon. But not that far, according to Ray Kurzweil (”The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”) in an essay in “The Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2007″ which states:
“If we think linearly, then the idea of turning off all disease and aging processes appears far off in the future, just as the genome project did in 1990. On the other hand, if we factor in the doubling of the power of
each year, the prospect of radical life extension is only a couple of decades away.”
Which is all well and good — hell, great — for anyone around when our progressive, humane national health care system of the future starts accepting appointments for regular 3,000-mile/3-year nanobot tune-ups... Read more 
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