Here's someone who believes living to age 150 is just around the corner.

(Cue Rod Serling)

Meet Aubrey de Grey, formerly of London and currently on a quest to revise the most basic fact of his existence, his own mortality. He will soon discover that time is more than what he makes of it. Next stop; the Twilight Zone.

Well, okay. Maybe that's a little over-dramatic. Or maybe not. Disney notwithstanding, The Sorcerer's Apprentice has proven itself to be a cautionary tale to be taken seriously. Mess with the Unseen Forces at your own risk. You have to live with spirits you summon.

In the future de Grey sees, the ravages time commits on our bodies will be unraveled at the doctor's office and we'll be able to live for 150 years, and maybe indefinitely. The effects of aging will even be reversible. So if you're say, 60, when this wonderful technology hits the street, the good doctors will be able to rewind you to the biological equivalent of 25.

This sounds just ducky, but I'm a little worried. I have concerns. My concerns manifest on several levels.

The human population is already 3-4 times what the planet's current ecosystem can sustain and it continues to grow. Since we humans show no sign of being willing to control our own numbers, nature will soon solve the problem the way nature always solves it, and a bunch of us living especially long lives will only make the medicine more bitter. And if it actually prolongs our ability to breed, so much the worse. A lot of us are going to have to go away soon. Let's not make things any worse than they already are.

The technology de Grey talks about will obviously not be available to everyone. It will no doubt be very expensive. Who will the gatekeepers be? What standards will they impose? This could be a tool for control and repression on a level never before seen.

That's all serious stuff, but here's my big concern:

Time is merely the perceived order of events. For us humans, time without memory is meaningless. And at least for me personally, time becomes less and less linear as I age, and my whole temporal landscape can shift without warning. An event of 50 years ago can suddenly seem more real than the breakfast I ate five minutes ago, until the phone rings and it all shifts again. This is endlessly entertaining, despite the occasional discomfort it can spawn. But I suspect it's also my mind's way of indexing large volumes of data; tying up loose ends, reconnecting loose fragments of files; my wetware's version of a disk optimization routine. I don't want to mess with that process.

I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid dying might hurt and I'd rather not be there when it happens, but the bare fact of my own mortality doesn't bother me. I certainly prefer it to any myth of an afterlife or rebirth I've ever heard. I don't want to roll around heaven all day, nor rot in hell, nor find myself looking at the universe through the eyes of a salamander or sewer rat. I'm quite sure I wasn't Catherine the Great in a past life, and I don't want to be the queen of Titan in a next life. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. We're just not that important in the big scheme of things.

(Images courtesy of Wikipedia. )