I find it interesting and would cheerfully agree to live a thousand years; I could easily live a thousand years and never run out of bucket-list items. Besides, think of the wealth one could accumulate in a thousand years! Nothing would be beyond one's financial grasp in only a couple of hundred years.

There's a lot of work going on now, the goal of which is to see just how far medical and biological science can push the human lifespan:

Extending human life sustainably is a complex challenge that intersects with bioethics, environmental sustainability, and healthcare resources. While advances in medicine and technology have made it increasingly possible to prolong life, the broader implications on resources and social systems need careful consideration. Addressing the sustainability of extending human life directly, including the ecological, economic costs, and social.

Longevity brings significant ecological and economic challenges. An ageing population demands more resources—food, energy, housing—intensifying pressures on already strained systems. These challenges are intertwined with economic considerations: longer lives strain pension systems and healthcare infrastructure, particularly if these years are not lived in good health.

Sounds OK to me - as long as I were in reasonably good health, I'd be happy to live a few hundred or a thousand years, and am pretty sure I wouldn't get bored. No person with any imagination should ever find themselves without something to do.

Bear in mind that, to attain the greatest advantage, the lifespan could only apply to a few people, lest the Earth be covered in a heaving sea of humanity in a few generations. But if I could confine it to myself, my wife, our kids, our grandkids, and so on, well, not only would it be a lot more fun, but eventually we would take over the world by sheer dint of numbers. I'm sure my wife and I would get along for a thousand years as well as we have for the last 30-plus; there's no age limit on love, as my colleague Bob Hoge so beautifully documented, earlier on Saturday.

See Related: Love Has No Age Limit: 100-Year-Old WWII Vet Marries 96-Year-Old Sweetheart Near Beaches of Normandy

But most of these longevity schemes one reads about don't seem to include, well, a body. There are also the folks who like to gas about the Singularity. That is, in its more optimistic form, a merging of human and artificial intelligence. In its less optimistic form, it is the destruction of human individuality by humanity’s incorporation into some all-encompassing AI.

The ultimate expression of that latter path, of course, would mean the possibility of “uploading” your brain into a virtual world space. That, unlikely as I think the prospect is, would rate a big fat “heck no.”

See Related: Life, Death, and Rebirth: Are Virtual Brain Uploads the Key?

See, I could live a thousand years in my physical body. And I suppose I could learn to see the appeal of some kind of virtual reality, on the condition that I could unplug whenever I wanted.

But two problems, as I see it, with the “brain upload” scenario:

First: It wouldn’t be me. What that set of data on some file server somewhere would be, is a computer simulation of me. It might be a good one, but it wouldn’t be me. I’d be dead. Gone. And as I don’t ascribe to Descartes’ concept of duality, I don’t see how any metaphysical “me” could somehow be uploaded. And let’s be honest, this wouldn’t be an “upload” at all. It would just be a file copy, a backup, so to speak. Not a person. Not a human, with continuity. No self. Not me.

Second: There’s so much about the physical world that just can’t be replicated. I could live a thousand years easily if circumstances were right, but if it meant not being able to hold my wife's hand or see her smile, it wouldn’t be worth it. There are physical aspects of the world, of our lives, and our experiences, that I don’t believe can be duplicated. If, somehow, that metaphysical “me” made the jump to a virtual space, I’d know it was fake.

While I can imagine living a thousand years and would love to have the chance to do it, I’m accepting the fact that it almost certainly won’t be possible in my lifetime. And that’s OK. My life to date has been great, with a great family and a happy marriage to a woman I love, and you can’t really ask for much more. I’ve already been to lots of places and done lots of things – for one, I spent a good portion of my youth running around with a pack and a rifle doing all kinds of screwy things, and for another, I spent most of my middle age globe-hopping as an independent corporate consultant. 

Now I'm in Alaska, working on my third career, this one in opinion journalism, and I think I enjoy this more than either of the others. All in all, I’ve had a hell of a good time. If I’m only to be allotted the traditional three-score and 10, well, then that’s likewise OK.

After all, going to the showers is part of the game, too. One should accept that with a certain grace.

 This seems appropriate.