Magic tape

Have you seen people at the gym lately with brightly-colored pieces of tape stuck to their skin?  If so, it's not some kind of strange fashion statement, nor a new sort of method for closing surgical incisions; it's the latest way for people with genuine medical issues not to get any better.

Developed by Dr. Kenzo Kase -- at least he claims to be a doctor, but after some of the statements he makes, you have to wonder -- the technique, called "KinesioTaping," allegedly helps everything from sprains and strains to arthritis, herniated discs, tendonitis, whiplash, TMJ, Bell's palsy, migraines, and plantar fascitis.  (See his website, containing these claims, here.)  All that from pieces of tape.  Pretty impressive.

So, how does it work, you might ask?  The idea is that if you put a piece of tape on your skin, it lifts the layers of the skin and allows "blood and lymphatic fluid" to drain away.  Since the collected blood and lymphatic fluid were what was causing the pain, the pain goes away.  Right?  Of course right.  Let's demonstrate that with a little experiment.

Let's say that the layers of your skin are a little like a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.  The jelly (raspberry jelly, of course) represents the accumulated fluid that is building up and causing the peanut butter to ache.  Now, get a piece of duct tape, since I doubt you want to pay $50 for a "KinesioTape Starter Pack" anyhow.  Put a piece of duct tape on the top slice of bread, and it should levitate and allow the raspberry jelly to drain away.  Um... keep watching, it should happen any moment now.  Um.  Look, I think the bread moved a little!  See, a little of the jelly dripped on the plate!  It's working!

Okay, maybe not so much.  But this hasn't stopped people like Lance Armstrong, Serena Williams, Kerri Walsh, and David Beckham from sticking the stuff all over themselves, although in Beckham's case it may just have been so he had another excuse for taking his shirt off in front of his fans. 

So, what are Dr. Kase's credentials, then?  Hard to tell.  He's apparently a certified chiropractor in Japan, but whether he's actually studied medicine and merits the "Dr." in front of his name is a matter of conjecture.  I'm to be excused for asking the question, given a statement he made in an interview in the UK Guardian (here) in which he explains why he never has jet lag:

I will be 69 in October and I visit 15 countries for work; that is too much travel for an old man. The reason we get jet lag is because we are at very high altitude and that causes our body temperatures to go up – you notice that kids don't really suffer from it, because their fluid maintenance is much better than old people's. So the first thing I do after flying is jump into cold water, even during winter. That brings my body temperature down and I don't have jet lag.

 So, jet lag has nothing to do with changing time zones, sleep patterns, and the like, it has to do with your body temperature rising because of your "fluid maintenance."

Well, sorry, Dr. Kase, I'm not plastering tape all over myself next time I go lift weights, even as an experiment, and I can explain why in two words:  "body hair."  And I'm not going to jump into cold water after a long airplane flight, and I can explain why in one word:  "AIIIEEEEEE."  Your medical advice sounds like a lot of pseudoscientific nonsense to me, and throwing around names like "Lance Armstrong" and "Serena Williams" doesn't impress me, because I've found that there's no particular correlation between fame and brains.

However, I seem to be in the minority here, because Dr. Kase's magical tape has been selling like mad.  In what may become an epic Battle of the Bullshit, it's looking like it may outsell Power Bracelets.  (In fact, when I went to Dr. Kase's site to look up the price of a "starter pack," it stated that it was "Temporarily Out of Stock.")  And once again, we have the issue of people buying into a quack cure and very likely not seeking prompt, and legitimate, medical treatment -- making me question how this sort of thing is not both fraud and medical malpractice.

Be that as it may, you should start looking for people showing up at your local gym with tape all over their arms and legs, in lovely designer colors.  Resist the temptation to run up and rip it off, which is what I wanted to do to the grinning models on Dr. Kase's website. 

Apologies to rock-throwing elves

I visited Iceland in 2000 with my then-girlfriend (now wife), and we were both impressed by its natural beauty, fascinating history, and amazing geology.  We were also taken by the civility of its people, who pride themselves on a near 100% adult literacy rate, and one of the most conservative languages on Earth (its lexicon and grammar have barely changed in 1000 years -- sagas written in the 10th century are still required reading in the schools, in the original language).  I had a rather idealized picture of the place, an idea that the people were sensible, reasonable, and rational people, notwithstanding that their culture produced Björk.

Now I find that sadly, my opinion may need to be revised.

A couple of weeks ago, a hillside was dynamited as part of work being done to construct an anti-avalanche barrier near the town of Bolungarvík, in the northwest of Iceland.  This resulted in areas of the town being pelted with fist-sized rocks.  You would think that the obvious explanation -- that dynamite has a way of making things fly through the air -- would be obvious enough, and that someone would solve the problem by respectfully asking the construction workers not to use so damned much dynamite next time. 

You would be wrong.

Last week, the residents of Bolungarvík went to a meeting of the Town Council and demanded that action be taken, not against the people who blew up the hillside, but against... elves.  The rock barrage was not caused by the dynamite, they said; they were thrown by the huldufólk, a type of elf that lives in the hills.  The huldufólk, they claimed, were pissed off because they hadn't been consulted in the construction of the anti-avalanche barrier, and had responded by throwing rocks.

I would have thought that town officials would give this claim the response it deserved, namely, laughing in said residents' faces and then recommending that they lay off the brennivín.  This, sadly, did not happen.  The residents who brought the story about the irritated elves to the Bolungarvík Town Council were politely listened to.  The residents then demanded that the Council draft a resolution apologizing to the elves on behalf of the town, so as to forestall any further rock-throwing incidents.  The members of the Town Council voted, and the motion for a resolution failed, which initially gave me some hope that my perception of Iceland as a seat of rational skepticism was correct.  But then, the Town Council, in a move that should make skeptics the world over do a faceplant, encouraged the townsfolk to convene an appeasement ceremony of their own to apologize to the elves for building the barrier without consulting them.

So they did.  A local musician, Benedikt Sigurdsson, wrote a song for the occasion, and the people got together and offered prayers to the huldufólk.  Sigurdsson is quoted as saying, “I have now been asked by both elves and men to broker a compromise here, and I hope that this song will suffice."

The fact that Sigurdsson thinks that the elves have talked to him should be a cause for concern, but that notwithstanding, I suspect he's right.  For one thing, the dynamiting is over, and so any further rock incidents are unlikely.  For another, I'm guessing that subsequent construction will be done only after contacting the local authorities, obtaining a building permit, and talking to the elves.

And when the elves are propitiated, and no rocks are pelted, it will further convince everyone in Bolungarvík that you can't do anything without consulting, appeasing, and asking advice from supernatural beings for which there is no evidence whatsoever.  And here I will stop, and trust that you are perfectly capable of drawing your own parallels without my having to point them out to you.

The number game

Yesterday I was perusing a site whose apparent purpose is to make people Repent For The End Is Near, and I found that one of the latest things to get the Apocalypse Soon crowd in a lather is the fact that some time in May of this year, the world's population was 6,666,666,666.

Their alarm does not, of course, have anything to do with the fact that that's a pretty scary number of people.  No mention of "wow, maybe we can prevent the end of the world if we stop reproducing like bunnies and increase access to, and remove the stigma of, birth control."  No, the issue was the number itself.

It is such common knowledge that it is hardly worth noting that numbers with lots of sixes tend to put these people's knickers in a twist.  666 is the "Number of the Beast" in the Book of Revelation, so the fact that the Earth's population hit 6,666,666,666 seems like some sort of omen, despite the fact that passing 6,666,666,666 is the most convenient way to get from 6,666,666,665 to 6,666,666,667.

It's interesting that this showed up on a fundamentalist Christian website, because the whole idea of numbers having "significance" is called numerology, and is considered by most devout Christians to fall into the realm of witchcraft and divination, and therefore be a fairly major no-no.  Numerology hinges on the idea that there's something magical about numbers, and that certain numbers are bad and others are good.  Generally speaking, even numbers are considered bad, and odd ones are good -- witness "lucky number seven" -- with the number thirteen being an obvious exception to the rule.  Associations also make a difference -- one is good (there is one god), two is so-so (it represents man/woman or Adam/Eve, and lots of other dichotomies -- light/dark, good/evil), three is great (man/woman/child, the holy trinity), and so on.  Interestingly, six has bad connotations largely because it is one less than seven, which represents perfection (although ironically, mathematicians call six the first "perfect number," a number equal to the sum of its factors).

So, anyway, that's the idea, and I'm perhaps to be forgiven that I think it sounds like a lot of horse waste.  My skepticism notwithstanding, numerology is highly popular.  Numerologists are consulted much in the same was as astrologers are, and then go to great lengths to try to convert everything to numbers, and show that those numbers "mean something."  One of the most common ways is to convert each of the letters of the alphabet into a number (usually starting with a=1, b=2, and so on, up to i=9, then starting over again at j=1).  Then you add up the numbers of whatever you're interested in (most commonly,  your name).  So, for example, my name as I usually sign it, Gordon P. Bonnet, would be 7+6+9+4+6+5+7+2+6+5+5+5+2.  This gives 69, a number with an entirely different meaning, one I will refrain from going into in the interest of keeping this post PG-13 rated.  So, anyway, then you add the two digits together, 6+9 = 15.  Then you add those two together, and keep doing it till you're down to a single digit (1+5 = 6).

So, we can see that my name adds to six, the number of evil incarnate.  So maybe there's something to numerology, after all.

What I find amusing about all of this is the lengths to which people go to twist this technique to get the results they like.  Some people will decide to count (or not) their middle name, middle initial, or whatnot, if the original configuration wasn't giving them a "nice number."  According to one site I looked at, more than one person has actually changed his/her name in order to have a moniker with a "better number" (and the site claimed that immediately afterwards, the person's luck changed for the better).  People do numerological analyses of home addresses, pet names, names of prospective romantic involvements, names of businesses they're considering working for, and so on.

If all of this sounds like a lot of silly hocus-pocus to you, well, it does to me, too.  But the ancients went in for it in a big way -- there was a whole study of the subject amongst Jewish scholars, who would take passages from the Torah (or other writings) and do a Hebrew numerological analysis of it (called gematria) in order to find hidden meanings.  (This practice is why the same numbers keep coming up in the bible -- particularly numbers like 3, 7, 13, and 40 -- all numbers of significance in Hebrew gematria.)  And, of course, there always were hidden meanings, because if you (1) believe that everything has significance, (2) are willing to tweak things until you find the meaning you want, and (3) have lots and lots of free time, you can make anything into anything.

It's the same phenomenon, really, as the people who search for "coded messages" in everything from the bible to Shakespeare.  There are now computer programs being employed to decipher these alleged codes.  Most of what they turn up is gibberish, but every once in a while something meaningful seems to arise, which to me only proves that if you have a long enough string of characters, and no particular restrictions on how you're allowed to mess around with it, you'll eventually create what you're looking for.

So, anyway, I wouldn't get all bent out of shape because some time in May, we had 6,666,666,666 people on Earth.  For one thing, we added another person about two seconds later.  For another, numerology is a lot of bunk.  There's only one number that has much influence over my life, and that's my bank account balance, and the only meaning it conveys to me is "can I pay the mortgage this month?"  Which, now that I come to think of it, is pretty damned significant.

Gorn down south

Good news for all of you East Coast cryptozoology buffs who thought you'd have to take a trip all the way to the Pacific Northwest to see something that probably doesn't exist:  we now have a very intriguing report coming in from rural South Carolina.

Some residents of Lee County heard an odd noise at night during the July 4 weekend, and went out to investigate.  They found that the front bumper of their car had been "clawed and chewed."  Well, that can only mean one thing.

Lizard Man is back.

When the owners of the munched car notified local police, some old-timers on the force noted the similarity of the story to reports from 23 years ago.  During a five-week episode in the summer of 1988, several people had their car bumpers scratched and mauled, and there were reports that the perpetrator of the damage was not some drunken vandal, but a seven-foot-tall lizard-like creature with red eyes and three clawlike fingers on each hand.

"This part here is how it all started in 1988," said former Lee County Sheriff Liston Truesdale.  "We got a call to come and look at something that had mauled a car.  I went out there and looked at that damaged car, and I haven't seen anything like that before."

Below is an artist's rendition of the creature by one of the witnesses:

An especially nice touch is that the red eyes are labeled, because otherwise we very likely wouldn't have noticed them.

In any case, speculation is running rampant.  Who is this strange creature with scaly skin and a taste for chrome?  The two chief theories are that Lizard Man is (1) an alien, or (2) a dinosaur.  Of course, it could always be (3) an alien dinosaur.  As evidence, let's look at this picture of a Gorn from Star Trek:

That's pretty close, don't you think?  I remember this episode mostly because it had the clumsiest, most ridiculous fight scene in the entire series, and there was some serious competition in that regard.  The problem was, the actor playing the Gorn was wearing this big plastic dinosaur head and it seemed like he couldn't see where he was going very well.  He kept lunging at Captain Kirk with his knife, and Kirk would do a slow-motion dodge and roll, and the Gorn would miss him by about twelve feet.  The Gorn would then go staggering off blindly, take about five minutes to relocate Kirk, and the whole thing would begin again.  It was sort of like watching an extremely slow-moving two-person game of Marco Polo.

But even so, I think the similarity between the Gorn and the South Carolina Lizard Man is pretty striking.  Of course, I don't recall the Star Trek episode mentioning anything about the Gorn race liking to eat car bumpers, but that may be because the scriptwriters had to concentrate on more important things, such as giving Kirk an opportunity to get his shirt ripped off.

In any case, we'll be watching Lee County, South Carolina pretty closely in the coming days.  It's to be hoped that someone will get a photograph or video clip of this creepy chrome-crunching cryptid creature before he packs it in for another 23 years.  One bit of advice: if you decide to visit Lee County to try for a sighting yourself, you might want to rent a car.  Don't waive the comprehensive damage insurance.

Guidance provided by the Sacred Weasel Spirit

I was having dinner with a friend last night, and she told me about an encounter she'd had at a party.

"We'd only been talking a few minutes," she said, "and she asked me what my totem animal was."

"Your 'totem animal'?" I asked.

"Yup."

"What did you tell her?" I asked.

"I said I didn't have one," she said.  "She said I did.  So she asked me what animal I dreamed about.  I told her I dreamed about my dogs because usually they're hogging the bed and snoring in my face.  I don't think she thought that was a very good answer."

So, intrigued, I started looking into it, and sure enough, there's this whole thing recently about ordinary, white-bread Americans deciding that they have a sacred animal spirit that is accompanying them through life.  On the Animal Totem website (here) there's a list of questions you can go through, to wit:

1. Since we are drawn to that which resonates with us, what animal, bird, or insect are you drawn to?
2. When you go to the park, forest, or zoo what animal are you most interested in seeing?
3. What animal do you most frequently see when you're out in nature or in the city?
4. What animals are you currently interested in learning about?
5. Which animal do you find most frightening or intriguing?
6. Have you ever been bitten or attacked by an animal?
7. Is there a recurring animal in your dreams or do you have one you have never forgotten?

My question is, what if you get conflicting answers?  For example, I like all of the big cats, but I rarely see one when I'm "out in nature," given that I live in upstate New York.  Mostly what I seem to see when I'm "out in nature" is mosquitoes, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be guided by the Sacred Mosquito Spirit.  As far as being attacked, the only animal I've ever been attacked by is an obnoxious spider monkey that resided in a cage in a bio lab where I was a lab assistant in college.  His name was Buster, and he bit me once.  It could have been worse; he one time splattered the lab director with monkey poo.  As far as what animal I'm frightened of, I think it would have to be snapping turtles.  They completely creep me out.  Plus, they can bite your toes off.  Not a nice combination.

So, as you can see, there's a problem with internal contradictions.  Plus, it seems to me that there's a lot of room for just picking an animal that's cool.  Not that there's any real harm in that, but the sources I looked at clearly consider the whole animal spirit guide thing to be real:

Your guide will instruct and protect you as you learn how to navigate through your spiritual and physical life. When you find an animal that speaks strongly to you or feel you must draw more deeply into your life, you might fill your environment with images of the animal to let the animal know it's welcome in your space. Animal guides can help you get back to your Earthly roots, and reconnect with nature by reminding you that we are all interconnected.

So, what if you think wolves are cool, but you're actually being guided by the Holy Weasel Spirit?  So there you are, with wolf pictures all over your house, and a wolf tattoo on your shoulder, and completely ignoring the guidance being provided by the Holy Weasel Spirit.  I don't know about you, but if I was the Holy Weasel Spirit, I'd be pissed.  I'd probably trip you while you're carrying your coffee, or something.

Some people take it a step further, and actually change their names, or at least adopt a pseudonym.  All of them sound vaguely pseudo-Native-American.  Some of the websites I looked at were managed by people with the last names of RavenWood, Coyote, Nighthawk, StarFox, and SkyWombat.

Okay, I made the last one up.  But I did note that where photos were provided, most of these people looked like regular old Caucasians.  I'm guessing that they had real names like Harold Snodgrass.  I suppose it's understandable that you'd prefer to be known as MoonChild FlyingEagle than Bernice Fleegman, but it does seem a little pretentious.

So, in any case, I suppose the next step is to figure out what my Totem Animal is.  I'm leaning toward a jaguar, which I've always thought was a beautiful animal.  Plus, it lives where the weather's always warm, which is a plus.  On the other hand, my personality has sometimes been compared to a border collie, so that's another possibility.

Now that I come to think of it, why limit yourself to one?  No reason why you have to have just a single animal guide, right?  I could adopt the best of both animal spirits.  From the jaguar, I can learn grace, courage, strength, and skill at hunting.  From the border collie, I can learn how to be a nervous, twitchy, type-A, hypercontrolling, stress-filled cat herder.

It could work.

Cellphones and brain explosions

A while back there was a rumor circulating that using cellphones could give you brain cancer.  A study published in 2010, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, indicates that there is no correlation between cellphone use and cancer, which caused sighs of relief from the thousands of people who like to discuss details of their sex lives and intimate health issues in public places.

Now, however, thanks to a scary email I received yesterday, I find that cellphone users have worse things to worry about than brain cancer; using your cellphone can simply make your head explode.

Don't believe me?  I'll show you.  I excerpt part of the email below:

Do not pick up calls under the following given numbers:  9888308001, 9316048121 91+, 9876266211, 9888854137, 9876715587.  These numbers will come up red in color, if the call comes from these numbers.  It's with very high wavelength, and very high frequency.  If a call is received from mobile on these numbers, it creates a very high frequency and will cause you to have a brain hemorrhage.

It's not a joke, it's TRUE.  27 people have died receiving calls from these numbers.  This has appeared on news programs and has been verified as true, it's not a hoax.  Please forward this on to all the people you care about!

Well, first off, it's a little ironic that I was the recipient of this email.  My wife recently perused the cellphone use by the members of our family, and found that in the months of May and June I accrued a grand total of seven minutes of cellphone use time.  I suspect that this was actually unusually high, because during May I was away teaching classes at a music workshop weekend in Pennsylvania, and had much higher need for my cellphone than normal.  I use my cellphone so infrequently that when I do need it, I often (1) can't find it, and then when I do find it, (2) the battery is dead, so I have to (3) locate my cellphone charger, and (4) wait several hours for the battery to charge, by which time (5) whatever need I had for a cellphone is long since past.

I think my problem is that besides being a Luddite, I just hate telephones in general.  I actually enjoy being in a place where I can't be reached by telephone.  I'm sort of like Pavlov's dog -- but instead of salivating, when the telephone rings, I swear.  The idea of taking a telephone with me, so I can be reached anywhere, has about as much appeal as taking along my dentist on vacation so that he can interrupt my lying around on the beach by doing a little impromptu root canal. 

But I digress.

For those of you who actually can find your cellphones, and do use them occasionally, should you worry about picking up your cellphone, for fear of your brain exploding?  The answer, fortunately, is no, and we don't need to have a study funded by the National Brain Explosion Institute to prove it.  Without even trying hard, I can find three problems with the contents of the email:

First, there's no way that a cellphone could transmit sound waves at a high enough volume to cause any damage.  Cellphone speakers are simply not capable of producing large-amplitude (high decibel level) sounds -- cellphone use isn't even damaging to your ears, much less your brain.  You're at more risk of ear damage from turning your iPod up too high than you are from your cellphone.

Second, how do they know all of this, if all the people it happened to died?  Did the victims pick up their cellphones, say "Hi," and then turn to their spouses and say, "OMIGOD I JUST RECEIVED A CALL FROM 9888308001 AND THE NUMBER CAME UP RED AND NOW I'M HAVING A BRAIN ANEURYSM ACCCCCKKKKK"?

Third, the email itself indicates that the originator has the intelligence of cream of wheat, because anyone who's taken high school physics knows that it's impossible for a wave to have high frequency and high wavelength at the same time, as wavelength and frequency are inversely proportional, sort of like IQ and the likelihood of watching Jersey Shore.

So, anyway, feel free to continue using your cellphones without any qualms, and I'll continue to not use mine.  Maybe one day I'll eventually arrive in the 21st century, and stop being such a grumpy curmudgeon about telephones, and consent to carry one around so I can have constant, 24/7 availability to receive calls from telemarketers.

But don't expect it to happen any time soon.

I don't want to go on the cart

A comic once stated that “everyone wants to live forever, but no one wants to be old.” Largely true, I fear, on both counts.  The continuing American obsession with cosmetics and surgeries designed to give an appearance of youth has been so thoroughly commented upon that I won’t do more than mention it; the question remains, is it possible to extend actual youth and life span significantly?

Apparently, it is.  Aubrey de Grey, Cambridge-educated biomedical gerontologist and director of the California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, recently stated that he believes that the first person who will live to be 150 years old has already been born, and the first person who will live to 1000 will be born within the next twenty years.  His team is currently working on a suite of therapies that focus on reversing cumulative cellular damage -- the culprit behind many of the diseases that eventually kill a lot of us, such as heart disease, dementia, and some forms of cancer.

"I call it longevity escape velocity -- where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing," de Grey told Reuters in an interview last week.  "And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on.  What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents, but there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born.  The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely."

De Grey's statement is looking less and less like science fiction.  A recent study showed that by manipulating only two genes, it was possible to extend the average life of yeast cells by a factor of ten – comparable to altering humans to allow them to live 800 years.   If you’re thinking, “hey, wait, that’s yeast; they’re simple single-celled life forms. How can we extend that to humans?” you should keep in mind that yeast, like humans, are eukaryotes.   The two species, however different they appear, have a remarkable overlap in genetics (of the six kingdoms, animals and fungi are the two which are the most closely related in the cladistic sense).  Most relevantly, the two yeast genes that the scientists manipulated also exist in humans, and apparently have a similar function in both organisms -- preventing senescence.

Now, I hasten to add that no one is claiming that a gene knockout procedure which extends yeast life spans by a factor of ten will have exactly the same effect in humans.   It’s merely suggestive that the possibility of significantly extending human life span exists.  As I continually harp upon in my AP Biology class, the developmental genes – which are the ones largely associated with aging – are notoriously dangerous things to mess about with.  There’s a constant tightrope-walking that the genetic substructure of the body undergoes.  If the developmental genes shut off too early, or too completely, the body becomes unable to heal itself and ages much more quickly.   If they stay active too long, it increases the risk of cancer.   (This is a significant oversimplification, but it highlights the fact that almost never can you alter a single factor in the body genetically – the vast majority of genes are pleiotropic, meaning one gene locus with many functions.)   The recent discovery that carrying the allele for Huntington’s disease (which dooms you to a lingering death by debility and neural degeneration) almost completely eliminates your risk of cancer highlights that fact.

But consider if they could do such a thing.   The mechanisms which control aging, physical growth, sexual maturity, emotional maturity, and intellectual maturity all seem to be relatively independent of one another; so think of a world where you reach your adult height at 18, your sexual maturity at 15 or 16, your emotional and intellectual maturity in your twenties… and then you go into a kind of stasis.  A thirty year old and a three hundred year old would look, and feel, substantially the same.  You don’t really start to age until you are 500 or so.  Barring accidents, you would live to see your far distant descendants.   Birth rates might not increase that much (women would probably still become menopausal in their forties, as this is a separate genetic construct from aging) but death rates would plummet.   Population growth would skyrocket.  You think that the Social Security and retirement systems are in crisis now?  On the other hand, people would probably not want to retire in their sixties – they’d still have hundreds of healthy years' worth of contributions to make.  (On the other hand, in my own case the prospect of teaching biology in the same classroom for the next 600 years falls into the "just shoot me" department.)

It would require a complete restructuring of society, not to mention a complete restructuring of how we personally look at life.  What would you do if you knew that you had, not forty or fifty more years of potential good health and vigor, but 400 or 500 years?   It would slow us all way down, not just physically but emotionally.   No need to rush; you have time.   It reminds me of the line from one of the old Star Trek episodes, from a character who was essentially death-proof; “Immortality consists largely of boredom.”

Of course, there’s the pessimist in me that feels like even if this becomes possible, we’ll get our comeuppance.  Cancer, if not unknown, was at least far less common before 1800, because infectious disease generally got people before they’d lived long enough for cancer to set in.  When infectious disease was largely eradicated, at least in the first world, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, cancer rates jumped because (among other things) we were not dying of other causes quite so much.   You have to wonder what new and devastating diseases might occur if we push the life span a lot further than we already have.

So, the inevitable question arises in my mind as to what I'd do if such a therapy were offered to me.  Honestly, I have to say that if the risks were sufficiently low, I'd probably go for it.  I'm not particularly afraid of dying, but I hate the thought of aging -- the insidious physical and mental weakening, the loss of vigor, and (especially) the eventual dependence on others.  If I could put that off for a few hundred years?  Yeah, no question about it.

It's not, however, without some ethical qualms.  Decisions made in self-interest aren't, sometimes, in the best interest of the world as a whole, and the social and environmental outcomes if such a therapy became widely available are mindblowing.  So, the bottom line is that I’m not anxious to die, myself, but the whole thing has me worried.  I’m not particularly enjoying aging, but I’m not sure that the alternative might not be worse.