If you could be immortal... (poll)

[nihilistcat]

Assuming everyone else had access to the pill, absolutely. Although, anti-aging therapies probably won't work that way. You have to restore telomere, and therefore you'd have to get at least one of the subunits of the telomerase enzyme into all of our cells (incidentally, there was a study that did this in rats and it worked, and another study that was able to reverse aging in mice). But then the problem in this case is a problem that permeates molecular biology, how do we deliver these therapies to our cells? We can use viral vectors or design novel vacuoles, but so far success with these techniques has been somewhat limited (although research is ongoing). You run into all sorts of problems, like immune response and viral replication rate and so on. But with the technology where it is today, this sort of development is inevitable. So the real question will be ... what will we do once we develop the ability to reverse aging and prevent age related death? I'm of the opinion that humans can and would adapt to this, but of course many of my fellow scientists disagree (but it's all pretty much speculation at this point).

But then, I don't think of this in terms of how I would keep myself entertained for thousands of years. I mean, biology can't really deal with traumatic death (unless we became cyborgs or some shit), and we would still die from other things (aging is only one of many causes of death). I think of this in terms of facing death and being given the chance not to die, which is I think a more realistic way to think about this. Under those conditions, I think most people here would choose to live. Granted, there would be certain preconditions to wanting to live for a really long time (e.g. most of my loved ones would still have to be around for me to have any will to live).

Sorry for geeking out ... but this is a fun question