| Scripting News: 5/1/2005 Happy 50th Birthday Dave. In the last 10 years, you've been a big factor in turning RSS, Blogging and XMLRPC into mainstream tools[1]. This changed our world, and for that, thanks. Dave also talks about the effects of a lifespan of three score years and ten on the species. "Every seventy or eighty years we do a complete refresh of the species." It's an interesting meditation to consider what life would be like if we lived to 150 instead of 70. If you think that people don't really become mature adults until 30, that's like 120 years of being an active adult instead of 40. Consider also that it takes about 10 years to become an expert in whatever field you choose. So if we lived to 150 we could easily fit in 4 or 5 careers where now it's hard to manage two and most people only manage one. Quite apart from the extra time, I think the world might be a better place with more respect for age and experience. But we'd have to put against that the increased frustration of the relatively young. Ever since I started reading Heinlein, I thought that life extension technologies that allowed an average lifespan of 150 would appear in my lifetime. Now I'm not so sure. As I think Rucker said, everyone has to face the same Koan. "I was not, I am now, I will not be", so what are you going to do when you get up in the morning? This time around. [1]I'm not going to get into whether you invented these and other technologies or not. It's not important. |
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