The Age of Stupid: Trailers: Original Theatrical Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

My friend thought this was an exciting idea and he’s all for it. He thinks that since we now spend 40 or 50 years figuring ourselves out, such an extended lifetime would result in 900+ years lived in maturity and self-actualization. He imagines travel, education, the perfection of skills, the pursuit of interests and appreciation of the arts. He makes it sound wonderful.

Call me a cynic (and many have), but I’m not so enthusiastic. I can’t help but wonder if our human tendency to squander precious things wouldn’t reassert itself with a vengeance once our mortality was pushed beyond the range of contemplation. If you can reasonably expect to live to be a thousand, why not spend your first 800 years wallowing in the pointless pleasures of youth before you start getting serious about your life? What sort of world would be created by a population of rash, self‑obsessed “juveniles”?

And that’s just one of the problems I foresee in a world of millennials.

Since technological advances are initially rare and expensive, the first individuals to benefit from them would be the fabulously wealthy. Only the Paris Hiltons and Michael Jacksons of the world would get that first taste of eternity. After them would come royalty and billionaire businessmen along with their progeny; the movie stars and world‑class athletes; the politicians with their trophy wives. These will be the first to enjoy a virtually limitless life. Such individuals know only privilege and exclusivity. It will be their impulse to restrict access to longevity and grant it only to those they wish to leverage. There may be nothing egalitarian about access to the technology for a long, long time.

Once longevity becomes more widely accessible, it seems to me that a caste system would be created. After all, someone has to cut the lawn, scrub the toilet, collect the garbage and sweep the streets. Who would want to bus tables for a thousand years? I can see the earliest wave of millennials—the wealthy, corrupt and powerful—justifying to themselves the retention of an underclass to do all the dirty work of life. The upper and middle classes will support such a system once they are granted access to long life themselves. It will serve to validate their identification with the wealthy and powerful. It will be easy for the long‑lived to excuse the slavery and oppression of an underclass by pointing out the “kindness” of allowing them only a hundred years to live.

There’s also a tangle of ethical questions that spring up around the subject of human reproduction. In a world where the most fecund woman can produce only 12–20 children, we’re already faced with crippling overpopulation. How will medical advances affect female fertility? Will we still be required to reproduce by the age of 40 or so—an age of infancy in a world of millennials—or can we expect the range of our fertile life to be extended along with our vitality? Try and imagine a world where any woman might give birth scores of times, even hundreds of times. The whole concept is staggering. And what are the alternatives? Forced sterilization? The outlawing of pregnancy? Will technology undertake the task of propagating the species in order to maintain population equilibrium? If so, who will control that process? Church? State? Industry?

Another issue is our current dynastic structure of power and wealth. What will the grown children of the wealthy and powerful do when the patriarch never steps aside? What is the opposite of a power vacuum?

It’s also not clear that the human psyche is resilient enough to withstand the demands of such a lifespan. Today’s centenarian has seen technology advance from horse and buggy to the exploration of the solar system. Does the human mind have the flexibility to incorporate the changes wrought by century upon century of human achievement and still remain sane?

All these issues and questions jump immediately to mind. I haven’t even begun to consider things like the penal system, the scarcity of resources, humankind’s murderous nature, our taste for warfare or our propensity to commit genocide. A thousand‑year lifespan might ultimately produce some sort of Utopia, but I fear it would only be after millennia of ruin and devastation. I don’t think the surviving world would be anything we would recognize.

That’s assuming any sort of world would survive at all.

It’s all a fascinating concept, but I think the question is a valid one: Do you want to live forever?