> There are some very good things I could see for a race of immortal humans, though. Imagine how much wiser you would be if you had the equivalent of several of our current lifetimes. Just the amount of experience and knowledge you could accumulate would be incredibly beneficial. Not to mention the fantastic number of things to do or movies to see.

You might want to check out "Trouble with Lichen" by John Wyndham for an interesting take on this part of the question. It's written from a very 1950s-60s viewpoint, and deals mostly with the differences which will be necessary in the marriage relationship and the role of women in society, if the lifespan is suddenly upped to three or four hundred years.

Like I say, it's *very* dated now, because a major point was that women would be allowed to be something other than a housewife, because a man would get bored stupid having to put up with the same wife for four hundred years if she wasn't as intelligent as he was. (Reading it today, it's nice to know we didn't have to wait for immortality to achieve that goal.) However, it is a very good read and has some interesting points to make about the extended-lifespan idea, such as strife between individuals/nations who can afford the treatment and those who can't, the moral issues about who SHOULD get it (I think it's safe to assume that in the early stages of any new technology, it won't be available to the entire population of the world), changes in the economy and so on.

One of the main things which I think came through in this book, and which I agree with, is Wyndham's feeling that extended life will only be beneficial to those who already have the brains and motivation to do something with it. The average person, he suggests, will go on doing exactly the same things and thinking exactly the same thoughts as they always have, only for longer.

I get the feeling most people would continue to live their first half-century or so in much the same way they would today, because that's how long it takes people to mature intellectually anyway. It seems to be after 50 that thoughtful, intelligent, highly educated people really start coming up with the goods as far as wisdom and creativity are concerned. Unfortunately, this is also about the time that they start going downhill physically, so an extended lifespan would definitely bring out some amazing things at the elite end of the intellectual scale.

The cynical side of me says that most people don't do much with the time they have *now*, when they know perfectly well how limited it is. I'd like to think boredom would lead to people spending eight hundred years bettering themselves, but I think it's just as likely they'd spend eight hundred years sitting on the couch watching "Survivor: Centaurus 6 Abandoned Lithium Mining Colony".