Comment Re:You really can't be serious (Score 3, Informative) 510
One day we may have cures for just about all disease, maybe even "old age" itself. And think about how horrible that will be! Knowing that you are still going to die, but it won't be peacefully in your home with your family at your bedside. You could end up like Draco, smothered to death by gifts of cloaks and hats showered upon him by appreciative citizens at a theatre [620 BC]. Or you might end up like martyr Saint Lawrence, patron saint of cooks, who was roasted alive on a giant grill during the persecution of Valerian [258AD]. Prudentius tells that he joked with his tormentors, "Turn me over — I'm done on this side".
As we grow older we could end up dying in ways we could not have ever imagined, like Hans Steininger, the burgomaster of Braunau, Austria, who died when he broke his neck by tripping over his own beard [1567 AD].
If age alone is one day no longer terminal, then we will probably have to keep working indefinitely. This only increases the odds of dying while pursuing our occasionally dangerous professions, such as Clement Vallandigham, a lawyer and Ohio politician defending a man on a charge of murder, who accidentally shot himself demonstrating how the victim might have shot himself while in the process of drawing a weapon when standing from a kneeling position.
So maybe you plan on spending eternity very carefully, not even to venture outside to avoid such horrendous impending deaths waiting to happen. Well, that didn't work for Joao Maria de Souza, who was killed while asleep, by a cow that fell through the roof of his house onto his bed in 2013.
Just thinking about all of the horrible ways to die can drive a person to madness, but in the end maybe there is one next-best-thing to knowing how you are going to die in six months while counting down the last days on your death bed, with enough time to tell your loved ones goodbye or changing your will to cut out your less-than-loved ones. And maybe that's taking matters into your own hands, like David Phyall, the last resident in a block of flats due to be demolished near Southampton, England, who decapitated himself with a chainsaw to highlight the injustice of being forced to move out. Ya. That'll show 'em!