Oh, and if the eventual solution (however we arrive at it) would involve some kind of forced dementia, e.g. about past events, I'd be fine with that. I have a feeling the way memories are encoded is way too complex to simply be able to selective forget something though, with everything jumbled up in a web of associations. Still, some way to "gracefully prune" stale connections so that the brain wouldn't have to keep growing indefinitely seems very doable over multiple generations at least, given our current stone-age tech.

And yeah, at some point it'd be questionable to still call use humans, but I have no problem with that either. I think it's inevitable that we'll eventually start modifying the heck out of ourselves (or create some replacement lifeform that takes over).

Hrm, slashdot ate my newlines. Sorry about that.

Not being in the medical field, I can't say whether those problems are as severe as you make them sound, but for the sake of argument I'll assume they are (I don't have much hope of personally living past 100 anyway). If we can't fix virtual immortality for currently living humans, it will probably be accomplished over many generations instead through successive modifications to each new generation. Such a process would eventually yield a human that's better adapted for a long life. Heck, it might even be a completely different lifeform that we create that escapes age-related death. You also shouldn't forget that adding even 30 years to someone's life gives ample time for additional progress to be made. I don't think we've come much further than cavemen compared to what we'll eventually achieve (provided we don't wipe ourselves out first). But yeah, the timescales might unfortunately be too large for me to stand and chance.

I believe you're making a few unfortunate assumptions here, the biggest one being that people would stay old and frail and "stuck in their ways" if we didn't die of old age, thus preventing further human progress. When we finally solve aging, so that your likelihood of dying no longer correlates to how long you have been alive (and I think it's only a question of time before we do), we will likely be able to rejuvenate ourselves too. That way we can return to a state where people more readily absorb new ideas and information.

Aging is just another thing that kills people, and I'd prefer if there was less dying in the world, regardless of cause. There are legitimate issues with people living until they die in freak accidents (possible overpopulation being the obvious one, if we keep having children), but the "if no one died we'd never get rid of the old bad people" argument always seemed like a case of lack of imagination to me.