Can we live 1000 years?

Who's read Asimov's "The Last Question" http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Imagine you can live to 1000 or more, at what point does your brain run out of space for memories?

When you're finally out of room in your memory buffer do you just turn it into a FIFO queue? So you could collect a whole bunch of information you like (like favorite books, music, movies, etc) start consuming at one end, forget that by the time you get to the end and start again. Repeat forever.

Alternatively you could expand your mind, you turn into a cyborg or something. See Asimov's The Last Question again.

Or you could stimulate your (possibly digital) brain's please center - forever.

And this leads me to a theory of what happened to all the other advanced civilizations in the universe.

Assume human like intelligence evolves somewhere out there, then:

Scenario #1: Self destruction.

Scenario #2: External destruction, asteroid or something.

Scenario #3 Super-intellect is achieved:

#3.1 Rational super intellect realized existence for the sake of existence is pointless and quits.

#3.2 Irrational super intellect wants to exist rational enlightenment be damned. Irrational intellect expands and expands.

In other words, if some alien species out there advanced enough to reach trans-humanism (or trans-alienism hardi har har har) then it probably also transcended any irrational genetic fear of death and then promptly took a bow and exited stage left.

I guess what I'm saying is you're doomed either way.

Either you are primitive and doomed to die a natural death.

Or you're super advanced and too smart to fear death, then you have something to do for a while but eventually...

If the means of life extension is not hideously expensive, then anyone past a certain age with even the smallest bit of sense will be rich beyond the dreams of mortal men. Compound interest works.

This would have interesting social ramifications. As it is, most states are organized such that the old are relatively rich, the young are relatively poor, and the young's income subsidizes the old's healthcare costs. In a state with some people who are 420 and some people are 20, the Methuselah will be worth $300 million. For every dollar invested back when he was twenty.

Imagine working for 100 years to save up enough money to live comfortably for the next 900 years, and how different that is than the people who will live paycheck to paycheck until only the last 20 years or so of their lives. It will create two very separate classes of people.

PS: For what it's worth, humans actually did live for about 900 years on average until the Great Flood---if you believe in the Bible.

Compound interest works in large part because capital has value. As the world becomes rich the value of wealth will go down relative to the value of peoples effort. Basically over the extremely long term expected ROI should go down if people start living into extreme old age. Granted some people will always balance this out with the 700 year old with credit card debt keeping the people who get that interest well paid but if 60 million people are willing to lend billions the interest rate is going to be vary low.

PS: What I wonder about is how the death penalty vs life in prison is going to work out. As people live longer I expect more people to commit "major" crimes and even larger groups of people to know someone that "flipped out". Will we want to punish people for mistakes they made 200 years ago or will people become so jaded that minor crimes are are just dealt with by killing the offender?