Imagine tomorrow at your local medical center the doctor asks you, “How long do you want to live? Just give me your desired age of death and I will conveniently make the arrangements.”

This must be make-believe fantasy. Well, not so fast. Consider what the Aubrey DeGrey, SENS Foundation’s chief science officer says about this possibility.

I call it longevity escape velocity — where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies as time goes on.

In other words medical science is moving faster than we are aging.

DeGrey continues.

I’d say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I’d call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so and what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious disease today.

Wow 50/50! Most of us would take those odds in any wager. But this is no ordinary wager; we’re talking life here and a lot of it. The ramifications to society as we know it are hard to imagine.

Exit questions.

How long would you choose to live?

Would the amount of your retirement savings dictate whether you choose to live or die?

If you are not retired when would you plan to retire assuming this new dynamic?

Perhaps we are on the threshold of these things no longer being an academic discussion.