What would you want to achieve in 600 years?

Lifespans are an interesting attribute of a species.  They don't always correlate to size and they don't conform to any great extent at all.  Some animals live for hours, some for days, and some for only a few years.  Our own lifespans vary by country.  The life expectancy of someone here in the UK for example is 81.5 years, while the USA is 78.7 years, and in Russia it is 70.5 years.  The lowest life expectancy in the world is 38 years in Sierra Leone and the highest is 84.6 years in Japan.

Our life expectancy changes over time, and while today we live relatively long in comparison to historical figures, it's still relatively short in comparison to some forms of life on Earth.  A Redwood tree for example can live for thousands of years and the oldest tree in the world is thought to be a Bristlecone pine tree at an approximate age of 5,000 years.

Our lives are incredibly short by comparison but given all we accomplish within them and given what we are expected to do within the time we are alive you have to ask yourself the question of how long you would actually want to live to as a species.  Increasing the pension age is something that often results in riots, not just here in the UK but around the world too.  Yet as our lifespans lengthen and we live longer, the system we have becomes unaffordable unless you expect people to work longer before they can claim it.  I'll discard the fact that 95% of people deplete their entire contribution within 3 years of claiming their pension as that is an entire post by itself; but if you maintain the system we have and had a life expectancy of say 600 years then the expectation that you would work until you were 560 years old would be real.  Would you want to work for so long?  Even those with the most hardened work ethic would wince at the thought of spending half a millennium in their job.

All that of course assumes that things would stay as they are, just with larger numbers, but that's not guaranteed either.  While you can attribute a lot of our advancement as a race within the last hundred years to the advancement of technology, you can't dismiss that population growth has contributed to many technological innovations, and the collective contributions of that growing population in taxes and purchases have provided the money to fund those innovations.  With a far greater population that would result from such long life expectancies you would have to consider what technological advances would come as a result.  For one, the desire to live on other planets would become a lot less idealistic and a lot more imperative.  Our expansion beyond Earth would be a necessity.

All this brings us back to the question that we started with:  What would you want to achieve in 600 years?