If the lifespan of humans dies become greatly extended, there will almost certainly be a problem with memory. The capacity of human memory is large, but limited; memory is also unreliable over long periods of time. A three-hundred year old person would have completely different memories of her childhood to a fifty-year-old. or a thousand-year-old.
I suggest that some kind of external storage will become necessary. It many be possible to record memories on a database directly, using some kind of neural interface; or you could just keep a diary. Like Lazarus Long, but perhaps in electronic form.
I suggest some sort of MeWiki- you can add to such a database, and amend it over time to take advantage of hindsight- but you can always look back at previous versions to compare the original entries with later post-rationalisations. The MeWiki (or some more sophisticated derivative) could make the difference between unreliable and fading memories and a much more comprehensive (yet still appealingly unreliable) alternative.
|