"who might've lived one thousand years..."

How long do you expect to live? It is a slightly different question than how old do you expect to become. In fact, if you follow some of the research being done now to its logical conclusion, you might start to think that your answers to those questions might be quite a bit different than your parents'.

If we take for granted that most cultural traits that humans exhibit seem to develop at an exponential rate (with technology being perhaps the most easily recognizable), it seems reasonable to expect that the field of medicine will undergo radical changes in the next several decades. For instance, the recent arrival of the first synthetic self-replicating DNA is already being recognized as a milestone. Research like that coupled with the rapidly-advancing state of stem cell research means that the medical options available to doctors twenty years from now are going to be much, much different than the ones available to our contemporary physicians. And given that there seem to be creatures that basically don't age (forgive the website, just note the article they're posting was originally published in Discover), it seems feasible that we may one day be able to bestow that enviable trait upon ourselves. And why not? Who wouldn't want to live an extra century or two?

Bear in mind that this is merely the research being done right now. In one of the articles, they mention that the whole notion of stem cell research has only been around a decade, an extremely short time in the medical field. And the second decade of research is probably much richer than the first. If they are already replacing large patches of skin, corneas, and some organs, they're already treating leukemia and other blood things, what do the next ten years hold?

So if you're interested in the future, maybe do yourself a favor and try and exercise a little more in the meantime, and hope to live long enough that some day you won't have to. And always remember your Arthur Clarke: "Technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic."