Unless, of course, they had small babies.

It's amazing how you can actually function on only four or five hours of sleep for weeks and weeks on end. I wonder if the body compensates somehow when you have a baby. (both mother and father)

I'm one of those people who doesn't believe that we'll lose all of the energy and the infrastructure that results in the ten-thousand-mile ceaser salad. (It will be majorly disrupted for a time during the big flu epidemic, but it will resume) Part of my job is to look at the trends in technology and see what the very smartest people are saying is coming and compare that with my own observations. What I see happening is, as always, a double-edged sword. But it's a pretty massively powerful sword.

In the next 10-15 years we will have a much better understanding of how our body functions and how we need to adapt each individual's lifestyle to their own body chemistry. Conservatively, in less than five years from now, you'll be able to buy a machine that fits on a desk, costs less than $2000 and will be able to sequence your genome in under an hour. For those not familiar with genetic sequencing, that is a huge jump in cost (downward), size and speed for genetic sequencing. Why will we care?

Because along with this advance in genetic sequencing is a concurrent advance in our understanding of what that means, of our ability to decode that genetic sequence. By the time my baby graduates from high school, part of a regular doctor's visit will be a scan both of your genetics, but also of the hormone and other chemical levels in your body. This will allow for a regular tweaking of your body profile and help you maximize what your particular body needs.

Twenty-five years from now we'll begin to have cell-sized diagnostic tools that we ingest that tell us how well we're working from the inside out. They will also develop these helpful guys to clean us out of toxins, both artificial and those our body makes as part of the aging process, damaged genetic material and damaged protein strings that lead to other kinds of diseases.

Thirty to fourty years from now, we may not even have to eat because we will be able to use these artificial cells to deliver the proper amount of the right nutrients directly to our cells using basic molecular raw material. You will able to eat whatever you want, and whatever you need is taken from this material, excess is packaged and discarded and gaps are made up for in a regular supliment. There's also the possibility of massively more efficient artificial red blood cells that would make our metabolism so efficient that you could go without breathing for an hour. (snorkling anyone?) Or artificial white blood cells that can take intelligently search and destroy the bad guys, including reprogramming the genetic material of a cell to turn it off (like cancer cells) or reprogram a cell that has gotten old to tell it to keep on reproducing when natural aging would have it become less able to reproduce.

The bottom line is that as we learn more about just how our systems work best, we will learn that not everyone fits into a one-size-fits-all prescription. And we will be able to use technology to fine tune the individual's needs and have better and better ways of delivering these needs and taking care of our physical bodies.

I started out a skeptic, but with a great deal of research, I'm convinced that the odds are quite good that my nine-month-old son will, if he chooses, never have to die. How's that for a question never broached in parenting books? How do you raise a child who will be immortal?

If I'm lucky, and keep good care of myself, I may be able to benefit from these advances as well and make the cut off. (I'm only 42 now) The trick is to not be too unhealthy as the advances occur so that you're not too far gone to benefit.

Eat well, live smart and keep your eyes out, this will be a very interesting next 50 years.

Plane