Essays on Infinite Lifespans   Russell Blackford 267 etc., that attach us to life. Moreover, it is also rational to feel frustrated when we experience, or imagine, the decline in our mental and physical powers that will make us less and less able, as we age, to carry out our projects and commence new ones. Indeed, our knowledge that aging and death await us restricts what projects we can rationally commit ourselves to in the time available. If not for the specters of age and death, we could commit ourselves to projects that might take hun- dreds of years to see completion. Williams’ argument that we would experience terrible bore- dom if we could live forever (p89–98) [1] strikes me as rather unconvincing. As long as I have my full capacities, I can see no limit to my ability to immerse myself in new projects, in new and more relationships, in new interests. I suppose it might be different if the world did not change around me, so that a time came when nothing was new. But why should that ever be the case? Technology will advance, society will change, our understanding of the Universe will deepen, and we will find time to explore it. I suppose one counterargument is that the longer our lives become the less we can have vivid and immediate memories of our entire lives. Very long-lived people might have some difficulty maintaining a psychological connection with their pasts, for, in a greatly extended life, memory may not be able to handle all that has been experienced. However, the extent of this problem is unclear, since we know so little about the neurophysiological workings of memory. In any event, it is not obvious that the outcome would be terrible  –  or  drastically  different  from  everyday  experience even now. I can remember little of my life before the age of five and I find that memories, even of critical experiences, become unexpectedly vaguer as I grow older. However, that does not mean that I fail to recognize how they have shaped me, nor has my past lost its interest to me.