Population is, of course, the number one problem…I’m not at all sure that I should survive any longer…I’m three years past the Biblical point at which I should let somebody else eat this food and live in this space.”

-- B.F. Skinner on his own mortality, in an interview in Harvard Magazine in 1977 (Skinner was 73, and lived to 86)

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

-- Woody Allen

“Arakawa, a Japanese-born conceptual artist and designer, who with his wife, Madeline Gins, explored ideas about mortality by creating buildings meant to stop aging and preclude death, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 73…‘This mortality thing is bad news,’ Ms. Gins said by phone from her studio on Houston Street. She said she would redouble her efforts to prove that “aging can be outlawed.’”

-- from New York Times obituary, May 19, 2010

Apparently, trying to live forever, or at least well beyond even a long life, is in. Less than two months after running that obituary on Arakawa, the Times, in its Sunday magazine had a story on guys who want to have their bodies frozen as soon as they die, to be thawed out sometime in the future when modern technology might offer them the possibility of resuming life. The story is titled, “Until Cryonics Do Us Part” and is subtitled, “The men who want to be cryonically preserved and the women who sometimes find it hard to be married to them.”

Hey, I don’t mean to be a spoil-fun, and I’m no fan of death, but isn’t it here for a reason? As that old lapel pin said -- back in the day when those pins with funny messages were all the rage -- “Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down.” But even if you live life just the right way, don’t you realize that the only reason the earth is habitable is because people (and animals) don’t live forever?

Think about this. The world is getting pretty crowded as we approach a population of seven billion. But if no one had ever died, the world population would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion. And if the proportion of idiots had always been what it is today, that would mean billions of idiots! And the earth would be so crowded, the chances are one of them would practically be in your lap.

And a lot of people would be very, very old. I mean, think about it: Isn’t dealing with your 95-year-old mother hard enough? How would it be if you were 95 and she were 130?

There are so many ramifications of the life expectancy growing exponentially. Why should senior citizen discounts start at 62 or 65, if those old folks are still going to be here hundreds of years from now? And Medicare? Forget about it.

Apparently, the way Arakawa tried to prevent death was by building a home with steeply sloping floors (so much so that visitors were worried that they’d slide into the kitchen), windows that seemed to high or too low, and “oddly angled light switches.” The intention was to “lead…users into a perpetually ‘tentative’ relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.’”

So suppose it worked? Suppose you did live forever? What kind of life is that, always worrying that with your floor so steep you’re going to fall into your kitchen, or windows that could make you and everyone around you crazy?

Now slightly more realistic -- and I want to emphasize “slightly” -- are the freezer people. I’m a little nervous about making fun of them because not only are there 200 of them already on ice, but apparently there are ten times that number signed up for freezing upon “death.” If you or one of your loved ones is such a person, forgive me. But come on! Global warming is bad enough for those of us who are trying to adapt to it. If you get defrosted in 200 years, when the average global temperature is 120 degrees, you’re going to be in for a real shock. In fact, you’ll probably want to go right back into the freezer.

Actually, I’m not being totally accurate in referring to bodies -- cryonicists refer to them as “patients,” incidentally -- as frozen in the traditional sense. It seems that literally having ice in your veins is not good for you, so as soon as possible, after that little pause most of us refer to as death, the “patient” is injected with some kind of anti-freeze.

You know, I consider myself pretty open-minded, but here is a place where I draw the line. And besides, consider this: Do you think that hundreds of years from now, when perhaps the technology is available to defrost those who had themselves put in cold storage, that your great-great-great…grandchildren will have any interest in defrosting your ancient a--? Maybe as an amusement, but that would be about it.