How long do you want to live?

[SYZ]

Here in my home state of Victoria, these are the
conditions for accessing voluntary assisted dying:

People can ask for voluntary assisted dying if they meet all the following conditions:

They must have an advanced disease that will cause their death and that is:

•  Likely to cause their death within six months (or within 12 months for neurodegenerative
diseases like motor neurone disease)  causing the person suffering that is unacceptable to them.

•  They must have the ability to make and communicate a decision about voluntary assisted dying
throughout the formal request process.

•  They must also:
       be an adult 18 years or over
       have been living in Victoria for at least 12 months
       be an Australian citizen or permanent resident.

Medical practitioners with appropriate experience and who
have completed voluntary assisted dying training can help
a person through the process. Access to voluntary assisted
dying requires two doctors to agree that the person
is eligible. One of the doctors will write a prescription for
the substance once the VAD permit has been approved.

[Edible crust]

Here in my home state of Victoria, these are the
conditions for accessing voluntary assisted dying:

People can ask for voluntary assisted dying if they meet all the following conditions:

They must have an advanced disease that will cause their death and that is:

•  Likely to cause their death within six months (or within 12 months for neurodegenerative
diseases like motor neurone disease)  causing the person suffering that is unacceptable to them.

•  They must have the ability to make and communicate a decision about voluntary assisted dying
throughout the formal request process.

•  They must also:
       be an adult 18 years or over
       have been living in Victoria for at least 12 months
       be an Australian citizen or permanent resident.

Medical practitioners with appropriate experience and who
have completed voluntary assisted dying training can help
a person through the process. Access to voluntary assisted
dying requires two doctors to agree that the person
is eligible. One of the doctors will write a prescription for
the substance once the VAD permit has been approved.

I think that adults that are deemed to be of sound mind should be able to outline under what circumstances lhey would like their lives ending legally.
You can write a legally binding will at any time under the above conditions, so why make someone jump through hoops to get what dog owners take for granted?

[pattylt]

My problem is that I’m basically healthy but I have degenerative arthritis. Because it isn’t some fatal disease, the Australian requirements leave me in the dust. Thats ok, I’m in the US anyway.

I will know when I’m done and the pain is no longer tolerable or treatable. I’ll take care of it myself. My only concern is that there are no repercussions to my husband so we have his innocence in the plan as well. I’ll be damned if some religion or government tells me I must continue to suffer under their foolish beliefs.

[mordant]

My problem is that I’m basically healthy but I have degenerative arthritis.  Because it isn’t some fatal disease, the Australian requirements leave me in the dust.  Thats ok, I’m in the US anyway.  

I will know when I’m done and the pain is no longer tolerable or treatable.  I’ll take care of it myself.  My only concern is that there are no repercussions to my husband so we have his innocence in the plan as well. I’ll be damned if some religion or government tells me I must continue to suffer under their foolish beliefs.

The irony in these things is that anyone in a position to be contemplating "self-deliverance" will tell you that knowing they are in control of their own destiny actually tends to extend their life rather than shorten it. My late / previous wife's greatest fear was waiting too long so that she couldn't (metaphorically or literally) turn the knob herself. Once she knew that arrangements were in place, that the knob was within reach gave her the strength to soldier on. I estimate it added a good 2 or 3 years to her life. Otherwise she would have resorted to some more violent and messy demise while she had the strength to proceed with it, and I would have been the one to come home to her brains splattered about the house.

[Vorpal]

I want 100 additional years if I could stay at my current level of fitness or better for most of it.

[Alan V]

• There’s an infinity button on the calculator, and there are endless digit spots.
  
  
• You can choose the age of your body and change it at any time—that means if you’re 40 right now you can choose to go back to 25 and live out a bunch of years in your 25-year-old body, then let yourself age up to 70 over the next 45 years, do that for a while, then bring yourself back down to 35 for a while, etc. (The point here is to take body age out of the question.)
  

A second human lifetime would likely be enough to do it right, or close enough.  So I would choose 150 years total and start over again as a child.

I also assume I could retain what I have learned.

I would certainly avoid most people on the second round.  That would eliminate a lot of mistakes all by itself.

Weird question, though.   

[Gwaithmir]

I turned 76 last March. Considering my declining health and all the meds I have to take, 80 is fine with me. 

[Reltzik]

You have exactly 10 minutes to choose how many years you want to live and type the number into the calculator. At the end of the 10 minutes, you’ll be escorted out of the room, and your decision is permanent and unable to ever be changed. You’ll live for exactly that many years and then you’ll die. Oh also…every other human on Earth is currently in a room just like this making the same exact decision and you won’t know what they chose until you leave the room. If you enter no number into the calculator, your life will go on exactly as it had before, unaffected—you’ll die a natural death whenever you would have if this had never happened.
Other information in the note’s fine print:

• There’s an infinity button on the calculator, and there are endless digit spots.
  
  
• You can choose the age of your body and change it at any time—that means if you’re 40 right now you can choose to go back to 25 and live out a bunch of years in your 25-year-old body, then let yourself age up to 70 over the next 45 years, do that for a while, then bring yourself back down to 35 for a while, etc. (The point here is to take body age out of the question.)
  
  
• Sickness and ailments don’t happen anymore for anyone who enters a number into the calculator. People who leave it blank will get sick as they would have in their normal life.
  
  
• People who enter a number in the calculator will no longer be able to reproduce—any children they already have (including existing pregnancies) can live on, but they can’t conceive any more children. People who leave the calculator blank can continue to have children, but those children won’t ever be given a chance to choose an age—they will be normal mortal people who will live and die naturally, as will their children, and so on.
  
  
• This opportunity will never come along again—it’s a one and only one time thing.
  
  
• No other guarantees about anything—if you enter a number into the calculator, you will continue to live a conscious existence until your birthday that year, and then you’ll peacefully die that day. Sickness and ailments won’t occur, but discomfort, pain, and suffering still can—i.e. if you’re living a comfortable life on Earth, you’ll have general good health at all times and any ailments or injuries will be healed immediately, but if you tried to free dive to the bottom of the ocean, while you won’t die, you’d experience horrible pain and suffering as if you were drowning. If you don’t eat or drink, you won’t die, but you’ll feel completely desperate for food and water like a normal person would.
  

The most interesting part of this question for me is the part about every other human facing the same decision.  That means that what my future looks like moving forward will be shaped not only by my choice, but by everyone else's.  Whether that existence is idyllic or hellish may come down to what decisions most people are likely to make, rather than just what decision I choose to make.  So, what choice will people make?

Answer:  A lot of them.  People are varied. Even if everyone else chose the same answer, there's going to be a percentage of the human population that doesn't put any more thought into the question  than "goo-goo-gah-gah I'm a six-month-old-baby who doesn't comprehend any of the words that were used to explain the question much less the deeper concepts of mortality they are tied to oh look buttons mashing buttons with my hand is fun!"  Others will be old enough to understand what's happening, but get confused about the instructions.  They might not bother to read the fine print or have an ADHD moment and skim through a paragraph without retaining it because they were thinking about aardvarks or something.  Others might give the matter two seconds of thought, press the infinity button, and spend most of the rest of infinity regretting those rash two seconds.  Maybe someone will have read something like Le Guin's Island of the Immortals and have a bunch of fictional notions of what eternity, or just extreme longevity, will be like, and make the decision based on those fictional notions.  WHICH decision they make would vary based on which fiction they'd been consuming. Some will have philosophical or religious objections to extending their life at all, while others might think "this is too good to be true" and reject it on the assumption that there's some strings attached they're not being told about.

Long story short, pretty much every variety of choice possible will be made by some portion of humanity.  So we can figure x percent will choose to enter nothing, y percent will enter a modestly old age of few decades longer than they'd expect, z percent will enter infinity, etc.

One thing that jumps out to me is what this will do to warfare.  What happens when a soldier cannot be killed and instantly heals any injury dealt to them and can remain in their physical prime after picking up several lifetimes worth of combat skills?  What happens when one side of a conflict has an army of soldiers like that? What happens when BOTH sides of a conflict have armies of soldiers like that?  When death is an impossibility and severe injury is just a minor inconvenience, what deterrent exists for generals to throw their armies into eternal combat?  There would be some deterrents, of course, things like limited ammunition and expense and not wanting widespread death.  So only x% of military leaders would try it.  Then y% will be forced to do the same to defend themselves against the x%, and z% will try to stage interventions to stop the conflict between the x% and the y%... this sounds like a recipe for an eternal war, in which everyone who took the calculator deal was forced to fight and kill for the rest of their lives and everyone who wasn't would quickly become colateral damage.  (And yes, of course the people with extended lives would be conscripted.  Some nation would get the bright idea, and others would be forced to follow suit once someone started.  Race to the bottom.)

Okay, so you can't stop the typical enemy soldier by killing him.  Same with violent criminals.  What CAN you do?  Maybe chain them up, permanently.  Maybe hermetically seal them into tungsten and dump them into a magma vent.  Tungsten has a higher melting temperature than the temperature of magma and is much denser, so down to the innards of the earth you go.  That would start to approach the torment of the Christian hell, including the part about it being eternal.  (Or maybe for just centuries, if the person wasn't a complete idiot and didn't enter infinity.)  The details don't matter.  What matters is that A) people would develop ways of permanently neutralizing people who can't die and B) they'd find fates worse than death to serve as deterrents for bad behavior.

Ultimately the calculator people will, though their immortality, come to dominate the rest of the human population.  They could kill normal humans with relative impunity and couldn't be killed back.  (Maybe if the vast majority of humans didn't take the deal, they could restrain the calculator people through sheer numbers, but I don't see the vast majority of humanity not taking the deal.)  They'd become almost a different species, unable to interbreed, and the only meaningful, long-term relationships they'd form would be with other calculator-people.  This is not a good recipe for quality of life among the non-calculator-people they'd be dominating.

I could spin this out further, but I think the bottom line is this:  that future would look horrific REGARDLESS of what I punched into the calculator, provided I lived to see it.  The optimal decision would seem to be either to give myself one or two years to enjoy a life free of pains or sickness and then kick it before things get really bad, or not enter any number at all and keep a lethal heroin overdose close at hand for when things take a turn for the worse.

But I am NOT the optimal-decision sort of person.  My life to date would have played out very differently if I was.  No, I'm the fuck-around-and-find-out-if-I-can-break it person.  It's like an OCD impulse for me.  So, rather than doing the smart thing, I'd try to break it.  Maybe I'd enter some number lower than my current age just to see if the magic calculator design team covered that use case.  ... or, no, wait!  It's not just a numeric keypad!  It's a calculator!  LET'S SEE WHAT HAPPENS IF I DIVIDE BY ZERO!