Ancient But Beautiful People Galore

CHRISTIE BRINKLEY IS TURNING SIXTY, and she looks not only like a twenty year old, but a gorgeous tweny year old to boot. Chalk it up to a combination of modern high tech facial repair technology, involving computers and lasers and so forth, excessive wealth, and a culture worshipfully devoted to eternal youth, sex, and celebritydom. Heaven only knows what she's had done; how many face lifts, facial massages, hair, mole and wrinkle removals, and so forth. You'll recall that Christie Brinkley is a true blue American celebrity, a model, multiple magazine covers and commercials to her credit, formerly married to pop music icon Billy Joel. So Christie will die at the usual age, eighty, ninety or so, knowing that she did all she could to look young and beautiful forever, right up until the end. She'll know much more than that, and will have accomplished much more than that, but she'll also have the youth and beauty as icing on the cake, which most of us don't and won't. For what its worth. As if most people would even care to go through all that to have it. Exactly what is it worth? We might venture to ask: what's the point, Christie? All that work, effort, energy, time, and money, just to look good, as good as possible, as long as possible? What do you gain by that, that you don't already have? What was the opportunity cost? What else, in other words, could you have been doing during all this, other than reading a good book, or making and sharing memories with good friends, or making love, or getting outside into the natural world, unaltered by humanity? Or maybe nano technology will eventually extend your life span to incredible lengths, thus amking all this worthwhile. But if that happesn, we're all in trouble. Do we really want to live in a world with billions and billions of ancient but beautiful people?