Do You Want to Live to 120? Most Say No

Would you want to live 20 years over a century? According to a recent report, most apparently don't.

The survey was composed of more than two-thirds (69 percent) of a nationally representative sample of 2,012 adults 18 and older who say they'd most likely prefer to live anywhere between the ripe old age of 79 or even possibly the withered, white-haired age of 100, with a median at 90. This is about an average of 11 years longer than the current U.S. average of 78.7 years (81 for women, 76.2 for men).

"There's really so little information about this kind of topic," said a Pew researcher and lead author of the study, Cary Funk said according to USA Today. "We're talking about something that would slow or repair the aging process and let people live decades longer, beyond the limits of what's thought of as human life expectancy."

Researchers found that the majority of participants were unaware of the breakthroughs that happen every day and help extend life. The survey showed that only seven percent of people actually stated that they knew about these medical advances, 38 percent said that they had heard or read a little about them and 54 percent said they did not know anything about this subject before reading about it in the survey.

"We have all these choices that previous generations haven't had - like whether or not to pursue treatment, whether or not to pursue life-extending measures," Sociologist Karla Erickson from Grinnell College, who was not a part of the study, via Counsel and Heal. "They've witnessed others and they have a lot of ambivalence about whether it's worth it. The people I talked to were really comfortable saying 'I wish my friend had not done it.' Now they believe one should be judicious about what medical procedures to embrace, but they worry when they get to the end, [if] they will go down fighting and pursue every possible life extension."

Though most said they would not want treatments that would extend their life and slow down aging, 63 percent of the people surveyed said that medical advances do help extend life and are good. Thirty-two percent of those surveyed also said that these medical advances can be bad even if they extend life as they may interrupt the natural cycle of life.

Overall findings regarding the study show that Americans tend to be generally optimistic about life. What about you? Would you want to live to be 120 years old?

Click here for the report.