Live forever

If I told you that what I was about to tell you was the truth then I’d be lying, but you’d probably judge me anyway because that’s what we’re programmed to do. The thing about the truth is, it’s a matter of perception based on our interpretation of information and, the chances of that being identical to someone else’s are somewhat impossible…How do we even know if we’re experiencing the same reality…

In most cases I’m a realist, as much as I believe in unicorns and fairies and voodoo, I deal with most situations logically and see things as they are because I guess it makes sense, or at least I thought it did. What I began to realise was that anyone could make anything they wanted to make sense, especially with revolutionary technology changing our lives and the world that we live in.

The US military is using technology to create self steering bullets and laser cannons. Multinational technology companies like Meta(previously Facebook) and many other social platforms are ruining/changing the way we interact with others. VR/AR, 3D-printing, robotics or nanotechnology are transforming the health/medical field. And, of course evangelists of human immortality are achieving major breakthroughs in the hope that some time soon humans will be able to live forever with the help of, of course technology.

Humans have been trying to find a way to dodge death for years. Ancient Greek alchemists tried to create a philosopher’s stone that would let people live forever but humans have yet to beat death. In the last decade especially the previous few years there has been great progress being made in the field.

Labs all over the world are working to get to the bottom of longevity, unlocking the secrets to our lifespans well into our 100s and beyond. By definition immortality means living forever, as in — to infinity. Mathematically you can never get any closer to infinity than when you started. So let’s just give up on technicalities and start with where we’re at today. The global life expectancy is currently hovering somewhere around 72 years. It’s longer for women, shorter for men, higher in developed countries and lower in impoverished nations with poor sanitation, diets and access to healthcare. This all may seem like common sense so far but it’s actually pretty striking when you consider how quickly things have changed.

That’s the crowning achievement of modern civilisation: the fact that there are fewer people in the graveyard. Up until a couple of hundred years ago the life expectancy was about 30 in most populations. In around 1840 life expectancy was gradually on the rise and today life expectancy in Japan (the country doing best) for an average woman is 87. Thanks to accelerating medical, technological, and economic progress, experts think this trend will continue.

There are whales that live hundreds of years and are very similar to us genetically but we do need to either find genomes or find medicines and other ways to enhance our systems so that we have the same kind of lifespans as they do. To do that we’d have to stall or reverse the process of ageing called senescence.

Over time cells lose their ability to replicate and function properly. But the problem is we don’t really know the whole story of what drives senescence. What we do know is it might be slowed by intermittent fasting, and a healthy diet.

Australian biologist and author of New York Times best seller Lifespan, Dr David Sinclair and other scientists say the best remedy for disease, is to age less. In order to radically slow ageing, he says, researchers are zeroing in on its nine leading causes, among them the shortening of telomeres (the “caps” on the end of chromosomes), loss of energy that is made by mitochondria (the battery packs in the cell), loss of stem cells, and an accumulation of so-called senescent cells (nonfunctioning “zombie” cells that linger in the skin and other tissues).

Meanwhile other branches of medical research are tackling specific diseases or symptoms associated with age, and some exciting technologies are on the horizon. There’s been a lot of very promising work in regenerating body tissue. Another very promising area is genetic manipulation, individualised medicine, nanotechnologies might eventually let us put small mini robots into our body that would help us build bones or kill germs. Progress is being made in reducing heart disease death rates, stroke death rates, cancer death rates, there’s some progress being made against Alzheimer’s.

If we do unlock the secrets to eternal youth — what would our world look like?

To keep yourself amused for 200 years, you’d have to have multiple careers, you’d have to learn new things, you’d have great, great, great, great, great grandchildren — it would be a completely different life. If we extended people’s lives by a lot, what are we going to do with all these people? Will there be enough jobs? Will there be enough money for them?

If the world treats ageing, there will be people living in their eighties and nineties in a productive healthy way saving billions of dollars in the US easily and globally trillions. This is money which can be put back into medical research and education, into protecting the environment.

In addition to continually improving the basics — nutrition, sleep, social life, global access to healthcare, the key might just be perfecting the recipe for thee ultimate youth vitamin made of synthetic molecules that mimic your body’s natural age-defying functions and of course maybe throw in some bone-building nano-bots and gene makeovers in there for good measure.

Recently visionaries such as Sergey Young, Aubrey De Grey and Michael Hufford have been interviewed by Longevity Technology and given us a lot of new information about the state of research in the field of immortality. The catastrophic 2020 events have helped the government and investors realise the huge burden and price that old and sick people pose to the society compared to the young and healthy population. This likely changed their mind from previously thinking that longevity serves no monetary goal to them realising the huge lift in burden of the younger generation and the increase of productivity that these rejuvenated people would bring to society. This shift in view in longevity has greatly increased the funding that longevity researchers receive. The amount of investors and money flowing into the field is also set to increase exponentially as research results in clinical trials start showing more and more results.

According to Aubrey, we’re considerably closer to robust mouse rejuvenation than we were ten years ago. The way we’re improving the way we rejuvenate mice and eventually humans is also getting more and more clear as time goes on. Aubrey believes that stem cells are going to be an essential pillar of the portfolio of damage repair approaches that researchers pursue — there are currently already studies that are combing stem cell studies with senolytic drugs to kill ageing senescent cells to prolong a persons life.

Scientific researchers are now starting to become optimistic in terms of the time frame in which we could expect to reach the longevity escape velocity. In the life extension movement, longevity escape velocity (LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which life expectancy is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example — in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase life expectancy more than the year that just went by.

One way to extend life would be to use biotechnology and medicine to keep renewing the body and rejuvenating it. No one wants to live forever at 95 years old but if you could rejuvenate the body to 29 or 30 it might be a good enough option. This could be done in several ways including genetic engineering that prevents or reverses the ageing of cells, alternatively why not replace vital body organs with new parts? Many scientists around the world are working on creating human organs using 3D printers loaded with living cells which could one day make human organ donors redundant.

Regardless of all these new inventions or great looking prospects in the field of longevity not everything goes to plan. While investments and government support into research is growing, investors and the government aren’t always being rational or can shift priorities at any point they seem fit. In 2020 resources had to be shifted from one area of research to another when BioNTech had to move from cancer research to developing vaccines to supply the world with, but maybe it turned out to be a good thing due to the amount of money they made from developing them and are now focusing on it again.

Another question is whether society is even ready to deal with a huge percentage of our population never dying. Will it lead to over populated areas? How will we produce enough goods for all these people? Is there even enough space on this planet? It’s clear that now is the time for the government to look into how this will all be regulated and dealt with in a proper manner as most researchers believe that as early as 2035 it could already be too late.

Can we be immortal? Although there is no technology that exists today that will allow us to live forever. The longer we live the more technology is created. Already we see age reversal in some experiments so by the end of the century it may be commonplace to reverse most parts of ageing if not the entire thing.