It’s like something out of a science fiction novel (Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback, for example). A team of researchers is working on a human longevity project with the goal of being able to reverse aging in humans by the year 2029.
If this is true — and I have no reason to believe that it is not — and these scientists succeed, the implications are mind-blowing.
First, the project:
After nine years of research and collaboration, a group of entrepreneurs and scientists [...] are disclosing their plan “to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029.” A Longevity Summit in November 2009 [...] brought together a number of researchers on human aging and longevity for a discussion on the state-of-the-art research, the implications of their discoveries, and round table, cross-disciplinary discussions that may lead to new and accelerated results.
It seems straightforward. Stop and reverse aging in humans. As sci-fi as it seems, it would be easy to pooh-pooh the idea and chalk it up to wishful thinking. But it seems that some are taking the potential seriously.
It’s serious enough that members of the Obama Administration consider it to be one of the major global destabilizing forces of the next 25 years.
I guess so! What about food shortages? Over-population? Disease? Without meaning to sound callous, people aren’t dying fast enough to keep the planet healthy as it is. When we stop an additional 100,000 people from dying every day, we’re talking about some explosive population growth.
On the other hand, I’d like to think that maybe two good things could come out of an extended human life:
1. If we knew we’d be around to see the outcomes of our actions, perhaps we’d take better care of our planet. Maybe we’d recycle more, be more conservative in our water use, take more care with the kinds of products we use — that sort of thing.
2. Space exploration! Now we that have people that can live a long time, maybe we can start shipping them out into the farthest reaches of space and get a real start on colonizing space.
If the potential for radically extending the human life exists, there needs to be some serious discussion from the earliest days of what to do with all the extra people…
T. Keith Edmunds
5 Responses to “2029 – the year we stop aging”
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A third thing — scientific endeavour. The first quarter-century of your life is spent just getting up to speed. Imagine if Einstein was still around. Or Newton.
A caveat to that third thing, though — most social progress only happens because the “old guard” dies and younger, more innovative people take their place. If people didn’t die, I’m relatively certain we’d still have slavery.
Wealth transfer, too — imagine if no one retires, so you can never move up the workplace ladder. Older people, just by the virtue of compound interest, will always be richer than younger people.
Adding on, however, to your theme of space exploration — you’d almost have to, just from the population explosion. Which would be awesome.
A fourth thing? It would allow we males to perfect our nascent ability to not hear what our better halves are saying!
Not sure if a person’s brain is ever going to be designed to last as long as (maybe) we can engineer bodies to. We barely know a fraction of how our minds work — if someone is senile past their 120th or 150th birthday, it won’t be much of a life or many accomplishments.
Not to mention the legal and ethical dilemmas getting someone declared incompetent in that scenario.
Also — how many will clock out via suicide?
Suicide’s an interesting question. The unspoken assumption in all these blue-sky scenarios is that quality of life is awesome. But what if you could live forever — but were somehow crippled? I’ll argue that you might want to stick around, not “clock out” just because, eventually, perhaps they’ll be able to cure you. But for some people, maybe living for 500 years with a greatly diminished quality of life would be too much.
Re: the brain — Although we don’t know very much, really, about how it all fits together, we do know an awful lot about the physical processes of how each cell and neuron works and how individual synapses fit together. And, really, that’s all we need to figure out how to fix for longevity*. The one thing that really intrigues me is wondering whether or not we have a “file size limit” in our brains. Can humans, say, hold 1,000 years’ worth of memories?
I also suspect that we’ll make huge progress in the next 20-30 years on integrating computer/silicon facilities into our gray matter, which might make this argument even more interesting.
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* It should be pretty similar for brain cells as for body cells.
There’s the psychological aspect, meant to mention that as well as the senility/decrepitude angle to the notion of our brains lasting 500 or 1000 years. We may go psychotic or just come plain old unhinged after a time…we just don’t know.
Let’s face it – living that long is only appealing if you’re the only one doing it! (or there are very few people doing so) If EVERYONE is crowding you out for that long, the notion suddenly becomes pretty awful. It makes me think of those old experiments where rats crowded too close together go nuts and destroy each other.