If you ask me my age, it is very likely that I will respond with a round number of the decade, not because it will happen that I am 40, 50, or 60 years old, but because it has been my habit to round up and so as of today I will indeed answer that I am 60 and maybe in a few years time I would reply that I am 70. I find this relaxing and also conducive to a positive outcome since at most hopefully people will say, “Wow, you look younger.” This method is also similar to how we don’t say the date of the month expressed in hours, and I find it a good way to think about longevity, which is what I want to discuss today.
Radical Human Longevity
Recently, I decided to dig a bit deeper and think about longevity in different ways, looking at the facets that this rather important concept for any of us can have. For example, I decided that rather than being at 60% of an ambitious 100-year lifespan, I want to think of myself as being at 6% of an astonishing 1000-year lifespan. The way to get accustomed to not only the results that we have already achieved, where during the 20th century, life expectancy at birth increased to what today is around 80 years, but to what is a harder objective, which is pushing the limits of how long it is possible to live beyond what is the currently assumed and observed 120 years.
It is, of course, worth noting that when I talk about longevity and radical longevity, I also support the type of achievement that allows us to be healthy at any future age in a body that is functional and that can perform the activities that we knew we would be able to do decades earlier. Also, I am looking at cures and approaches for extending the human lifespan and healthspan that can be very naturally expensive at the beginning but that rapidly become more and more accessible and available to everyone who wants them.
Exponential birthdays
Another mental trick that could work in a world where, year after year, fewer and fewer people die, is to celebrate in the progression of one’s life the first day, and then the first week, the first month, the first year, which is a little bit of what we do today, but then not the second year, rather the first decade, and then after the first decade, the first century. This is more aligned with an exponential mindset. There are those who congratulate me for another orbit around the Sun. Well, I am looking forward to my first orbit around the galaxy.
This is called the Cosmic Year, and it takes over 200 million years. So yeah, that is admittedly ambitious. Even though when people ask me, often sarcastically, after learning that I am a supporter of radical life extension and indefinite lifespans, how long I want to live, my immediate answer to them is a billion years. Let’s start with that, and then afterwards we can re-discuss.
OCSE declaration
For a long time in the fields of science and medicine, talk about life extension and radical human longevity was shunned. So I was very pleasantly surprised that the latest OCSE declaration, the Bucharest Declaration, included references to longevity. There are a surprisingly large number of people who still worship the alternative to a healthy old age, which is death, so any shift away from that mortal position is welcome. The first mention of longevity is unambiguous, but a bit misaligned.
“108. Underscoring the imperative for OSCE participating States to actively co-operate to better address the complex range of challenges stemming from demographic trends, through knowledge sharing and investments in longevity medicine”
Because if they want to support or reverse the current demographic trend of very low natality, well, longevity medicine is not going to impact fertility, reversing demographic trends. We need babies, too! 👶
The second mention is more actionable, but will be causing riots in the streets in Paris, at least:
“141. Calls on parliaments of OSCE participating States to promote welfare policies and public investments that are longevity-oriented by reforming public healthcare systems, fostering age-inclusive labour markets and businesses, achieving resilient pension systems, and prioritizing research, development and accessibility of longevity-enhancing technologies and treatments”
The reason being that the simplest way to interpret it by politicians and policymakers is going to be to raise the retirement age. 😜
Secondary effects of radical longevity
There will also be secondary effects to Radical Longevity, and I played around to list a few:.
- Your enemies never die
- “Till death do us part” is a lie, but for a different reason
- If your waistline grows 1% per year, how long does your home planet fit?
- A midlife crisis will outlast civilizations
- Forever young sounds great until you are carded for eternity
- Parsing the family tree needs a quantum computer
- The rich uncle may be real enough, but the inheritance will still never come
- Terraforming planets is your new hobby as a green thumb
- A perfectionist novel writer’s wet dream of endless procrastination
- Enthusiastically reinventing yourself becomes the gravest mortal threat
- Suicide and euthanasia become the ultimate expression of free will in an immortal world
My Mother’s Morbid Humor
My dog died a few years ago, and since she has a Facebook account, her birthday still comes up. So I noticed my mother, who is 85, writing on her Facebook wall, “Happy birthday, Bri. Wait for me. I am coming soon.” Which is certainly a morbid kind of humor. So when I confronted her, she very calmly responded. “Think about it. I have to get accustomed to the thought of dying. Imagine if I didn’t, and I died, how would that be? Completely unprepared.” So there you go. That’s an additional dose of my mother’s humor for you. Worthy of Woody Allen.
She’s in good health. According to Ray Kurzweil in his latest book, “The Singularity is Nearer” we can expect treatments with radical results already within the coming decade. So, could it be that she will have a chance to reach what my friend Aubrey de Grey calls “longevity escape velocity”? I certainly hope so!
Immortality is nonsensical
I remember when my children were young and they asked me about immortality. I told them that it was possible to think about an indefinite lifespan, but to talk about an infinite lifespan was useless in a closed universe and impossible in an open one. If you think about it, it doesn’t matter if it takes a billion years or a trillion years. In a closed universe, sooner or later, you also close the loop of your own actions and experiences and unavoidably start to repeat them. Endlessly, but meaninglessly. On the other hand, in an open universe, where you must adapt to an arbitrarily large degree to an ever-changing environment in order to preserve yourself and survive, sooner or later, there will be a point where you look back and having diverged from your original self to an arbitrarily large degree, you will be able to calmly observe, “Oh, yeah, David, I remember him. He’s dead.”
But I told my children that not only is the Hindu concept of reincarnation real, but they were not ambitious enough.Because what they teach you is that even if your actions in your previous life influence whether you become a worm or not, after you reincarnate, you cannot influence that further. And I told them that in my case, not only I experienced reincarnation, but I did it in a manner that is so much better than the Hindu concept, because after reincarnating, I was able, and still am, to positively influence my reincarnations. And it is you, and you, and you, as I pointed at them.
The Chain Continues
If you think about it, each of your cells dies for the first time after having lived uninterruptedly for 4 billion years. No wonder they are pissed. Only the sperm and the egg of biological reproduction extend this chain in a beautiful process. And in my case, I am thrilled and proud and exhilarated for the continuation of the chain as my eldest son Jacopo and his partner Sarah have two children, Emily and Christopher, and I am a grandfather.