Tomorrow is What We Make It
If you only had a day to live, would you live it differently from today? What if you had a century to live?
A lot of movies are made about people with a terminal illness, and how it changes their remaining days. In real life, some are devastated, and withdraw. Some are inspired and achieve great things. Steve Jobs got a cancer diagnosis and reinvented the telephone, producing a product that everyone on earth now either has or wants to have. Quite a legacy.
We assume we’ll spend 20 years in school, 40 years working, retire at 65, and die at 78. Our culture is organized around that schedule. Many people find it difficult to change that schedule. We mourn those who die earlier. “He had his whole life ahead of him!” But we don’t give much thought to altering our expectations at the other end — living longer than expected. We need to confront that prospect. Much longer lifespans are close at hand.
I read Lifespan by David Sinclair (2019) a couple years ago, and decided that if someone is going to live forever, why not me? Sinclair runs a lab at Harvard University and explores a lot of technologies that are proving successful in lower life forms. Of course, we’re a little different than mice, but we have a lot of similarities at the genetic levels. The advantage of testing on mice is their expected lifespans are a couple of years, so success can be measured fairly quickly. His book is an excellent introduction to the biology of life, and the exploration of ways to extend it. He believes we’re on the verge of dramatic improvements that will greatly increase human lifespans.
For a more strategic view, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime by Aubrey de Grey (2007) describes plans to engineer solutions to reverse aging. He believes we'll solve aging within a few decades.
Solutions require a more tactical approach, a business approach, to design and execute projects needed to extend lifespans. The Science And Technology of Growing Young by Sergey Young (2021) takes it out of the labs and into the board rooms. Those who are interested in learning about why our future is much different than most people expect should begin here. It’s a brief but comprehensive overview of the technologies that will make us essentially immortal, and the short path to get there.
Young is an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist who raises enormous sums to start new companies. He’s applying that to aging. He says success in his business endeavors requires an effective “BS meter” which tells him this is a viable business. He has invested $100 million in a Longevity Vision Fund to support new breakthroughs in “artificial intelligence, organ regeneration, genetic editing, pharmaceutical drug discovery, precision medicine, personal diagnostics and other fields that are central to the mission of living longer and healthier than ever before.”
As the early astronauts said, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” They made it to the moon, and beyond. Sergey has the bucks, and is shooting for a new moon shot.
His business plan has two phases, which he calls the near horizon, which gets us to life expectancy of 150 years, and a far horizon, which will get us to 200 years or more. We can’t know for sure what path that will take, but we can take a lesson from history that innovation has always been faster than expected, and it is always accelerating. The more we know, the faster we improve.
Remarkably, many people resist the idea of longer lifetimes. Some envision extending their old age, not their youth. They imagine a longer period of decrepitude, of debilitating illnesses, of uselessness and dependence on others. Those who arrive at that state won’t have long to go in the future, just as they don’t now. The goal, and the reasonable expectation, is extended “healthspan,” not just lifespans.
Young discusses three factors that discourage many from even considering life extension. He presents them as myths.
Myth 1: Living more means living less. We assume that old age is debilitating, and life extension adds to the declining years, not the productive ones. But expanding lifespans requires defeating the ailments of old age, not adding to them. The objective of longer healthspan is achievable.
Myth 2: Longevity is dangerous and selfish. We assume that longer lives will expand the population, increasing the strain on resources and increasing misery for those who can’t afford the increasingly scarce resources. This assumes people will continue producing children as if we were still enduring high infant mortality and need large families to produce enough income to survive. But family size is already declining, and will continue. We steadily learn to use resources more efficiently. And having shorter life expectancies naturally makes us less interested in the future — we’ll become more careful when we realize we’ll have to live with the results of our actions for a long time.
Myth 3: Life extension is not really possible. The record for human life is over 120 years. If they can, why not all of us? Our history is full of unexpected innovations. We already live in a world recently believed to be impossible
Ray Kurzweil is a “futurist” currently employed at Google. His prior predictions included Garry Kasparov being beaten at chess by a computer, self-driving cars, remote learning, cloud computing, smart watches, augmented reality, nano devices, robotic exoskeleton and hundreds of others. He predicts longevity “escape velocity,” where we can expect another year every year, in “ten or twelve years.” He’s probably not always right, but he definitely has insights few others have. Maybe he’s actually from the future.
Breakthroughs are already accumulating in key technologies. Gene editing is curing previously incurable diseases like sickle cell and some cancers. We’ve had successes in organ repair and replacement. Advanced prosthetics resolve handicaps. Diagnostics on our wrist or fingers provide health insights that previously required well equipped medical centers. And the greatest seismic shift is computation. Already, medical knowledge exceeds the capabilities of any human to master. Artificial Intelligence assistants are emerging to assist practitioners and researchers in understanding what they need to know, and will very soon replace those specialists for many routine functions. This will extend medical care currently only available in centralized, and very expensive, medical centers, to remote and impoverished regions, making early detection and therapy widely available.
Growing Young has a list to guide us to improve our odds of reaching longevity “escape velocity,” and being around to reap the benefits of the technologies that will help us exceed all common expectations.
Check yourself. Keep tabs on your blood count, metabolic blood chemistry, thyroid,nutrients, and STDs. Prostate and breast exams. Find a good doctor and develop a relationship.
Quit bad habits. Tobacco, alcohol, and sugar. “High consumption levels of carbs don’t just make you fat and prone to insulin resistance — they can even be detrimental to brain health.”
Don’t do dumb things. Many people die unintentionally. Some people enjoy dangerous activities. Many of them won’t see the future.
Eat early, and less often. Calorie restriction is a proven way to extend lifespans. In prosperous societies, gluttony is a sign of success. We don’t need to get fancy. Just eat less. One article in this series discussed fasting. Time restricted eating, where we limit our meals (and snacks) to a 6 or 8 hour period has a lot of benefits, including extending life expectancy.
Eat a healthy diet. Hippocrates said “Let your food be your medicine.” Poor diet is the number one cause of noncommunicable disease worldwide, killing at least eleven million annually. We don’t get much help from the medical industry, but more than we can use from self help authors. I’ve discussed several here who have helped me.
Supplements. Make sure you’re getting enough nutrients, especially vitamins B, D, and K, selenium, magnesium, potassium, quinine, iodine and carotenoid.
Exercise. Traditional hunter gatherer tribes like the Hadzabe of Tanzania have insignificant cardiovascular disease, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. We don’t need to walk to catch game or climb trees to get honey, but regular exercise can equal their efforts. You probably don’t get enough. Get a fitness tracker watch. You’ll be surprised. A 2017 study linked a twofold risk of early death to regularly sitting for more than thirty minutes — even among those who exercise.
Sleep well. One hour less sleep on a single day can increase your chance of heart attack by 24 percent.
Meditate. Stress is a killer. Stress increases the level of fight-or-flight stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which increase heart rate, dilate pupils, suppress pain and immune systems, increase blood pressure and pour glucose and destructive insulin into your blood. Meditation counteracts the age-accelerating effects of stress by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing blood pressure, slowing breathing and heart rate, and exerting control over emotional and physical responses to stress.
Think young, grow young. Elvis sang “I’m so lonely I could die.” And he died. The peanut butter and banana sandwiches might have been a factor, but studies show loneliness increases risk of premature death by 50 percent. Humans evolved as tribal creatures, and our health depends on active social life. Stay active, be kind, and work on being happy.
Lifespan researchers consider aging to be a disease, like any other. A problem to be solved. It is not inevitable. Chronological age is objectively distinguishable from biological age. Many people are already older than their years, and some are younger. These differences can be measured. And anything that can be measured can be managed. We’re learning to manage our age.
Those who need incentives to improve their health should read Sergey Young's book. He has insight and a plan that will completely change our outlook on life. The changes will occur whether we’re ready or not. Some won’t be prepared, and will miss out on those benefits.
The first step in gaining these benefits to improve our own longevity is to remain healthy until they're ready. My own health was declining right on schedule. I told my doctors I expected them to keep me going 30 more years, by which time I expect technologies to give me 50 more years. They smiled benignly and sold me more pills and procedures as I continued to decline. The other articles in this series chronicle my efforts to survive longer. Maybe I’ll do it well enough to see the benefits of Young's Longevity Revolution. If not, maybe I can help others. Drinks are on me when we meet in 50 years to toast our success.
Manage your health. Live long enough to confront the future, and gain the benefits the future will offer. The future will be here sooner than we expect.
Some people who are alive today will live forever. Why not us?