Do You Want to Live Forever? Soon, That May be an Option

Could “Escape Velocity” be a real thing?

“Who wants to live forever?

Who wants to live forever? Ooh

Who dares to love forever

Oh, when love must die?” – Queen, Who Wants to Live Forever

Myths about “eternal life” (or close to it) have been floating around for a long time.

There was Ponce De Leon and the Fountain of Youth, Vampires, the Norse Gods eating Golden Apples that kept them young, elves living for thousands of years, or even a modern movie like “In Time,” where the rich could essentially buy time that theoretically would let them live forever barring an accident, suicide or murder:

Well, today, we’ve moved on from myths, legends, and stories to real people declaring, like Dave Asprey, that he intends to live until 180:

We also can’t forget Bryan Johnson, who calls himself “the most measured man alive,” and spends millions of dollars per year measuring his health. Johnson is particularly interesting (or you may think weird) because he relentlessly tests how different things impact his health and does extreme things like eating the same food every day, having his “last meal” at 11 AM, measuring his nighttime erections, and going to bed at 8:30 PM every night:

Personally?

I pay a great deal of attention to the latest longevity research, not so much because I want to live forever, but because it’s important to me to have a HEALTHSPAN as long as possible. If I could live to 180 but had to spend the last 90 years in a lot of pain, barely able to move around or enjoy life, I wouldn’t consider that a good outcome. To me, it’s not about living forever; it’s about being healthy, strong, mobile, and able to do what you want to do all the way until whenever it is that you check out. In my book, that’s worth spending a lot of money, time, and effort on, while, at the moment, at least, trying to “live forever” is not.

What do I mean by that? I mean that there are a lot of things you can do to greatly improve your health, most of which, happily, are free. If you eat mostly healthy whole foods, aren’t overweight (I’m still working on this one), don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, don’t drink a lot of alcohol (maybe any), avoid chemical exposure, get 7-8 quality hours of sleep each night, add some muscle, work on your frame (mobility and stretching), and have yearly testing to see how you’re doing, it will go a long way toward keeping you far healthier than the vast majority of the population.

If you do all those things, you probably have a decent shot of hitting 90 if your genetics aren’t too bad, and there are roughly something like 100,000 Americans currently at 100 or over. Only hundreds of Americans have ever been verified to have hit 110, and one lone human being, Jeanne Calment, has been confirmed to have cracked 120.

Is there anything currently available to the public that seems likely to break that pattern and help us live much longer? You know: stem cells, GLP-1s, PCSK9 inhibitors, rapamycin, young plasma, therapeutic plasma exchange, or gene therapy?Unfortunately, there’s no real evidence yet that any of those things would get us over the hump and allow us to dramatically extend lifespans, although it seems entirely possible some of those things could extend the HEALTHSPAN of the general public, which is extremely important.

However, that brings us to a concept called “Escape Velocity” that people like Ray Kuzweil helped implant into the public consciousness.

The basic concept behind “Escape Velocity,” which seems orders of magnitude more plausible in the age of AI, is that we could get to a point where medical advances come so quickly that they extend our lives faster than we age. In other words, if you age five years, but medical advances extend human life for another 10 years during that same time period, your chances of dying have DECREASED even though you’re older.

So, what are the chances of that actually happening?

Well, if you’re trying to judge what’s going to happen in the future, the first place you should look at is the past. In this case, that may not be particularly encouraging.

After making some significant advances in lifespan with better sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, better treatment of cardiovascular problems, and improved medicines, Americans added 30 years to their lifespans between 1900 and 2000. On the other hand, from 1990 to the present, we’ve basically just been treading water with just a three-to-four-year jump in lifespan since then.

On the other hand, the future looks more promising than the immediate past for three reasons:

1) The first is that much more money has started to flow into the field thanks to billionaires getting interested in the problem.

2) AI is going to help tremendously with this problem as it advances because what it does so well is comb through extraordinary amounts of data and find connections that humans miss. It’s going to teach us a lot of things about how the body works that we’ve never understood before. When you hear people like Dave Asprey and Bryan Johnson talking about living much longer than currently normal lives, what both of them have said is that they believe that new information that comes to light via AI is going to make it possible. They may be right.

3) The third key thing is that there are already some very plausible strategies in the pipeline. Some of them revolve around fixing failing parts like better organ replacement, repairing DNA, and getting rid of senescent cells, but to me, the much more promising direction seems to be rejuvenating tissues.

On that front, epigenetic reprogramming is particularly exciting because they’ve already had success with mice. They’ve dramatically increased their lifespans and effectively made their eyes, heart, brain, skin, and muscle tissue YOUNGER. In other words, they have successfully REVERSED aging damage in mice.

Is that ready to go for humans? Nope, but could it be in, say, a decade or two? Absolutely.

Of course, as we all know, “could” and “will” are two very different things. Still, does it change how you approach life to know that “could” is a genuine possibility? That if you’re still around 10, 15, or 20 years from now, MAYBE you might be able to live a much longer, healthier life than anyone does today? Does it make you want to take better care of yourself? Does it make you want to save up more money to be able to potentially buy into these things? None of us know for sure what the future holds, but it’s good to know that this is a genuine possibility.

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