Your Kids Might Live Forever
So get your head in the game.
“Your kids might live to be 300, or not die at all.”
Every parent I have said this to is shocked. Most don’t believe me, even though they probably want to. Not believing something even though you prefer it to be true is very unusual in modern society. Which means that this idea has not had its foundation laid properly, and people simply aren’t really ready for it.
Unfortunately, there isn’t time to slowly acclimate cultures to this fact. We need to start taking actions now in order to prepare our kids to rule the world (the Solar System?) almost permanently.
Is This Longevity Increase Really Going to Happen?
We don’t know for sure, but I would say that this is extremely likely. The following is a list of treatments and methods that are available today, along with their estimated life extension.
Caloric Restriction (4 years) - Reducing calories from 2000 per day down to 1400 per day isn’t fun, but it could increase lifespans by 5-20% in humans. The mechanism appears to be that your cells simply have less food to oxidize, and so oxidation stress and damage occur at a slower rate.
Resveratrol (3 years) - This plant extract appears to help keep small blood vessels more supple. Normally, stiffening of small blood vessels leads to clots getting jammed because the vessels cannot expand to let the clot pass. This doesn’t just happen with big clots. In our smallest blood vessels, capillaries, even having a traffic jam of two or three red blood cells at once can block off that capillary, effectively killing many of the downstream cells fed by it. This might be a significant cause of organ failure and brain problems like dementia, which occur with age. Resveratrol may stave this off some by keeping blood vessels, especially small ones, from becoming stiff.
Metformin (5 years) - In mice, metformin appears to lengthen their lifespans by 15-25%. Its mechanism appears to come from how it affects the way the body responds to glucose and spikes in glucose. This drug is currently approved for use in helping Type 2 diabetics deal with glucose in their system, and it appears to be relatively safe.
Rapamycin (4 years) - This anti-cancer drug lengthens mouse lives by 10-20% years. Its mechanism is not very clear, but might have to do with encouraging our bodies’ DNA repair mechanisms.
Keep in mind that these treatments don’t necessarily stack. Using caloric restriction likely gives you anti-oxidation benefits strongly related to what Metformin accomplishes. Also, most studies show the longevity effects in humans are generally less than those in mice. That said, it takes a long time to study human ageing, and a four year study is hardly a lifetime dose of anything.
Other treatments are also in the pipeline, including many senolytics (anti-ageing drugs) entering Phase 2 and 3 trials1, gene therapies related to CRISPR to repair DNA damage, immunotherapies to help dispose of older malfunctioning cells, immunotherapy to disperse disease-causing protein aggregates, and molecules meant to break down age-stiffened tissues. A little further up the pipe are therapies such as iNKTs that kill senescent cells.
And this is just a small selection. Here is a non-comprehensive list of anti-ageing drugs being studied, according to this paper:
None of these are 70-year-away sci-fi remedies. We aren’t talking about cloning bodies or mind transfer or nanobots swimming in your blood repairing your cells. Some of these technologies are 5 years away and being tested now. Many of them won’t work, or will have unacceptable side effects. But some of them will work.
For almost 200 years, we have been gaining 1 year of life expectancy every 4 years or so. And this all without today’s deeper genetic knowledge or much funding for research on ageing (click to expand the picture below).
Now we are seeing many new startups in anti-ageing research, and tens of billions of dollars of investment are queued to jumpstart this nascent2 industry. In my opinion, we are at a point in anti-ageing application research similar to where we were in semiconductor application research around 1970 — about to hit the bigtime.
Technology has increased lifespans fairly drastically in the last 200 years by improving water supplies, providing consistent food, and treating diseases such as infections and cancers. But now technology is tackling ageing itself3, a process that kills about 100,000 people every day. It is a different type of task with a very different outcome. Barring a new Dark Age where society falls apart (more on this later), life expectancies will begin to increase much more quickly.
What Will My Kids’ Lives Be Like?
Our children will likely be the first generation to widely experience Lifetime Escape Velocity. This term, coined by anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Gray, means that at some point in the future we will see something remarkable: The average life expectancy will increase more than 1 year per year. Meaning that if, in 2050, the average life expectancy is 95, then by 2051 the average life expectancy will be 96.5, an increase of 1.5 years in 1 year. Anyone that makes it to that point while young will have the option to live very, very long lives. Why? Because when they are 50 years old, that per-year increase will be even higher.
Our children, therefore, will not make plans for retirement. They will not rush through college, or just go through college once. They will not have one career, or two. Imagine how these humans will think about compound interest. $10,000 dollars invested at 8% interest would buy a neighborhood after 100 years, and be worth almost $50 billion after 200 years.
Imagine being able to make plans that span a century or two. What art could be created? What research program could be done4? What type of teacher or dancer or comedian or engineer could they become?
Imagine the business acumen of a 150 year old who is as mentally spry as a 45 year old. That person won’t make mistakes that a 30 year old would make. She would have not only the financial resources (due to compounding interest) to do what she deems best, but also the accumulated wisdom of several lifetimes. Imagine the salesmanship, the mastery of financial instruments, and the vision that can be brought to bear.
Our children’s children will find a world inhabited by demi-gods, residing in a cultural Olympus, impossible to dethrone. Their only chance at competitive success with the subsequent generation will be to outsmart them, either with gene-edited IQs or brains supplemented by neural-connected computers, or some other type of unimaginable trans-human gambit. I’m really just guessing about these crazy options our grandchildren will have. But unlike every other generation of humans up to this point, they will not have the luxury of the previous generation ageing out of the way. There is a severe chance of real stagnation5, resentment, and ugliness. That said, maybe our grandchildren will simply head to the stars and leave the Earth to our kids.
So What Does This Have To Do With Poor Old Me?
This set of very likely facts about our kids (I’m not too sure about our grandkids), means that we, their parents and grandparents and teachers and mentors, have one of the most important jobs in all of human history.
We have to train the First Immortals.
It cannot be underestimated how important this is: We must teach our kids how to think. This is why one out of every four articles on this blog is aimed at children, illustrated Logical Fallacy Parables (see the first two here and here.) In fact, let me be very open…one of the primary reasons I am doing this blog is to write down useful ways of thinking and understanding the world to share with my children when they are older. Because they need to be better than me — better than almost everyone that has come before. Their generation will hold the entire world in their hands in a way never true before.
We parents especially need to realize that if we raise our children to view politics or finances or theology or philosophy or empathy in the wrong way…if we don’t teach them how to think logically and charitably and holistically, we aren’t just messing up one generation. We are messing up the foundation of human culture perhaps for the next 1,000 years.
But it is not all warning. The other side of the token is bright and beautiful and astounding. Our children will be able to craft a world with wonders brought about by new forms of technology and even new forms of society (which is itself a technology). They will send probes to other stars. They will create food from stones. They will create music and art more complex and beautiful than the world has ever seen. Their church services, their medical procedures, their bridges, their spaceships, their poetry will be without compare. The full potential of the human spirit will spread its wings past the constricting straightjacket of age.
And they will remember us, the last dying generation, with fondness.
If we train them well.
See section 5 of this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047637421001639
Couldn’t resist.
Audbrey de Grey in his controversial and influential life extension program called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), seeks to enumerate all of the causes of aging along with proposed solutions for each. This is laid out in his book Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime.
You could have a career that actually extends from the planning to deployment of the next space telescope, which is already not planned to launch before 2042.
There is a morbid saying that science advances one funeral at a time. Or more formally, the famous German physicist Max Plank posited a, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Not only would science be held back, but the world of business and engineering could be stuck with experts whose wisdom no longer applies to the current world.