- The History of Aging
- What We Know About Super Agers
- Longevity Research Is Still Young
- Lifestyle Secrets: Live Long and Prosper
- Centenarian Studies
- The Longevity Genes Project
- Strategies for a Longer Life
- Current Bodies of Research in Longevity
- Living Forever: The Research of Dr. Aubrey de Grey
- Cryonics: Freeze Me When I Die So I Can Live Forever
- Reports of Your Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
- Extendgame, Not the Endgame
Extendgame, Not the Endgame
Now you might get the sense that the avant garde thinking among the people we studied and spoke to for this chapter is that death is generally curable. And aging is not only stoppable but reversible. You’d be right.
However, the cynics out there don’t believe any of it. Some say it will be hundreds of years before any of this is feasible. Some even say it will never be possible and that Mother Nature will find a way to do in the oldest of us with some virus or other biological process that clears the way for future generations.
If you are onboard with the cynics, go book your casket this weekend and pick out your funeral flowers. If you’re not that cynical, here’s what there is to do: Stay alive for 15 more years. American life spans on average, as we said earlier, are just shy of 80 years. And that is increasing every year.
If you are a baby boomer or younger that should be relatively simple to do. Then by 2030, there should be technologies around to hyper-extend your life long enough for you to be around when nanomedicine and nano-engineering technologies are commercialized such that we can fix all this old person business and become young again.
We’ll give the last word here to Kurzweil, who said in his 2006 book The Singularity is Near, the following: “We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever. Existing knowledge can be aggressively applied to dramatically slow down aging processes so we can still be in vital health when the more radical life extending therapies from biotechnology and nanotechnology become available. But most baby boomers won’t make it because they are unaware of the accelerating aging process in their bodies and the opportunity to intervene.”