In a long post at WorldChanging, the author opines on the implications of significantly extending the healthy human life span under a number of scenarios. Here's a paragraph made interesting in light of my recent comments on immortality and perceptions thereof:

[*I'm skirting around the otherwise obvious term "immortality" for a few reasons: I consider it inaccurate (an immortal would never die, while someone with a radically long life could still be crushed by a bus); it's mythical (that is, it's a term redolent with symbolism and non-rational implications for many people); and it's presumptuous (even if we figure out how to keep the body going indefinitely, there are still enough questions about how the mind works for me to be uncomfortable about the assumption that it could go on forever).]

For my money, I'd say that none of the offered scenarios for rejuvenative medical technology are quite what is likely to happen in the real world. The "holy fire" option is closest, though:

In this scenario, your older body is subject to a regimen of biotechnological and nanotechnological treatments that effectively "resets" you to the aforementioned healthy twentysomething body. After that, aging re-commences, and you would presumably need another aging reset half a century later.

Rejuvenation medicine of the next few decades will probably be a good deal more complex and ongoing - a mix of advanced diagnostics enabled by nanomedicine, regenerative medicine, personalized drugs, whole body gene therapies and similar treatments for other cellular mechanisms that change with age (such as telomere lengthening). It will no doubt be fairly expensive in the early years - all the more reason to start saving now.

One objection:

Extending the human lifespan by 30, 50, 100, 500 years (or more) doesn't have an immediate and noticeable result.

It does for me! Not being dead or crippled by age-related degeneration is a wonderful state to be in, and I will certainly notice having a great deal more of it. That is true wealth - time and health.

On a related note, it is good to see that Aubrey de Grey's ideas regarding "acturial escape velocity" have escaped and are doing well in the wild. These are important concepts for people to grasp - that each advance in healthy life extension technology and life span means that you stand a better chance of benefiting from the next advance in line ... and the next, and the next, and so forth. The path to the far future is paved by small advances in medicine.

It's very likely that we will be the ones who get to decide how a world of radically long lives turns out. If we manage to survive the next decade, it's a good bet we'll be seeing the latter half of the twenty-first century. If we make it to 2075 (or so), it's hard to imagine researchers not having figured by then out how to live much longer still, barring some sort of planetary disaster. Radical longevity will be ours to choose, if we want it.

Developing radical life extension technology - in effect engineering an end to aging - rapidly enough to help those alive now is far from a given. As a species we are capable of many things that we have not yet accomplished. Medical research must be actively supported, funded and encouraged if it is to happen; in that sense, the future of healthy life extension is in all of our hands.

Posted by Reason at October 13, 2004 12:27 AM | TrackBack (0)