On the Inevitability of Radical Life Extension

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Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

The choice of living a healthy, youthful life of centuries and more is inevitable - it will come to pass. That much is obvious, written in the present breadth of human civilization, knowledge of what is possible under the laws of physics, and pace of progress in biotechnology. Replacement biological organs are a decade away, and commercial efforts to develop sophisticated repairs to age-damaged cells and vital biomechanisms will be rife in the 2020s. Computational power will be so great and so cheap that tens of thousands and then millions of research programs will be accomplished in simulation for a tiny fraction of their cost today; the priesthood of bioscience will dissolve and progress will be as diverse, energetic and imaginative as it is for open source software today. Redesigning human biochemistry and (greatly) augmenting our biology with nanomachinery will be hot areas for venture funding in the 2030s and 2040s.

"All" we need to do is to repair ourselves. The new bio- and nanotechnologies of the 2040s will be massive overkill for the "simple" task of repairing the damage of aging. The only thing stopping us from being able to do the job with the projected technologies of 2020 is that (a) we haven't yet proven our vision for success is accurate in its details, (b) support for the task at hand has yet to rise to the levels needed for success on a short timeframe.

The technology to enable youthful life spans of centuries is inevitable in the fullness of time - as the cost of developing an application of medical technology falls, the level of support required to complete the task falls with it. Sooner or later, a determined group will gather to get the job done.

So, to the point: the technology base required for the repair of aging is inevitable in the next few decades. Its application to this end, however, is not. That means that radical life extension is not inevitable for you and I; we're going to have to work on making it happen.

As is usually the case, achieving great goals across mere decades is far more a matter of persuasion than endeavor. The path is very clear and very plausible - if we can just convince a great many people to see things the same way and help out.

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