The Edge Annual Question and Thoughs on Engineered Longevity
This year's Edge annual question is:
What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?
With that lead-in, it's perhaps not surprising to see a range of thoughts on engineered longevity in amongst a range of less relevant but still interesting responses:
Live to 150: I expect to see this happen, because I'll be living longer. Maybe even to 150, about 30 more years than any human is known to have lived. I expect this because I've worked on it, seen the consequences of genomics when applied to the complex problem of our aging.
The biggest game-changer looming in your future, if not mine, is Life Prolongation. It works for mice and worms, and surely one of these days it'll work for the rest of us.
While medicine will advance in the next half century, we are not on a crash-course for achieving immortality by curing all disease. Bodies simply wear down with use. We are on a crash-course, however, with technologies that let us store unthinkable amounts of data and run gargantuan simulations. Therefore, well before we understand how brains work, we will find ourselves able to digitally copy the brain's structure and able to download the conscious mind into a computer.
Society will change when the poor and middle class have easy access to cryonic suspension of their cognitive remains - even if the future technology involved ultimately fails.Today we almost always either bury dead brains or burn them. Both disposal techniques result in irreversible loss of personhood information because both techniques either slowly or quickly destroy all the brain tissue that houses a person's unique neural-net circuitry. The result is a neural information apocalypse and all the denial and superstition that every culture has evolved to cope with it.
I have little doubt that progress in fighting disease and patching up our genetic weaknesses will make it possible for people to routinely reach the full human lifespan of about 120. Going far beyond that will require halting or reversing the core aging process, which involves not just genetic triggers but also oxidation and simple wear-and-tear. Engineering someone to have gills is probably a much easier proposition. Still, if we can hit 200 I see no reason why the same techniques couldn't allow people to live to 1,000 or more. Odds: 60 percent.
I can't say as I think any of these folk are exactly on the ball, even Benford, who clearly subscribes to the mainstream view of genetic and metabolic reprogramming to slow aging rather than the damage repair view of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. It is promising to see engineered longevity as a prominent topic, but it still looks like a lot of fumbling around in the dark is taking place. That shows that more work is needed on the part of advocates to direct interest and potential support onto the best paths forward.