One of the weirdest things about radical Life Extension technology is that your great-grandparents
might phone you up to ask you to babysit your granduncle for the evening.
So today's topic is Life Extension.
We've looked at this in passing before but never actually dug into the details of the
technological hurdles to achieving it or what it might mean for civilization.
Partially because we don't even have a universally agreed upon definition of aging yet, let alone
a consensus view on what causes it.
It's difficult to discuss strategies for slowing or eliminating aging when we aren't
even sure who we are targeting for that battle.
There are dozens of different theories on what causes aging, but the simple reality
is that we do not know yet.
You are probably familiar with what is called the Wear and Tear Theory, which was developed
over a century ago and is very simple and easy to understand.
Basically the notion that the body wears out and that damage to it can accelerate that
process.
It's remained sort of the default view of aging for the public but has been in disfavor
for a long while now.
As our understanding of cellular biology and DNA improved we began realizing just how amazing
they were at self-repair.
Lots of theories have arisen as successors, but the only one to really gain much notice
with the public is the Free Radical Theory of Aging, particularly the subcategory known
as Mitochrodrial Free Radical Theory of Aging.
Free Radicals, mostly superoxides, cause a lot of damage to the body and are considered
quite toxic to biological organisms, we even use them in our immune system, but they are
also produced by various life-essential processes.
Mitochondria, the power plants of our cells, produce them and take damage from them.
And since Mitochrondrial DNA is not so well protected from damage as our own DNA, tucked
away safely in the nucleus of the cell, they can take DNA damage from those free radicals.
They often produce more free radicals when they take damage too, so it becomes a bit
of a feedback loop, and the theory says that this is what causes aging, complete with the
final decline we often see near the end.
A large part of the reason anti-oxidants have become a common health supplement is because
they are thought to mitigate much of this free radical damage, which again is mostly
superoxides.
This is one of the better theories for Aging but not without its criticisms.
It's a handy one for demonstration of longevity though, since if it were true you could send
something in that could detect those mitochondria that were overproducing free radicals and
kill them, letting the healthy ones multiply and replenish themselves.
Just like that your lifespan would be massively increased, not by a small increment of a few
years but potentially centuries.
This is the big thing about radical life extension.
It is not necessarily an incremental approach where the average lifespan increases by a
couple years every decade, as we see now as product of many factors decreasing early deaths.
Nor is it necessarily a slow incremental push to maximum lifespan, often given as about
120 years of age.
It can, and indeed probably will be, something where almost overnight the human lifespan
suddenly leaps to be 3 or 400 years.
This is arguably effective immortality since if it did that we would have centuries to
improve on that before anyone else died, and we would probably have little difficulty funding
it and would benefit from centuries of additional science, much of it conducted by folks who
have been personally researching it for centuries themselves.
It's a little hard to contemplate the sort of expertise someone might have if they've
spent a few centuries studying a topic.
Now a couple things.
First, average lifespan is not increasing because we've slowed aging.
Most if not all of that increase in average lifespan is us getting better at preventing
early deaths.
This is not just medical.
Technology in general has massively decreased the number of early deaths, and something
as simple as airbag technology, or a law requiring seatbelts, can instantly add to average lifespan.
That is another aspect of today's topic too, even if you can end aging entirely, what
is often called biological immortality, this doesn't mean people don't die.
Accidents, homicides, and suicides would still tend to bring the Grim Reaper by to collect
people.
To use a rounded figure, if we assume about 300,000 deaths a year in the US from causes
unrelated to age in anyway, like crashing a car or being shot or shooting yourself,
out of population of 300 million, that would mean you had about a .1% chance to die every
year.
Making the median age of death about 700 and the average about 1000.
About 10% would die before they lived a century and about 10% would survive to age 2300.
About .6% would make it to age 5000 and about one in every 20,000 people would make it to
age 10,000.
Assuming everybody had that .1% chance to die each year.
That's probably high in some ways since we'd expect technology to prevent death
from trauma to improve and for us to get better at detecting and treating the mental health
issues that drive some folks to homicide or suicide or reckless behavior.
Regardless though it isn't true immortality.
That of course isn't even on the table in this Universe.
Entropy eventually wins and there's no available energy left to keep life going, even the sort
of ridiculously efficient and long lived life we discussed in Civilizations at the End of
Time.
Only an infinite Universe offers immortality, and amusingly guarantees it too.
Over a long enough period of time anything that can happen will happen, including your
death, so that on first inspection even an infinite Universe shouldn't offer immortality,
but resurrection, even in the form of someone born trillions of years later who was a copy
of you down to every cell and memory, would also occur.
An infinite Universe, in either space or time or both, is essentially a repeating circle.
Go far enough ahead and you will find a total reset, same as if you shuffle a deck of cards
enough times it will return to its original state, and if you travel far enough in one
direction you will eventually encounter some place identical to the home you left.
Such things are a topic for another time but serve as reminder today that we are not discussing
actual immortality, though you will hear me use the term when discussing this topic.
I don't always mean biological immortality either, since extending one's life by uploading
it to a computer or copying it to a new body if the old one is destroyed would seem to
still count, even if one can argue that those are simply copies, not the original you.
No, today we are focused on simply either ending aging or delaying it massively.
Extending the human lifespan for centuries, and doing it in healthy youthful bodies, not
cyborgs or withered husks.
We do not yet have a concrete theory for aging so we can't discuss those individual technologies,
though I will link the SENS Research Foundation's webpage in the video description and they
do explain their own theories and efforts quite well in many animations, videos, talks,
and papers.
I am a fan of that effort so for neutrality's sake I should note that they can be a bit
controversial in some circles.
Yet we can still contemplate the idea as quite likely, because even if we do not find a nice-easy
fix, relatively speaking, we always have the ultimate fall back of nano-machines.
As we discussed in the self-replicating machines episode, it should be possible to make tiny
little machines we could use to repair things all the way down to the molecular or atomic
level.
This is not an ideal fix, flooding the body with trillions of tiny machines, but it would
get the job done.
A human cell, or any cell, can best be thought of as a city unto itself, full of lots of
neighborhoods and individual factories, ports, and so on.
As an analogy to this, an easy fix like being able to kill off damaged Mitochondria is treating
the root problem, it is fixing whatever makes your roads and bridges break down faster than
they should, like salt or ice damage, maybe a spray coating that prevents such damage,
cheap and easy.
The nano-machine flood approach is like having a virtually inexhaustible pile of money that
lets you hire huge numbers of construction workers paid overtime to work at nights repairing
those roads so they don't disrupt day time traffic.
This can be a brute force technique where they treat the symptoms, though preferably
it would be more sophisticated and elegant, treating the underlying causes, but it's
our fallback if we can't master aging through other means.
It is also entirely possible we might get those before we get true mastery of biology
too, that sort of nanotech is the kind of thing that could be invented any time between
tomorrow and a couple centuries from now.
This isn't an episode on that though, and you can watch the one on Self-Replicating
machines for more details on that topic.
We also discussed the more biological machinery approach in the Bioforming and Genetailoring
episode and the cyborg approach in the Transhumanism episode, if you want to learn more about those
options.
So extending our lifespans does seem on the table for the not-too-distant future.
I personally think it is pretty likely to happen in our lifetimes, possibly even in
the next decade or two though I won't hold my breath on that.
So what would that be like?
How would that alter our civilization?
I have found it is often easier to discuss these topics if we just pick one of the probable
scenarios and go with that, so I present this scenario.
Tomorrow someone comes by and says they've discovered a pill that taken once a year simply
eliminates aging, and even slowly reverses it in those already old.
It has worked on every animal he has tested it on and everything is working so smoothly
and as predicted that he cannot stand the idea of waiting for clinical trials.
From his perspective every year he waits for those would see tens of millions of people
die who he could have prevented.
The technology is also very easy, not something you could whip up in your kitchen but something
almost any scientist or engineer would feel comfortable doing even in a lab they rigged
up in their garage for a few thousand bucks, and they could churn out pills by the hundreds
each day.
So he releases detailed plans for how to make the stuff, no patent, the risk is on you,
use at your own peril.
He advises starting with the elderly, they need it soonest and there are no guarantees,
he's also a well-respected scientist and he releases everything and his peers say 'everything
looks right but obviously we need to conduct trials'.
The recipe is everywhere though and by months end Youtube is flooded with videos of people
doing a DIY walkthrough of making the stuff and people are trying it at home and already
noticing positive effects.
At this point it's a firestorm on the news and people are demanding action.
Nobody is quite sure what that action should be just yet but by God they want some.
So congress, or whatever parliamentary body or oligarchy or president for life runs your
home nation decides it needs a blue ribbon committee to figure out what to do, and you've
been tapped to sit on that committee, look at the problem and make recommendations.
What do you do?
What are the problems society is now facing and what is urgent?
First thing I would probably do is recommend various scientific institutions release more
detailed and proper methods of manufacture, because odds are a lot of the DIY processes
are going to include big mistakes that might kill people.
Garage laboratories not being the height of safety, efficiency, or sophistication.
The second thing I'd do is probably to tell pharmaceutical companies they could make the
stuff and be exempt from any lawsuits except those coming from screwing up the product.
You're not covered if the pills are full of mercury but you are if the process turns
out to make people into zombies.
The immortality drug leads to zombie apocalypse seems a pretty popular one in fiction, I remember
a failed TV show pilot from the mid-90's called Island City that did that one.
We see lots of examples in fiction of how immortality always seems to have some horrible
pitfall.
For our example we will contemplate damaging effects it might have on civilization but
bypass any options like it draining away your humanity or making you psychotic or someone
having a monopoly on it and using that to coerce obedience or charging an arm and a
leg for it.
None of those have much to do with living longer so do not interest us today.
And of course people are appearing in front of your committee raising those concerns,
but they are also pointing out some other problems we can't so easily dismiss.
As well as benefits too.
One person comes in and says that now that people aren't dying we are going to be flooded
in overpopulation and die off of starvation in a couple years.
But we look at the global birth rate and see that it isn't the case at all.
At the moment 131 Million people are born each year and 55 million die each year, a
net increase of 76 million, if we assumed no one died that would mean 131 Million added
each year, but we are assuming a .1% death rate from other stuff so it would be 7 million
less, or 124 million.
Either way it would take another 8 years to add a billion people, instead of 13 years.
Obviously a concern but not an urgent one.
Also, as Aubrey de Grey once pointed out, while fertility rises with immortality it
doesn't imply a population boom.
Men can have kids indefinitely, though age lowers fertility, but it would also be expected
to delay menopause in women too.
However while both of those would seem to imply a huge boom in childbirths, it is worth
remembering that people tend to have children later and later these days and what often
pushes folks to have them is wanting to make sure they can do so before health problems
become a concern or they are too old to take care of their kids.
An awful lot of folks, suddenly given the ability to have kids much later in life, will
go for that option.
And we would not expect a lot of seniors, even restored to the appearance and vigor
of their mid-twenties, to suddenly decide they need to have a new set of kids.
Some certainly will, especially if the reproductive equipment is restored enough that women already
past menopause could have an embryo implanted safely, but I don't think most would rush
to do that when they already have grandkids.
So the overpopulation concern would seem minimal, at least for the short term, nothing to worry
about for the near future any more than it already is.
Those of you have seen the episodes on Arcologies and Ecumenopolises, let alone the bigger megastructures
we have discussed, are already familiar with some of the approaches on the table for dealing
with that.
Pensions and Social Security are obviously a big issue too.
Now in a way that is simple enough, you just tell everyone those are done, if you have
youthful vigor restored you are un-retired.
However there is going to be a lot of complaint about that and not without some legitimacy.
If you just turned 65 and had your retirement party you are going to feel screwed over after
paying huge amounts into various retirement packages and taxes if you get nothing out
of it, plus someone who is 80 years old, even restored to youthful vigor, is not too likely
to be able to just jump back into the workforce with ease.
So you are probably going to need to maintain those for a period of time and institute some
options for getting people ready to rejoin the workforce and preferably not way back
at square one.
The folks back at square one, just emerging from school to enter the workplace, are also
a problem now because there is going to be a big issue with upward mobility.
People will obviously still leave jobs, but they're no longer retiring.
You are not going to get the management slot when Sally retires in two years, you are not
inheriting Dad's business, at least not for several centuries.
You're not inheriting his house either.
When he does die odds are good he will have several thousand descendants kicking around.
You also now have a de facto gerontocracy.
That's a pretty common state of affairs of course, we value experience and the older
you get, the more influence and power you tend to acquire too, and the retention of
youthful vigor helps.
I once floated the notion that you might have senators who had been in office for centuries,
but imagine athletes who kept getting better every year, gaining experience and skill while
not losing their physical edge.
Imagine if your local sports team had the same quarterback or goalie for a century?
He's be awesome at his job, getting better every year.
Imagine if the team stayed the same for a century?
How amazingly well coordinated are they likely to be?
How good is a band or symphony that's been doing concerts together for 200 years?
That of course has downsides too, your athletic scholarships would tend to dry up a bit when
there is low turnover and no advantage to recruiting from the young, when you've got
tons of folks who did it as a weekend hobby for decades and are still in perfect shape.
You'd probably get a resistance to change too, though you would still expect innovation
from younger folks trying to make a name for themselves or thinking outside the box.
It is a potential problem for long-lived societies though, and one reason why expansion growth
off Earth would be handy.
This fortunately is also not an immediate concern.
We do have some good news too, we would expect a bit of an economic boom.
Currently in most developed nations we essentially spend the first quarter of our life growing
up and the last quarter being retired, and we mostly do our producing in the two middle
quarters.
That's suddenly changed, with a median lifespan of 700 years you only spend the first 3% of
your life as a child and none of it as a retired senior.
This seriously decreases the economic burden connected to that, and it also means you don't
particularly need a full time job anymore.
Unless you plan to have kids perpetually and frequently, or are saving up for retirement
anyway, to live off your interest and dividends, you wouldn't need as high an income, probably
taxes would go down too.
Technology itself ought to keep increasing the production per hour of work, and combined
with a long lifespan it should tend to make the work day shorter.
Easier to justify too since you can sell the notion of working less as giving the new and
younger generations some place to go.
If you weren't a particularly work-centric person or planning for eternal retirement
off interest or having kids constantly, your buying habits are going to be shifting too.
You are now interested in a house that doesn't need tons of repairs after 20 or 30 years,
for instance.
You are going to be thinking about trying to find a job you enjoy even if it doesn't
pay as well because you have a long, long time to work there.
Maybe you are going to be thinking about learning a lot of skills you haven't had time for
before, like fixing your own roof so that when you do get the mortgage paid off you
don't need to take out another for repairs.
It's kind of mind-boggling to contemplate the degree of expertise someone can acquire
working in a field for centuries, but also to consider the sheer amount of different
skills folks might acquire who had a jack-of-all-trades approach to life.
I tend to expect that to be pretty visible to other people too.
Everybody in a room would look about the same age, as we assess these things now, but I'd
imagine people would start picking up on telltale signs someone was 30 or 300.
Mannerisms, style of dress, or maybe just an air of confidence you'd expect from someone
who has a few hundred years of experience under their belt.
I could imagine people complaining that nobody takes you seriously till you're over a hundred.
I could also imagine social taboos about people asking or saying their age.
You could get some pretty extreme May-December romances too, though I think for context it
would be kind of like going on a date and ordering a Sam Adams to drink and your date
saying "I always liked him, he was my daughter's prom date."
It might be kind of hard to relate to someone whose idea of going to the theater did not
mean seeing a movie and when she says she saw Shakespeare one time, she is being literal.
Neither of those, the upward mobility problem or the extreme age gap problem, is an immediate
concern for our hypothetical committee either.
People might live to be a thousand but you'd only have a handful of people over a hundred
when that committee was convened, and no one sitting on it is ever going to have a huge
problem with that themselves.
You'd presumably have a lot of people coming before the committee about the ethics of immortality
but I honestly don't see that gaining much traction.
We have had tons of products that extend life in some fashion, or claim to, and I don't
recall any of them being picketed.
Nobody goes around saying you shouldn't take antioxidants even though that is convincingly
marketed as an anti-aging supplement, how well it works is debatable of course.
I don't see it from religious groups either, beyond many of them already having as part
of their tradition some period of time when people lived a lot longer, like Methuselah,
I've never had anyone tell me it was wrong on religious grounds.
From my own anecdotal observations, asking friends who are clergy members for instance,
they seem to view it with a shrug.
Everyone will still die, true immortality is not something science can offer and 10
years or 10 billion is nothing compared to Eternity.
I'm sure you'd see some objecting but I suspect this would mostly just take the
form of them choosing not to take the longevity pill themselves.
I can also imagine a lot of children arguing with their elderly parents to take the bloody
things and a lot of folks refusing.
Which is obviously their right, and you are going to die eventually even if you take them.
But I deplore when people use the argument that they'd get bored with life.
I never get the boredom objection to longevity, partially of course because your brain does
get filled up, you do overwrite memories especially those you don't consider important or important
anymore.
I can't remember my address from 1990, though amusingly I remember my phone number from
then.
I might be biased on that one too, I've never been bored with life.
I've been bored in that sitting in a waiting room kind of way, and I've changed primary
life goals for something I decided was better a few times, but I can't recall ever disliking
let alone getting bored with existence.
We've discussed that notion before and as I said at the time, if you got bored with
existence you can always opt to end it, don't take the pills anymore or pick up a dangerous
hobby, as I recall I suggested hunting lions with a nerf bat.
I don't particularly approve of big game hunting or harassing wildlife, but I would
have to give props to anyone pulled that off or survived bare-knuckle boxing with an actual
bear.
And while you are pestering those critters, they are at least compensated by getting a
free meal out of it.
I've given life extension a lot of thought over the years, it's always seemed like
an actual option on the table I might live to see, too much scifi growing up perhaps,
but my own motto is 'live forever or die trying' and I basically put it at coin flip
odds that I might get to live for centuries.
I've never worried about the morality of that or getting bored or inhuman from it.
I could see wanting to make majors changes to my life every so often, change jobs, change
hobbies, move around, that sort of thing.
I could also see semi-retiring occasionally, like working for a decade at something then
just taking a year off to see the sights.
Personally I like the idea of being able to read volume #100 of a book series or owning
a home I've lived in for a few hundred years.
Though that author might get bored writing it, or you might get bored living in that
house, I can see boredom with specific things just not boredom with life in general.
Hate you career as an engineer?
Go back to college and get a Ph.D. in economics or art history or something.
Go spend a decade as a beach bum living off your savings or go the opposite route and
join a monastery for a few years so that when you leave all the little luxuries you've
come to take for granted seem like the coolest thing ever again.
Collect skills so you can be that 300 year old who has friends over for dinner and you
can casually remark that you got to be a good cook from that decade you spent as a chef.
Enjoy the freedom of having the time to do all the things you've always wanted to do
but didn't have the time for, because now you do.
Okay, we will wrap up there for today.
As is often the case we tried to limit our discussion of the ethics of the technology
under discussion, where we did it was mostly to bridge past a lot of the regular bits that
are a little worn out and get to less-discussed and more interesting bits.
As I mentioned earlier, I wouldn't put money on life extension happening in our lifetimes
but I wouldn't want to bet against it either.
It is physically possible and there's been quite an uptick in funding for researching
it in recent years.
We did have to bypass a lot of the specific mechanics, I'm not a biologist and even
if I were we'd have had to spend a lot of time stepping through a lot of basic biochemistry
first.
Should you be so inclined though, you can learn more about the mechanics and specific
technological challenges by following the link to the SENS Research Foundation in the
episode description.
Next week we will be returning to our discussion of alien civilizations by taking a look at
languages.
We will look over some of the more peculiar ways intelligent organisms might talk to each
other and also look at the problems and strategies involved in deciphering a totally foreign
language.
To get alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to like it and share it with others, and join
in the conversation either in the comments section or over at the Channel's Facebook
and Reddit groups, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!
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