Life Extension, Immortality, and society. (Part 2)
The real question is, how close are we to immortality? It may be a lot closer than you think.
This piece is a continuation of my series on Life and Health Extension.
We’ve become accustomed to the existence of death as an inevitability. We do not realize the absolute lack of control we have over the nature of death. Most people rarely realize the fact that they will never get to choose how they’ll die. And if this is provoking a slight sense of anxiety and dread… good. You’ve understood the motivation behind this series of essays.
If you are less vulnerable to persuasion by feeling, hopefully, this post convinces you otherwise.
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Immortality. How close are we to it?
First of all, it’s best I note that we’ve already extended our lifespans…dramatically.
Research suggests that no country had an average life expectancy of over 40 years at the beginning of the 19th century. The average life expectancy was about 30 years in all regions of the world.
A lot of that increase has been attributed to a drastic decline in child mortality.
Although child mortality decreases partly contributed to these gains, we know that life expectancy increased across ALL ages. Meaning, that there was a whole lot more to it. At its core, these gains are a story about our shared technological progress.
Technology and diet have proven influential to us improving life expectancy. Antibiotics, radiation therapy and biological research have all helped us extend our lives. Medicines meant for chronic illnesses weren’t available to us just a few decades ago. And many perished as a result of it.
Now, the average person can slow aging by:
Eating well
Not smoking
Not drinking
Exercising
Sleeping sufficiently
Avoiding stress
(That last one has to be the most difficult thing here honestly)
That said, we sadly spend most of our old age in such a decrepit state. A study of 18524 deaths (9156 men, 9368 women) showed that people spend an increased amount of time in the hospital as they get older— even more so in the last 15 years of their lives.
So whereas life and health extension are (and already has been) possible, it has meant that we live the latter part of our years in misery. Perhaps, this is the reason why old people would much rather live 50 years longer if they could!
Out of admiration for the old (and my own distaste of death), I believe a genuine question we should be asking ourselves is, “how do we live longer, more fruitful lives?” How do we get to jump, dance, and feel as if we were 18 for the rest of our lives? (Without the teenage angst phase.)
I was shocked to find out that reversing aging, is already possible. Several studies have been carried out on mice and actual people that point us in that direction.
Just last year, a small trial hinted that it was possible “to reverse the body’s epigenetic clock”.
The Epigenetic Clock is a test, that can be used to measure a person’s biological age. More grimly, it can also tell us when a person will die…(Yes, you can already predict your own death.)
It makes use of the body’s epigenomes, which are basically logs or records that can instruct your genes on how they should behave. These epigenomes change as a person gets older.
We can expect what changes we are supposed to see at a particular age. Depending on these expectations, one can tell whether a person has aged rapidly, is younger than they are meant to be, or just about right.
It’s like those mental age tests, but for your entire physiology. And unlike most of the ones you see on social media, these are actually real!
For a year, participants in the trial took a concoction of three common drugs. The first was the steroid DHEA.
DHEA is capable of regenerating the thymus— a gland that’s active in the production of immunity promoting cells.
The second drug was rhGH(Human Growth Hormone). RhGH is known to induce diabetes. Hence,the introduction of DHEA and the other diabetic medication, Metformin in the experiment.
The results?
Participants shed 2.5 whole years of their biological ages! They literally reversed their lifespans by 2.5 years!
The mice trials have been fascinating too. These have tackled or made use of senescent cells that impair the function of more healthy cells, stem cells, and NAD+. In all cases, there was significant evidence of rejuvenation.
Progress! Right?
I just wonder why the results of these studies aren’t as mainstream as they could be. There were pieces of news here and there. There was hype about CRISPR for a while too.
But aging and age reversal itself hasn’t gained as much notoriety except for a few spaces:
The scientific establishment, Silicon Valley, and the investor class, as well as the transhumanists.
Scientists see Age Reversal as a problem to be solved.
When you’re given a hint about a task, you have an intuition that it indeed can be solved, and so you do everything in your might to complete the task.
That’s the scientific enterprise in a nutshell. As Thomas Kuhn explained(and i clarified in my description of his book), paradigms are guidelines for solving problems. The discovery of the epigenome and the genome overall has made Age Reversal nothing more than a technical problem to be solved in the mind of scientists.
It has far less to do with actually discovering something new and far more to do with solving a lot of problems. It has far more to do “when” it will be possible and far less to do with “if” it will be possible in the first place.
VCs are also pretty interested in this area. They tend to be an excitable bunch who are driven—primarily, by two forces: profit and curiosity. That said, they also have a genuine desire to change the world, and few would claim otherwise. Their belief in the power of enterprise and technology to alter the path of human life is incredible. It's no surprise then that they are amongst the greatest proponents of life extension and age reversal.
Then, there are the transhumanists. The human body for all its ability to adapt to external conditions is so pathetically frail in many ways. I’m wary of any dogma or ideological thinking about paths forward, but the transhumanists are a truly fascinating bunch.
Transhumanists are driven by the primary belief that people should make use of technology to exceed their limitations. As mentioned before, a lot of that is driven in large part due to the fact that we are fragile.
A person could quite literally choke on a piece of chips and poof, dead!
I find myself laughing as I write this, knowing how much risk-taking I pursue on a day-to-day basis. The greatest gift I've had writing this series was another chance at deep reflection over the nature of my mortality.
Just the other day I was laughing at a Key and Peele skit while drinking some tea. I accidentally gulped on a bit too much and felt my life flash before my eyes… for like a split second… then I want back to laughing my ass off.
It’s funny I know. But this is the sort of fragility we don't think about enough.
Anyway, a lot of our ability to move past our current limitations will depend heavily on technology, and as always, on the vested few who believe that a technological and scientific progress are worth pursuing.
The question then becomes, how do we push this into the mainstream?
Biological findings are almost always thrilling. But people tend to be quick to disregard them.
Why?
There’s the feeling that practitioners in the biological sciences rarely deliver solutions that directly impact our lives. Every new finding seems to be light years away from being applicable to the lives of the average person now. And even if that may not actually be the case, people tend to feel so.
But perception and intuition don't always reflect reality.
The coronavirus pandemic is bound to revamp a desire amongst many to move towards biotech.
The biggest obstacle towards this insurgence as with most novel technologies is the human mind. We revere that which fascinates us. But that reverence rarely translates into an understanding of concepts.
For the average individual, it may be hard accepting that one day, death may truly be an option. But it’s necessary to remind ourselves, that despite our biases, we do actually have the ability to live longer than ever before; that immortality, life extension, or blatant Age Reversal are things that can be engineered into existence.
So what happens when we do live longer? What happens if (as GPT-3 put it) we take the immortality pill? What does that mean for society? What does that mean for us and our relationships? I hope to dive deep into that in the next post.
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Resource: The rhGH experiment.
Till next time!
Update: I’ve written the last part of the series. Click here to read it.