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!
