Sounds unlikely? It’s not – it’s actually quite likely.
The only way to get people to live for a thousand years or more is to develop advanced technologies that can manipulate our bodies down to the cellular and molecular level. So the question is whether humanity will develop the necessary technologies over the next 30 years, or not. Personally, I think it’s very close to 100% certain that we’ll manage to do this.
That is, we don’t have to perfect the technology in 30 years. What we must do is to develop technology that can make old people 10, 20 or 30 years younger, biologically speaking, so an 80-year-old, for example, can get the body of a 60-year-old. In that case, he has bought himself 20 more years of life, and in those 20 years the technology will have progressed even further, so that when he is 100 years and his body again is like an 80-year-old’s, he can rejuvenate more than 20 years. In all likelihood we will take treatments more often than once every 20 years, and if so, the remaining life expectancy can be illustrated like this:
The figure is not entirely accurate, partly because people aged 100 years and 0 years clearly don’t have the same remaining life expectancy today, and also because the curves would be more jagged (since it might go some time between each treatment), but it still illustrates the point well: the numbers above the curves represent how old the person is today (today is all the way to the left in the figure), and if the curve hits the horizontal line at the bottom (the time axis), the person is dead. According to the figure, then, a person who’s 80 years old today will have difficulty living forever, while a typical 50-year-old might just make it.
Normally, the remaining life expectancy of a person goes down as time passes and the person gets older. When someone is 50 years old, for example, one thinks that they have a shorter remaining life expectancy than when the person was 30. In the figure that means that the curve always slopes downward towards 0 (the horizontal line) as time passes. But in the future, better technology will cause life expectancy to start increasing: The older we get, the longer we can actually expect to live. In the figure this is illustrated by the curve turning and starting to slope upwards.
It would therefore theoretically be possible to live indefinitely without getting an old body, but not only is it possible for many of us, it is possible even if the technology isn’t progressing particularly fast. For it is, like I said, not necessary for the technology that can make us younger to be perfect in 30 years, it only needs to work well enough that we can live long enough to benefit from the technology that will be developed after that. Looking at it like this, it doesn’t really take all that much to get people to live for more than 1,000 years.
Many might still be skeptical of the notion that technology will progress fast enough over the next 30 years. Will we be able to rejuvenate people by about 20 years, biologically speaking, in such a relatively short time span? I am almost certain that the answer to that question is Yes.
Because technology will advance fast – very fast.
With a few assumptions, such as the Earth not being hit by a large asteroid, some aspects of the future can actually be predicted with a high degree of certainty. One of these is that we will have more efficient technology in the future than today. It’s even become apparent that just how much better the technology will be is also quite easy to predict – in certain areas. The best known example of this is perhaps Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on an area doubles every two years. More generally, the amount of computing power we can buy for a fixed amount of money doubles in a relatively short span of time. 1) This was true long before we got transistors (Moore’s Law), and it will probably also hold true after it is no longer possible to increase the number of transistors per area. At that point some other technology with significantly greater potential will take over for transistors.
The time it takes to double computers’ performance is only half the time it takes to double the number of transistors per area, for since the spacing between transistors is shorter, it also takes less time for signals to move between them. Thus, the performance of computers doubles, not every other year, but every single year!
The fact that the performance of computers does not increase linearly, but actually doubles at regular intervals, is very important. Those who know the history of the inventor of the game of chess know how few doublings are needed before we get to very large numbers: If we take the number 1 as the starting point, 10 doublings take us to about 1000, 20 doublings get us to a million and 30 doublings from the number 1 take us to a little over one billion. If the price performance of computers doubles every year, the price performance will thus be a billion times better in 30 years than it is today. At that point it’s virtually just the imagination that limits what we can achieve with all that computing power.
If we examine how computing power per constant dollar has evolved since the year 1900, we will see that the time between each doubling is actually shorter now than it was 100 years ago. If this trend continues and we extrapolate the trend all the way to the end of this century, we might get a development that looks something like this: 2)
Note that the y-axis is logarithmic – each of the marked values on the y-axis is actually 100,000 times greater than the previous one. A straight line pointing upwards in a logarithmic plot corresponds to an exponential (explosive) increase. The amount of computing power we can buy for a given amount of money increases even faster than this!
Computers aren’t just getting faster, they are also becoming smarter and can do more and more of the things we previously thought only humans could do. In 1997, the world’s best chess player, Garry Kasparov was defeated in chess by a computer. In 2011, two of the world’s best Jeopardy players were defeated in Jeopardy by Watson, a supercomputer developed by IBM. So with increased computing power and better algorithms computers have become smarter and smarter. The progress has been very rapid, and if it continues, machine intelligence will at some point not only be faster, but also become smarter than human/biological intelligence. Machine intelligence will then be able to make improvements to itself without input from humans. Ray Kurzweil, whom Bill Gates has called the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence, and who works as director of engineering at Google, is perhaps the best-known futurist, and he has said that this will happen by the year 2045. 2045 is less than 30 years away.
Sure, computers are getting better, but how’s that relevant for making people younger?
We take advantage of computers in ever more areas of our lives. According to Ray Kurzweil, as soon as something becomes an information technology, it starts progressing according to Moore’s Law. The technology thus begins to progress exponentially, with regular doublings in performance. An information technology is a technology that uses computers extensively. In recent decades, biology and medicine has to an increasing extent started to become an information technology. With computers we can now, among other things:
- Read human genes.
- Edit genes with CRISPR/Cas9, a revolutionary technology that has been adopted by laboratories worldwide. Still better technologies for gene editing are under development.
- 3D print some human organs.
- Create a physical chromosome designed on a computer. Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute did this in 2010, before putting the chromosome into a cell where it caused the cell to start dividing.
- Diagnose diseases better than human doctors, based on image files, description of symptoms and information about the patient. (The Watson supercomputer has, among other things, been used for this purpose after its Jeopardy victory.)
- Measure the body’s health condition using small sensors. Do you remember that relatively small device the Star Trek doctors scanned their patients with to diagnose them? In Star Trek, they called it a Tricorder. The X Prize Foundation has an ongoing competition where the goal of the participating teams is to create a Tricorder-like device that can be used to diagnose a few diseases, 16 of them to begin with. The aim is to give people, even in poor parts of the world, easy access to their own health information. Patients must therefore be able to use the Tricorder to diagnose themselves with ease.
So medicine is about to become an information technology, and that’s the main reason why we can expect medical technology to advance exponentially in the future.
The more advanced our technology becomes, the smaller sized computers we’re able to make, and in the long term we can envisage mini computers the size of red blood cells. We can have billions of these in our blood, and they can act as an artificial immune system that continuously helps our natural immune system to fix things that have gone wrong. In the long term this may be the way we will be controlling the aging process, but fortunately it’s not necessary with technology that advanced in order to repair aging damage ‘well enough’ in the short term.
Most aging researchers agree that there’s only about seven fundamental reasons why we age. Aubrey de Grey, the best-known advocate for defeating aging and Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation 3), a charitable organization working to fight aging, stated already more than ten years ago that even without revolutionary new technologies there was about a 50% chance that we would be able, within 25 years, to repair the seven types of aging damage well enough to increase people’s life expectancy by 25-30 years.
For this to be achievable in just 25 years, the level of funding would have to be very good, according to de Grey. Thus far, the funding has been far from as good as one might hope for, but important progress has been made, nonetheless, and 2015 was a good year for aging research. Private firms are now trying to develop treatments for four (perhaps soon to be five) of the seven categories of aging damage. Simply removing old “zombie cells” (senescent cells – cells that have stopped dividing, but that aren’t being recycled by the immune system) has led to a 25% increase in longevity in mice. Actually, two different companies are now working to develop treatments to remove this type of harmful cells in humans, Unity Biotechnology and Oisin Biotechnology. The more firms competing to develop treatments, the greater the likelihood that someone succeeds, so this is very promising!
So considering how far we’ve come already and how fast technology is improving and can be expected to improve in the future, I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ll have the aging process under control in less than 30 years. Maybe 30 years is too cautious an estimate, even. Ray Kurzweil has said that already by 2030, life expectancy will increase by one year per year, and I actually won’t be very surprised if he’s right. But everyone in the world won’t get access to the technology as early as Kurzweil estimates, which is why nearly 30 years might still be closer to the truth for most people?
Is it inevitable that we’ll be living much longer lives in the future?
Living a long time is closely linked to being healthy. As long as you have good health, you are not going to die of aging. No matter how skeptical some people are today to the idea of people living lives of more than 1,000 years, I think most of them will still choose good health if they can. No one wants to get cancer, dementia or heart problems. One would have to be pretty principled if one refuses to take the anti-aging treatments that in the future can provide us with much better health, when most other people around us are taking them. It is in everyone’s interest to develop these treatments and to have good health. 4) Technology trends indicate that the treatments will arrive soon, and, yes, it is virtually inevitable!
And we’re not going to extend human life expectancy to a mere 150 years. It may well be that new, still unknown, types of aging damage will be found to be important when people start approaching 150 years of age, but given the incredibly fast pace of technological progress, at the time when the first humans will be 150 years old, it’s going to be easy to figure out how to repair these new types of aging damage. So if you’ve made it to 150, you’re “over the hump” (a long time ago), and then there’s simply no limit to how long you can live.
1) An important reason why technological progress is speeding up as rapidly as it is, is that we’re developing more and more effective tools, and with more effective tools, we’re in turn able to develop even more effective tool.
2) But isn’t the pace of technological progress eventually going to slow down? Maybe, but Ray Kurzweil (who thinks people are going to improve themselves by “merging” with the technology we’re developing) thinks it’s going to be a very long time until that’s going to happen. In his essay The Law of Accelerating Returns, he writes:
Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Is there not a point where humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up with it? With regard to unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would a thousand scientists, each a thousand times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating a thousand times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily nonbiological brains is faster) accomplish? One year would be like a millennium. What would they come up with?
Well, for one thing, they would come up with technology to become even more intelligent (because their intelligence is no longer of fixed capacity). They would change their own thought processes to think even faster. When the scientists evolve to be a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, then an hour would result in a century of progress (in today’s terms).
3) Donate to SENS Research Foundation.
4) Many people might think that the Earth will be overpopulated if we stop dying. That’s far from certain.
This blog post has also been discussed on Reddit (/r/Futurology, /r/singularity) and Hacker News.
2
O yes, we will soon be reverse aging. I think in 20 years we will transition away from cellular physiology altogether. In the same way we’re not trying to improve covered wagons, we are now entering a new time with safe, self-driving cars. Biology is too fussy, too fragile, too error fraught. It will simply make more sense to have nanobots and blood cell size computers perfect our bodies.
For this reason, it’s no longer relevant your age. A person who is 15 or 60 or 199, would each enjoy an indestructable, yet more sensual, far more capable human form. Your vision, for example, will be multi-spectrum. You’ll be able to image-stablize features as small as a virus, perhaps see in ultraviolet, and see perfectly in absolute darkness.
Music to your ears will have a depth and dimension exceeding the range you know now. Also, because our minds will themselves have faster and broader intelligence, we’ll experience it with vivid color and a finer texture of consciousness.
So, no, in the sense that we will extend life by improving cells, only for a couple more decades, then beyond we transition to high humans, living in ever-improving non-biological, non-smelly, no-longer-weak , no-lomger-frail bodies.
Well, this will be great?if we can find a new planet to live on. Because at the rate we’re going now, it’s not going to support human life very well by the next century.
Or maybe we can someone stop the petroleum and mining industries from their extract-and-pollute behavior and their financial control of the governments’ regulations, and stop our species’ addiction to oil and rare-earth minerals.
Yeah, that’s probably not going to happen, so the previous poster’s idea of transitioning away from cellular physiology is probably the only solution to staying alive as a species.
I’d must rather simply go full OT. Then I won’t need a body. I’ll have one when I want it and not when I don’t want it. I’d keep it’s identity alive regardless of the body’s survival or age limit. After all, it is my creation. Man Obey’s the God of His Universe.
Figure that one out 😉
Nikko
The concern I have is that micro-strokes and other damage could lead to wards full of near immortal but mentally compromised patients.
However thanks to improvements in neural scanning including some of my own inventions (still have to do patent search) it might be possible to preserve some of the structure so any damage can be repaired when/if it occurs like cloning a hard disk.
Having just had one of these fail it was a lot easier to recover from a backup than recreate all the content from scratch so this is a good analogy.
My ideas are actually so novel that one medical imaging company has already contacted me to ask for a copy of my research notes, so watch this space!
I will be happy if you can transplant my brain into a fighting robot haha
Just realize that increasing the time you are alive, also reduces the impact life has on you. A week when you’re 15 years old is 2 times more intense and memorable to your brain than when you are 30. So when you’re 300 years old, a week is only 5% of what it used to be at 15.
“Normally, the life expectancy of a person goes down as time passes and the person gets older.”
I think this is wrong. Life expectancy goes up every year that you fail to die in the previous year. But I think you are trying to say that “Normally, the expected amount of life that a person has left goes down as a time passes and the person gets older.”
Yes, I meant remaining life expectancy. Thanks! Fixed now.
How about the telomeres? Did you think about that?
Another issue is: as we age the probability of the “errors” that derive from renewing cells is growing larger – in other words – even if we manage to live longer we will all die sooner or later of cancer.
I personally believe because of these kind of limitations the human life has a definite stop at some point – and it might end already at the age of 200 for example.
It’s not certain that the shortening of telomeres is a cause of aging, it could also be an effect of aging: https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2015/04/telomere-erosion-is-complex-but-looks-more-like-a-measure-of-damage-than-a-source-of-damage.php
Telomeres are shorter in people who are sick, so it could be a “stress indicator”, as the article explains.
Errors in nuclear DNA is probably a cause of aging, contributing to a higher cancer incidence in old people, as you say. However, when we can cure cancer, those cancer-causing mutations won’t be that big of a problem. Still, being able to fix DNA errors is going to be important, and I think we’ll be able to do just that within a few decades. Gene editing technology has improved a lot lately.
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/03/evidence-against-the-role-of-nuclear-dna-damage-in-aging.php
Actually with 14/16nm nodes the cost of transistors is increasing for the first time. So, despite what Intel may say, we have reached the beginning of the end for Moore’s Law. That’s why we have architectural alternatives such as parallel processing.
It’s very interesting to see your line of reasoning there.
I fully agree that technology is able to greatly increase our lifespan, as it already has done until now.
Of course, the’re also setbacks, like our unhealthy eating that we just don’t seem to stop with that for the pas 40 years or so has shortened our lifespan.
Also, did you know there is even a religion who’s official teaching is that humans are ment to live as corporeal beings on earth (sort of like we do now) only in perfect health?
Check this: http://wol.jw.org/nl/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2006721
This is excellent, so long as said technology is made affordable and accessible to everyone. Otherwise, the title of the article should add “for the top 20% of the world’s population.”
With a topic like life extension, it’s not only IF we can accomplish it … which I think we will (and your timeline is certainly possible), it’s whether or not everybody will be able to access the solution.
The more competitive the rejuvenation market will be, the more confident I am that the treatments will become affordable. I’m optimistic. 🙂
So, great: everyone lives forever! I’m not quite sure whether you see this as progress? Apart from the questionable desirability of everlasting life, my main thought is ‘where are you going to put everyone?’
Your vision of the future seems to ignore the problem of the inexorable rise in human population and the increasing demands for all to enjoy the same quality life experienced by those of us in the developed world. So, how’s it going to work?
The ‘good’ news is that – if we are talking probabilities – I take the view that the human race is likely to disappear within the next century or two, so that the scenario you envisage will never come to pass. The fundamental flaw of the human race is that we are just far too clever for our own good. People are never satisfied and never will be; they will always want more. (The conscious or unconscious drive for everlasting life, as you describe, is a good example of this). So where does this end up? An infinite expansion of world population is simply unsustainable.
It is my personal view that humanity will either wipe itself out through its own greed or that some ‘natural’ event will decimate the planet (for example, as we progressively generate viral and bacterial non-resistance and the development of super bugs). And, depending on your religious or atheistic leanings, you may consider this no bad thing! No other species has done so much harm to the natural world. Not even come close. We continue to exist at the cost of destroying our environment. As I say, we are just too clever for our own survival. In terms of geological time, humanity is still merely a blip. Throughout earth’s history, species have come and gone. Perhaps when humanity is no longer a factor, the natural environment can regain the equilibrium that hitherto existed.
I’ve addressed the overpopulation concern in this blog post: http://haakonsk.blogg.no/1424053138_humankind_could_risk_.html
(If the fertility rate falls below 2, which might happen in a few decades, overpopulation shouldn’t be a problem.)
My question is what should’a person be taking to live to the thirty years I’m 57 now +30=87 years so this is roughy top of my life span
Luv to here what people are doing now
Ehhh The only way to become immortal is to transcend material attachment… 😀
http://electroiq.com/petes-posts/2015/01/26/exponentially-rising-costs-will-bring-changes/
The evidence presented in the given article, disproves the continuously accelerating Moore’s Law assumption.
You are right that the number of transistors per area (Moore’s Law) won’t keep growing at its current rate for very long. However, Moore’s Law wasn’t the first paradigm of computing, and it won’t be the last.
http://singularityhub.com/2016/03/08/will-the-end-of-moores-law-halt-computings-exponential-rise/
Thank you for this article. First of all, let me say that I agree that we shouldn’t be aging. Since we are born, we shouldn’t be aging and I would do anything in my power not to age. I completely reject that mentality. However, that being said, that is pure science fiction saying that in 30 years we will have the technology available. My grandparents used to say the same things that in 30 years technology would be available. And nothing is available yet. So, if that will ever be possible, it will take several hundreds of years.
Humans already do live forever… its called procreation and the passing down of genes. So if you want to live forever have a bunch of kids.
So, I’m interested in your thesis, but I was regretful not to see a good graph of rate of change of life expectancy at birth over time. So, I used the data from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time
And I made this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16D1G7v-ZgSOIyplksxAzugZdEHXxlZJxxvpzLqYySM4/edit?usp=sharing
The graph is relatively flat for most of human history; it isn’t even monotonic. But it shoots up during the 20th century.
It would be nice to see some accelerated growth; for example, if the second half of the 20th century showed a faster rate of change than the first half. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I’m going to dig a little deeper, but it seems that during a period in which our computing capacity went up by ~10 orders of magnitude, our life expectancy rate-of-change stayed about the same. So (increased compute power -> accelerated change in life expectancy) isn’t born out by previous data.
So, what makes us think that it will make a sudden jump in the next 30 years?
Thank you for the graphs!
I guess the reason is that we aren’t able to manipulate matter well enough yet on the molecular scale.
Computers are getting smaller as well as faster, and Ray Kurzweil expects there to be medical nanobots the size of red blood cells by 2030. If the nanobots are able to sense their surroundings and take different types of action to repair the things that have gone wrong, then rejuvenation shouldn’t be so hard. This is a lot like what our immune system is doing, but we will have better control.
From Ray Kurzweil’s Playboy-interview (http://www.kurzweilai.net/reinvent-yourself-the-playboy-interview-with-ray-kurzweil):
“As they gain traction in the 2030s, nanobots in the bloodstream will destroy pathogens, remove debris, rid our bodies of clots, clogs and tumors, correct DNA errors and actually reverse the aging process. One researcher has already cured type 1 diabetes in rats with a blood-cell-size device.”
I doubt there will be Nano doctors in 2030. Lol Crisper still hasn’t changed much. Maybe 2100
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One of the problem to be addressed is psychological. If you know your life is limited, you accept taking risks, drive, enjoy dangerous sports or care less about yourself in general.
If you know you are going to live one millennium, would you even cross the road ? This fact has psychological implications that are presumably important.
Life extension is already happening, and the value of life is already increasing in this sense (see the increase of health related topic in the net). An “infinite” life, implies extreme attention to accidents and errors that could terminate it.
Greg Ruo
What’s the problem with that? Wait 100 years until cars are replaced with something else more safer, What else do you have to do?
Yes, but the real question is should we be increasing life expectancy? The idea of humans being able to live for an extremely long time sounds nice and all, but is it really something we should do? How would our increase of life affect other ecosystems? We really don’t have a natural predator that keeps our population in check.
Always good to read info. about not having to grow old and be dead. It has been something i have been talking about for the past 25 years. I obtained the Registered Trade Mark to “Immortality Systems IS Extra Terrestrial Migration – Gene Engineering”
in 1997 and had a forum on the internet for 10 years.
“Homo Immortalis Omnipotent” will be the outcome of goal oriented evolution.
To see what i mean, please google.
What’s there of worth in this world that makes worth living in it for a thousand years? I would rather live a more meaningful and full 50 years than a dragging and painful 1000 years. Wherever you see, hypocrisy, deceit, hate, heartbreak and what not. A thousand years is too much but each to their own. May you live long and prosper! Peace.
Why not live a more meaningful life with 1000 years?
I do agree with you that mankind will eventually figure out how some
animals are immortal(I think they have already?) and give that power to
people. But I disagree it’s in 30 years, I think it will be in 150 years.
People’s understanding of biology hasn’t increased as rapidly as transistor count, and why would it? They are two different systems.
That’s my guess.