Life expectancy to grow by one year per year.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Cambridge gerontologist Aubrey de Grey has admitted that while he dislikes the notion of immortality, there’s no denying it will be a reality in the near future. In fact, with in an interview with Motherboard, the scientist stated it is likely the first human being who will achieve the feat of perpetual life has already been born.
“The first thing I want to do is get rid of the use of this word immortality, because it’s enormously damaging, it is not just wrong, it is damaging,” de Grey told Motherboard. “It means zero risk of death from any cause — whereas I just work on one particular cause of death, namely aging. It is also a distraction, it causes people to think this whole quest is morally ambiguous and technologically fanciful.”
He continued: “If we ask the question: ‘Has the person been born who will be able to escape the ill health of old age indefinitely?’ Then I would say the chances of that are very high. Probably about 80 percent.”
According to The Metro, de Grey does not believe that a singular discovery will make people immortal in a single go. However, he proposed an increased life expectancy of 30 years will give gerontologists enough time to think about and bring about a series of small breakthroughs in the field.
“We will be able to keep one step ahead of the problem and keep rejuvenating the same people as long as we like. That is what longevity escape velocity is all about,” de Grey said during his interview with Motherboard.
de Grey’s theories are rooted in the idea that treatments that extend humanity’s lifespan will eventually become potent enough to match the speed at which we age.
“Life expectancy is growing by two years per decade at the moment,’ De Grey told the Metro. “But it will be one year per year.”
1 Comment
I am 100% behind Aubrey de Grey on this and of course there are potential routes other than the engineering approach and I think even Aubrey knows that SENS is only a means to to get a foot on the ladder but clearly once SENS strategies are perfected they will certainly save millions of lives and prevent a great deal of suffering, in my opinion SENS probably the most likely technology to come to fruition first. As I see it there are five technologies which will ultimately lead to radical life extension during the course of this century, these are advanced Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Advanced Robotics, Genetics and Robust Artificial Intelligence often just referred to just as AI, the effect these technologies will have on life extension differs greatly but my guess is that there are two potential approaches which are likely to come to fruition first, one as I said above is SENS which is biotechnology the other is a combination of robust artificial intelligence combined with whole brain emulation. Whole brain emulation is where the brain is uploaded to a digital medium and increasingly enhanced and replaced with non biological components until it reaches a stage where the non biological components can model the biological part so accurately the original brains loss would be irrelevant from a functional perspective. Personally I feel the outcome long term will ultimately be a combination of the five, the crucial point is that each of these technologies individually has the potential to get us to where we need to go. What this means is that for the development of radical life extension to fail all of these technologies must also fail and that simply won’t happen so my guess is we will reach the stage of having a decisive level of control over the aging process within 20/30 years. We must also factor in that there is also a possibility that we could find a faster route and that treatments to lengthen telomeres might have a greater benefit than assumed. Clearly lengthening the telomeres in certain cells through temporary activation of telomerase through a drug developed for the purpose, or maybe permanently by gene therapy could be interesting. The implications for tissue engineering are interesting too but it is not even certain whether the relationship between telomeres and aging is causal so that again is speculative. Its possible the shortening is a consequence of aging and not a cause. Nevertheless the implications of combined stem cell and lengthened telomeres could mean we can greatly improve our abilities regarding biomedical repairs.
In conclusion I feel we have every chance of being able to bring these technologies to bear within a timeframe that benefits the majority of people currently alive and credit must go to Aubrey de Grey for his exhaustive efforts over many years to make both scientists and people in general aware that aging is a disease and like all diseases there is a potential intervention to mitigate its effects.