This article introduces recent scientific advances in anti-aging technologies and life extension, exploring the potential for these technologies to bring eternal life to humans, and discussing the ethical and social issues that may arise.
Gold If I asked you how long you would like to live, what would you say? 80 years, 90 years, 120 years, or longer? And do you think this will change when you reach that age? Fifty thousand years ago, many people died young. Data suggests that less than 25% of the population survived to age 20. However, as humans developed ways to utilize resources to heal themselves, the mortality rate got lower and lower. Today, people are living the healthiest and longest lives in history. Nearly 90% of people live to be over 60 years old. But this has come with consequences that humanity hasn’t anticipated. We’re spending more and more time in our lives getting sick and needing care. Most people will die in a hospital bed. Dying in a hospital bed is depressing enough, but you can’t help but watch the same thing happen to your loved ones. That’s why scientists are trying to shift the medical community’s focus from “life extension” to “life prolongation,” which means increasing the amount of time a person is free from disease. To do this, they need to target the underlying cause of the body’s defects: aging itself. Although not well known to many, the field of aging research has made remarkable progress in recent years. These scientific approaches can be divided into two main categories: biotechnology and non-organic engineering.
There are two leading areas of life extension using biotechnology. The first is senescent cells. Every cell has an expiration date. Every time a cell divides, it copies its chromosomes, and in the process, it loses a little bit of the ends of its DNA. This poses a risk of losing genetic information, so to protect it, the human body builds long bundles of genes called telomeres at the ends of chromosomes. They’re like the hard plastic bits at the end of your shoelaces. But these telomeres get shorter and shorter each time a cell divides. By the time most cells have repeated divisions, the telomeres are gone, and the cell becomes a senescent cell. Senescent cells don’t stay in place and die, and the older you get, the higher the percentage of senescent cells in your body. They damage the surrounding tissues and contribute to many diseases, such as age-related diabetes and kidney failure, which means that removing them can restore health. Scientists have genetically engineered mice to eliminate senescent cells on their own. With senescent cells gone, the old mice were more active, had better functioning hearts and kidneys, and were less likely to develop cancer. As a result, they lived 30% longer and healthier than normal mice. But since we can’t genetically engineer every cell in the body, we need other ways to deal with aging cells. Most cells are designed to commit suicide when they are damaged, but senescent cells are not. That’s because they don’t produce enough of the protein that commands suicide. In a late 2016 study, researchers injected this protein into mice and succeeded in eliminating 80% of senescent cells, while leaving healthy cells intact – in other words, selectively eliminating only the life-threatening cells. As a result, the mice were generally healthier and even regrew their missing fur.
The second is the NAD+ enzyme. Cells are made up of hundreds of millions of parts. They’re made up of structures, machines, signals, and catalysts that make chemical reactions happen, all of which are constantly being damaged, cleaned up, and made new. But as we age, this process becomes less efficient, and parts become broken, clogged, or slow to clear. Eventually, the body can’t meet its production needs, one of which is NAD+. This enzyme, in short, tells cells to take care of themselves. By the time you’re 50, you have half the amount of NAD+ you did when you were 20, and the problem is that the decline in NAD+ has been linked to a number of diseases. For example, skin cancer, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and various forms of sclerosis. However, NAD+ can’t be administered as a drug because it can’t penetrate cells. So scientists have been working to find a substance that is flexible enough to enter cells and convert to NAD+ inside them. In 2016, they administered the substance to mice several times and found that it accelerated the proliferation of stem cells in the skin, brain, and muscles. The mice were literally “rejuvenated,” and their lifespan increased somewhat. It’s too early to say that this technology will extend or accelerate life in humans, but it’s noteworthy and could serve as humanity’s first true “anti-aging” agent.
Inorganic engineering takes a different approach. The core idea is to create an inanimate entity that is completely separate from the physical body we occupy, and infuse it with our minds. Examples include computer programs and computer viruses that can undergo independent evolution. The Blue Brain Project, launched in 2005, aims to recreate the entire human brain in a computer simulation. Also, in the movie Transcendence, the main character exists inside a supercomputer and is able to do things that he would never dream of doing if he were trapped in a human body. While bioengineering is not as direct as biotechnology and has a lower probability of success than biotechnology, it is a new attempt to achieve eternal life, and if successful, it has greater potential because we are no longer limited to our bodies.
But if we can stop aging in this way, is it desirable? Life extension or the end of aging makes many people uncomfortable. Humans have always been subject to the laws of nature: we are born, stay young, and die old. On the contrary, aging is considered a blessing, as it allows us to gain many experiences. As the saying goes, “golden old age”. But the truth is that while everyone likes the process of aging, few people like being old. For example, there”s the story of Tithonos from Greek mythology. Tithonos was the lover of the goddess Eos, who loved him so much that she asked Zeus to grant him eternal life. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth, so Tithonos lived forever, but kept getting older. After a few hundred years, he shrank to the size of a grape and was forced to continue his meaningless life forever. For millennia, humans have feared endless aging, but ending aging doesn’t mean continuing to grow weaker. Biotechnologically speaking, once a person is too old, it’s too late. A person who stops aging at 90 will die in a few years anyway. If non-organic engineering succeeds, we won’t be weakened because we will be free from physical disabilities. The concept of life extension means the end of disease and the consequent end of fixed life expectancy, so you can live forever and still find meaning in life. Now let’s look at the objections from two perspectives, biotechnology and non-organic engineering, and see how they can be resolved.
One objection is that the burden of living forever is so great that only a few people will benefit from it. These issues of justice and equity are often raised in opposition to life extension, and of course it’s impossible to predict the hypothetical price of aging cures. Thinking about it from a biotechnology perspective, it has already been proven that many medical innovations are not immediately available to everyone. Early antibiotics were only available to the elite, and many technologies like CAT scans and heart transplants were also not available to everyone. But that doesn’t mean we should ban pacemakers or regenerative medicine. Just because some people don’t have access to all the benefits doesn’t mean they should lose the opportunity to lead a healthy life. Besides, even if aging treatments are initially expensive, mass production has the potential to make them affordable, at least in developed countries. This is a common trend in medical innovation. In terms of non-organic engineering, transplanting a human mind into an inanimate object is expected to be much cheaper than biotechnology. Just as no two human minds in simulation are exactly the same in the real world, and can evolve in different directions, the cost per person will be less than in biotechnology, because different minds can be realized by adjusting the initial conditions. However, nonorganic engineering is still in its infancy, and it is not possible to predict how much more initial technology development costs will be required, so we need to look at which is more economical: biotechnology or nonorganic engineering.
Another counterargument is that without death, the population would grow so rapidly that there wouldn’t be enough room for all those people. (In non-organic engineering, a person’s mind doesn’t necessarily need to occupy a body, so running out of space isn’t an issue.) In fact, this argument is almost akin to Malthusianism, which foresaw major problems with overpopulation in the 1970s that would occur in the year 2000. However, the proponents of this argument failed to take into account technological advances in agriculture, transportation, and so on, so their predictions were completely off the mark. Therefore, if anti-aging is successful, it should be viewed as an overall evolutionary process of the “social organism” rather than an isolated breakthrough. Although the world’s population has almost quadrupled in the last century, humans today enjoy a quality of life unparalleled in history. In addition, many developed countries, Japan, and some European countries are facing population decline and aging populations, which means that even if anti-aging is successful, humanity will have plenty of time to adapt. Other advances in anti-aging, such as the space industry and the construction of oceanic cities, are ongoing, so if we find a new home, such as Mars or a city in the deep ocean, we’ll be able to accommodate a burgeoning population.
When Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus explored the world, they left death and injustice on the shores of Europe. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon at the height of the Cold War, and Tim Berners-Lee didn’t wait for poverty to end before inventing the internet. Neither of these men made their achievements under ideal circumstances, but their discoveries and endeavors have greatly benefited society and humanity. Whether biotechnology or non-organic engineering, each has its advantages and disadvantages. But either way, setting new limits and making new discoveries will eventually improve everyone’s lives. If anti-aging is realized, we will all be able to enjoy growing old without pain.
