LISTEN: Could it be possible to be biologically 60 when you’re chronologically 150?
But what about actually “curing” death? There have long been proposals to do this by cryogenically freezing a person’s brain or body immediately after death so they can be revived at a later date when technology has advanced sufficiently. A number of companies even offer the opportunity for wealthy clients to preserve their bodies in this way, such the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. However, to date, none of their clients have ever been resurrected from their icy storage units.
Others, such as Ray Kurzweil, theorist of the Singularity and lead engineer at Google have espoused “mind uploading” as a way to achieve (at least digital) immortality.
It’s easy to conflate these outlandish ideas, which seem more based in science fiction than reality, with the lab-based work De Grey and others in longevity research are doing. But regardless of how it is achieved, extending human lifespans by decades or even hundreds of years will present us with some difficult social realities. As BBC Future has explored before, there could be major societal impacts if we all start living longer. There are some that fear greater longevity could lead to swelling populations and raise doubts that our planet could support such numbers.
De Grey himself says he is often asked about whether the technologies he is working on could be abused by wealthy tyrants to give them extended lifespans, while others ask whether we will simply be bored by lives that can be continuously extended.
He has little time for such questions and believes that other technologies – such as artificial meat, desalination, solar energy and other renewables – will increase the carrying capacity of the planet, allowing more people to live longer lives. But this rationale suffers from a dependence on uncertain techno-fixes that may not alleviate suffering in an equally distributed manner.
Yet, if concerns like these had paralysed the early pioneers of vaccination and antibiotics, it is unlikely many of us today could expect to live much beyond the age of 40-years-old. Advances in medicine over the last two centuries have taught us that we have the power to defeat the diseases that afflict us. Perhaps if we apply ourselves, then we can beat ageing too.
