How far can longevity go? 100 is already a done deal. 120 is very rare but increasingly believable. How about 150? How about … no limit?
We first ran this story at the end of last year, but we’re updating it now because of a recent interview we read with legendary futurist Dr. Ray Kurzweil, who made this prediction.
For a stunning view of what technology is about to bring us, and not just in relation to longevity, we urge you to read the whole piece. But focusing only on the longevity component, it’s staggering. Of course, it may not all come true, and on the dates predicted, but the mere fact that it can be spoken about so seriously, and with so much evidence, commanded our attention.
Ray Kurzweil is a leading scientist, inventor and author. He predicts that the combination of new developments in genetics, nanotechnology, AI and robotics will enable us to reverse the effects of aging altogether.
He has impeccable credentials: he’s written books on health, artificial intelligence and transhumanismhas (which envisions a fusion of biology and technology to embed AI-powered devices in the human body). He’s also been inducted into the U.S. Patent Office’s National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002, and received over 21 honorary doctorates.
In this interview, he develops the concept of Longevity Escape Velocity: “Right now you go through a year and use up a year of your longevity. However, research is advancing and it’s curing various diseases. You’re actually getting back on average about four months a year. So you lose a year of longevity. You get back about four months because of scientific research. However, scientific research is also on an exponential curve. By 2029, you’ll get back a full year. So you lose a year, but you get back a year.”
And past 2029? “You’ll get back more than a year. Go backwards in time. Once you can get back at least a year, you’ve reached longevity escape velocity.”
Of course, that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll live forever. Even if treatments exist for more and more diseases, those treatments won’t be available to everyone all at once. And there are unexpected factors like accidents.
Even so, “once you’re past longevity escape velocity, you go through a year, you’re not a year older and you’re not more likely to die.”
But no matter how dazzling the therapies may be, aren’t we going to be slowed down by the snail’s pace of actually bring a new treatment on to the market? The established evidence is that it can take almost 20 years before cutting edge research makes it into practice.
Kurweil has a strong answer: “That’s an old statistic. We’re constantly speeding that up… We got the COVID vaccine out in ten months. It took two days to create it. Because we sequenced through several billion different mRNA sequences in two days. There’s many other advances happening. We’re starting to see simulated biology being used and that’s one of the reasons that we’re going to make so much progress in the next five years.”
The full picture of longevity escape velocity encompasses many technological breakthroughs all taking place more or less at the same time, including reversing aging at the cellular level, replacing body parts, and even the fusion of computer and brain that would enable knowledge, memory, ideas and all the other markers of individual identity to be digitized and capable of living forever, and even being added to, in digital space.
Too farfetched? You can learn more about Kurzweil’s ideas here, here and here.
Could it actually happen? What do you think?