How Long Can We Achieve Youthfulness and Defy Death?

In 2003, Zoltan Istvan almost tripped on a landmine in Vietnam working as a reporter for National Geographic. His brush with death convinced him to quit journalism and eventually devote his life to transhumanism or the belief that emerging technologies can enhance human intellect and physiology. One question — How can we get around death? — prevailed foremost in his mind.

Four Immortals Saluting Longevity, a hanging scroll at the National Palace Museum, Taibei.

This is not a plot to a sci-fi thriller. Istvan actually ran for president in 2016, a candidate in the newly created Transhumanist Party. It’s slogan:”Putting science, health and technology at the forefront of American politics,” smacks of understatement when you consider that Istvan and his transhumanist tribe (alive and well in Silicon Valley and beyond) hope to to extend their lifetimes to the record 122 years and more. Infinity even.

Investing in Longevity

An atheist who made a fortune in real estate after the land mine scare, Istvan joins like-minded affluents who are directing their wealth into anti-aging research and businesses. One gene-hacking experiment recently doubled the life span of worms.

Calico, a Google subsidiary headquartered in San Francisco, California, broadly states that the biotech’s mission is to “cure death.” MIT, Harvard, and

Chinese symbol of longevity

Ancestry are among its working partnerships.

Two years ago, Ambrosia, a startup company in Monterey, California, launched a controversial, pay-to-participate clinical trial to test the anti-aging benefits of giving young blood to relatively healthy people. The subjects of the study have their blood “cleaned” of age-related proteins.

As of last month the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, located in Scottsdale Arizona, reported over 1000 members who have made legal and financial arrangements for cryopreservation.  The process will take place upon their death, when their bodies will be cooled with liquid nitrogen and stored, with the hope that new medical technologies will then be available to reanimate them in the future.

Questioning Longevity

Inevitably, human lives will exist radically longer and, some say, last forever. By then, the question of how to live longer will change to: How will living longer change the way we live?

John Harris, a University of Manchester philosopher, predicts only the rich will be able to afford longevity therapies. That could lead to a new “underclass of the un-enhanced”.

“Where will we all live?” wonders Paul Root Wolpe, chief bioethicist for NASA and director of the centre for ethics at Emory University. Will we migrate to planets? If so, who would relocate? Wolfe also questions how long  a non-aging super-centenarian would be expected to work.

And what would become of our social norms? Sex love and marriage would “inevitably change” says Joel Michael Reynolds of The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute. Reynolds asks us to imagine how family dynamics would further complicate with five, six or more generations living at the same time.

Zoltan Itsvan, 2018 Libertarian Party candidate for governor of California

Ultimately,would the wonder of the gift of life disappear? Would “same old, same old,” convert to a dull sense of “same young, same young?” How much would be too much?

The answers to these questions, while deeply personal, become political as well. The average life expectancy in the United States has already doubled over the past 200 years, to 78.7, while in other parts of the world it has stalled at 52. It may take a number of extended lifetimes to figure out answers in the  political universe, as anti-aging therapies continue to be enhanced in bio-tech labs. Meanwhile, Zoltan Itsvan, 45 years young, has declared his candidacy for the 2018 California governor election, running as a Libertarian.