I'll live forever or die trying
After much reading up on it over the past couple of months, I'm firmly in favor of anti-aging research. But I haven't shouted about it anywhere but here. While the longevity space is fast gaining both attention and legitimacy, there's still a lot of people who consider it fringe and a bit kooky.
If I posted on facebook that I was heavily into research that hoped to eradicate cancer, I'd almost certainly recieve nothing but support.
But if I were to post that I saw aging as a disease and was heavily into research to tackle it, the reaction would be far more mixed, likely involving a few 'LOL' emojis and people wondering if I'd lost the plot. Many would claim it simply can't be done. Some would say it shouldn't be done.
Had you asked me a few months ago what the biggest issue facing humankind was, I would have ummed and arred and probably listed half a dozen issues that I thought merited attention. But now, if there were one issue I could click my fingers and magically cure, it would be the problem of aging.
The reason I wouldn't have said so earlier is not because I didn't recognise it was a terrible thing, but because I never gave serious thought to the idea that we could do anything about it. As Sinclair puts it 'we didn't just throw in the towel before the fight. We never realised there was a fight to be had'.
Now that I am thinking about it, much of the socio-political commentary articles, Youtube etc that I used to take an interest in all seem a bit trivial by comparison.
But once your perception switches from seeing aging as an inevitability to be endured to instead a problem to be solved, then you suddenly start to feel very frustrated with the comparitive lack of focus and funding that the problem is recieving. Public funding is miniscule, or often absent altogether, when compared to the attention given to other diseases. As Ingemar Patrick Linden notes 'The National Institutes of Health spent less than one percent of its $43 billion budget for the fiscal year of 2021 on the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Aging Biology. When you visit the division’s webpage you find that their mission statement carefully omits any mention of the possibility of slowing down the aging process.'
Things have been changing in recent years. Saudi Arabia recently announced it would be putting a billion into anti-aging research a year.
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/saudi-arabia/2023/11/29/Saudi-s-billion-dollar-Hevolution-Global-fight-against-aging-at-inaugural-summit
Now there's a lot not to like about Saudi Arabia, but on this I'm totally behind them. It's an infinitely better use of their money than the vanity mega-structures that they've so far been unable to even finish. A billion may sound like a lot to you or I, but compare it to the USA's annual military budget of over 800 per billion per a year, and you realise how much more it could be if the world really got behind this.
A number of tech billionaires are also funding anti-aging research, often to be greeted by sneering comments. 'Huh, why do all these tech billionaires want to live forever'. Dude, it's not just billionaires that don't want to grow old and die, it's most of us. These are simply the people who have the money to invest in it. And I wish them the best of luck. Not because I'm particuarly enamoured with the individuals involved. I don't care about the lives of billionaires any more or less than anyone else on this planet. But if they're successful in doing it then that means it can be done, and the knowledge of how to do it will then go on to benefit everyone else.
I've been thinking a lot of the rhetoic of the more extreme end of the climate change movement, where it's framed as an existential threat to the whole species. "How dare you, you've stolen my future" is the quote that everyone will recognise. That always struck me as hyperbolic. For middle class Scandinavian teenagers, the impact of climate change on their lives is likely to be negligable. For poorer people in some of the hotter parts of the world, the effects will be more noticable, though even then I think the upwards trend towards higher living standards and health the world over will still continue. Climate change is a thing, but it's far from a literally going to kill us all thing.
But you know what's going to steal all of our futures? Aging. With regards to funding longevity research, we can honestly say, without a shred of exaggeration, that "if you don't address this problem now we are literally all going to die".
If money being thrown at a problem automatically translated to progress being made I would be outside whatever government body was most likely to fund this kind of research, holding a sign and screaming my head off. But ultimately we can never know when and where the breakthroughs needed will come. In something as messy as biological research, there will inevitably be disappointments and deadends. But the fact that numerous techniques have already been proven to slow aging in mice, and even reverse it completely in cells, shows that we almost certainly have far more progress to be made if the funding is avaliable. It's a safe bet to say that the more time, money and effort is poured into this now, the quicker those breakthroughs and treatments will arrive. I have heard the estimate 'a hundred billion to cure aging'. There's no way of knowing for now how accurate that number might be, but even if it costs a hundred times that the results would still be an absolute bargain for the suffering and death it would save future generations from.
I think this is an issue that deserves at least as much media and government attention as anything else that makes the news. It's a poor politician these days who doesn't have a soundbite ready when quizzed on environmental issues. But ask them about longevity research and the result would likely be blank stares and "what's that?"
Some in the longevity space talk about a 'moonshot' or 'Manhattan project' for longevity, where a country, or preferably the world at large, goes all in on trying to find a way to treat it.
Just look at what drastic measures humanity took to combat Covid 19, a disease with a fatality rate of around 1%. As one commentator put it 'Covid kills less than 1% of people and everyone loses their shit. Aging kills 100% and no one gives a shit'.
Even at the peak of covid deaths, deaths from other age related causes were still higher. Infact, even most covid deaths could be attributed to 'age related deaths' as the disease is far more dangerous in the elderly. Cure aging and covid would not have had nearly the death toll that it did.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have taken serious measures to combat Covid 19. But I will say it's utterly nonsensical to be deeply worried about covid but uninterested in the potential of longevity research.
Even if the breakthroughs arrive too late to give our generation any real benefit, then the decisions made now could make the difference between the treatements being made ready in time for our children (myself and most of my readers don't have our own kids, but you get the idea) or our grandchildren. The rate at which this research takes place means the difference for literally billions of lives.
Technology can move at a breakneck speed when humans have the motivation to do so. From the Wright brother's first flight (Dec 17th, 1903) to the first men to set foot on the moon (July 20th, 1969) was a mere sixty five and a half years, both events well within the lifetimes of many individuals. How fast could longevity research move if we really went all in on it? It may sound like a fantasy to most now, but for the vast majority of history flying was also an impossible dream. Now millions of people do it every day.
Even if humanity fails to achieve the goal of age reversal medication, a partial victory against aging would still be a huge improvement over where we are now. A treatment that gives us only an average of five more years of healthy living may not be the anti-aging pill we were ultimately hoping for, but it's still an enourmous achievement, one equivalent to wiping out both cancer and heart disease.
Many of the treatments (especially the anti-senescents that target senescent cells) being discussed in Ageless are first being trialled to target specific aging related diseases such as arthritis and Alzheimer's, before likely being extended to a general anti-aging treatments if those go successfully. Even though true antiaging medication probably remains some decades and billions of dollars away, every step towards that ultimate end goal still yields valuable breakthroughs that benefit people suffering from disease.
I'm convinced that anti-aging treatments will arrive eventually, and when they do death due to aging will be regarded as just as tragic and avoidable as death from crime or accident. Future generations will pity us, and be astounded that we didn't put more effort into eradicating aging to begin with.
I can't imagine any better feeling than realizing that an antiaging treatment was working so that I no longer had to age, and could even be rejuvinated back to state comparable to my mid twenties. Sometimes when hiking I pause, take in the wonderful scenery I'm surrounded by, and try to imagine it. It's a hard thing to truly picture, but I suspect that if the moment ever came the world would seem so much vaster and filled with opportunity.
There's a Bible verse (1 Corinthians 15:26) that I recall from my Jehovah's Witness days.
'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death'. We were taught that in the paradise future people would no longer die of old age. I may no longer believe in a god that can achieve that, but in his absence, perhaps humans will. I believe that we will continue on an upward climb of moral and technological progress. I doubt we'll ever achieve a true utopia, but I don't need one. I have only one fear about the future. That I won't live to see it.
In many ways I've been born into a fantastic time to be alive. Communication to anywhere else on the planet is instantaneous, as is access to most of the world's information. I take for granted medical advances that most of humanity has had to suffer without, and will likely have a longer life than had I been born a century or two back. Air travel allows me to be at most of the worlds major cities within 24 hours, and all but the most remote places on Earth within 48 hours.
But in just a century or two people will have the chance to live not only better lives still, but far longer ones.
We're the generation that has been born late enough to see the beginning of the longevity revolution and realise where it is ultimately headed, but too early to derive much benefit from it. I'm glad for the advances that future generations will live to see, but from a purely personal perspective, knowing what I'll likely miss out on is also a bit tragic.
What to do in the meantime? I have no money or expertise to lend to the cause, so I'll just keep one keen eye on the developments and try to stay healthy and live long on the off chance that some of them arrive in time.
At the risk of sounding vain, I look younger than I am. I'm forty two, but people nearly always underguess my age by quite a few years. It's gotten to the point where I'm surprised if someone's not surprised when they find out my age!
I read that people who look young actually are often biologically younger as well, so I'm hoping that's true. I haven't taken a biological age test, but I am curious about doing so.
I'll try to keep up with the exercise. I've got a lot of green space nearby that's ideal for a stroll. I also have gym membership until the end of October, though as my gym is now twenty minutes walk away rather than twenty seconds, I'm not going nearly as often.
The doctor recomended that I avoid fatty foods, which I'm attempting to do. My weight has reduced very slightly since I was first diagnosed with high cholesterol, but I'm hoping to get it down further to just under 70Kg. It's also been widely suggested that fasting is also good for longevity. But I'm weak willed and there are too many avaliable snacks both at home and at work!
I was curious about the supposed benefits of cold showers. It turns out that our new homes water heater does a terrible job of heating the bathroom next to our bedroom that I usually use. So I have ended up having very quick cold showers anyway! Which as I used to spend far too long luxuriating in the shower, is not be a bad thing for time management either.
If at the end of the day none of this longevity stuff materializes in time, then keeping in good health is still a positive regardless of what helped motivate me to do so. I'll try to live life so if these seventy or eighty odd years are all I've got I'll have still lived my best life. But if anything comes along to extend that, fantastic!
If I posted on facebook that I was heavily into research that hoped to eradicate cancer, I'd almost certainly recieve nothing but support.
But if I were to post that I saw aging as a disease and was heavily into research to tackle it, the reaction would be far more mixed, likely involving a few 'LOL' emojis and people wondering if I'd lost the plot. Many would claim it simply can't be done. Some would say it shouldn't be done.
Had you asked me a few months ago what the biggest issue facing humankind was, I would have ummed and arred and probably listed half a dozen issues that I thought merited attention. But now, if there were one issue I could click my fingers and magically cure, it would be the problem of aging.
The reason I wouldn't have said so earlier is not because I didn't recognise it was a terrible thing, but because I never gave serious thought to the idea that we could do anything about it. As Sinclair puts it 'we didn't just throw in the towel before the fight. We never realised there was a fight to be had'.
Now that I am thinking about it, much of the socio-political commentary articles, Youtube etc that I used to take an interest in all seem a bit trivial by comparison.
But once your perception switches from seeing aging as an inevitability to be endured to instead a problem to be solved, then you suddenly start to feel very frustrated with the comparitive lack of focus and funding that the problem is recieving. Public funding is miniscule, or often absent altogether, when compared to the attention given to other diseases. As Ingemar Patrick Linden notes 'The National Institutes of Health spent less than one percent of its $43 billion budget for the fiscal year of 2021 on the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Aging Biology. When you visit the division’s webpage you find that their mission statement carefully omits any mention of the possibility of slowing down the aging process.'
Things have been changing in recent years. Saudi Arabia recently announced it would be putting a billion into anti-aging research a year.
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/saudi-arabia/2023/11/29/Saudi-s-billion-dollar-Hevolution-Global-fight-against-aging-at-inaugural-summit
Now there's a lot not to like about Saudi Arabia, but on this I'm totally behind them. It's an infinitely better use of their money than the vanity mega-structures that they've so far been unable to even finish. A billion may sound like a lot to you or I, but compare it to the USA's annual military budget of over 800 per billion per a year, and you realise how much more it could be if the world really got behind this.
A number of tech billionaires are also funding anti-aging research, often to be greeted by sneering comments. 'Huh, why do all these tech billionaires want to live forever'. Dude, it's not just billionaires that don't want to grow old and die, it's most of us. These are simply the people who have the money to invest in it. And I wish them the best of luck. Not because I'm particuarly enamoured with the individuals involved. I don't care about the lives of billionaires any more or less than anyone else on this planet. But if they're successful in doing it then that means it can be done, and the knowledge of how to do it will then go on to benefit everyone else.
I've been thinking a lot of the rhetoic of the more extreme end of the climate change movement, where it's framed as an existential threat to the whole species. "How dare you, you've stolen my future" is the quote that everyone will recognise. That always struck me as hyperbolic. For middle class Scandinavian teenagers, the impact of climate change on their lives is likely to be negligable. For poorer people in some of the hotter parts of the world, the effects will be more noticable, though even then I think the upwards trend towards higher living standards and health the world over will still continue. Climate change is a thing, but it's far from a literally going to kill us all thing.
But you know what's going to steal all of our futures? Aging. With regards to funding longevity research, we can honestly say, without a shred of exaggeration, that "if you don't address this problem now we are literally all going to die".
If money being thrown at a problem automatically translated to progress being made I would be outside whatever government body was most likely to fund this kind of research, holding a sign and screaming my head off. But ultimately we can never know when and where the breakthroughs needed will come. In something as messy as biological research, there will inevitably be disappointments and deadends. But the fact that numerous techniques have already been proven to slow aging in mice, and even reverse it completely in cells, shows that we almost certainly have far more progress to be made if the funding is avaliable. It's a safe bet to say that the more time, money and effort is poured into this now, the quicker those breakthroughs and treatments will arrive. I have heard the estimate 'a hundred billion to cure aging'. There's no way of knowing for now how accurate that number might be, but even if it costs a hundred times that the results would still be an absolute bargain for the suffering and death it would save future generations from.
I think this is an issue that deserves at least as much media and government attention as anything else that makes the news. It's a poor politician these days who doesn't have a soundbite ready when quizzed on environmental issues. But ask them about longevity research and the result would likely be blank stares and "what's that?"
Some in the longevity space talk about a 'moonshot' or 'Manhattan project' for longevity, where a country, or preferably the world at large, goes all in on trying to find a way to treat it.
Just look at what drastic measures humanity took to combat Covid 19, a disease with a fatality rate of around 1%. As one commentator put it 'Covid kills less than 1% of people and everyone loses their shit. Aging kills 100% and no one gives a shit'.
Even at the peak of covid deaths, deaths from other age related causes were still higher. Infact, even most covid deaths could be attributed to 'age related deaths' as the disease is far more dangerous in the elderly. Cure aging and covid would not have had nearly the death toll that it did.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have taken serious measures to combat Covid 19. But I will say it's utterly nonsensical to be deeply worried about covid but uninterested in the potential of longevity research.
Even if the breakthroughs arrive too late to give our generation any real benefit, then the decisions made now could make the difference between the treatements being made ready in time for our children (myself and most of my readers don't have our own kids, but you get the idea) or our grandchildren. The rate at which this research takes place means the difference for literally billions of lives.
Technology can move at a breakneck speed when humans have the motivation to do so. From the Wright brother's first flight (Dec 17th, 1903) to the first men to set foot on the moon (July 20th, 1969) was a mere sixty five and a half years, both events well within the lifetimes of many individuals. How fast could longevity research move if we really went all in on it? It may sound like a fantasy to most now, but for the vast majority of history flying was also an impossible dream. Now millions of people do it every day.
Even if humanity fails to achieve the goal of age reversal medication, a partial victory against aging would still be a huge improvement over where we are now. A treatment that gives us only an average of five more years of healthy living may not be the anti-aging pill we were ultimately hoping for, but it's still an enourmous achievement, one equivalent to wiping out both cancer and heart disease.
Many of the treatments (especially the anti-senescents that target senescent cells) being discussed in Ageless are first being trialled to target specific aging related diseases such as arthritis and Alzheimer's, before likely being extended to a general anti-aging treatments if those go successfully. Even though true antiaging medication probably remains some decades and billions of dollars away, every step towards that ultimate end goal still yields valuable breakthroughs that benefit people suffering from disease.
I'm convinced that anti-aging treatments will arrive eventually, and when they do death due to aging will be regarded as just as tragic and avoidable as death from crime or accident. Future generations will pity us, and be astounded that we didn't put more effort into eradicating aging to begin with.
I can't imagine any better feeling than realizing that an antiaging treatment was working so that I no longer had to age, and could even be rejuvinated back to state comparable to my mid twenties. Sometimes when hiking I pause, take in the wonderful scenery I'm surrounded by, and try to imagine it. It's a hard thing to truly picture, but I suspect that if the moment ever came the world would seem so much vaster and filled with opportunity.
There's a Bible verse (1 Corinthians 15:26) that I recall from my Jehovah's Witness days.
'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death'. We were taught that in the paradise future people would no longer die of old age. I may no longer believe in a god that can achieve that, but in his absence, perhaps humans will. I believe that we will continue on an upward climb of moral and technological progress. I doubt we'll ever achieve a true utopia, but I don't need one. I have only one fear about the future. That I won't live to see it.
In many ways I've been born into a fantastic time to be alive. Communication to anywhere else on the planet is instantaneous, as is access to most of the world's information. I take for granted medical advances that most of humanity has had to suffer without, and will likely have a longer life than had I been born a century or two back. Air travel allows me to be at most of the worlds major cities within 24 hours, and all but the most remote places on Earth within 48 hours.
But in just a century or two people will have the chance to live not only better lives still, but far longer ones.
We're the generation that has been born late enough to see the beginning of the longevity revolution and realise where it is ultimately headed, but too early to derive much benefit from it. I'm glad for the advances that future generations will live to see, but from a purely personal perspective, knowing what I'll likely miss out on is also a bit tragic.
What to do in the meantime? I have no money or expertise to lend to the cause, so I'll just keep one keen eye on the developments and try to stay healthy and live long on the off chance that some of them arrive in time.
At the risk of sounding vain, I look younger than I am. I'm forty two, but people nearly always underguess my age by quite a few years. It's gotten to the point where I'm surprised if someone's not surprised when they find out my age!
I read that people who look young actually are often biologically younger as well, so I'm hoping that's true. I haven't taken a biological age test, but I am curious about doing so.
I'll try to keep up with the exercise. I've got a lot of green space nearby that's ideal for a stroll. I also have gym membership until the end of October, though as my gym is now twenty minutes walk away rather than twenty seconds, I'm not going nearly as often.
The doctor recomended that I avoid fatty foods, which I'm attempting to do. My weight has reduced very slightly since I was first diagnosed with high cholesterol, but I'm hoping to get it down further to just under 70Kg. It's also been widely suggested that fasting is also good for longevity. But I'm weak willed and there are too many avaliable snacks both at home and at work!
I was curious about the supposed benefits of cold showers. It turns out that our new homes water heater does a terrible job of heating the bathroom next to our bedroom that I usually use. So I have ended up having very quick cold showers anyway! Which as I used to spend far too long luxuriating in the shower, is not be a bad thing for time management either.
If at the end of the day none of this longevity stuff materializes in time, then keeping in good health is still a positive regardless of what helped motivate me to do so. I'll try to live life so if these seventy or eighty odd years are all I've got I'll have still lived my best life. But if anything comes along to extend that, fantastic!