Scenarios for the future of healthy life extension
Great presentation David.
The one critical aspect you didn’t raise, is on the logic of life extension (your page 43).
If you think about it from a “cell’s eye” view, then all cellular life alive today is part of an unbroken continuum of cellular life. We are all 4 billion years old in a cellular sense.
Sure some cells die, and some change, and every cell must carry code to allow it the possibility of living for billions of years. We just need to understand that code, and how it has been modified to create the bodies and brains that are us.
Indefinite life is the cellular default setting.
When I had that realisation in 1974, I knew that part of living a very long time would be solved, it was relatively simple in a sense.
The really tricky part is dealing to all the other risk factors that exist in living.
Once you start to seriously consider the possibility of living for thousands of years, the list of risk factors that are likely to be significant grows quite large.
They have been my focus for most of the last 42 years, and I am cautiously optimistic that they can all be reduced to a level of risk even very long lived individuals are willing to accept.
It is all coming together, and the idea of money does now seem to be the single greatest risk factor. We need to disinvent it – soon.
