End of aging: scientists predict 1,000-yr lifespan ahead

By Dick Pelletier

      

    Imagine playing football at age 200 with your great-great-great-great grandchildren, or boarding a spaceship to visit relatives on Mars. If life extension scientists achieve their goals, regardless of age, your "rejuvenated" body of the future will become ageless and remain forever young and healthy. You will live to experience all the sci-fi wonders predicted for the 21st century and beyond.

    A growing number of researchers around the world believe that eternal health and youth can be realized. Aging is a destructive biochemical event, experts say, and scientists are on the brink of developing interventions for all of its life-destroying processes.

    At a recent Singularity University conference, anti-aging guru Aubrey de Grey declared, "The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is alive today. Whether they realize it or not," he added, "barring accidents and suicide, many people alive today can expect to live for centuries."

    Though de Gray's statement may sound overly optimistic, a growing number of researchers, doctors, geneticists and nanotechnologists, many with impeccable academic credentials, agree that there is no scientific reason why aging can't be slowed, or even eliminated completely.

    "Over 100,000 people die every day from age-related diseases," de Grey says. But research ventures, some which are already in beginning stages today, promise to one day end this carnage.

    Forward-thinking scientists believe that the goal to end aging is technologically achievable, and it could be reached in time to benefit most people alive today. "I am working on immortality," says UC Irvine's Michael Rose, who has achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies.

"There are many different components of aging and we are chipping away at all of them," added Robert Freitas at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. "During the next two-to-four decades," Freitas claims, "the disease of aging will be cured."

    Futurist Ray Kurzweil, in his best-selling book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, confirmed that we are in early stages of an anti-aging revolution. "By 2020," he says, "biotech upgrades will add more than one year of life expectancy to our lives each year."

    Even the government has joined in the quest. Federal funding for "the biology of aging," excluding heart disease and cancer research, runs $2.4 billion per year, according to the NIH.

    However, not everyone agrees that curing aging is a good thing. Skeptics claim it will deplete resources, which will cause unrest and friction with undeveloped populations. Bioethicist Daniel Callahan believes that "There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death." But if this is true, advocates argue, then why do humans strive so hard to prolong their lives?

    Anti-aging enthusiasts believe that as our perspectives change and tomorrow's technologies advance exponentially, new solutions will emerge. Space colonization, along with improved resource management, will resolve all of the concerns associated with long life. Some reason that if the universe is so vast, and most of it unused, why not populate it?

    Anti-aging therapies promise to return older citizens to a more youthful form. The smart, sexy, strong years, once thought long lost for seniors, is about to be reclaimed as humanity evolves into this most exciting "ageless" era.

This article appeared in various print publications and on-line blogs. Comments always welcome.