Living Forever? Ask Aubrey de Grey.Just got home from healthy shopping (yes, I want to live as long as possible, too) and heard a discussion that alluded to the theories of Aubrey de Grey (1) on the expansion of life to 1000 years or more. Not as an old fart, but rejuvenated to age of about 30, there to stay indefinitely. de Grey has a Ph.D. (not earned) for his work. He has his own foundation, first named the Methuselah Foundation, and now Sens (for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) where he is employed as the director and researcher into aging.
The support for Sens is very rich people who hope to live a very long time. The rest of us? We get the ‘trickle down” benefits. The really poor people? They get to take away the garbage, eat bugs and a bit of rice and kill each other in ethnic and religious conflict, like they do now. Talk about a Utopian world. An over class that lives forever and an underclass that does all the work. And way too many people for sustainability of good old earth.
Now don’t get me wrong here. I would love a few more decades of active life. Maybe even 3 more. Medicine is going that direction now, and I may be able to catch a ride. The world cannot support an entire population that lives forever. Nonsense.
So let’s keep medicine going on helping treat chronic diseases of the aging population while at the same time finding cures or preventions for all the rest of the diseases that kill us. Ooops. That leads to more population, doesn’t it? Bugger.
1. http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-vision_reflections/eternal_3237.jsp
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