Why you should be working on living forever

I am afraid of death. I’m not old or sick or in a particularly dangerous situation, I just don’t like how short human lives are. Fortunately, I see no reason why humans couldn’t live forever, or at least indefinitely long. People really underestimate how long forever and I would actually wager that would be much worse than living for our given 80 years but that’s a much more philosophical discussion than this will be. What I want to say is that given what we know about biology in general, we have it in our collective power to start taking much bigger steps toward curing aging than we currently are. I use the word “curing” deliberately here. I see age as a degenerative genetic disease or combination thereof. From birth until about 30 we are growing and developing while 30 to death we are aging. I see no reason to preserve the aging component. There are animals that age much slower than us, some don’t age at all as we experience it. They are not magic, we should be able to learn what causes us to age and what causes the speed to be different between species. Once we know what causes it, we should be able to fix it, to stop whatever causes all the undesirable degeneration that happens to the body after 30.

There are several avenues of approach that could be fruitful in curing aging. I would very much like to do a much deeper dive on all of these, these are mostly my uncited thoughts you could use as a starting point should they strike you as interesting. My overly simplistic separation is going to be the mostly biological processes and the mostly physical processes. The border is fuzzy but the former is stuff that repairs the body, replaces damaged components, lets the body fix itself, and similar stuff. The latter is mostly just various methods of mind uploading.

Genetic modification is very promising but also very challenging. One of the reasons that humans and most other animals die of old age is that cells stop dividing after a certain number of times. After a while, we physically can’t repair damage or keep up with the regular functions of our own body. Formally, this is called Hayflick limit although I am sure there is an immense level of detail I have glossed over. Anyway, if we turn this off, we may be able to have our cells continue doing their job indefinitely. Unfortunately, we would likely also get cancer as this limit restricts the uncontrolled growth of cancer. Still, there are clearly some animals that don’t experience aging in the same way people do, most famously are lobsters and the very aptly named immortal jellyfish. So, there is hope that with adequate genetic modification we could keep people young forever. The deepest dive I went on in this particular area was the book Ending Aging by Aubrey DeGrey. It features a lot of very specific challenges in ending aging at a cellular level. Related, but in my mind, adjacent to all this is more like tricking the body into working without tampering with our own genetic code. After all, we generally don’t jump to genetic engineering when facing other diseases, why would aging be different? And we do already have all the genes necessary to keep our body working, maybe we can keep them on without resorting to directly editing the genome. One of the earliest and most clearly promising forms of this is parabiosis. Connecting the circulatory system of an old mouse to a young mouse causes the old mouse to age in reverse and the young mouse to age faster. That is a gross oversimplification of course but the idea is that certain chemicals in the young mouse's blood may be signaling the old mouse’s cells to begin repair or perhaps the young mouse is pulling double duty, keeping both healthy. If chemicals are causing the old mouse’s cells to behave differently, the standard paradigm of drug testing could be applicable. If the young mouse is doing maintenance on the old mouse, perhaps we could have continual transplants of lab grown organs or some sort of dialysis machine that offloads whatever work old cells can’t keep up with. This is all somewhat speculative and generalizes studies from mice to humans but I think it is a promising line of research. Crucially, it is also one that can be investigated without a very high level understanding of what we are actually doing. The method of direct genetic manipulation is quite hard but if exposure to young organs keeps people young then perhaps we simply need to master lab grown organs, an area of research rapidly progressing although this is mostly for traditional transplants and not aimed at life extension.

A bit stranger and further of a reach is mind uploading or some variant thereof. If we can scan the brain in cellular detail we may be able to use a computer to emulate the whole brain. I’ll be honest, the idea of this brings up a lot of philosophical discourse over what’s you and what’s just a copy. Personally, I think that if a computer replaced bits of your brain piece by piece slowly there is some continuity and it would count. After that, if you get copied and pasted between different computers, all bets are off. Whatever the case may be, once a person’s mind is in a computer there is no reason they wouldn’t be able to live forever. I’m obviously partial to the idea of imaging the brain while we’re alive but there is no reason the whole brain couldn’t be reconstructed after death. I shouldn’t say no reason, but if cryonics works I would be more confident in scanning the brain rather than thawing the body and bringing it back to life. Whatever the case may be in terms of personal identity and whether or not it's you, scanning the brain and emulating it is a technological challenge but we may actually be equipped to tackle. Scanning the brain is essentially a physics and computer science problem. How can we take enough images of high enough resolution to determine the properties of individual cells and stitch them together to see all the connections? After that, it’s a matter of an extremely high amount of computational power and you should have a brain. Alternatively, you could use all this information to build a new brain out of biological neurons if we had sufficient control over their individual properties.

Well, hopefully that made a modicum of sense and explained why I think the idea of curing aging is possible. So, why the hell aren’t we throwing everything we have at this? Honestly I’m not sure. Here I would like to motivate that the amount of effort we are putting in is not enough and that there is something of a cultural taboo around expressly discussing this. Some call this a pro-aging trace, that people will expressly defend the idea of aging as a positive aspect of human life. There is a fair bit of this, I don’t think the term would have caught on if people more entrenched in the field than I hadn’t routinely encountered these attitudes. People have even defended the idea of death to me which I still find truly bizarre. Still, for most people I think it is more an aging unaware daze. People don’t even consider the possibility that it is a field that they could go into. Some will rationalize post hoc (in my opinion that is what they are doing) when confronted about the problem of aging, but I really do think that many people just don’t think that it’s something they could go into. It just isn’t something that is widely publicized. Other problems, some of which are much more hopeless, attract attention by academics and in popular science. Quantum computing, fusion, and AI attract a lot of intelligent people and press but whether or not they will bear fruit in a timely manner remains to be seen. I honestly don’t know what is most hyped up in biology as my background is in physics, but I maintain that it isn’t anti aging research as I didn’t meet anyone in college who was interested in that as a career. I think that this should be the big flashy thing we hang our hat on. Not in a way to overhype and underdeliver, just in a way where the bright young minds currently in highschool are nudged into it when they start their careers.

So why am I actually writing this? I suffer no delusions that this is actually what will get the word out, but I have gone through a bit of a personal turning point in terms of career motivation. There are only a few reasons to have a job. The most obvious is money, everyone needs to put food on the table. Another is for personal satisfaction, a job that is enjoyable on a day to day basis or delays gratification but is worth the suffering in some sense. Lastly, there is some broader societal obligation. People feel that they ought to do good in the world even if that means that their own life is not maximally pleasurable. I think that there is a relatively large population that could be fulfilling the societal obligation niche without sacrificing the enjoyment from their job. Some people will always be focused on something that is not world changing but is personally satisfying. Many people don’t have the talent to contribute to anything world changing, I’m not sure that I do myself. Still, I can’t help but think that there are a lot of people that could contribute to anti-aging or other “big problems” that just aren’t because of personal or societal inertia. It’s no secret that a lot of people have a job they like but don’t love, or love for reasons other than the end product. I had an internship at GTRI. It was a good job, there were cool people and interesting discussions, but I wasn’t passionate about free space optical communication which is what I was working on. I think many people are in a spot like that, their effort could be directed toward a variety of projects without their day to day enjoyment being compromised. There are people truly passionate about their work and they ought not be pulled out of whatever they love. All this is to say, I took a long look at myself and wondered why I was not trying to work on something that actually mattered if the day to day enjoyment wasn’t going to go down if I picked that over some other career? Why would I do fun high energy physics when I could do fun neuroscience if the neuroscience had even a small chance of making a big difference? So it is with me, so it should be with many others. I don’t want people to think that I think anti-aging is the only noble goal out there. In fact, I don’t even think it is the most important, just the one that is most likely to affect me. I would say that addressing threats from nuclear weapons, space based threats, misaligned/misused AI, climate change, and pandemics are all worthy causes to devote one's life to as they could all pose real challenges to the whole species. Additionally, I cannot stress enough that nobody should make themselves miserable trying to work on these projects out of social obligation if they find them dreadfully boring or their skills just aren’t helpful. I just don’t want people to leave their talent on the table so to speak. Everytime some smart person gets a job they don’t particularly like that isn’t exceptionally important for not a great salary it is a tragedy though. I want as many happy humans aimed at the big problems as possible, this is my first toe in the water for that endeavor.

I’ve winged a fair bit about the lack of research and big projects in this area. First of all, I would be remiss in not mentioning SENS and the Human Brain Project. These are great and I will likely do a deep dive into both of these to give details on their progress and mission for my edification and for some small amount of attention being brought to them. Secondly, just because these projects exist does not mean that there is enough research or no taboo toward anti-aging. There are people in renewable energy research but that doesn’t mean we’re on track to ending climate change. So it is with climate change, so it is with anti-aging. And finally, nothing here is meant to be particularly revolutionary or novel. In fact, this is mostly off the cuff and largely opinionated. I’m not trying to undermine my own point, just that if this is interesting to you, you can and should go out and read more about it in great detail.