Dying is overrated, so let’s talk about longevity escape velocity. LEV is the moment when the speed with which the life expectancy grows becomes greater than one year per year. This means that your anticipated remaining life span stays the same at every point in time, and you theoretically achieved immortality. I will give a brief introduction to why I believe we will achieve this, when we will achieve this and what are the consequences.
As with nearly everything that has to do with technological singularity we must look at an exponential graph first.
As you can see human life expectancy exploded in the last few years thanks to modern medicine and a safer environment. This graph is generous but you get the idea. Even if you take other data you get the same exponential growth everywhere. Most of it is thanks to medical breakthroughs like antibiotics, vaccines, and other core drugs. These drugs help against many diseases and viruses, but they do not stop aging itself. So why I am so confident that we will get there? I don’t want to take the success away from the biologist, but computer science plays a bigger part than ever before. Most symptoms of aging, like cancer, dying cells, and neurological diseases are related to the smallest building blocks of the human body: proteins. Proteins are complex molecular structures with complicated geometry and they have many different tasks in a cell. Finding out what they do and how they work was nearly impossible for the longest time. Until Deepmind came and presented Alphafold 2, an AI system that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. Alphafold 2 came out a year ago and we are slowly getting the first results from it. Alphafold 2 also helps to solve the mystery of aging itself. Deepmind is planning to use Alphafold 2, to build an entire simulated cell. This could not only reveal the last secrets of aging but also help to find a way to stop it. Deepmind is not the only Company, there are many more. This leads to my next point, why I think we will achieve immortality: Money. We have the technology, and we are getting the knowledge, but we also have the funding. The amount of money that is invested in this kind of research is stunning and not surprising at the same time. Every rich person not knowing what to do with their money uses it to try to live longer. We have Jeff Bezos, a google co-founder, and peter Thiel who founded Altos Lab with approx. 6 billion dollars, then we have the Saudis with a billion, and at the end Mark Zuckerberg with 3 billion in his foundation. These big names are just the tip of the iceberg. I would guess the overall amount is around 60-70 billion dollars, just to cure aging. The money that is spent in all the related areas like cancer or Alzheimer’s treatment is several times higher. And it works. There are already impressive results and tests that treat or stop symptoms of aging or even reverse the process. A famous example from last year was the result of David Sinclair at Harvard University who reversed the age of mice by turning cells back to their original state as stem cells.
These kinds of experiments are exciting, but need rigorous testing and finetuning to be applied to humans. The result, to stop aging will most likely not be a single pill, but several drugs and procedures combined. Another technology that is rapidly advancing, is organ printing. Instead of using the heart or liver of another person, it will be possible to print your own using your own stem cells. This will enable organ transplantation not only as a last resort but as a legitimate way to renew parts of your body. And then there is one last strategy that is used by the desperate to extend their lives if they are already dying: cryonics. Freezing a body shortly before or after their death to preserve the brain and/or body for a longer period until all needed technology is available. I think that this is mostly a scam since there is no known way to freeze a body in a way that preserves it for more than a few weeks. I would probably do it if I had that much money left when I die. You have nothing to lose, and it is probably the best thing that you could try at this point, but the chances that someone will think about you in 100 years and will spend all this time and effort into resurrecting you in case the company that was responsible for your freezing did not fuck up are low. So, I would prefer to stay alive until there are better ways to extend my life.
The core question is who will live long enough to live forever. I think that every person under 60 with a healthy body could be in reach of this goal. There are obviously a lot of conditions. First, we assume that this person has access to all the technology and knowledge that is required and has enough power and money to apply them without being stopped by a government or any other entity that wants to prevent immortality. Unsurprisingly, the people who spend a lot of money, come to mind. I will not discuss the ethical questions of immortality in this post, but I want to shortly address the problem of overpopulation and the imbalance in the world if some people can live forever and some do not. If we look at immortality isolated it looks really scary, but in the context of the technological singularity, it is not that much of a problem. The number of births is dropping dramatically in every country with enough education. More convenient and accessible ways to prevent high birth rates will reduce the number of newborn babies even more. According to the World Population Prospect report, the global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950 and we will peak at around 10 billion people in a few decades. And just because people can live forever, does not mean they do. Some people just do not want to, some will just die due to accidents, and some will get killed. Most people will probably not even have access to this technology, because they lack the money or whatever form of power is used in the future. I would guess that the average lifetime of a human will be around 200 years even if immortality would already be possible. The limited access to immortality sounds unfair and it is, I wish I could say that we will solve all conflicts and find a way to give every human access to whatever he wants, but I am not that optimistic. I believe that A.G.I. and other breakthroughs will solve many problems and the overall quality of life will improve, but at our core, we are all still apes throwing shit at each other and fighting for every piece of food even if there is an unlimited supply. I hope I am wrong, but as with all things that grow with exponential speed, our governments are not well prepared. When the first drugs for life extension are hitting the market in a few years, I bet the price will be high and the rules will be unclear and different in every part of the world. If some people live significantly longer than others, wealth and power will move towards longer-living people since they are able to invest time and money into larger projects that pay out after decades. The only hope is to replace humans in leading positions with A.I. systems to prevent them from gathering power over decades.
The last form and ultimate form of immortality is digital immortality. I add this at the end since it is not part of the LEV discussion, but I want to mention it. If you read my post about human-machine merging, you will know that parts of our brain will likely be digital in a few years. At this point, it could become possible to completely transfer your conciseness into the machine and live without a biological body. This idea is inspired by the Ship of Theseus paradox. The alternative would be to make a digital copy of your brain, which brings a lot of practical and ethical problems. The way of slowly merging with the machine circumvents this problem and gives us a way to become immortal in the best possible way. As digital entities, we would have the possibility to live as many lives as we want, in whatever form we want, and in whatever world we want. Most people will likely lose all interest in the real world that we could only experience through an artificial body, while our digital world allows us to experience our surroundings in whatever way we want. It is close to whatever people imagine when they talk about heaven, and I would not be surprised if biological people would try to talk to the digital ancestors like they pray today, but this time they would get an answer. It is hard to predict how exactly this will look like since this is probably already behind the event horizon of the technological singularity and at this point, everything I say is just guessed, but I like to dream about a future where there is no limit to what we can be and what we can experience.