Live more and live better, but above all live more. Longevity is the obsession of many, including some “futurologists” who believe that eternal life (understood as the end of deaths due to natural cause) is close.
Objective 2029. As close as This same decade. Before even its end, to be exact. That is the forecast of Google and “futuristic” Ray Kurzweil’s exingender. This was what I pointed out a few months ago In an interview For the company Bessemer Venture Partners. This raises some doubts, as this arguments based on this notion and if we are close to getting out of death indefinitely.
In the interview, Kurzweil expressed it as follows: “Science advances and is healing several diseases. You are receiving on average about four months a year (…) however, scientific research is also in an exponential curve. By 2029, you will have received a whole year account. So you lose a year, but you receive a year back. ”
“Exhaust speed ”. Kurzweil’s idea revolves around Longevity escape speed concept. In physics, the exhaust speed is a speed that allows us to counteract the gravitational pull of a body and boost away from it thanks to the simple inertia. In this context, the escape speed means something different, which does not lead us to escape something physical but to get away from death from death.
The idea is simple, and that is that the increase in life expectancy grows exponentially until it reaches a point where this life expectancy increases in more than a year. Thanks to advances in medicine and other fields, life expectancy has been significantly increasing throughout the world, but, at least for now, indefinitely prolong our life expectancy looks like a simple chimera.
Arguments For a short time, if we trust the Kurzweil arguments. The main argument is the rapid advance of contemporary medicine. Medical advances have allowed us to overcome numerous infectious diseases through treatments and vaccines. Kurzweil himself puts as an example the speed with which the Covid vaccine (obviating perhaps the titanic development effort, which was also based on previous works in immunization and genetic).
However, it is also true that we continue advancing a lot in the fight against diseases such as cancers. We are even close to Replicate technology which gave us the Covid vaccine in the fight against some tumors. On the other hand, diseases closely linked to age such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson continue to be a challenge for scientists who still seek to understand the causes of these disorders to combat them effectively.
Not just health. The increase in life expectancy is not only limited to the health field. Our world is safer than it was in the past. Transport is safer than a few decades ago, less frequent wars, and violent crimes occur to a lesser extent. These factors have also contributed to the increase in life expectancy and is likely (not sure) to continue doing it in the future.
Not so fast. There are those who believe that we will reach the exhaust speed soon without reaching Kurzweil’s optimism. For example, George Church, a genetic expert at Harvard University that indicated that, perhaps throughout our lives, we can reach this evolutionary point. A little more optimistic than Church, Aubrey de Gray, president of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, proposes that it will be throughout the 2030s when we reach it.
Will it arrive? There are many reasons to be skeptics, not only with the ambitious Kurzweil agenda, but with the very concept of escape speed of longevity. As we indicated above, there are reasons for some skepticism. For example, the fact that advances in a disease do not imply advances in others.
Even cancer is so varied that it implies that, while some are perfectly treatable, others still represent a huge threat to our life. Infectious diseases represent another stumbling block: although we had advanced a lot in the creation of vaccines and antibiotics, the latter are losing efficacy by leaps and bounds before the arrival of the “superbacteria.”
Neurodegenerative diseases also remind us that not only just dodge death, while we do not improve our quality of life in the last stages of our life, these improvements will be little.
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Image | Harli Marten
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