Immortality

Call me stupid, but I think our generations will be among the first ones to be immortal. Maybe not mine, maybe not the one of my children, but this will happen, and probably sooner than teletransportation. I am not saying either that we will all be immortal and that we will survive gunshots or terrible illnesses, but we will be able to counter the effects of aging… and from then, we will be probably able to cure more and more illnesses.

I was quite impressed a few years ago when I read about Aubrey de Grey, who let’s admit it looks like a crazy guy! His theory is that researchers have now identified the 7 types of damages that aging causes and that we can now focus on each of the to each theoretical immortality. Look at this video from Ted to learn a little bit more.

Does it still look crazy? Our life-expectancy is evolving in already evolving in a interesting way. When someone is 60, his got 23,53 years ahead of him, (he would die at about 83,53), but when he is 61, he as 22,71 years to live, so he would die at 83,71… Leave one more year, and you gain 0,18 years! If you take this at the first degree : the longer one lives, the longer he lives! Isn’t that immortality? Of course, there is actually a flow here, and I’ll let you find it, but the tendency is here: on average, every year which passes grants me with 0,33 years to live more [see this life expectancy table]. 50 years ago, it was probably way lower… and we can bet that this will somehow reach 1 at some point (or close enough to one, so that we can consider being immortal… at 0,9 we could probably live for centuries)

Anyway, this brings a lot of questions and raises a lot of political issues : how can we manage/share our “limited” resources forever? And I really wish I can be there to elaborate solutions and debate about it!