State of the Art

State of the Art

Longevity Ecosystems for the 21st and 22nd Centuries

Prologue

Fathering radical life extension studies is a monumental and extremely important task for me. I have explored ideas concerning radical life extension for 15 years, following the tragic death of a classmate and track team member. Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil were my “cyber-mentors” throughout the process of learning about the topic. De Grey helped me understand cellular aging, and Kurzweil helped me understand the exponential growth of technology. These technical experts weren’t the only to offer guidance. I learned quite a lot from Ernest Becker’s 20th century ideas about mortality salience and how death is so central to human civilization. Various professors, journalists, freelance video bloggers, and others also introduced me to transhumanism, the Kardashev scale, and interesting ideas about population control. Even after completing my education at Emory University, conducting neuroscience experiments at some of the nation's most reputable laboratories, co-teaching some biology courses, and learning other interesting, futurist ideas in the field of biology; I still kept my desire to study radical life extension in spite of it not even being a formal field. Thus, the following work is a continuation of my attempt to fully establish the field of radical life extension studies.

Introduction

Francis Bacon believed that the goal of scientific inquiry was the “discovery of all operations and possibilities of operations from immortality, if it were possible, to the meanest mechanical practice (Bacon, 1603). Simply, he thought civilization's ultimate goal was to achieve immortal life with science and technology. Today, loose and exciting versions of this goal have lived on in Western scholarship, but that thrill has been met with much skepticism. For instance, Ray Kurzweil (2024) believes that artificial intelligence will defeat degenerative diseases “this decade” and “radical life extension is close at hand” given Moore’s Law, but Demitrius et al. (2024) believe that radical life extension is “implausible” this century because of current mortality trends.

Still, both believers and skeptics of radical life extension fail to formalize the study of radical life extension as an idea and practice itself into a discipline. Though scholars clearly understand the difference between an immortal life and an indefinite life, are aware of the self-defining nature of the phrase “radical life extension”, and know that achieving radical life extension will obviously be an interdisciplinary field; no one, besides me, has proposed to establish an entire field (with its own theories, methods, and applications) called “radical life extension studies”.

At any rate, we return to Bacon's view on immortality being the "terminus" of science. Unlike math, physics, chemistry, ecology, biology, psychology, economics, sociology, and political science, for instance, radical life extension seems to have a hierarchically bidirectional relationship with every field of human scientific inquiry. Radical life extension is virtually the ultimate goal of all of those fields, yet radical life extension studies depend on every one of those fields’ insights to advance. Physics doesn't depend on sociology though sociology is mildly useful to physics. Chemistry doesn't depend on political science in the same way. Radical life extension transcends the standard physics to chemistry to biology (so on and so forth) hierarchy. The word “virtually” is used here because theoretically practitioners and theorists in those fields could not want their advances to better humanity, or lifeforms, or the planet, but rather the opposite– destroy.

Theoretical Framework for T.J. Greer Theory of Radical Life Extension

T.J. Greer's First Postulate: Longevity will likely be rooted in biomedical advances.

T.J. Greer's Second Postulate: Indefinite lifespans will likely be rooted in supply chain management and conflict resolution in a longevity ecosystem.

T.J.'s Greer Third Postulate: No rational person with a normally functioning prefrontal cortex and amygdala would not want to live a radically longer life in some format, even if spiritual, unless experiencing pain, lacking psychological equanimity ie. grieving, or under the influence of a mind-alternating substance.

In laying the framework for Radical Life Extension Studies, or "Longevity Studies", first it is significant to note that one's personal idea of what constitutes a radically long life is subjective. 250 years may not be adequate for one scholar and 130 years may be praiseworthy for another. Second, an indefinite lifespan is not the same as an immortal lifespan. Yet still both are under the umbrella of a "radically longer life". Finally, it is clear that every academic field is rooted in a human need to deny and avoid death and death anxiety. Failure in medicine results in death. Failure in economics results in dehydration and starvation leading to death. Failure in political science results in death via war and domestic violence, and so on and so forth. Terror management theory provides solid empirical support for Ernest Becker's work on death anxiety.

At any rate, it appears that an ecological framework will form the core of radical life extension studies theory. Envision a "longevity ecosystem".

Ecosystems are characterized by feedback loops, adaptation, birth, entropy, and death. Inorganic, organic, technological, psychological, and sociological materials and forces are all interwoven into the tapestry of the Earth, solar system, galaxy, and universe. Radical life extension studies cannot and will not reach an 'ideal' state without being grounded in a solid understanding of how these materials and forces interact in a way that allows for the sustainment of radically long human lives.

Population biology and resource management should take precedence before engineering, computer science, biomedical science, surgery, and neuroscience. However, this is more of a scholarly opinion than an appeal to some sort of unreasonable dogmatic philosophy of science. It is very likely that people will be living radically longer lives before the end of the century via organ transplants and anti-aging therapies, for instance, way before humans develop the necessary infrastructure to resist overpopulation, climate disasters, and senseless wars.

Moreover, another field that will be crucial in helping develop a theory of radical life extension studies will be supply chain management.

Finally, insights from anthropolgy will serve a key role. Human beings living radically longer lives will likely change the nature of humanity. Surely, culture will likely be changed significantly and ideas concerning dignity, entertainment, and divinity will likely be focal points for those in radical life extension studies. To me, it appears one of the "hot topics" of the future will be "What separates human beings from animals?" I believe understanding that distinction will have major effects on our collective global psychology as we take on such a monumentous journey towards a human longevity ecosystem.

Google Trends Study and Correlation Analysis Results

I used Google Trends to see which countries have had the most people search for the phrase "anti-aging" over the last 20 years. I then conducted a correlation analysis between the Google Trends Interest Rate (1 to 100) and GDP, median income, average age of living population, average age of death, and education levels in each of the top 35 to 60 countries on the list. Overall, it appears interest in "anti-aging" is universal. Wealth, age, and education don't appear to correlate in any significant way with interest in anti-aging. This further supports Ernest Becker's ideas of mortality salience being universal. All datasets came from verifiable government databases.

Conclusion

Ending aging with cellular therapy, curing all known diseases with nanotechnology, practicing tissue engineering, biomedically engineering artificial organs, transplanting stem cells, eliminating trauma with artificial intelligence, building ecologically sustainable communities and nations, practicing cryogenics, using biotechnology to eliminate death from medical events like heart attack and stroke, mastering supply chain management and conflict resolution all make radical life extension a realistic goal for this century, and a very realistic goal for the next. Pearson correlation coefficients for each of these variables averaged about 0.23 with the highest being 0.36 and the lowest being 0.13. Below are some images of the Google Trends Results, which readers may find interesting to examine.

Peace ought to be the wave of the future. War ought to be a spectre of the past. Death ought to be a distant collective memory. Longevity ought to be the daydream of tomorrow.

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***Note: The implausibility of radical life extension article is oddly poor quality to be published in an academic publication like Nature. It's findings are irrelevant and. some strange form of the moving the goal post logical fallacy. Then, the authors somehow conclude "radical life extension will be possible with radical life extension", a type of circular reasoning that is perplexing to say the least. I read this article about 6 months ago and thought it was strange the leading article on the topic used current mortality rates to judge a biomedical idea that mostly depends on technological advances, which are exponential and highly disruptive in nature.***

Works Cited

Kurzweil R, The Singularity is Near

DeGrey, Ending Aging

Demitrius et al., The Implausibility of Radical Life Extension

Bacon, F, Valerius Terminus

Sheldon et al., Terror Management Theory

Becker, E., The Denial of Death

Comte, Positive Philosophy

N Dragojlovic, "Canadians' support for radical life extension resulting from advances in regenerative medicine", Journal of Aging Studies