The main fighter against aging, who promises that the first immortal person has already been born, explained why the rich will not be able to live longer than the poor, and dictators – to rule forever
Aubrey de Gray is a British gerontologist and engineer and chairman of the SENS Foundation, which aims to completely defeat aging. De Gray claims that the first person to live a thousand years has already been born. At the same time, the scientist does not promise a magic pill for death – he adheres to a “strategy to achieve negligible aging.” Its meaning is to offer people at the age of temporary remedies for aging, allowing them to live another 10-20 years, living up to the next, radical breakthrough in gerontology, which will provide more advanced anti-aging technologies. As a result, in 50–100 years, the patient will be able to live to see the invention of a perfect aging therapy that will allow him to rejuvenate to the physical age of 20–30 years and remain there indefinitely.
— You often say that immortality is an engineering task. But in order to solve it, we need to have a completely different level of understanding of biology than now. Until we understand all the processes that occur in our body, we will not achieve this, right?
People often don’t understand the difference between science and technology. The task of technology is to effectively bypass the “white spots”. Yes, of course, we are always trying to find out more about the system we are going to work with (in this case, our body), but at the same time we are ready to use what we already know. What do we know about aging? That its cause is the accumulation of damage that occurs during the daily processes in the body. These damages are harmless as long as their volume does not exceed the level after which the body can no longer cope with them. We do not yet know what is the source of many of them, but we can understand what to do so that they do not lead to a fatal outcome.
– Effective anti-aging technologies, at least at the dawn of their development, will obviously be expensive. Won’t this widen the gap between the poor and the rich? After all, the latter will clearly turn into a healthier and much longer class.
– At first glance, there are many reasons for concern that social inequality will increase. People think so primarily because they project the picture that they see now into the future. Effective treatments today are most often out of reach for the poor, whether in the United States or in any developing country. But again, I think that everything will be different. Imagine what would happen if we had medicine in our hands that allows a person not to age and remain full of strength? In countries like the United States, no president could come to power unless he promised in advance that he would make it available to all. There are also economic reasons that would quickly reduce the prices of such medicine. Modern methods of treatment do not return the old, sick person to the number of those who work productively, contributing to the economy. They are just a kind of hole where the money goes. But, if medicine works to bring an elderly person back into society, it begins to quickly pay off – the number of specialists with serious experience is growing, the costs of nurses and social benefits are decreasing. The state benefits from all this.
“Let’s imagine that some dictator uses anti-aging technologies to live and rule forever, and his subjects will be forbidden to use them.
“I am sure that there will be no difference in the availability of these technologies between democracies and dictatorships. There is no doubt that the dictator can restrict the use of these technologies as he pleases, but the question is: what will he achieve by this? And how can his country survive? Any country that does not make anti-aging technology cheap will commit economic suicide. It is important that everyone understand this before there are really effective ways to combat aging. In the coming years, there will be an important shift in the minds of people: they realize that medicine can now offer them a completely different quality of life at any age, the sooner the better. And they will begin to demand from those who rule the country to support such research. And of course, we should not make decisions about how we develop technology by thinking about what might happen in any one country many years from now.
– Victory over aging does not mean that people will stop dying, because there will be car accidents, accidents, murders. Don’t you think that humanity will have to solve a lot of social problems before we can enjoy the fruits of eternal youth?
“I am absolutely sure that we do not need to solve all these problems before we start fighting aging. The fact is that the victory over aging will change the attitude of people to many of these problems. For example, now the auto insurance system works mainly to compensate for damage to cars, and not to reduce the number of fatal accidents. Subconsciously, people reason like this: why should I worry about getting into an accident, because sooner or later I will die anyway. As people begin to live much longer, they will begin to pay a very different attention to other causes of death, such as investing in the development of a system of self-driving cars that will reduce the risk of accidents to almost zero, or in the development of reliable vaccines against epidemics. And even in tracking the trajectories of asteroids so that one of them does not hit the Earth.
“One of the pretty crazy arguments against fighting aging is that it will lead to overpopulation. Why is it not?
— Oh yes, this is the most frequent argument I hear. Why don’t people worry about overpopulation when it comes to fighting serious diseases? But we are precisely engaged in the fact that we are going to save people from diseases that lead to death. Still, it’s a valid question. When we defeat all these diseases, the mortality rate will seriously fall, and this cannot but affect the demographics. Even now, the birth rate on the planet is more than twice the death rate. But we must remember that overpopulation is not a matter of a lack of habitable space: there is a lot of it.
– A number of scientists are going to develop other areas of the fight against death, for example, “digital immortality”, when a person’s personality will be loaded onto computer media.
– At the moment we have no way to determine whether this problem is at least theoretically solvable. Of course, the brain consists of elements that can indeed be copied onto a non-biological medium, and make a copy of our thinking organ, consisting, for example, of silicon “neurons”. But then everything is lost in the fog. Will this “brain” be one with our personality? Will he be conscious? No, it is much easier to achieve an unlimited duration of our ordinary life.
— And how do you feel about projects to preserve the bodies or heads of people at low temperatures?
— Cryonic projects are quite serious from a scientific point of view. But investors are not ready to invest in them, and this is understandable. So far, there is no way to put the human body in a vessel with liquid nitrogen without causing serious damage to it. Cryonicists are aware of this and hope that in the future there will be ways to repair this damage done to the organism to be “awakened”. The success of the whole undertaking depends on whether they appear. Will it be possible to revive those who have already been frozen? No one knows.
You can find the full version of the conversation with Aubrey de Grey on the Pro website at the link below.