Time Magazine’s special issue on 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now promotes some great ideas such as light commuter rail, recycling empty suburban malls into libraries and town centers, and ecological intelligence. Idea Number Five is Amortality, engineering an end to aging.
5. Amortality
By CATHERINE MAYER
...Amortals don’t just dread extinction. They deny it. Ray Kurzweil encourages them to do so. Fantastic Voyage, which the futurist and cryonics enthusiast co-wrote with Terry Grossman, recommends a regimen to forestall aging so that adherents live long enough to take advantage of forthcoming “radical life-extending and life-enhancing technologies.” Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is toiling away at just such research in his laboratory. “We are in serious striking distance of stopping aging,” says De Grey, founder and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, which awards the Mprize to each successive research team that breaks the record for the life span of a mouse. It is “bleeding obvious,” he adds, that it is possible to extend the human life span indefinitely. “Most people take the view that aging is this natural thing that is going on independently of disease. That’s nonsense. The fact is that age-related diseases are age-related diseases because they’re the later stages of aging.”
...Notions of age-appropriate behavior will soon be relegated as firmly to the past as dentures and black-and-white television. “The important thing is not how many years have passed since you were born,” says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, “but where you are in your life, how you think about yourself and what you are able and willing to do.” If that doesn’t sound like a manifesto for revolution, it’s only because amortality has already revolutionized our attitudes toward age.
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