Not Life Extension, Youth Extension

Ending death should be the highest priority of technology. We now know that reversing aging may be technically achievable.

When you deal with mechanical things like cars, you can calculate a failure rate for each part. Some cars are lucky and never experience any of those failures. One out of ten thousand cars may make it fifty years or one hundred years without being repaired, because the errors don’t accumulate. By random chance, a car might be able to last a long time.

Humans aren’t like that. There is a hard drop-off at 120 years old. If humans broke down like cars, some humans would live to a thousand. Instead, what happens is a predictable and coordinated process where people kind of go gray and get fat in similar ways as they age. Now, there’s a lot of evidence this is actually a triggered and coordinated event. Just like you’re genetically wired to grow from a baby into an adult, you’re genetically wired to die. Maybe we can unwire that. In fact, folks are working on it now.

Get life extension or die tryin’.

A better term might be “youth extension.” Many people think life extension would just mean more years as a senior citizen. But if we could keep you at twenty-something from a physiological standpoint, or even get you back there, that would be very different.

When I say, “I want life extension,” some people who support universal healthcare reply, “That's impractical. We can't do that.” They’re missing the point. Are we trying to extend the end of somebody's life from seventy-five to seventy-eight years? Or is the goal to proactively increase quantity and quality of life for everybody?

The moral is clear: if you're against life extension, you want us to die. We can win that moral battle; people have to concede. If you're for universal healthcare, you better be for life extension research and technologies.

There has been tremendous progress in the molecular biology of aging in the last decade. Professor Sinclair of Harvard Medical School has a great line: “Aging may be a reversible condition, if it is caught early.” Eventually, we'll want to measure methylation or similar biomarkers for aging as frequently as possible. You might actually detect months where you are aging faster or slower.

Longevity has the potential to be to traditional medicine what crypto is to traditional finance. It changes the terms of the debate.

Longevity rejects the most fundamental premise of the legacy medical system—that death is inevitable and arguably desirable—and branches the entire biomedical tech stack in a new direction. Making life-extension tech widely accessible is important for ethical reasons and to build the largest possible coalition of support.

We should prioritize this because life extension makes everything relatively cheaper. If a purchase used to cost you $100 and now costs you $1, that purchase takes 100x less time from your life because your working life produced that $100 or $1 by trading your time. Rather than spending, say, one hundred minutes of your life, you spent one minute. Life extension, or reversing aging, is the ultimate scarcity reduction. It gives everybody lots of time.

Life extension should be technically feasible now. That’s the thing people don’t get yet. Reversing aging is possible. It’s starting to happen now in mice.

There is almost nobody who gets older and enjoys it, right? Life extension products would be some of the most popular products ever.