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Part 2: How to Live Forever, Immortality for You (Here's Part 1 if you missed it: How to Live Forever, Age 1,000 In Your Lifetime)

Live Forever Age is just a Number

People have collectively been living longer since the beginning of mankind. For some basic evidence of this fact, consider that Martha Graham was the world’s oldest living person in 1959 when she was 114 years old. But in 1997, the previously discussed Jeanne Calment now stands as the oldest person ever at 122 years of age. Obviously these are extreme examples, but you can get the picture from this comparison on how people are growing older and older.

Assuming scientists can indeed treat cellular damage on a widespread level and find a way to clean up molecular garbage, the world’s oldest person figures to put both Graham and Calment’s life spans to shame. Like I said at the outset, De Grey estimates that the number could be as high as 1,000 years or more!

However, the gerontologist doesn’t like to speak in absolutes, and instead prefers to expand on the possibilities as he said, “I call it longevity escape velocity…where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on.”

De Grey also added, “What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents. But there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely.” Essentially, the award-winning scientist believes that aging will become a thing of the past. But while this may sound great to some people, others aren’t so sure if extreme anti-aging will help or hurt matters.

Live Forever The Age-Old Debate

When it comes to prolonging people’s lives beyond what is typically natural so that they could live forever, two big concerns have been raised: 1) decrepit, old people being kept alive, and 2) overpopulation. As for the first point, the goal of this type of research is not to keep sickly, old people alive.

In fact, De Grey made this point clear by saying, “This is absolutely not a matter of having people live forever in a bad state of health. This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health.” This is comforting to know, considering how most people conjure up images of the crypt keeper or worse when they think of somebody living to one-thousand years old.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t cover what is perhaps an even bigger issue in overpopulation. After all, if millions of people are suddenly living to several hundred years old or longer, how much will this affect the world’s population? The planet already has over 7 billion people living on it, and this figure only looks to get bigger in the following decades. So when you talk about extending people’s lives tenfold, this only serves to overcrowd the earth even more.

Of course, there is always the option to limit the number of children people can have like China is doing. But even with this being the case, the population will most likely grow out of control if anti-aging science ever advances the way that De Grey believes it will. Along with this, there is also the issue of a lack of resources since we already struggle to get everybody enough food, clean water and shelter. Just imagine how far resources would be stretched if people were near-immortals in the future.

Fortunately, the one solace in all of this is that De Grey’s scientific theory is just that – a theory. We don’t have the technology to extend people’s lives by another 900 years yet, and there is no guarantee we will in the near future either. Going further, it’s unlikely that everyone will be able to afford these anti-aging treatments (at least initially).

Now this isn’t to say I’m sitting here rooting against anti-aging science advancing well beyond where it’s at today, but I also worry about the aforementioned problems discussed earlier. In any case, I guess people will deal with these issues when we get there... assuming it’s any time soon.

Here's some links where you can discuss living forever on EliteFitness.com:

Poll: Would you want to live forever?

Do You Want To Live Forever?

Living Forever

Would you become a cyborg if it ment you could live forever.

If you could take a pill that would guarentee that you would live forever....

If you could stay young and beautiful for ever, never get sick or die, would you?

And check out our forums dedicated to:

Life Extension, Andropause & Masters Bodybuilding