When I first read Genesis in the Bible, I was curious about the giants and the people who lived to be a long age. Someone explained to me that the people who lived beyond five hundred years were not individual people but families. Still, the notion of living to a very old age was inspiring. We see around us trees that survive human beings and live to be well over two thousand years old. How?
Recently, the odds have improved that a few people may live to an age that staggers the imagination. Again, one needs to ask the questions how and what is the evidence. Most people I talk to about the issue say that living so long is not attractive. They site the loss of friends and immediate family as their biggest concern.
Who says that people can live much longer? We know that Ponce de Leon searched Florida for something that would allow long life and he appears to have failed. What sent him on the mission and have the odds now improved because companies and research groups are beginning to understand how the body actually works rather than what works on the body?
The Washington Post recently ran with a story about Aubrey de Grey, a 'young' man in California, who has just published a book on ending aging. They report on a competition amongst biologists to assess whether the idea is completely implausible or whether there is a possibility. The odds are stacked up against a person, even one in the future, living beyond one hundred years, but what are the real determinants of the possibilities? If you have one thousand dollars to give each year for 25 years, you can join a group that seeks the science of curing aging.
The Determinants of the Aging Process
The determinants can be organized into many groups of determinants:
1. what you eat, drink, and consume that strengthens or weakens your body's healthy normal functioning
2. what you breath and how well,
3. how often you exercise your whole body,
4. how well you tend to all your senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch,
5. whether you have a mate and regular exchanges of a meaningful and intimate nature,
6. how well all your body systems function, especially respiration, digestion, immune, neurological, physical, and cognitive systems,
7. how well you function within your support groups,
8. where you live and engage with other people,
9. how well endowed you are with the right genes,
10. how well financed you are,
11. whether you are under stress,
12. whether you are happy and feel in control,
13. how easy it is for you to be motivated to create and engage in activity that is pychologically enhancing,
14. what systems can be put in place to help strengthen those systems in your body that fight disease, that resist aging, that heal and promote a sense of well being,
15. how well you fit into your community,
16. how quickly the sciences needed to support your anti-aging programs are put into place,
17. How well you can sustain a positive attitude and initiative to continue with life and life strengthening activity,
18. whether your community and you can protect itself against those forces of nature that would increase the risk of dying abd contamination,
19. whether there is international peace and shared prosperity for you and your neighbours,
20. whether the intractible issues of poverty, disease, hunger, lack of shelter and clean water can be resolved,
21. whether you and your neighbours can develop spiritually,
22. whether nature's systems survive along with you and strengthen,
23. whether there is sustainability and balance in your environment for the widest variety of people, animals, plants, and the earth ecology,
24. whether the supportive natural, physical and social sciences supporting longetivity are developing at a sufficient pace,
25. whether the depressing problem of debt can be eliminated.
What is the Score?
Whether you achieve a high score or not, you will begin to realize how interconnected we are to other people and the many natural and geophysical support systems of our planet. We house an extremely complicated world, and it is not getting any simpler. If we are to increase the odds of living longer, it needs to be a community effort and we cannot leave out the plants and other systems that sustain life support. If any key system fails, such as the ability to share clean fresh water with plants and people, then the goals of longetivity also fail.
In my model Wuh Lax world, it is working 'cum alliis, pro alliis', 'with others, for others' that will ratchet up our survival possibilities.
Science of Not-Aging
In 1975, I interviewed many heads of research in pharmaceutical companies in the UK. Some of them related their interest in the financing of basic research into the aging process and what it would take to slow it down. That was thirty years ago and some of this basic / fundamental research is just beginning to show favourable results. The science of understanding the aging process is still very much in its infancy, but the results are amazing.