“You can live long enough to live forever.” —Ray Kurzweil, Inventor and Futurist “The first person to live to 150 has already been born.” —Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Biogerontologist “Until death, it is all life.” —Miguel de Cervantes, Author, Don Quixote

 

infant deaths decline from about 100 per 1,000 births in the year 1900 to about 0.1 per 1,000 today as maternal and neonatal care has improved.

 

it took two hundred years from the first smallpox outbreak in 1595 before a vaccine was invented to prevent the disease. From the first instance of polio in 1895, scientists worked for more than fifty years before a successful vaccine was developed. But within just twelve months of the discovery of SARS-CoV-2, multiple highly effective vaccines were shipped around the world.

 

Futurist and Google’s director of engineering Ray Kurzweil, whose accuracy of predictions in the technology world has earned him “oracle” status in Silicon Valley, says that longevity escape velocity is “just another ten to twelve years away.”

 

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” —Woody Allen, Filmmaker

 

As these pioneers work to reframe our relationship with age and aging, they principally focus on three key “longevity dimensions”—prevention of premature death; life extension; and age reversal.

 

WHAT IS THE SECRET TO LIVING LONGER? FIRST—DO NOT DIE

 

Eric told me. “If we were to implement everything we know today, the average life expectancy should already be closer to one hundred—today!”

 

Based on the past record, most scientists put today’s maximum human life expectancy—the longevity equivalent of the “sound barrier”—at 115 to 125 years old.

 

Ocean quahog clams’ lifespan can exceed 500 years;

 

Even among mammals, there are examples of extended longevity—some bowhead whales survive for more than two hundred years.

 

These four genes, or “Yamanaka factors,” effectively created a “return ticket” for mature cells to age in reverse.

 

THE NEAR HORIZON OF LONGEVITY: LIVING TO BE 150 YEARS OLD

 

In the first section of this book, you will discover the amazing new technologies that will, within the next five to twenty years, without hyperbole, change everything that you currently know and think about lifespan and health care.

 

I’m not going to kid you—in this section, things are going to get a little weird. In the Far Horizon of Longevity we will examine what it would be like to be two hundred or even older, while looking and feeling like you are just twenty-five.

 

After all, as Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD famously wrote, all we need to do is “live long enough to live forever.”

 

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” —Bill Gates, Entrepreneur, Global Health Pioneer

 

As it turns out, this reaction to extended longevity is very common. In a Pew Research report on radical life extension, 56 percent of Americans said they would not want to live to 120 if given the chance.

 

We live in a world of “reactive medicine.” Most people do not have advanced batteries of diagnostic tests unless they’re experiencing problems.

 

“Aging is just like smoking—it’s really bad for you.” —Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Biogerontologist

 

“The 9 Hallmarks of Aging,”

 

1.Genomic instability:

 

2.Telomere attrition:

 

3.Epigenetic alterations:

 

4.Loss of proteostasis:

 

5.Deregulated nutrient sensing:

 

6.Mitochondrial dysfunction:

 

7.Cellular senescence:

 

8.Stem cell exhaustion:

 

9.Altered intercellular communication:

 

In the years since these nine hallmarks were adopted, one more hallmark of aging has crept into consideration, and is believed by many to be an inseparable item on this list:

 

10.Protein crosslinking:

 

Multiple scientific studies show that your psychological age actually influences your biological age, regardless of your chronological age.

 

These wearable, embeddable, ingestible, and portable devices collecting your health data are not working alone. They are all connected in an Internet of Body (IoB), working to amass a 360-degree view of your health.

 

The importance of early diagnosis of cancer cannot be overstated. Early diagnosis of breast, cervix, colon, and bladder cancer results in survival rates that are 3.6, 5.43, 6.3, and 20.83 times higher than their respective rates for late-stage diagnoses.

 

In fact, when you dig into the nearly sixty million lives lost around the globe each year, more than thirty million are from conditions that are restorable if caught early.

 

Human Longevity Incorporated (HLI), one of the world’s leading precision medicine centers. Although the staff wear scrubs, HLI feels more five-star hotel than hospital. A personal concierge greets me at the entrance and guides me to my private room, replete with a sofa, well-equipped kitchen, and a menu of healthy vegan culinary selections. Over the next six hours, I give twenty-one samples of blood, undergo a two-hour, full-body MRI scan, receive a cardiac ultrasound and a battery of neurological tests, and walk ten times back and forth over pressure-sensitive floor panels that carefully record the quality of my balance and movement. At the end of the day, I receive a seventy-page report detailing my hormone levels, cholesterol, vitamins, proteins, sugars, antibiotics, and other biodata. More reports reveal the state of my gut health, DNA, and my personal risk factors. The reports track changes since my last visit and advise the nutrition, lifestyle, and pharmaceutical adjustments that would benefit my unique biology and keep me disease free.

 

How is this done? It is all about the “omes.” I don’t mean something from yoga class, of course (although I do yoga every day). I mean your genome, epigenome, and microbiome. I also mean your proteome, a complete set of proteins that reflect your current health; your transcriptome, a collection of all the RNA molecules in your body; and your metabolome, containing metabolites, microbiome by-products, and food and drug remnants. Together, these comprise your “personalome”—the incredibly sophisticated and data-rich picture of your health, which is changing how medicine is practiced.

 

Insidetracker.com is a website where you can upload your personalomic data from blood tests, DNA sequencing, and fitness trackers to receive a customized nutrition and exercise program.

 

“Every disease that’s with us is caused by DNA. And every disease can be fixed by DNA.” —Dr. George Church, Geneticist

 

“Just because we are not ready for scientific progress does not mean it won’t happen.” —Dr. Jennifer Doudna, Biochemist and CRISPR Pioneer

 

While the first genomic sequencing cost $3 billion and took fifteen years to complete, today a whole human genome can be sequenced in an afternoon for about $200.

 

On January 12, 2020, China publicly shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus, just twelve days after Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, China, reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Some ten to fifteen years ago that would have been completely unthinkable.

 

In total, some seventeen million annual new cases of cancer could potentially be treated using CAR T-cell therapy, when more specific cancer antigens are found and therapies are developed to target them. I do believe there is a high possibility that we could see the cure for cancer within most readers’ lifespans.

 

Terry Grossman, MD, regenerative medicine expert and author of multiple books on aging, including Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, runs one of the few authorized stem cell therapy treatment centers in the United States.

As a result, NR and NMN are some of the most popular supplements on the market. While piloting a single-engine Cessna from Santa Monica to Novato (home to Buck Institute for Research on Aging) with yours truly on board, Peter Diamandis told me that taking NMN for the last couple of months allowed him to perform 1.5 times more push-ups than he had been able to do previously.

 

If aging were a treatable condition, then the money would flow into research, innovation, and drug development. Right now, what pharmaceutical or biotech company could go after aging as a condition if it doesn’t exist?” These words from a 2019 interview David Sinclair gave to MIT Technology Review sum up the state of affairs holding back rapid development of longevity pills. “Unless we address aging at its root cause,” he added, “we’re not going to continue our linear, upward progress toward longer and longer lifespans.”

 

“Ultimately, these drugs would treat one disease,” says David Sinclair, “but unlike drugs of today, they would prevent twenty others.”

But what if the number could be greater than that? Can you believe that it may be possible to live to age 200 or even longer? I can.

 

“I intend to live forever. So far, so good.” —Steven Wright, Comedian

 

To refresh your memory, longevity escape velocity proposes that life expectancy will continue to rise with advances in science and technology until each year of scientific research and technological development will add one year to our average life expectancy. That will allow humans—in theory, at least—to become biologically immortal.

 

The idea of longevity is, as Nir Barzilai says, to “die young at an old age.”

 

Today, the average woman has just 2.4 children, less than half of what her grandmother produced.

 

For all of the competition, disputes, and armed conflicts that we still have between nations, races, genders, religions, and social classes, the world is a better place than it was two hundred years ago, by every imaginable standard. Peace, equality, justice, and social progress are universally shared values.

 

The inflation-adjusted income of the average person on Earth is 4.4 times greater than it was in 1950.

 

Between 1981 and 2013, China lifted 850 million people out of poverty, reducing its poverty rate from 63 percent to less than 2 percent today.32 Global poverty declined over the same period from 29 percent to 12 percent!33

 

The family unit may be the first casualty. The average marriage today lasts eight years. When we live three times as long, will we marry five or more times? Will we marry multiple people simultaneously? Or perhaps never marry at all? Perhaps sex for procreation will be replaced by joint ventures of parental partners based on contribution of gametes.

 

At a minimum, you should have a complete annual physical exam that includes blood count and metabolic blood chemistry panels, a thyroid panel, and testing to reveal potential deficiencies in nutrients such as vitamin D, vitamin B, iron, and magnesium. If you are sexually active, you should also be checked for STDs.

 

As for drinking, there’s no excuse anymore. If you must drink, use a ride-sharing app like Uber or Lyft, which studies show have reduced alcohol-related auto accidents by 25 to 35 percent since their launch.

 

One of my adventure-loving friends invited me to join him on an attempt to summit Mount Everest not long ago. It sounded exhilarating, but when I learned that up to 3.9 percent never make it home, I had to pass.

 

According to former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy, loneliness increases your risk of premature death as much as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day does.