100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith

281 Pages·2011·2.03 MB·English

by  Sonia Arrison

Table of Contents

Also by Sonia Arrison
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
CHAPTER 1 - Humankind’s Eternal Quest for the Fountain of Youth
IT’S OUR FAULT
OVERCOMING DEATH, IMAGINING TRAGIC RESULTS
FIGHTING DEATH
CHAPTER 2 - How Science and Technology Will Increase Life Span
REDEFINING OLD AGE
SCIENCE FICTION BECOMING REALITY
LEARNING FROM SALAMANDERS
MANIPULATING CELLS
MANIPULATING GENES
THE PLASTICITY OF AGING
THE SEARCH FOR AN ANTIAGING PILL
GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT OF ALL TIME
CHAPTER 3 - Mother Nature and the Longevity Revolution
THE EARTH’S ABILITY TO HANDLE LONGER-LIVED HUMANS
MODELING POPULATIONS WITH LONGER LIVES
WHY THOMAS MALTHUS WAS WRONG
OLDER, RICHER, AND CLEANER
NEXT STEPS
PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE VERSUS INNOVATION
CHAPTER 4 - The Longevity Divide
NATURE AND HUMANITY
THE PRUDENCE OF AUGMENTING NATURE
THREAT OF EUGENICS?
RESOURCE USE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
HUMAN RIGHTS, GENETIC WARFARE, AND ECONOMIC
DIVIDES
INNOVATION, EXPONENTIAL GROWTH, AND DISTRIBUTION
OF TECHNOLOGY
WOULD OUR ANCESTORS HAVE WANTED TO LIVE LONGER?
CHAPTER 5 - The Changing Face of Family
FERTILITY TECHNOLOGY TODAY AND BEYOND
GETTING AROUND TO “I DO”
MORE TIME ON THE ROAD TO ADULTHOOD
THE EVOLUTION OF FAMILY: COUPLE RELATIONSHIPS AND
CHILDREN
FAMILY CULTURE AND SHARED MEMORIES
FAMILY SIZE AND STRUCTURE
A RETURN TO EXTENDED AND MIXED FAMILIES
CHAPTER 6 - The Financial Implications of Longevity
THE VALUE OF TIME
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEALTH AND WEALTH
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION
EXTREME EXPERIENCE
GOING LONG ON AMBITION
THE PERSISTENCE OF WORK AND A REDEFINITION OF
RETIREMENT
SAVINGS AND INVESTMENT
MORE OR LESS HARRIED?
CHAPTER 7 - The Afterlife Versus a Longer Life
A GLIMPSE OF IMMORTALITY
LOSING OUR RELIGION—REEXAMINED
EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
THE APPEAL OF RELIGION
THE CHANGING RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE
STAYING RELEVANT
BROADENING RELIGION IN A LONGER-LIVED WORLD
CHAPTER 8 - Leadership for a Longer-Lived World
SALESPEOPLE: SPREADING THE MEME
MAVENS: DATA COLLECTORS FUELING THE LONGEVITY
MEME
CONNECT ME
IS IT REAL, AND ARE THE COOL KIDS DOING IT?
TECH TITANS TAKING ON BIOLOGY
NECESSITY AS CONTEXT
A CHANGE IN POLICY
FIGHTING FOR LIFE AND CHANGING THE WORLD
Notes
Index
Copyright Page
Also by Sonia Arrison

Telecrisis (editor)

Digital Dialogue
To my grandparents, Mollie and Ralph, who inspired this book. And to my
husband, Aydin, and son, Henry, for their continual love and support.
Foreword
The Problem of Death

OVER THE WHOLE history of our world, about 100 billion human beings have
been born to see and experience the wonder of life. Only 7 billion remain alive
today. The rest have perished. One hundred thousand more pass away every day;
the most common causes, at least in the advanced countries, are diseases related
to aging. In 2011 fewer than 1 in 10,000 people lived to see their hundredth
birthday. Euphemistically, these terrible things are called the facts of life. It
would be far more accurate to call them the problem of death.
With piercing clarity, I still recall the day I first learned of the problem of
death. I was three years old. I was sitting on a rug in the living room of my
parents’ modest apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. I was at the age where I was
asking my dad lots of questions.
“Where did the rug come from?”
“It came from a cow.”
“What happened to the cow?”
“The cow died.”
“What is death?”
“It means that the cow is no longer alive. Death happens to all animals. It also
happens to all people. It will one day happen to me. It will one day happen to
you.”
My father seemed sad as he was saying these things. I remember that it was a
very sad and disturbing day for me. I did not want my dad to die. And the world
seemed too happy and wonderful a place to leave.
But human beings are not cows. For present purposes let me mention one key
difference: unlike the other animals, we have knowledge of death. The origins of
language, of culture, and of religion can perhaps all be traced to that point in the
distant past when our ancestors first acquired this terrible knowledge and needed
to tell themselves stories to make sense of life and death. Every myth on this
planet is an untrue story that tells people that the purpose of life is death.
Nationalist myths tell us that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,
ideological myths tell us that progress requires violence and that one must break
some eggs to make an omelet, and religious myths tell us to worship the old, the
ancient, and the spirits of the dead.
The crisis of the modern world is the crisis of mythology. We no longer
believe in the old stories about life and death, but we also cannot go back to a
time when we were not yet human and did not know about death. We cannot go
back in time and become two-year-olds, and we would prefer not to be turned
into cows. At the same time, we cannot simply deal with death as a “fact of life.”
What we desperately need is a new story—a true story—to help make sense of
the world in which we find ourselves.
MY GOOD FRIEND Sonia Arrison offers a new story that makes more sense of
the world by replacing solace with a challenge. From her perch as a technology
analyst at the Pacific Research Institute in Silicon Valley, Arrison has been at the
nexus of the future for the better part of two decades. Over the years the two of
us have debated and discussed many of the cutting-edge questions in the
technology world, but our conversations have always returned to the most
important of questions: of how technology will change the balance between life
and death.
Since the myths of the past and the present have been exposed, Arrison
argues, we must follow the critical path forward: if we cannot forget or accept
decline, then we must fight it and work to create a future no longer dominated by
aging and death. The time has come for death to die.
Arrison began her work in public policy with a focus on computer
technologies and the Internet, and it is perhaps worth highlighting the key
difference between computer science and biological science, as traditionally
understood: computers involve bits and reversible processes; biology involves
stuff and seemingly irreversible processes. But computational power will soon
be brought to bear on more and more domains, up to and including biological
domains beginning with areas like genomics, protein folding, and modeling but
culminating in a deeper understanding of life that will enable us to reverse all
human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer
program. Unlike the world of stuff, in the world of bits the arrow of time can be
turned backward. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable
problem. In this reduction we may hope that human life will achieve a new level
of freedom and consciousness.
Arrison’s book begins with a history of the many great men and women of the
past who sought human longevity. She surveys the current generation of
scientists and technologists who promise to usher in a new era, demonstrating
that aging is a foe that can be hobbled and potentially even beaten. From here
Arrison goes to the heart of things by directly confronting opposition to longer
and healthier lives and outlining the extraordinary economic, social, and cultural
changes that will happen as the world wakes up from history. Although Arrison
considers a world where individuals will have their life expectancies extended to
150 years, the logic of her work leads to the more speculative question of the
final conquest of death.
We may wonder whether triumph over death may also mean the end of
science in the twofold sense of “end” as both culmination and termination. It will
be a culmination because the end of aging and death would mean the final
mastery of science over nature or chance. And it would also perhaps represent a
termination because the greatest driver for scientific progress in the modern
world will be no more. In the end, the Tree of Life may prove more desirable
than the Tree of Knowledge, but for now we must begin with the latter to find
our way back to the former.
QUESTIONS OF LIFE and death have vexed humanity for millennia. There is a
tendency to respond to these questions with opposite (but strangely related)
extremes of despair or complacency: we may despair of solving the problem of
aging and give up, or we may become complacent about the problem of aging
and so not try. To my mind, the most important aspect of the book involves the
way in which Arrison’s approach to the problem—her incredible style, if you
will—charts the substantive path forward to avoid these twin shoals. Let me end
with a few thoughts on how to avoid each.
The most insidious form of despair makes a claim about nature—that aging
and death are somehow natural or that “all that lives must die,” as Hamlet’s evil
mother, Gertrude, rationalizes away the rottenness that is Denmark. Arrison
dispatches this claim by reminding us that the very question of nature must be
asked in earnest and answered with action. Properly, few things are less natural
than not to rage against the dying of the light. The struggle against aging is
therefore the most natural thing we could possibly do. It is the most humane, and
the most human, of struggles. Arrison fights despair by urging us to become
more like ourselves, to become more human than we already are.
The most insidious form of complacency makes a claim about other people—
that aging and death will be solved by others and that we are mere spectators to
the unfolding of technology. But the future is not determined. We cannot (or
should not) outsource our own lives. In whatever capacity we can—as
intellectuals, scientists, investors, voters, cultural leaders—we must take
ownership of the future. In order to win, we must fight. We are not mere
spectators, and Arrison is no mere prophet. Instead, she truly is a great general,
who is marshaling all of the vast forces of humanity in its titanic struggle against
the Great Enemy of the world, whose true name is Death. I look forward to the
battle being joined.