Even the most optimistic of today's big-dreaming tech luminaries — people like Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page — know that living forever is a most-likely impossible goal.
Yet they still want to defeat death.
At the very least, they want to find a way to delay it as long as possible.
The quest for eternal life goes back thousands of years with mostly unimpressive results. But since 1840, life expectancy in developed countries has risen from the low-to-mid 40s to about 80. We're living almost twice as long as we would have if we were born less than two centuries ago.
So can we almost double life expectancy again, to 150?
That's a goal that these Silicon Alley luminaries agreed was "worthy" and reasonable at a 2004 dinner party, held with some of the top scientists interested in prolonging life, according to a fascinating Washington Post profile by Ariana Eunjung Cha.
And these billionaires don't just have money at their disposal, Cha notes in her detailed look at their efforts to defy death, they also have access to modern medicine, genetics, efforts to map the human brain, and computers that can process quantities of information so huge they've never even been conceived of before. We know more about human health than we ever have and have access to tools that didn't exist decades ago. Full story...
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Yet they still want to defeat death.
At the very least, they want to find a way to delay it as long as possible.
The quest for eternal life goes back thousands of years with mostly unimpressive results. But since 1840, life expectancy in developed countries has risen from the low-to-mid 40s to about 80. We're living almost twice as long as we would have if we were born less than two centuries ago.
So can we almost double life expectancy again, to 150?
That's a goal that these Silicon Alley luminaries agreed was "worthy" and reasonable at a 2004 dinner party, held with some of the top scientists interested in prolonging life, according to a fascinating Washington Post profile by Ariana Eunjung Cha.
And these billionaires don't just have money at their disposal, Cha notes in her detailed look at their efforts to defy death, they also have access to modern medicine, genetics, efforts to map the human brain, and computers that can process quantities of information so huge they've never even been conceived of before. We know more about human health than we ever have and have access to tools that didn't exist decades ago. Full story...
Related posts:
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- The science of near-death experiences...
- My Last Wish, a social network for those who are on the verge of death...
- "Happy coffins" in Singapore to overcome taboo about death...
- The bizzare electromagnetic after effects of near-death experiences...
- Life after death? Largest-ever study provides evidence that 'out of body'
- A new book, drawing on the stories of dying patients and doctors...
- Is death an illusion? Evidence suggests death isn't the end..
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