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The Proto-Communist Plan to Resurrect Everyone Who Ever Lived – VICE UK

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Is there anything that can be done to escape the death cult we seem trapped in?

One of the more radical visions for how to organize human society begins with a simple goal: lets resurrect everyone who has ever lived. Nikolai Fedorov, a nineteenth-century librarian and Russian Orthodoxy philosopher, went so far as to call this project the common task of humanity, calling for the living to be rejuvenated, the dead to be resurrected, and space to be colonized specifically to house them. From the 1860s to the 1930s, Fedorovs influence was present throughout the culturehe influenced a generation of Marxists ahead of the Russian Revolution, as well as literary writers like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novel, The Brothers Karamazov, directly engaged with Federov's ideas about resurrection.

After his death, Federovs acolytes consolidated his ideas into a single text, A Philosophy of the Common Task, and created Cosmism, the movement based on his anti-death eschatology. Federov left the technical details to those who would someday create the prerequisite technology, but this did not stop his disciples: Alexander Bogdanov, who founded the Bolsheviks with Lenin, was an early pioneer of blood transfusions in hopes of rejuvenating humanity; Konstantin Tsiolkvosky, an astrophysicist who was the progenitor of Russia's space program, sought to colonize space to house the resurrected dead; and Alexander Chizhevsky, a biophysicist who sought to map out the effects of solar activity on Earth life and behavior, thought his research might help design the ideal society for the dead to return to.

The vast majority of cosmists were, by the 1930s, either murdered or purged by Stalin, muting the influence of their ambitious project but also leaving us with an incomplete body of work about what type of society resurrection requires or will result in, and whether that wouldas some cosmists believe nowbring us closer to the liberation of the species. Now, I think it is obvious thatdespite what todays transhumanists might tell youwe are in no position, now or anytime soon, to resurrect anyone let alone bring back to life the untold billions that have existed across human history and past it into the eons before civilizations dawn.

To be clear, I think cosmism is absolute madness, but I also find it fascinating. With an introduction to Cosmism and its implications, maybe we can further explore the arbitrary and calculated parts of our social and political order that prioritize capital instead of humanity, often for sinister ends.

**

What? Who gets resurrected? And how?

At its core, the Common Task calls for the subordination of all social relations, productive forces, and civilization itself to the single-minded goal of achieving immortality for the living and resurrection for the dead. Cosmists see this as a necessarily universal project for either everyone or no one at all. That constraint means that their fundamental overhaul of society must go a step further in securing a place where evil or ill-intentioned people cant hurt anyone, but also where immortality is freely accessible for everyone.

Its hard to imagine how that worldwhere resources are pooled together for this project, where humans cannot hurt one another, and where immortality is freeis compatible with the accumulation and exploitation that sit at the heart of capitalism. The crisis heightened by coronavirus should make painfully clear to us all that, as J.W. Masonan economist at CUNYrecently put it, we have a system organized around the threat of withholding people's subsistence, and it "will deeply resist measures to guarantee it, even when the particular circumstances make that necessary for the survival of the system itself." Universal immortality, already an optimistic vision, simply cannot happen in a system that relies on perpetual commodification.

Take one small front of the original cosmist project: blood transfusions. In the 1920s, after being pushed out of the Bolshevik party, Bogdanov focused on experimenting with blood transfusions to create a rejuvenation process for humans (theres little evidence they do this). He tried and failed to set up blood banks across the Soviet Union for the universal rejuvenation of the public, dying from complications of a transfusion himself. Today, young blood is offered for transfusion by industrious start-ups, largely to wealthy and eccentric clientsmost notably (and allegedly) Peter Thiel.

In a book of conversations on cosmism published in 2017 titled Art Without Death, the first dialogue between Anton Vidokle and Hito Steyerl, living artists and writers in Berlin, drives home this same point. Vidokle tells Steyerl that he believes Death is capital quite literally, because everything we accumulatefood, energy, raw material, etc.these are all products of death. For him, it is no surprise were in a capitalist death cult given that he sees value as created through perpetual acts of extraction or exhaustion.

Steyerl echoes these concerns in the conversation, comparing the resurrected dead to artificial general intelligences (AGIs), which oligarch billionaires warn pose an existential threat to humanity. Both groups anticipate fundamental reorganizations of human society, but capitalists diverge sharply from cosmists in that their reorganization necessitates more extraction, more exhaustion, and more death. In their conversation, Steyerl tells Vidokle:

Within the AGI Debate, several solutions have been suggested: first to program the AGI so it will not harm humans, or, on the alt-right/fascist end of the spectrum, to just accelerate extreme capitalisms tendency to exterminate humans and resurrect rich people as some sort of high-net-worth robot race.

These eugenicist ideas are already being implemented: cryogenics and blood transfusions for the rich get the headlines, but the breakdown of healthcare in particularand sustenance in generalfor poor people is literally shortening the lives of millions ... In the present reactionary backlash, oligarchic and neoreactionary eugenics are in full swing, with few attempts being made to contain or limit the impact on the living. The consequences of this are clear: the focus needs to be on the living first and foremost. Because if we dont sort out societycreate noncapitalist abundance and so forththe dead cannot be resurrected safely (or, by extension, AGI cannot be implemented without exterminating humankind or only preserving its most privileged parts).

One of the major problems of todays transhumanist movement is that we are currently unable to equally distribute even basic life-extension technology such as nutrition, medicine, and medical care. At least initially, transhumanists vision of a world in which people live forever is one in which the rich live forever, using the wealth theyve built by extracting value from the poor. Todays transhumanism exists largely within a capitalist framework, and the countrys foremost transhumanist, Zoltan Istvan, a Libertarian candidate for president, is currently campaigning on a platform that shutdown orders intended to preserve human life during the coronavirus pandemic are overblown and are causing irrevocable damage to the capitalist economy (Istvan has in the past written extensively for Motherboard, and has also in the past advocated for the abolition of money).

Cosmists were clear in explaining what resurrection would look like in their idealized version of society, even though they were thin on what the technological details would be. Some argue we must not only restructure our civilization, but our bodies so that we can acquire regenerative abilities, alter our metabolic activity so food or shelter are optional, and thus overcome the natural, social, sexual, and other limitations of the species as Arseny Zhilyaev puts it in a later conversation within the book.

Zhilyaev also invokes Federovs conception of a universal museum, a radicalized, expanded, and more inclusive version of the museums we have now as the site of resurrection. In our world, the closest example of this universal museum is the digital world which also doubles as an enormous data collector used for anything from commerce to government surveillance. The prospect of being resurrected because of government/corporate surveillance records or Mormon genealogy databases is sinister at best, but Zhilyaevs argumentand the larger one advanced by other cosmistsis that our world is already full of and defined by absurd and oppressive institutions that are hostile to our collective interests, yet still manage to thrive. The options for our digital worlds development have been defined by advertisers, state authorities, telecom companies, deep-pocketed investors, and the likewhat might it look like if we decided to focus instead on literally any other task?

All this brings us to the question of where the immortal and resurrected would go. The answer, for cosmists, is space. In the cosmist vision, space colonization must happen so that we can properly honor our ethical responsibility to take care of the resurrected by housing them on museum planets. If the universal museum looks like a digital world emancipated from the demands of capital returns, then the museum planet is a space saved from the whims of our knock-off Willy Wonkasthe Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world. I am not saying it is a good or fair idea to segregate resurrected dead people to museum planets in space, but this is what cosmists suggested, and its a quainter, more peaceful vision for space than what todays capitalists believe we should do.

For Musk, Mars and other future worlds will become colonies that require space mortgages, are used for resource extraction, or, in some cases, be used as landing spots for the rich once we have completely destroyed the Earth. Bezos, the worlds richest man, says we will have "gigantic chip factories in space where heavy industry is kept off-planet. Beyond Earth, Bezos anticipates humanity will be contained to O'Neill cylinder space colonies. One might stop and consider the fact that while the cosmist vision calls for improving human civilization on Earth before resurrecting the dead and colonizing space, the capitalist vision sees space as the next frontier to colonize and extract stupendous returns fromtrillions of dollars of resource extraction is the goal. Even in space, they cannot imagine humanity without the same growth that demands the sort of material extraction and environmental degradation already despoiling the world. Better to export it to another place (another country, planet, etc.) than fix the underlying system.

Why?

Ostensibly, the why behind cosmism is a belief that we have an ethical responsibility to resurrect the dead, much like we have one to care for the sick or infirm. At a deeper level, however, cosmists not only see noncapitalist abundance as a virtue in of itself, but believe the process of realizing it would offer chances to challenge deep-seated assumptions about humanity that might aid political and cultural forms hostile to the better future cosmists seek.

Vidokle tells Steyerl in their conversation that he sees the path towards resurrection involving expanding the rights of the dead in ways that undermine certain political and cultural forms,

The dead ... dont have any rights in our society: they dont communicate, consume, or vote and so they are not political subjects. Their remains are removed further and further from the cities, where most of the living reside. Culturally, the dead are now largely pathetical comical figures: zombies in movies, he said. Financial capitalism does not care about the dead because they do not produce or consume. Fascism only uses them as a mythical proof of sacrifice. Communism is also indifferent to the dead because only the generation that achieves communism will benefit from it; everyone who died on the way gets nothing.

In another part of their conversation, Steyerl suggests that failing to pursue the cosmist project might cede ground to the right-wing accelerationism already killing millions:

There is another aspect to this: the maintenance and reproduction of life is of course a very gendered technologyand control of this is on a social battleground. Reactionaries try to grab control over lifes production and reproduction by any means: religious, economic, legal, and scientific. This affects womens rights on the one hand, and, on the other, it spawns fantasies of reproduction wrested from female control: in labs, via genetic engineering, etc.

In other words, the failure to imagine and pursue some alternative to this oligarchic project has real-world consequences that not only kill human beings, but undermine the collective agency of the majority of humanity. In order for this narrow minority to rejuvenate and resurrect themselves in a way that preserves their own privilege and power, they will have to sharply curtail the rights and agency of almost every other human being in every other sphere of society.

Elena Shaposhnikova, another artist who appears later in the book, wonders whether the end of deathor the arrival of a project promising to abolish itmight help us better imagine and pursue lives beyond capitalism:

It seems to me that most of us tend to sublimate our current life conditions and all its problems, tragedies, and inequalities, and project this into future scenarios, she said. So while its easy to imagine and represent life in a society without money and with intergalactic travel, the plot invariably defaults to essentialist conflicts of power, heroism, betrayal, revenge, or something along these lines.

In a conversation with Shaposhnikova, Zhilyaev offers that cosmism might help fight the general fear of socialism as he understands it:

According to Marx, or even Lenin, socialism as a goal is associated with something elsewith opportunities of unlimited plurality and playful creativity, wider than those offered by capitalism. ... the universal museum producing eternal life and resurrection for all as the last necessary step for establishing social justice.

In the conversations that this book, cosmism emerges not simply as an ambition to resurrect the dead but to create, for the first time in human history, a civilization committed to egalitarianism and justice. So committed, in fact, that no part of the human experienceincluding deathwould escape the frenzied wake of our restructuring.

Its a nice thought, and something worth thinking about. Ours is not that world but in fact, one that is committed, above all else, to capital accumulation. There will be no resurrection for the deadthere isnt even healthcare for most of the living, after all. Even in the Citadel of Capital, the heart of the World Empire, the belly of the beast, the richest country in human history, most are expected to fend for themselves as massive wealth transfers drain the public treasuries that mightve funded some measure of protection from the pandemic, the economic meltdown, and every disaster lurking just out of sight. And yet, for all our plumage, our death cult still holds true to Adam Smith's observation in The Wealth of Nations: "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

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The Proto-Communist Plan to Resurrect Everyone Who Ever Lived - VICE UK

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How to live when nobody dies – E&T Magazine

Three score and ten is so 1970s. Today, the average baby born in the UK will live long enough to see the beginning of the 22nd century. Increasingly we also hear claims of longevity breakthroughs that could propel those children and maybe even their parents into triple digits and beyond. Is eternal life something we want outside of science fiction? And how will society cope if it is?

The first ten million years were the worst, said Marvin. The second ten million years, they were the worst, too. The third ten million years I didnt enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.

So opines Marvin, Douglas Adams paranoid android, who follows the protagonists of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy around like a bumbling, grumbling storm cloud. Functionally immortal (and cursed with a brain the size of a planet), Marvin is the hubristic dream of eternal life printed and stamped in circuitry. While his human shipmates stumble from one disaster to another, devoting their limited talents to avoiding death at all costs, Marvin plods glumly along, bemoaning the pointlessness of an infinite existence in which there is nothing new to learn, no challenge to his intellect and in which everyone even his closest friend, a rat that nested for a time in his foot dies. Except him.

Marvin is archetypical of immortals. Our stories are not kind to them. The Ancient Greek gods were positively psychopathic in doling out eternal damnation as punishment for everything from stealing fire (the titan Prometheus, who was lashed to a rock and whose liver was pecked out by an eagle, every day, forever) to winning a sewing contest (Arachne, who with perhaps limited foresight challenged Athena to a weave-off and was transformed into a forever-spinning spider when she won). For centuries since, thats more or less been the lot of would-be immortals: vampires are stuck in castles, the future rich keep their youth (but lose their humanity), and seekers of life-giving plants, elixirs and artefacts end up eaten, cursed or crushed under collapsing temples. If ever you are invited on a quest to find the... well, anything of eternal life, the entirety of our literary canon says: dont go.

Yet at the same time life extension is, almost by definition, what we expect of medicine. Its feels odd to frame chemotherapy or cardiovascular treatments as life-extension technologies, but for cancer and heart disease patients thats exactly what they are. More generally, we expect some small increase in life expectancy for each new generation. Every ten years, the Office for National Statistics releases data on how long the populations of England and Wales are living, and for the last five decades, life expectancy at birth has risen by around two-to-three years per decade. And when that increase stalls (as it did in the late 2010s), scientists are rounded up for television interviews and grilled over what or who is toblame.

This is a paradox of human life extension: we expect our kids to live longer than we do, but not much longer. An extra half-decade sounds about right. An extra half-century does not. The latter would seem outrageous and unfair if it werent so fanciful. And yet, serious people are treating the postponement of ageing increasingly seriously. The UKs Nuffield Council on Bioethics, by way of example, published a paper titled The Search for a Treatment for Ageing in 2018, listing eight avenues of current life-extension research. In 2013, Google a company associated with many things, but not life extension funded Calico, a company which specialises in exactly that.

Various studies in mice and rats have shown what well-publicised studies in mouse and rat populations often do: that a thing (in this case, a potential anti-ageing treatment) has done something miraculous (slowed down ageing) for the mice and rats (who have since been dissected) from which we can extrapolate a comparable result for humans (who will live longer and healthier lives and not be dissected). Theres no one clear indicator that radical life extension is around the corner but this rise in funding, debate and vivisected mouse carcasses suggests that our everyday assumption that there is a right amount of life for people may be rooted more in experience than in rational thought.

I havent really, fully absorbed how deep-seated the irrationality is, says Dr Aubrey de Grey, biogerontologist and co-founder of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation. De Grey has been both researching and campaigning for what he calls radical life extension for nearly two decades. His two most recognisable features are the long grey beard that reaches almost to his waist, and his utter impatience with what he has called The Global Trance: the cross-cultural acceptance that one day, in the not-so-far-future, all of us must necessarily stop existing. De Greys view that functional immortality may not only be possible, but that its disparate foundations have already been laid in laboratories around the world, is highly controversial.

Scathing appraisals of his proposals have been made by experts across the biological sciences, who argue that the technologies he presents as joint candidates for life extension are too early in their development to be useful for decades, if ever. But taking this macro view of deGreys ideas feels like missing the point. SENS is far from the only organisation with the goal of increasing lifespan and it is far from the largest. But deGrey is a powerful orator, cowing audiences into listening with the air of an otherwise jovial science teacher who cant quite believe how badly his class has done in their mock exam.

These days Im very strong on not only saying, Look, have a sense of proportion, boys and girls: [ageing] is by far the major cause of suffering in the world. Hands up anyone who wants to get Alzheimers? Hands up anyone who wants anyone else to get Alzheimers?, he says, contrasting his current presentational style with the impatient brusqueness of his 2005 Ted Talk. But now I also tend to spend a fair amount of my time being a little bit more sympathetic to this irrationality and acknowledging that it only became irrational very recently... 20 years ago, it made sense to trick oneself into putting ageing out of ones mind and getting on with ones miserably short life rather than being preoccupied with this terrible thing, because there was no real reason to believe that we had much chance of moving the needle of actually accelerating the arrival of therapies that really bring ageing under control. So it kind of made sense; I have some sympathy.

20 years ago, it made sense to trick oneself into putting ageing out of ones mind and getting on with ones miserably short life rather than being preoccupied with this terrible thing, because there was no real reason to believe that we had much chance of moving the needle.

De Grey and the other researchers at SENS lay out seven factors that contribute to ageing, including cell loss and tissue atrophy, cancers and mitochondrial mutations along with novel biotechnologies that may one day mitigate their deleterious effects. SENS is not alone in suggesting potential therapies to delay ageing other candidate treatments have included the diabetes drug Metformin, resveratrol (the chemical compound/viticultural PR mega-win found in red wine) and gruesomely the transfusion of the blood of young people into the elderly. Life extension, as an investment, is high-risk-enormous-reward hence the glut of proposed therapies.

De Grey stresses that any sudden and significant change in life expectancy will not be the result of one breakthrough, but of many treatments working in concert. Attacking ageing from multiple angles will lead to what he terms Longevity Escape Velocity the idea that if you can develop treatments for age-related disease more quickly than they can kill people, not only does lifespan increase exponentially, but frailty is similarly delayed. Lifespan is almost the wrong term for what life-extension proponents are seeking a better term, already in academic use, is healthspan. Living to 150 and feeling it would be nightmarish. Proposed therapies must offer something more akin to eternal youth than eternal life.

This is something that I have to spend an enormous proportion of my time on, says deGrey. Just driving [that distinction] over and over again into peoples heads that lifespan is a side-effect of healthspan. Youve got to stay healthy to stay alive, and health is the major contributor to quality of life.

This is the second challenge for advocates of life extension: because we havent evolved, literally or culturally, to view extended, healthy lives as anything but fiction, almost nobody outside of the insular debate is equipped to properly assess its risks and virtues. If you accept that a sudden jump in healthy life expectancy is coming whether thats 50 years or 500 the lack of public discourse is troubling.

Very few studies have been performed to properly assess the publics view of living dramatically longer, and those that have show little coherence among subjects. The University of Queensland performed two such studies face-to-face studies and focus groups with 57 Australians in 2009; another, larger telephone study of 605 people in 2011. In both cases, participants views ranged from being strongly in favour to strongly against, with reasons for the latter position including issues of distributive justice, overpopulation, the breakdown of the traditional family unit and religious concerns. They showed, essentially, that most people dont know what to think, but one thing that is broadly shared is a concern that radical life extension threatens a sense of fairness.

Part of our attitude to what we think of as premature death dying before your time, is that its a sort of unfairness, and that idea of unfairness absolutely permeates across society, says bioethicist Professor John Harris. Besides teaching, Harris has acted as ethical advisor to the European Parliament, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the UK Department of Health; has published or edited more than 20 books, and written over 300 academic papers on subjects from cloning to human enhancement to the ethics of ageing both in how we treat the elderly now and why we should be supportive of life extension in the future.

There are limitless examples of the unfairness of some people getting what they want and others not getting what they want not just lifespan, but money, or sex, or whatever, Harris continues. But we cant eradicate that, because to eradicate that unfairness would mean always levelling down, rather than levelling up. We dont say wed better make sure nobody goes to university, because that would give them an unfair advantage looking for a job. The alternative to living with that unfairness of accepting that some people get what others would like but cant have is not just applicable to life extension: its applicable to almost everything that is valued.

The question of who would have access to life-extension therapies might be the biggest concern in the debate. The refugee crisis and the post-2008 focus on the widening gap between rich and poor in the UK often viewed through the lens of an overstretched NHS have raised disturbing questions about how human life is valued. The spread of Covid-19 has further highlighted how closely intertwined money and life expectancy have become, with millions of people around the world simply unable to afford to heed governments advice to self-isolate and miss work. Recent science-fiction has mined this inequality to great effect, perhaps most successfully in Netflixs Altered Carbon (based on the novels by Richard K Morgan), in which the super-rich have literally ascended to a place where they will never die, leaving the rest of humanity to exist in violence, criminality and squalor. The idea of billionaires escaping not only taxes but death as well is becoming an increasingly popular dystopia.

We dont know how this would play out, Harris continues. There are ways [we could distribute treatments]: some would be fair and some would be unfair, like not funding them through national health services. Those arent arguments against life extension per se, but they may be arguments about how certain societies choose to deal with the desirability of longer life. There would be many strategies open and hopefully in democratic societies they would be debated democratically.

That distinction between life extension and what creates inequality is important. As Harris explains, the availability of life-extending therapies tells us nothing about how they should be used.

We are very familiar with life extension, but mostly it has appeared in the guise of life-saving strategies, like vaccination, he says. The vaccinations for polio and smallpox have saved hundreds of millions of lives, or to put it another way, have enabled hundreds of millions of people to live who otherwise would have died. Vaccination is an exercise in life extension but nobody throws up their hands in horror about its huge effect on life expectancy.

De Greys first answer not just to the concern of fair distribution, but also to fears of seismic societal and institutional change that may follow major breakthroughs in healthy life extension is also political: in functioning democracies, we have term limits on governments, and in his view any government that did not make life extension for all a priority as it became feasible would collapse in popularity with voters. His second answer is that whatever possible negatives we can imagine, its difficult to imagine a dystopian setting so bad that death would be preferable.

Which is not to advocate complacency: part of deGreys frustration with the lack of public debate is precisely that he sees these advances in increased longevity as potential flashpoints that a revolution in healthcare poorly handled could devolve into an actual revolution. Its not just a matter of when [these therapies] are ready: its the lead-up to it, he explains. One thing that Ive been putting more and more energy into is getting policymakers to understand that the planning needs to happen now, before the therapies are ready... At some point, public opinion is going to undergo a very sudden sea change.

Handled competently, what could radical life extension offer, beyond the obvious benefits of extra time enjoying the people and things that we value? One possibility is that, in the same way that we tend to value life more the longer it has to go (people die tragically young nobody dies tragically old), adding decades of healthy living onto the national or global average might raise the value we place on life in general. De Grey sees evidence of this over the past century.

[The world] has become, both at the individual societal level and also at the global international level, a much, much less violent place, he says. And a huge part of why [thats happened] is that there is greater value given to life. If we look, for example, within the USA at the areas that have the greatest amount of violence, they are the areas that have the lowest life expectancy. But thats not because a lot of people are dying from violence: its because a lot of people are dying from poor nutrition, lack of access to medical treatment and so life is valued less.

As a species weve become increasingly familiar with the clash between our biology and the mutagenic effects of technology upon it, but we have survived through adaptation. We think in tribes but thrive in cities. We cross the world without losing our roots. We marry our Tinder matches. If the next technological shift in our stars is the collapse of the milestoned life birth, work, family, frailty, death it will be because we see more opportunities than costs. We arent Marvins: were good, as individuals and as a species, at finding new things to do when the world changes around us.

The great thing about longevity is that you wouldnt have to choose just one career, Harris reflects. If I had my time again, I would probably have liked to be a biologist. And then once I had my 70-odd years as a biologist I might want to do something else. Nobody wants to just go on doing the same old stuff, but if we have the time and ability we can change. Its one of my regrets now, at the age that I am, that while I do go on doing philosophy and writing about the things I like writing about, I would like to learn about new things and do other things.

There are people who say, Oh, youd just get bored if you had all that time. But I dont think I would. I would gladly sample a few million years and see how it goes.

Finance

Postponing ageing isnt just a natural extension of what our healthcare system does (which, at its core, is stop people from dying) theres also a strong economic argument to pursue life-extension research.

According to the most recent available figures from the Office for National Statistics, the UK spent 197.4bn on healthcare in 2017 just under 10 per cent of GDP. As life expectancy rises, so does the length of time the average person can expect to require care or live in poor health. The number of chronic conditions linked to ageing is rising (dementia, for example, currently affects an estimated 850,000 people in the UK, with that number expected to grow to one million by 2025).

The cost of fighting these age-related conditions is astronomical: according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the NHS spends more than twice as much on the average 65-year-old as on the average 30-year-old. Patients aged 85 and over require, on average, five times as much spending as 30-year-olds.

All of which sounds like a pretty good argument against life-extension if we struggle to treat the elderly now, it follows that dramatically extending life should be disastrous. But there are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, it ignores the fact that life-extension is something that happens albeit slowly already. A child born today is predicted to live, on average, a little over eighty years or about five years longer than a child born in 1980. An increase in age-related diseases is a crisis were living already.

The second problem is that the financial argument conflates age and health. No-one who advocates radical life-extension is suggesting the goal should be an extra 50 years in a nursing home. A treatment for ageing isnt the same as a cure for death: the proposal is to extend healthy life.

The humanitarian benefits of longer and healthier lives aside, extending life while reversing the current trend (in which longer life correlates with a longer period of physical and mental decline) would not only reduce the burden on the healthcare service, but also mean that fewer people would be forced into retirement due to poor health.

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How to live when nobody dies - E&T Magazine

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This rescue racoon is too cute for its own damn good and wants to remind you to wash your hands – BingePost

Endlessly WeekEndlessly WeekThis week were exploring all issues everlasting, countless, and infinite.

As pet deathcare suppliers, we help households with the euthanasia course of in their very own properties and with the disposition of their pets physique as soon as loss of life has occurred. Most households selected conventional dispositions like burial or cremation. Much less steadily, they could select one thing untraditional, like taxidermy. This may be the primary time weve ever labored with shoppers who requested cryogenic preservation.

It was practically 7:30 pm in Richmond, California, in late March of 2018, and from the crest the place I stood I might see the final dregs of the solar slipping under the horizon. Throughout the Bay, the silhouette of San Francisco was drenched in shades of hazy sherbet. My husband Derek and I held palms as we slipped contained in the nook homes gate and knocked on the door. His black medical equipment, a plain bag, was slung over one shoulder to hold on his hip.

Laura, a tall, on-line psychology professor in her fifties with a background in hospice and disaster line work, ushered us inside. Her son, Jordan, a quiet 27-year-old faculty pupil, slipped into the room after us. We had been there to satisfy Dakota, a 14-year-old blended breed canine who was dying of right-sided coronary heart failure.

In late April 2017, our personal canine Harper was dying of coronary heart failure, too. We ultimately euthanized her in our lounge, sitting on our purple leather-based sofa, with our favourite band enjoying quietly from the audio system as I held her to my chest the identical approach we took naps collectively over our 9 years collectively. As soon as she died, I positioned her in a casket lined with a brilliant pink towel and surrounded her physique with flowers and her favourite treats. We took photos of her earlier than the process and after she was organized in her casket. Then we drove to the crematory. I positioned her physique within the retort myself, and we picked her up an hour later. Sitting in our parked automotive together with her urn in my lap, we determined to open a veterinary practice centered on offering in-home hospice, palliative care, and euthanasia. Derek was a veterinarian; I labored as a licensed funeral director, embalmer, and crematory operator throughout the Bay Space earlier than transferring to pet deathcare. We believed {that a} good loss of life was an integral a part of a very good life.

Hospice and palliative care is healthcare centered on maximizing high quality of life, often for terminally unwell sufferers. Dakota the canine was that form of affected person. He had right-sided coronary heart failure, a persistent situation during which the guts muscle or valves doesnt pump blood effectively. In consequence, the fluids again up into the stomach. (Left-sided coronary heart failure causes the blood to again up within the lungs as an alternative, resulting in respiratory issues and eventual suffocation.) Laura and Jordan had been managing Dakotas sickness with treatment, administration of concentrated oxygen, and periodic drainage of the fluid from his stomach. In the end, most causes of coronary heart illness in canine should not reversible situations. Dying isnt a matter of if, however when.

Usually, we advise that households select euthanasia over a pure loss of life. As we clarify it, the physique is a machine whose dominant aim is to proceed functioning. It should push to take action no matter ache or issue. Euthanasia hastens the pure dying course of as painlessly as we all know with present medical science. Jordan and Laura wished Dakota to die naturally, with out the help of euthanasia medicines, however in addition they wished to make sure his ache was managed.

As a veterinarian, my major position and moral crucial is to advocate on behalf of the pet, whos at a drawback within the decision-making course of to start with, Derek explains, as he remembers Dakota. Even on the expense of disappointing or angering the proprietor, advocating for essentially the most moral loss of life expertise is forefront. If Dakota had been dying of left-sided coronary heart failure, the sort that causes suffocation, Derek would have insisted on euthanasia as essentially the most humane and moral selection. As a result of Dakota was experiencing right-sided coronary heart failure as an alternative, a pure loss of life was acceptable as a result of the quantity of struggling was minimal. (Ache is one sort of struggling, however there are various several types of struggling, together with nausea, malaise, fatigue, and concern.) Derek and I supplied a hospice Emergency Consolation Package stuffed with sedatives and ache aid, as inspired by the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care.

Jordan tell us that they had been all for cryogenically preserving Dakotas physique after loss of life, a course of he first discovered about when he was a youngster. My dad died once I was 10, Jordan would later inform me. I believe that form of actually made me extra conscious of mortality in a approach most 10-year-olds arent. He and Laura organized to have Dakota acquired on the Cryonics Institute (CI) in Detroit, Michigan, a spot that describes cryonics as a type of one-way medical time journey. Cryopreservation is the method the place organic tissue, like a physique, is cooled to very low temperatures with the intention of stopping chemical processes which may trigger injury to the tissue, like decomposition. The our bodies (or sufferers, as theyre referred to within the trade) are held in a dewar, a tall stainless-steel vat. In the end, the top aim of cryopreservation is to carry the physique in stasis till new expertise is invented that may reverse or treatment the harm or ailment that brought on loss of life.

Cryopreservation of tissue isnt a brand new idea. In 1964, a physics instructor named Robert Ettinger revealed The Prospect of Immortality, a e book which promoted the idea of cryonics. By 1972, the primary cryonics group was based (an organization now known as Alcor, situated in Scottsdale, AZ.) And the expertise used within the cryopreservation course of is even older than that.

The tech we use goes again to the time of Queen Victoria, Steve Garan tells me over the cellphone. Garan is the Chief Expertise Officer of TransTime, a cryonic suspension service out of San Leandro, CA that was based in 1974. Hes additionally a Analysis Fellow at UC Berkeley, the Director of Bioinformatics on the Heart for Analysis & Schooling on Getting older, and a researcher on the Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory. Cryogenic liquids had been synthesized again within the late 1800s The dewar was developed again within the 1800s as properly. We use Victorian expertise.

Cryopreservation of organic materials has included semen, blood, tissues like tumors, eggs, embryos, ovarian tissue, and plant seeds, however as of but no human has been cryopreserved and revived. With the intention to do this, youd need to treatment no matter brought on their loss of life, chuckles Garan. [But] there are individuals strolling round as we speak that had been frozen embryos, he provides as proof of idea. For each open letter on cryonic justification signed by scientists, yow will discover the same counterargument denouncing it as snake oil mixed with false hopes.

In Richmond, Derek and I gently recommended Laura and Jordan concerning the scientific validity of cryonics, guaranteeing they totally understood that theres, as of but, no proof as to the chance of success. The contract they signed with CI is equally shrouded in dire authorized jargon: Laura and Jordan should signify that they perceive cryonic cryopreservation is an unknown, untested course of, and that no human being, or any grownup vertebrate, has ever been efficiently cryonically suspended and revived, and that the success of cryopreservation is dependent upon future advances in science and expertise and that the likelihood of success is totally unknown. CI charged $7,300 for the privilege of storing Dakotas physique after loss of life, excluding the prices of transport his physique there as quickly as doable after dying.

Laura doesnt disagree. Id not advise anyone to do it, she tells me frankly, talking rapidly however clearly. I believe theyre simply throwing cash away. She used life insurance coverage cash from her husbands loss of life to cowl many of the prices and bridged the hole by borrowing from her retirement fund. Jordan nonetheless feels gratitude about each the cash spent and the truth that spending it didnt have an effect on their high quality of life. He plans to repay her as soon as hes graduated and creating wealth.

Derek and I agree that apart from the need of guaranteeing the consolation of the pet, an enormous a part of our work is targeted on serving to the household discover consolation of their second of grief. If cash is a device meant to enhance our lifes expertise whereas were dwelling, and cryopreservation of Dakotas physique contributes to a way of solace for Laura and Jordan, then weve efficiently accomplished no less than one aspect of our job.

Laura acknowledges that shes selecting of her personal free will and volition to signal the paperwork, pay the charges, and ship Dakota (and, ultimately, in February 2020, their 16-year-old canine Maggie, too) to be cryopreserved. However she believes the trade preys upon individualss concern of loss of life.

It magnifies my concern of loss of life, she explains. It makes me extra afraid to die. Im involved they may begin cryopreserving me earlier than Im totally useless, I would really feel it, it is perhaps painful. And the considered waking up a millennium from now, surrounded by individuals with completely different customs, expertise, and languages, contributes to her concern.

She receivedt totally decide to saying that sufferers wont ever be revivedshes been flawed earlier thanhowever posits that the variety of variables that need to fall into place for it to occur appear unlikely. There are such a lot of components which can be going to need to work out completely.

Jordan himself isnt truly totally offered on the feasibility, both. I believe theres an inexpensive sufficient probability that its value doing, he explains fastidiously, his measured cadence in direct opposition to his mothers rapid-fire responses. I form of see it like an insurance coverage coverage. I imply, when youre decomposed within the floor or burnt to ash [via cremation], theres mainly a zero % probability of ever dwelling once more. He likens it to Pascals Wager, a philosophical argument that posits people wager with their lives within the existence or nonexistence of God. Pascals Wager argues {that a} rational particular person ought to stay as if God exists, as his nonexistence will end in finite loss, whereas they stand to obtain infinite beneficial properties (an eternity in Heaven) or undergo infinite loss (eternity in hell) for atheism.

Jordans different large argument is the shifting litmus take a look at for what constitutes loss of life. By many of the existence of animal life, in case your coronary heart stops, youre useless, he says. However now, in fact, theres loads of individuals who have gone into cardiac arrest and been resuscitated. Have a look at somebody like Dick Cheney, who was alive with out a heartbeat strolling and speaking. (After a sequence of coronary heart assaults, Cheney had a small pump known as a left ventricular assist device put in whereas ready for a coronary heart transplant. The gadgets creates steady blood movement and leads to no pulse or measurable blood strain.)

After Derek and I left, we exchanged emails with Laura late into the night, amassing details about the necessities to ship Dakotas physique to CI. We initially deliberate to make use of UPS. Per CIs directions, Dakota needs to be wrapped in a towel, contained inside a plastic bag, tucked right into a good high quality cooler secured with clear tape, cooled with luggage of ice. From there, he needs to be packed into a big cardboard field and shipped as an animal diagnostic specimen. The phrases useless canine or useless animal had been not for use, lest they trigger the usemployee to refuse the package deal. Time, we had been informed, is of the essence. With cryopreservation of individuals, if there may be advance warning of the loss of life, the affected person is positioned in an ice tub inside seconds of scientific loss of life being declared. Decomposition begins instantly.

Dakota handed in a single day. The canines loss of life led to a mad scramble, the place the very best laid plans of veterinarians and cryonic institutes finally go awry when two UPS workers refuse the cargo. I did what I might to help with the method, however my palms had been tied by the failure of the usto comply with their very own bureaucratic insurance policies. My contact at CI informed me this type of screw-up is a rarity and relies upon solely on the worker; they claimed to have acquired one other pet by way of UPS cargo by way of with out difficulty.

One full day passes. Then one other. Derek and I apprehensive and puzzled about what occurred. Did Dakota get there? Even when Dakota obtained there, would he be capable of be cryopreserved? Does water ice even comply with the suitable requirements for good cryopreservation? Have been we serving to our shoppers get ripped off by helping on this course of?

I finally came upon that Laura was put in contact with Garan at TransTime, who delivered Dakotas physique in particular person by way of business flight from California to Michigan. TransTime doesnt usually deal with the cryopreservation of pets, however Garan can also be a pet proprietor; he has a 15-year-old canine named Skippy and will empathize with Lauras predicament. Canines are like household, he says. We deal with them nearly like kids, in a approach. He had no downside helping with the switch and he jokes that the x-ray technician who took Dakotas physique by way of safety practically fainted.

Dakota was lastly acquired at CI and his physique cryopreserved in a dewar, per Laura and Jordans directions. Jordan says he was despatched an image of Dakota cryopreserved in Michigan, and tells me he has no worries about it being an outright rip-off. It looks like it will be a fairly large conspiracy in the event that theyre probably not even freezing the our bodies, he says.

Even with out bodily seeing the process carried out, Lauras intestine feeling can also be that Dakota was correctly preserved and saved. They genuinely imagine in what theyre doing. I dont imagine theyre consciously getting down to reap the benefits of individuals.

For his or her half, CI Headquarters say they attempt to be as open as doable so individuals can discover consolation and closure. Theyve pets shipped by way of water ice as a result of dry ice freezes a pets smaller physique and prevents perfusion, a course of involving an injection of cryoprotective options that decreases freezing injury to the cells. (Although pets like birds should not perfused as a result of their vascular techniques are too small to work with, which suggests theyre frozen and extra prone to undergo injury than a perfused pet.) CI at the moment has 184 pets in cryopreserved storage.

Garan notes that whereas the restore job for Dakota could also be tougher due to the time between loss of life and cryopreservation, its not inconceivable. By the point we get to that time, it could be form of irrelevant, he says. The expertise to take action might exist within the type of bioprinters, biogenerators, nanorobotics, the human/mind cloud On the finish of the day, theres simply as a lot uncertainty concerning the preservation of a pet as there may be about individuals. The underside line is theyve on a regular basis for expertise to do its factor.

Once I communicate to Laura practically two years after Dakotas loss of life, shes every week out from her second canines loss of life. She and Jordan have additionally elected to have Maggies physique cryopreserved, although this time nearer to residence at TransTime. (Garan, for his half, makes it clear that TransTime will solely think about pet cryopreservation if their accompanying human has plans to be preserved as properly.)

Each Laura and Jordan felt like cryopreserving Dakota and Maggie was anxious to bear. I wouldnt name it a nice course of by any means, says Jordan, although he does level out that working nearer to residence actually made issues simpler. For Laura, the grief of Maggies loss of life mixed with the stress of logistics plus the added regret of cash spent has her feeling unhappy and depressed.

Its nearly like with each canine, I didnt actually have an opportunity to grieve and mourn as a result of there was a lot trouble to make this occur. She vacillates between worrying about whether or not its unhealthy that Jordan has a lifetime of false hope that he may get his canine again and feeling adamant that its value it to grant Jordan that modicum of hope and defend him from his concern.

For Jordan, his intense concern of loss of life, of nonexistence, and of a adverse afterlife are sufficient to overpower any frustrations brought on by way of the method. If I did it for myself, however I didnt do it for Maggie and Dakota once I awakened then Id remorse it endlessly, he says.

Ace Ratcliff lives and works in sunny Boynton Seaside, FL with their veterinarian husband and a pack of untamed beasts. Their hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome makes for a rebellious meatcage. They like studying, getting tattooed, and tweeting @mortuaryreport.

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This rescue racoon is too cute for its own damn good and wants to remind you to wash your hands - BingePost

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Science is still studying how telomeres are linked to longevity – Quartz

Inside each of our cells is a genetic hourglass. Every time our cells dividewhich they have to do to keep us alivetheir 23 pairs of chromosomes remain nearly identical. Except for one intentional change: After each division, a cells chromosomes get a little bit shorter.

Ten years ago, a group of scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering these ever-shortening DNA sequences at the end of our chromosomes, called telomeres. After a cell has divided a certain number of timesknown as the Hayflick limitits telomeres are so short that the cell knows its time to peacefully shut itself down. When enough cells die off, organs wear out, and eventually, we die, too.

This discovery ushered in decades of aspirational research that set out to understand the role of telomeresand the protein that can rebuild them, called telomerasein aging. Perhaps, if scientists could figure out how to flip our biological hourglasses over, our cells could replicate for longer. Our organs would tire more slowly, and we could delay death.

The Nobel-winning research began way back in the 1970s with the work of biologist Elizabeth Blackburn. But even after four decades, its still not clear if telomeres can safely be manipulated to thwart aging.

That hasnt stopped some scientists from betting on artificially extending telomeres to support longevity: Just last week, Kansas-based biotech startup Libella Gene Therapeutics announced that it would begin early clinical trials testing out a gene therapy that could lengthen telomeres, according to OneZero.

That approach, which as of yet has only been tested in mice, is indicative of humans deep desire to roll back the clock. But the deeper scientists go into the field, the more complicated the story behind telomeres gets: Theres evidence that they may play an important role in other aspects of our health, and that cell division may not be the only reason they shrink over time. Before scientists can try to safely harness telomeres to improve our health, theyll have to answer these questions.

One anti-aging strategy that researchers have investigated involves telomerase, the telomere-building protein that Blackburns colleague Carol Greider discovered on Christmas Day in 1984.

Telomerase is an important tool for cells that divide frequentlylike blood cells, the lining of our digestive systems, or sperm and egg cells. These cells regenerate so often that they need an enzyme to regularly rebuild the caps on the end of their chromosomes.

All the other kinds of cells in our bodies shouldnt have telomerase. But if they did, theoretically, their telomeres would never shrink. They could keep dividing beyond their normal Hayflick limit.

Theres one big problem, though: Cells that have telomerase but arent supposed to often wind up to be cancerous.

In approximately 90% to 95% of cancers, during the process of oncogenesis, telomerase is reactivated, says Masood Shammas, a lead scientist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. As cancer cells spread, theyre able to build their telomeres back upallowing them to keep dividing and dividing and dividing.

This means that messing with telomerase to somehow extend lifeas Libella is attempting to, by injecting patients with a virus containing the gene that codes for telomeraseis risky business.

On the other hand, it also means that blocking telomerase could be a way to treat cancer. Shammas has worked on clinical trials that have tested telomerase-targeting drugs with a company called Geron. Although their original drug worked in mouse models, it failed in early-stage clinical trials for people, because it had some nasty side effects. As a result, scientists have had to put stopping telomerase on hold until they can figure out how to make it only work in cancer cells.

An alternative strategy focuses not on rebuilding telomeres, but slowing their shrinkage in the first place. Scientists are trying to understand what, in addition to normal cell division, causes telomeres to contract. Maybe limiting these activities could decelerate aging in a way that doesnt accidentally reactivate a cancer pathway.

The activities that can slow telomere degradation are still being researched. It seems, though, that theres a lot of daily living that may play a role in telomere length. Anything that damages DNA will damage telomeres, says Shammas.

Telomeres are particularly vulnerable because theyre more exposed on the ends of the chromosomes. Smoking, drinking, and eating red meats fried in oilswhich all produce molecules that can bind to and distort DNAmay harm your telomeres, too. They also happen to all be known carcinogens.

Of course, this doesnt mean their effects are felt immediately, or that these activities will definitely lead to telomere shortening or cancer. Its their cumulative effect over a lifetime, plus other factors that scientists havent nailed down yet, that we need to watch out for. And clinicians generally advise against these activities anyway.

Perhaps more surprisingly, a life-affirming action may also cause telomeres to shrink: Pregnancy.

Dan Eisenberg, a biological anthropologist at the University of Washington, has studied how telomeres behave over time for people who become pregnant. A large cohort study he and his team published last year looked at women in the Philippines. After controlling for age, they found that the more times someone had been pregnant, the shorter their telomeres were. Each pregnancy seemed to shorten a persons telomeres by the equivalent of as many as four years of life.

This could be because of how taxing pregnancy can be on the body. Developing a fetus takes about twice the energy a person normally uses. Theres less energy available to maintain and repair cells for the long-term, Eisenberg says.

While it seems counterintuitive that evolution would penalize a person for reproducing, it may be a necessary trade-off. Perhaps the benefit of spreading new genes into the world is worth the cost of slightly shorter telomeres, Eisenberg explained. After all, evolution doesnt affect the processes that happen to us after we after our reproductive years. Weve already achieved the goal of immortality by way of our progeny.

So, lifestyle modifications to prevent telomere shortening dont sound too appealing. And so far, the only activity that researchers have found that can naturally extend telomeres in the slightest may be exercise. The only thing that world show that can activate telomerase activity is regular exercise, says Shammas. But its still not clear why this is the case, and it certainly doesnt mean that hitting the gym can stave off all aging.

Which brings us back to the promises made by companies like Libella, the gene therapy outfit currently promoting a telomere therapy. With four decades of telomere research yet to produce better guidance than cut down on red meat and exercise more, its easy to appeal to the insecurities and fears of the aging population with less-than-fully-baked treatments.

As OneZero reported, Libellas study is slated to begin early next year in Colombia. Likely, its running there to skirt the US Food and Drug Administrations (FDA) requirement for an Institutional Review Board, which ensures the safety of clinical research participants. Generally, clinical trials overseen by the FDA have been preceded by trials in at least two animal species to show theyre safe and effective. So far, the studies that have backed Libellas gene therapy are based just in mice.

This study has caused a lot of experts to raise eyebrows, particularly when it comes to the ethical issue of asking participants to pay for a therapy with high risks. The company is charging $1 million for each of its five aging but otherwise healthy participants, as well as five participants who have Alzheimers disease and five who have a form of artery disease.

But the trial also raises the question of whether aging itself is a disease worth treating. With any disease, there has to be a disease-free state, says Suresh Rattan, biogerontologist at Aarhus University. In the case of a situation like aging whose main cause is life itself, when will we say that we have treated it? Evolution didnt design us to live forever.

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Science is still studying how telomeres are linked to longevity - Quartz

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How to live forever – TechRadar

Humans have wanted to live forever for as long as we've lived at all. It's an obsession that stretches back so far that it feels like it's somehow hard-coded into our DNA. Over the years, immortality (to a greater or lesser extent) has been promised by everyone from religions and cults to the cosmetics industry, big tech companies and questionable food blogs.

It's also a staple of fiction, all the way back to the earliest surviving great work of literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh, carved onto stone tablets in 2100 BC, depicts its titular king hunting for the secret of eternal life, which he finds in a plant that lives at at the bottom of the sea. He collects the plant by roping stones to his feet, but then a snake steals it while he's having a pre-immortality bath. Gilgamesh has a little cry, then gives up.

A cuneiform tablet containing part of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

The reason why we age is still the subject of major scientific debate, but it basically boils down to damage accumulating in our cells throughout our lives, which eventually kills us. By slowing that damage - first by making tools, then controlling fire, inventing writing, trade, agriculture, logic, the scientific method, the industrial revolution, democracy and so on, we've managed to massively increase human life expectancy.

There's a common misconception that to live forever we need to somehow pause the ageing process. We don't. We just need to increase the rate at which our lifespans are lengthening. Human lifespan has been lengthening at a constant rate of about two years per decade for the last 200 years. If we can speed that up past the rate at which we age then we hit what futurist Aubrey de Grey calls "longevity escape velocity" - the point we become immortal.

There's a common misconception that to live forever we need to somehow pause the ageing process. We don't. We just need to increase the rate at which our lifespans are lengthening.

That all sounds rather easy, and of course it's not quite that simple. It's all we can do at the moment to keep up with the Moore's Law of increasing lifespans. But with a major research effort, coordinated around the world, who knows? Scientific history is filled with fields that ticked along slowly and then suddenly, massively, accelerated. Computer science is one. Genetics is another recent example.

To understand what we need to do to hit longevity escape velocity, it's worth looking at how life expectancy has increased in recent history. The late statistician Hans Rosling made a powerful case that average lifespans rise alongside per capita income. Take a couple of minutes to watch this video and you'll be convinced:

Reducing the gap between the global rich and poor, therefore, is probably the fastest way to boost the world average life expectancy figure, but it's limited. And it won't do much for people in rich countries.

To boost the lifespans of the people living in countries that are already pretty wealthy, we need to look closer at the countries that are forecast to have the highest life expectancies in the coming years. A study published earlier this year in the Lancet shows what life expectancy might look like in 2030 in 35 industrialised countries, using an amalgamation of 21 different forecasting models.

South Korea tops the chart with women living on average beyond 90, while France, Japan, Switzerland and Australia are not far behind. Most of the countries at the top of the chart have high-quality healthcare provision, low infant deaths, and low smoking and road traffic injury rates. Fewer people are overweight or obese. The US, meanwhile, is projected to see only a modest rise - due to a lack of healthcare access, and high rates of obesity, child mortality and homicides.

The study results are interesting, not only because they're the best possible guess at our future but because they clearly show how social policies make a massive difference to how long people live. There are unknowns, of course - no-one could have predicted the 80s AIDS epidemic, for example, and no doubt further pandemics lurk in humanity's future. But ban smoking, fight obesity, and introduce autonomous cars and personalised medicine, and you'll see lifespans rise.

The US is projected to see only a modest rise in lifespan - due to a lack of healthcare access, and high rates of obesity, child mortality and homicides.

The other interesting thing is that the study's results are a shot across the bows of scientists who claim that there are hard limits to human lifespan.

"As recently as the turn of the century, many researchers believed that life expectancy would never surpass 90 years, lead author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London told the Guardian back in February.

That prediction mirrors another, published in Nature in October 2016, that concluded that the upper limit of human age is stuck at about 115 years.

"By analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the worlds oldest person has not increased since the 1990s," wrote the authors - Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland & Jan Vijg.

"Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints."

The maximum length of a human lifespan remains up for debate.

Other researchers, however, disagree. Bryan G. Hughes & Siegfried Hekimi wrote in the same journal a few months later that their analysis showed that there are many possible maximum lifespan trajectories.

We just dont know what the age limit might be. In fact, by extending trend lines, we can show that maximum and average lifespans, could continue to increase far into the foreseeable future, Hekimi said.

Three hundred years ago, many people lived only short lives. If we would have told them that one day most humans might live up to 100, they would have said we were crazy.

That's all big-picture stuff, so let's dive down to a more personal level. Assuming that you can't change your genetics or your life up until the point that you're currently at, what can you personally do to live longer?

Here's the list: Don't smoke. Exercise your body and mind on a daily basis. Eat foods rich in whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and unsaturated fat. Don't drink too much alcohol. Get your blood pressure checked. Chop out sources of stress and anxiety in your life. Travel by train. Stay in school. Think positive. Cultivate a strong social group. Don't sit for long periods of time. Make sure you get enough calcium and vitamin D. Keep your weight at a healthy level. And don't go to hospital if you can help it - hospitals are dangerous places.

All of those things have been correlated with increased lifespan in scientific studies. And they're all pretty easy and cheap to do. If you want to maximise your longevity, then that's your to-do list. But there are also strategies that have a little less scientific merit. The ones that people with too much money pursue when they realise they haven't been following any of the above for most of their life.

Inside the Cryonics Institute.

Cryonics is probably the most popular. First proposed in the 1960s by US academic Robert Ettinger in his book "The Prospect of Immortality", it involves freezing the body as soon as possible after death in a tube kept at -196C, along with detailed notes of what they died of. The idea is that when medicine has invented a cure for that ailment, the corpse can be thawed and reanimated.

Calling someone dead is merely medicines way of excusing itself from resuscitation problems it cannot fix today, reads the website of top cryogenics firm Alcor.

The problem is the brain. First, it's so dense and well-protected that it's extremely difficult for the cryonics chemicals to penetrate it. It's almost impossible that it doesn't get damaged in the freezing process.

The 21,000,000,000 neurons and ~1,000,000,000,000,000 synapses in the human brain means that it'll be a while until we have the computational resources to map it.

Secondly, your neurons die quickly - even if you're immersed within minutes of death, you're still likely to suffer substantial brain damage. To which cryonics proponents argue: "What do I have to lose?" If the choice is between probably never waking up again and never waking up again, and it's your money to spend, then why not give it a shot?

An alternative to deep freeze is storing your brain in a computer. Not literally a lump of grey matter, but a database detailing in full all of the connections between the neurons in your brain that make you you (known as your connectome). Future doctors could then either rewire a real or artificial brain to match that data, resurrecting you in a new body (or perhaps even as an artificial intelligence).

A close look at a slice of mouse brain. Credit: Robert Cudmore

So far, we've only managed to map the full connectome of one animal - the roundworm C. elegans. Despite the worm's mere 302 neurons and 7,500 or so synapses, the resulting data is about 12GB in size - you can download it in full at the Open Connectome Project, and even install it in a robot, which will then act like a worm.

Unfortunately the human brain is a somewhat larger undertaking. The Human Connectome Project is making a start, and AI is helping, but the 21,000,000,000 neurons and ~1,000,000,000,000,000 synapses in the human brain means that it'll be a while until we have the computational resources to get it done. It's worth noting that this isn't an unassailable goal, especially if we can somehow figure out which bits are actually important to our personality and who we are as individuals and which bits are just used to remember the lyrics of Spice Girls songs.

For now, though, my recommendation would be to stick to the list of simple life extension strategies above. It's probable that in time we'll have new ways of augmenting our bodies that will extend our lifespans (we've already started with cyborg technology - just look at pacemakers and artificial hips).

But if you want to be at the front of the waiting list then you'll need to arrive at that point with as youthful a body as possible.

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High school students explore chemistry and biochemistry at Misericordia University’s annual Career Exploration Camp – The Dallas Post

Misericordia University hosted a Chemistry-Biochemistry Sciences Career Exploration Camp in June. High school students participating in the camp are, from left, first row, Kyra Grzymski, Shavertown; Lainey Mentrikoski, Mountain Top; Laura Miller, White Haven; Tyler Mendoza, Wilkes-Barre; Cole Yantiss, Vienna, Va.; Charles Saladino, an associate professor; Beth Haas, an assistant professor; Darren Tomeo, Laflin; Erika Wintersteen, Dallas; Hunter Kline, Dallas and Catherine Falzone, Dallas.

DALLAS Misericordia Universitys Chemistry-Biochemistry Sciences Career Exploration Camp gave high school juniors and seniors a chance to explore careers in cosmetic and food chemistry, alternative energy, the pharmaceutical industries.

Students created nylon fibers, extracted essential oils from orange peels, designed and created batteries, made hand lotion, along with other exciting projects and experiments during the three-day residential camp.

Misericordia University also offered camps in biology, communications and media, literature, occupational therapy and speech-language pathology.

The camp programs provide high school students with an opportunity to explore career fields, experience on campus residential life and interact with faculty and current college students.

For more information about the 2017 Chemistry-Biochemistry Sciences Career Exploration Camp, call Anna Fedor, the assistant professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, at 570-674-6769 or at afedor@misericordia.edu.

Misericordia University hosted a Chemistry-Biochemistry Sciences Career Exploration Camp in June. High school students participating in the camp are, from left, first row, Kyra Grzymski, Shavertown; Lainey Mentrikoski, Mountain Top; Laura Miller, White Haven; Tyler Mendoza, Wilkes-Barre; Cole Yantiss, Vienna, Va.; Charles Saladino, an associate professor; Beth Haas, an assistant professor; Darren Tomeo, Laflin; Erika Wintersteen, Dallas; Hunter Kline, Dallas and Catherine Falzone, Dallas.

http://www.mydallaspost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/web1_FOR-PUBLICATION-Chemistry-Biochem.jpgMisericordia University hosted a Chemistry-Biochemistry Sciences Career Exploration Camp in June. High school students participating in the camp are, from left, first row, Kyra Grzymski, Shavertown; Lainey Mentrikoski, Mountain Top; Laura Miller, White Haven; Tyler Mendoza, Wilkes-Barre; Cole Yantiss, Vienna, Va.; Charles Saladino, an associate professor; Beth Haas, an assistant professor; Darren Tomeo, Laflin; Erika Wintersteen, Dallas; Hunter Kline, Dallas and Catherine Falzone, Dallas.

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High school students explore chemistry and biochemistry at Misericordia University's annual Career Exploration Camp - The Dallas Post

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