Could You Live Forever?

Scott: Can you give me what you think is our future of longevity? I mean, our longevity in the last 50 years has grown by, I don't know, 10, 20 years? Where will we be 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now in terms of average age if we see some of the advances in the stem cells and some of those other things come along?

Dr. Ed Park: That's all conjecture. But my gestalt of it is that we're going to hit negligible senescence in about 30 years and then it'll be a financial-political equation. The ability to give you custom replacement parts is close.

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Ed Park: And I believe that the TA, or Thalamus Activation is 90% of the answer. If you start taking it at age 21, you just won't get that old. Maybe you'll get other problems of genetic drift, but you just don't get old. So I think the TA is the key to negligible senescence. Let's say at 21 you start taking it, at this point in current technology, hundreds of years. But once you introduce the ability to get custom replacement parts, probably different rules apply. You're talking about really subtle things about neurological aging. It's like maintaining the wiring in a TV that was invented 90 years ago. 

But people are smart, they come up with good things, they're clever. Again, it all comes down to money and politics. I think we're very close, which is why before I even heard about TA I wrote a graphic novel about the sci-fi future where people don't age, and what would that mean. Because you wonder, who would be allowed to live if everybody could live forever? So, you know, that's a question beyond the scope of this, probably.