In a profile of Aubrey de Grey, author of Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, Charlotte Allen considers the tension between empiricism and belief in the “live-forever movement”:
The current fascination with achieving immortality via science seems to track the general loss of religious faith in the modern West. Since the New Testament phrase “death hath no more dominion” no longer resonates with many people as a promise of heavenly survival, scientific life extension can be explained as an effort to achieve transcendence and eternal life by other means. Aldous Huxley explored those themes satirically in his 1939 novel, After Many a Summer Dies The Swan. … Interestingly, today’s living-forever movement involves precisely the same two themes that animated Huxley’s novel: advanced medical technology and primitive living. And also faith of a steadfastness to rival that of a medieval saint.
Living-forever people tend to display a consistent cluster of traits and fixations, of which de Grey’s major benefactor Peter Thiel is a quintessential example. Among them are: political libertarianism (a New Yorker profile of Thiel in 2011 explains that he built PayPal – since sold to eBay – in part because “he wanted to create an online currency that could circumvent government control”); boundless optimism regarding a technically enhanced utopian future (for Thiel, according to the New Yorker, it’s “sea-steading” – floating city-states on the high seas; for others, it’s colonizing Mars); and a preoccupation with one’s food intake. Nearly all living-forever people are on one version or other of the currently fashionable carb-free “Paleo diet,” if not cutting back on eating altogether. … Finally, most living-forever people seem to be confident that they personally will be around long enough to take advantage of the biomedical breakthroughs that Aubrey de Grey predicts lie just around the corner. Thiel told New Yorker writer George Packer that he expected to live until age 120 – which, because he’s just 46 right now, should give him plenty of time to become that man of de Grey’s prophecy who lives until age 1,000.
Previous Dish on de Grey and longevity here, here, and here.
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