What If You Could Live Forever?
Some people believe they can conquer death — an age-old quest similar to Ponce de Leon’s search for the Fountain of Youth
Bruce wants to live a long time.
How long? He says at least 300. Somehow I’m not picturing him ending up like this article’s illustration: Superman Santa.
I’m not of the same inclination. I think at a certain point, normal humans and other living creatures just get tired.
Even Diego, the famous 130-year-old Galapagos tortoise, has retired to his native habitat after siring more than 900 offspring.
Back in the 1990s, I used to stop by my graduate advisor Jim Blaylock’s office once or twice a week. Our conversations often turned to the strange obsessions of the wealthy and the weird. With a twinkle in his eye, Jim sometimes opined that the world was probably ruled by a small group of six ancient people who sat in a room smoking and playing cards like the card-playing dogs, randomly deciding the fate of billions, most of the time doing things for no particular reason whatsoever.
One day the appalling behavior of a well-known author who’d published several bestselling “hard sci fi” books in the 80s and 90s came up.
“If you think that’s weird,” Jim said, “Guess what else? He wants to have his head frozen.”
“What?” I replied, having never heard of Alcor, the Scottsdale, Arizona- based cryonics enterprise that keeps plenty of heads and bodies at “a consistent -196° C.” Alcor now offers options for pet preservation too.
Today, even Alcor’s own sales website helpfully states that no one has been successfully revived after dying and being cryonically preserved. “Death is a process,” they say.
Bruce also recently suggested, “Maybe we could clone Gambit.” (Gambit died in August at age 17 — he had a good long life).
“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t be him.”
I left the rest unsaid.
Living forever is a funny thing.
We’ve Only Recently Advanced Beyond Middle Age
In 1900, average life expectancy in the U.S. was only 47 years. People’s lives got hard, young. My great-grandmother Nallie was born in 1865. She graduated from Stephens College in Columbia, MO in her early teens. Shortly thereafter, her parents were both killed when the family’s house burned down.
Nallie left Missouri and came to California on the train with her sister Sterling. Both of them met their future husbands on that train: Great Aunt Sterling married John P. Baumgartner, who ended up founding the Santa Ana — now Orange County — Register. Nallie married William John Turnbull Doak, who had the barbershop in Riverside’s Mission Inn.
Sterling and John had only one child, “Bitty” (I don’t know his real name). Bitty was five years old, playing outside their house in Santa Ana, when he was hit by a streetcar and killed.
In the exact words of my grandmother, “The streetcar hit his head and crushed it.”
I don’t think Aunt Sterling would have wanted to live forever. I don’t know how old she was when she died, but I was always told she died from grief.
My great grandmother Nallie lived to be 98 and in good health up to the very end. Her daughters who survived (Jessie died young — scarlet fever), my grandmother Lyda and her sister Stella, lived to be 97 and 99, respectively.
But my mother Sterling died at age 40 from pancreatic cancer, which she almost certainly contracted from being one of the early female animation art directors, using toxic acrylic paints.
I think Aunt Sterling would have preferred that her little boy “Bitty” would have lived. I know the choice my mother made when she was pregnant with me. I know the choice I made when I was pregnant with Anthony.
We did consider life and death, but the lives we were concerned about were not exclusively our own.
The Quest For Immortality
Medical science and technology have made incredible advances. In just a few generations, life expectancy advanced from just 47 years in 1900 to …
Yeah. U.S. life expectancy declined to 78.99 years in 2021, with a slight increase last year over the 79 mark. This decline wasn’t just the first time in over 100 years, it was one of the largest declines ever and it wasn’t just COVID that was responsible.
However, worldwide, life expectancy continues to increase. And, many people remain unaware that even in the U.S., if you’re better-off and live in a wealthy, healthy area, you can easily expect to live into your 80s, and probably even 90s.
The average life expectancy in the U.S. is declining in large part due to the nation’s horrible gap between rich and poor, which includes the toxic, life-shortening foods that are commonly sold and consumed by less wealthy individuals for the profit of a few, difficult and dangerous jobs that again — benefit primarily the few wealthiest — and finally, toxic, harmful lifestyles that primarily injure non-wealthy people.
The richest few who profit from all of these intertwined problems have been successful in convincing people that all of these health and wellness challenges are “their fault” even as they pursue immortality for themselves.
Yeah, this type of person is the sort we all want as neighbors.
Come to think of it, if they had the bucks, some of my neighbors might make the same choices as some perpetual youth and immortality advocates make. The “We don’t talk to strangers” couple and self-entitled Snowbirds? Heck yeah they’d take some teenage blood and rob a grandma of her trailer if they thought it would give them a few more miserable weeks or months of life.
Did I say miserable?
Ha ha ha, just foolin’.
Of course the Quest For Immortality Man has a Medium account with nearly 25,000 “followers.” He’s in his 40s, but Bryan Johnson, profiled last month in TIME, is unquestionably fit. He used to look normal (as of 2018) judging by his Medium profile picture.
As of his TIME profile in September 2023, Bryan looked a little different.
Bryan is a serial entrepreneur who cashed out a several-hundred-million payday by selling his payment processing platform to PayPal a few years back. Now he is head of several companies, and currently and most particularly Blueprint, a longevity promoting corporation that sells $60 EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil) and … Bryan.
Bryan states he is the “most measured person for biomarkers in history.”
I don’t even want to talk about his health regimen but let’s just say it includes wearing a “tiny jet pack” attached to his penis that measures the erections he gets while sleeping.
Bryan’s Blueprint website says, “In the 20th century, it was reasonable to make health choices that prioritized living fast and dying young.” Bryan believes he is doing a science experiment to “explore the future of being human.”
Bryan and others who think similarly to him, including his female partner Kate Tolo, in her late 20s, believe that following a strict health protocol of extreme diet and workouts based on the advice of dozens of health practitioners and living a lifestyle of —
They don’t eat regular food, they eat supplement concoctions out of a blender, go to bed early, and they probably don’t do a lot of things others do — and they also believe that humans are going to merge with Artificial Intelligence and become God knows what —
Bryan is selling olive oil and living like a black jeans-clad atheist monk gobbling supplements and eating weird nonfood.
Well who wouldn’t want to live to be 10,000 years old living like that?
The TIME profiler, a kindly-seeming writer named Charlotte Alter, asked both Johnson and Solo the obvious question about living forever: eventually all their loved ones, relatives, and friends would die while they continued.
“Surely,” Alter writes, “there must be more to living than simply maintaining adequate oxygen in your spleen.”
Alter asked the immortality pair, “Is a life without the people you love worth living?”
Johnson’s answer tells you everything you need to know about him and the mentality of those who pursue immortality in the way most humans today understand it.
The question reminded him of “senior night” before graduating from high school. “We say goodbye, we have been together all these years, and we’re probably not going to see each other again,” he said.
Gee, I wonder what Bryan’s class reunions are like.
Probably a lot of fun as long as he stays home.
We Live Near The Fountain Of Youth
I don’t know if it’s ironic or just a coincidence, but Bruce and I live in the proverbial “Fountain of Youth” region in Southwest Florida. There’s a statue to Ponce de Leon in Punta Gorda, where we initially moved. Some people say that Warm Mineral Springs, about five miles from our current home, was de Leon’s youth-giving water source. However, St. Augustine, a cool, very old town on the other coast near the Georgia border, has the official Ponce de Leon historical park.
Bryan Johnson says he has spent $4 million on his anti-aging and immortality protocol.
I don’t want to live forever, nor even to 300, like Bruce.
But for the time I have, I do want to live well, with good health and quality of life.
I’ve probably spent a cool $500 on my quest for good health, and that includes the four fitness trackers I’ve invested in. Johnson advertises he’s in the top 1.5% VO2 Max for eighteen-year-olds and yes, he did use some of his teen son’s own blood before apparently discovering it didn’t have any benefits for him.
I think I’m in the top 5% for my age and gender and that’s fine with me. It’s taken me about 5 years of continuous improvement and work to get here.
We eat pizza once a week now — homemade sourdough crust — and so far, it hasn’t put a pound on me.
I still drink alcohol (limited) and I don’t work out every single day. Keeping my health up is what has helped me to cope with Bruce’s serious spine surgery and lengthy recovery.
The reason to be healthy isn’t to live forever and I would hope, would not be so people can “merge” with AI (which isn’t very artificial and is not, as yet, super ‘intelligent’).
Most people reading this, especially those who visit the TIME link and read about Johnson and his lifestyle and ideas, will quickly see how he may be individually interested, but the majority of others will not — there really aren’t that many people who want to live that way for a day, much less for hundreds or thousands of years.
Most people want to live well and healthily and happily.
Our relationships with others and with the world we actually live in are key to achieving that.
There’s a growing understanding that physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellness are all intertwined.
I do believe that things like interpersonal abuse, violence, and war, are linked with physical and mental health in ways that our society is just now beginning to understand and investigate.
I don’t think the Bryan Johnsons of the world have any idea of the answers to that. It’s too bad that his type — like our long-ago friend who signed up to have his disembodied head frozen so he could be revived in the 25th Century — are the ones who receive so much press for their cockamamie schemes and self-centered ideas.
It's interesting that these immortality-quest people are a thing. The program this zillionare practices is little changed from those described in 1960s science fiction. I imagine that's where guys like this get the ideas; Bezos in particular seems to have taken pre-1980s science fiction as a user manual. Maybe they'll be successful, and be wraithlike weirdos living all alone in otherwise abandoned towers, with the rest of the world having utterly forgotten them.
St. Augustine is the oldest continually settled town in the United States. Montreal and Quebec City in Canada come close to their longevity but there's nearly a century of time between them.