8 Today. 8 Trillion Tomorrow.
Longevity Biotech is a child on a mission - to have us live ludicrously-long, physically-healthy lives. But what about those who won’t?
Nearly 8 trillion dollars of market value is predicted for nascent longevity space. The boyish excitement of those investing in longevity ventures is as intoxicating as the magnitude of naive optimism. In all this are we forgetting the value of healthcare, and human happiness, as we know it?
At time of writing, it’s May 1, 2022. Another ‘8’ to reflect on. Our daughter’s birthday. A day of infinite joy. She’s on the rise! Yet, this is nature’s parabolic trajectory towards a short low-earth orbit from which, like us all, she will one day start descending back, from whence she came. Long, long after we as her parents touched down gently we hope. Actuarial tables say this won’t be until well into the 90's on average. May the gods (or the 13 year old kid running this reality simulation) help her pension fund if she’s not got gainful employment into her early 80’s then. But aside from the macro economic matters, it will not be plain sailing for all. Some will glide back down gracefully, some will unexpectedly crash, some will burn on re-entry, some will spin tortuously for far too long. No-one will sustain an effortless, affordable, orbit circling the cradle of humanity any time soon. Gravity is time’s graveyard.
Everyone on our team counts themselves among the ultra-privileged even if not so financially independent as some of those we look after. Personally, I feel I have a tremendous amount to live for. Not least my eight year old. It makes a lot of sense to put a significant amount of time, and net worth into maintaining one’s health for as long as one can. This way, we may well live and work and enjoy being around for longer. And there are huge start-ups to invest in, full of the brainiest people on the planet trying to make this all possible. The most successful ‘unicorn’ founders (ironically named, as seekers of longevity from eternal beings) are pouring funds and thus creating a future market in longevity. It feels like the new Healthcare + Pharma markets combined. Whether you're the Pharaoh of all Egypt, or just Twitter, it does make sense. What better way to spend a few spare billions than to spend more time with those you love, doing great stuff, or visiting Mars, while swerving round the reaper’s scythe.
The radical bullishness of the longevity fund manager is infectious. The sharp pitch. The limitless self belief. The investment quanta bolstering the brightest of minds gives me FOMO. It’s an organic goldrush. Pascal’s happy with my wager. My tummy tingles with anticipation, hell yeah, let’s do this, I’m in. Sentiment echoed far more subtly by serious scientists unraveling the study design that Nature’s currently running to escape extinction: Live, reproduce and evolve. Death is not seen as a Serious Adverse Event. Kurtzwiel argues that by 2045 we will have evolved enough to engineer our exit from the universal inevitability. That’s not that far away. So why not keep an ear to the ground, stay as healthy as humanly possible and wait till then before injecting pro-ageing peptides for plumper skin or firmer pecs now. Another good argument.
Sticking to the space analogy, many ambitious folk are planning to visit Space. Some are leaving the planet altogether, and some really do want to opt out of nature’s 5 billion year ongoing clinical trial of life, death and random evolution altogether. I am pretty sure that the cost of getting into orbit will come down. So will the cost of bioengineering. The impact of ultra-longevity on the planet will get incrementally more economical, but exponentially terrifying socially as more of us get stratospherically old. Our current approach is look forward, shoot for the stars, worry about consequences later.
It’s perhaps not unsurprising that those happy, healthy, wealthy and once-young have a quite sensible aversion to aging and dying. There is less consensus among those who have not been dealt as good a hand. And we must also continually remind ourselves to remember those with hard to treat, and terminal, illnesses who will not harvest the fruits of the tremendous science dollars now being generously, if sometimes ludicrously, ventured.
It begs the question of where we should be investing, in the transition from treating disease, as we are trying to today with ever diminishing returns, to engineering out the process of aging from our very cells that leads to most of illness as we know it. And even then there is no such thing as a life without incident or injury that has little or nothing to do with the process of getting old. On that note, we'd like to pay tribute here to someone whose family our cancer charity advised, though sadly without the outcome we hoped for. George Fox recently lost his life far too young, to a disease on the rise that has more to do with how we turn from a single cell into trillions of them and from the first brain cell into countless neural interconnections that host our mind and enable us to experience life itself. George was just 13 when he died a couple of weeks ago of brain cancer. Glioblastoma. He was and remains an inspiration to us and a guiding star to spreading our bets in research.
Asteroids can hit us at any time and just by nature of us living, and living longer, we must take ever greater care of ourselves, and invest in our health, including sacrificing some of the stuff we indulge in the most, versus relying on future engineering fixes if and when they are safe and affordable for the likes of us to prescribe. Don’t count on 2045 as the end of aging for everyone. I’ll bet my life on it.
Universally, the greatest hack in feeling okay about all this is to achieve super-wellness. There is a science, and a modality of therapeutics emerging for this, closely connected to the school of consciousness studies. Life is not merely a physical phenomenon but an experiential one. The ‘matter’ of being aware of our existence and to appreciate it more is as much a part of health as physical intactness. Pursue wellness. In its fullest sense. Infinite length of life is not achievable. Infinite joy of life, is.
JK