The 1000-Year-Old Human [Part One]

A Casual Encounter with Environmental Reality

A few years back a friend of mine picked me up from the Miami International Airport and asked me if I wouldn’t mind if we dropped by a tropical fish store called Aquarama to grab some parts for a saltwater aquarium that was being set up at his new place.

The store stood alone off of one of Florida’s multi-lane double roads and had the look of a Greek restaurant with its white exterior and blue trim. Inside, the specialty shop was home to a pretty impressive set up and I could see why we’d made the side trip. As Jeff got his parts, I wandered around checking out all the displays and bumped into a guy who was polite but seemingly a tad annoyed as he worked on transferring some fish out of a 100-gallon tank and working on restoring the quality of the water. As opposed to the ever seemingly pristine aquarium, the water in this one had become discoloured with a deep brownish tinge and there was a fair amount of excrement on the bottom and floating all throughout, along with seemingly rapidly spreading algae growth on the sides.

He explained that the power had tripped on this particular part of the building he guessed sometime on Saturday night and that the tank had gone unfiltered, circulated, or aerated for a couple of days over the long weekend.

Only a couple of the few dozen Royal Gramma hadn’t survived, but more than a few were floating on their backs, which they often do seemingly just for fun and that helps make the colorful fish an aquarium favorite, but that he was taking as a sort of personal condemnation, as though it was some sort of unionized picket line where these purple and orange Fairy Basslets were expressing their dissatisfaction with their living conditions.

He was carefully removing the fish with a net held in his well-trained hand and placing them directly into a nearby tank of crystal-clear water, and I was able to see the once lethargic and certainly on their death beds reef fish seemingly take in deep breaths through their gills as they scurried off to swim, obviously relieved, in the steady flow of fresh saltwater moving through their new location.

The memory has always lingered as I was sort of surprised by how little time it took for a well-balanced environment, perfectly suited for its inhabitants, to turn nasty and unliveable.

I mention this experience because in June and July of 2023 NASA released a series of videos showing a visualization of what CO2 being added to the Earth’s atmosphere over the course of the year in 2021 looked like, and I couldn’t help but be immediately transported back to the tank that held the Royal Gammas.

If you haven’t seen the videos, I truly urge you to take a look. The Earth might be bigger than any fish tank, but the images quickly drive home a pretty stark realization…

A Glimpse into Historical Climate Awareness

In 1896, a Swedish scientist by the name of Svante Arrhenius – who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903 – first proposed that fossil fuel combustion would eventually result in global warming as he established a relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and rising temperatures.

His work was inspired by the work of Joseph Fourier, who in 1798 accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on his Egyptian Expedition, and in 1801 until 1807, while in Grenoble, conducted experiments on the dissemination of heat and calculated that given the Earth’s size it should be much cooler than it was and that the atmosphere must be acting as some kind of insulator keeping the planet warmer than it otherwise should be.

In 1857, Eunice Foote, an amateur female climate scientist, made the discovery that when sunshine shines on carbon dioxide and water vapour confined within a closed container that heat builds up. It wasn’t until 1901 that her realizations, along with Arrhenius’ theories, combined to create the term the “greenhouse effect”, first coined by meteorologist Nils Gustaf Ekholm.

So, as early as the 1800’s, humans had an inkling that there was such a thing as global warming, and in 1901 it took on a name, but it wasn’t until the late 1970’s that the concept really came into the public’s consciousness.

Misdirection and Misinformation: The 1970’s Climate Wars Begin

Before it did, an enduring and still to this day popular in some circles myth was propagated in the mid-1970s that claimed that the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, with many in the media reporting that the amount of sunshine hitting the ground had diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972, and that the thickness of the ice pack was growing, and that since the 1940’s the global mean temperature had dropped by 2.7 degrees. Media reports in many publications such as Newsweek even suggested that the threat of a new ice age might stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind, and “doctored” pictures of a 1977 Time magazine cover circulated and further fueled the falsehoods pointing towards global cooling.

Big Tobacco and Big Oil: Profit Over People

The reality was that while there were some studies providing information that might be able to claim to support elements of a climate cooling theory, that the vast majority of scientific research was pointing to the exact opposite.

However, thanks to companies such as Exxon, that thoroughly understood the climate warming science even before 1977 and then actively spent tens of millions to promote misinformation and attempted to downplay their contributions and the dangers of carbon dioxide emitted through the burning of fossil fuels, the general public found itself muddled in conflicting science similar to the smokescreen that the tobacco industry had generated to mask its culpabilities. With this, and as we squandered a valuable window to actually do something to offset the problems of rising global temperatures throughout the 1980’s, we now find ourselves deep in the middle of a runaway train of global warming, again effectively illustrated by further NASA videos.

Longevity: A New Perspective

But this is where an interesting thought occurred to me.

What if all the ails and looming perils that we’re seemingly at the mercy of today weren’t simply the result of profit-oriented corporations or individual stockholders or self-serving people in general, but had more to do with a common shortcoming that engages us all as humans?

What if the very core of the problem was that we simply didn’t live long enough?

What If We Lived to Be 1,000? A Thought Experiment

So, as a brief thought experiment, I’d like you to imagine what the world would look like if we all lived to be 1,000 years old, with the main 975 years of it spent as youthful, vigorous, healthy and energetic individuals, the way most of us are in our 20’s and 30’s.

Would we all then just stand by and passively watch, as we seemingly do now, as a world and a civilization that we created veers over the edge of collapse and into the abyss as we say, “Oh well. It was a fun ride.”?

Or would we actually do something more than swim on our backs to express our displeasure at the great big hand in the sky and on the other side of the glass?

The Longevity Paradigm: A Step Towards Solving Our Global Crises

Ronald Reagan, in talking to the 42d Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September of 1987 speculated that,

“Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

Reagan conceived that an outside force like an alien invasion would be the impetus needed to unite us, but as we learned from the Covid plague starting in 2019, as a species we seem more intent on tribal survival than in joining together in any great united effort to combat a common foe. Maybe it’s because Covid is microscopic and we can’t attack it with tanks or missiles that differentiates our ability to unite and do battle? Maybe it’s because wearing a mask for a few months would force us to give up more of our individual freedoms than any of us can abide? Maybe it’s because we truly have no vested interest in the long-term survivability of the species if we only live to be 70?

But would Reagan’s imagined aliens even need to invade to be able destroy us?

In the rather far-fetched sci-fi 1996 Charlie Sheen movie, “The Arrival”, A SETI radio astronomer discovers a signal coming from deep space and being returned back to the stars from Earth and learns that aliens are already here, living amongst us, and changing the climate on the planet to suit their own needs by releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gasses generated from a fake a powerplant located in Mexico.

Apparently though, even this sort of alien intervention is unnecessary as we seem quite content to do it all on our own.

So right now, we all share a common foe and we should all have a common purpose.

I mean, how often is it that you can look directly into the eye of a giant meteor bearing down directly upon us and actually have within our own lifetimes the capability to actively do something about it? Or even in the case of greenhouse gasses to actually do nothing by simply not generating any more of their outputs by switching to alternatives?

And sure, there are a million and one reasons why switching will be difficult and time consuming and that will shatter existing industrial models.

But here’s the thing, new and never before seen models will be created, and new, and never before imagined wealth will be created, and a clean and more beneficial atmosphere will be created.

From Horses to Electric Cars: The Power of Paradigm Shifts

For thousands of years and until the early 1900’s everything was built around transportation provided virtually exclusively by horses. By 1930, with the advent of the gasoline powered car, unless you were on a farm, and even then to a far lesser degree, you couldn’t give away a horse. A technology thousands and thousands of years old was all but eliminated overnight because the desire was there.

So within thirty years, if we wanted to, and with what we know right now, we could change the whole paradigm.

All that’s lacking is the will and the old warhorses desperately hanging onto technologies whose time has passed.

The Next Frontier of Human Evolution

But would this even be a question at all, or would we have even ever gotten to this place in time and our experiences in history, if we lived to be a thousand years old?

Would anyone who had lived through a World War ever want to live through one again?

Would anyone who had ever experienced a plague ever be resistant to doing any and everything necessary to prevent another from ever occurring again?

Would we all be content to live in an atmosphere that extends no more than 20,000 feet high –about 3.76 miles high or the distance you could drive in a few minutes – containing all the breathable air that a whole planet needs to survive on, and continue to dump 36.8 billion tonnes of CO2 into it in as we did through energy generation in the year 2022 alone, and not counting all the other billions of tonnes of other greenhouse gasses that we generate every year?

My guess is that a lot, if not the vast majority of all of the issues facing us as a species would have been solved at least 500 years ago especially if we all knew we had to live through another 500 years of it.

Of the 70 years we now live on average, the first 15 are developmental, we’re essentially children. For the next 45 we’re more or less productive in one sense or another, and for the last 10 we’re essentially riding out our golden years.

Think about that.

In an average lifetime, 45 years of it shape a planet.

45 years where we have the chance to be at our physical and mental best.

Now, extend that to 975 years…

Imagine all that we could learn. Imagine all that we would do differently so that we wouldn’t have to be moved from one fish tank to another because, first of all, we knew that there were no other tanks and that no one except for ourselves was coming to our rescue.

Imagine the paradise that we would build for ourselves in one lifetime because not only would we have the time to do it but because we would all actually want to do it.

That’s why I’m a huge proponent of the need for longevity.

That’s why I believe that one of the cornerstones to the survival and ultimate success of our species will be our ability to live healthy and vigorous youthful lives well into our 900’s.

That’s why I believe that as we move to making it possible for people within this lifetime to reach 200 healthy years, that from there the technologies will exist to make the leap to the next 800 years a reality.

From there, anything is possible.

And I’d like to believe that with that comes the very best of what we can all be…

– Written by a human.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.