The 1000-Year-Old Human [Part Two]

[For Part One, Click Here]

Lifespan Insights

What if the litany of humanity’s present problems aren’t so much ones of rising global temperatures, spreading drought, widespread famine, looming world wars, rampant pestilence, and newly circulating diseases, but rather one that stems more directly as a result of the length of our own lifetimes?

In fact, what if almost all of the crisis that our species face originate from the fact that, on average, we only each live to see about 70 laps around the sun?

It’s not a very long time when you think about it, and even then, this boost in our enhanced longevity is a pretty recent development.

Using carbon dating and other techniques on human fossils throughout Europe and Africa, scientists have been able to estimate that our lifespan only began to significantly increase – past the age of 30 or so – about 30,000 years ago.

And surprisingly, our current life expectancy has not changed all that much from the 1880’s to what it is today. In fact, if we were to set aside infant and child mortality, the average lifespan for men and women of the mid-Victorian era would have been around 70 years of age.

By comparison, in 2020, the average life expectancy for most industrialized nations was a little more than 75 years. It’s now down to an average of 72 since the introduction of Covid, and it hasn’t truly been rising much beyond that since the height of the pandemic.

Even when you go back in time though, changes in life expectancy were not always as dramatic as you might probably guess. There are records of certain populations living well into their 50s in ancient Rome and into their 60s during the late Renaissance.

There are even writings that confirm that some ancient Greek philosophers and politicians lived to an average of 56 years, and Italian Renaissance painters lived to an average of 62 years, but given their elevated social status these findings are, just as is true today, probably more indicative of their standings as more privileged members of society as compared to the harsher conditions that the poorest had to endure and who typically expected lifespans almost 15 years shorter.

Lifespan Historical Context

However, biologist Caleb Finch, in 2010, explained that for the most part the average lifespans of ancient Greeks and Romans was between 20 and 35 years, with the life expectancy in pre-industrial Sweden to be around 35 years, especially when factoring in infant deaths and early deaths caused by malnutrition and disease.

Based on his analysis of the data though, while there really was no genetic barrier to people of that time reaching 70 years of age, the likelihood of a newborn living to achieve that milestone was pretty limited given that the conditions that caused infant mortality were around 40% more prevalent than they are compared to today’s rate of 0.54%.

Finch concluded that the risk of early death continued to be high until age 15, mainly due to a multitude of daily injuries as well as infectious diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, and smallpox. He then concluded that people who survived through this especially challenging period of life had a much better chance of making it to the ripe “old” age of 35.

But here’s the thing though, even as our societies have advanced by dramatic leaps and bounds over the last 3,000 years, especially from a technological perspective, our life expectancy seems to have plateaued.

Since the 1880’s, humans on the whole rarely survived beyond their 70s, and making it to their 100’s, while slightly more common, is still a rarity. Of the more than 8 billion people currently on the planet, there are roughly 321,000 or about 0.004% of the population are centenarians.

Why I Believe Our Short Lives Create a Problem

And here’s where I content that our short life expectancy creates a problem.

When people forget what’s happened in the past, mostly because there’s no one around to remind us of what happened in the past – even the recent past – and as newer technologies allow for the easy creation of misinformation, manipulation, and especially the dissemination of fake and heavily slanted news, and as the ever-lowering standards of education prevail, it becomes a de facto realization that history is most likely going to be doomed to repeating itself.

The war in Ukraine; seen it before in 1917.

Plagues like Covid; seen it before with the Spanish Flu in 1919.

Democracies on the edge of collapse; seen it before with the first World War starting in 1914.

The increasing rise in authoritarianism and totalitarianism; been there and done that as recently as 1939.

In fact, pretty much everything I’ve mentioned happened, give or take a decade, in the last 100 years – or just a little longer than the span of the typical modern lifetime.

And, although there are a ton of reasons that might precipitate it, including devastating population collapses in more developed nations that are experiencing an economic reset such as China, Russia, Germany, and Japan, along with a myriad of other global issues, is it any wonder that many fear WWIII?

In 1905, Spanish philosopher George Santayana said,

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

And because this important lesson seemed to have been forgotten, especially in the fog of war, it was again mirrored by Winston Churchill about 40 years later in a speech to the British parliament in 1948 when he said,

“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

And this truth has been echoed a thousand other times, but it still seems to be that the lessons that have often been the most hard earned are the ones most quickly entirely forgotten once the generation that acquired the knowledge dies off.

So, let me ask you this – would any of what we’re presently seeing and living through be allowed to happen if we all lived to be 1,000?

I have a 60-year-old friend with failing health, who when he reads about the potential perils of A.I., or of unprecedented global warming, or of things like Bird Flu, or even just the true effectiveness of recycling plastic, he just laughs and says,

“What do I care? I’ll be dead in less than 5 years and I doubt that reincarnation is a thing.”

He sees aging as a curse where the body’s systems unnecessarily fail internally and externally, where the skin wrinkles, folds, and thins pointlessly, doing no more than essentially signalling to the world that a lifetime is nearing an end and that the person who lived it basically no longer bears any useful significance, especially in our present western cultures.

He calls most humans over 60, “Invisible People”, and he maintains that this can be clearly seen walking down pretty much any street around the world where this whole class of people is mostly ignored or displaced as the more youthful rush by without paying them any attention, or even seeing them, as they scurry about to dash into a Starbucks for a heavily marketed flavor of the moment.

In some cultures, especially in ages past, the elderly were revered for both their wisdom as well as their success at being able to be the examples of genetic superiority. They were the ones that through their lifetime of knowledge and hard-earned secrets were able to overcome the disease, pestilence, wars, and starvation that had otherwise devastated the vast majority of the rest of the planet’s population. They held the keys to making it past 15 and so they were of value.

But in today’s “everything needs to be absorbed in a weekend” Netflix world of immediate gratification, there’s no time to either recognize, value, or even bother to ask for the wisdom achieved through the accumulated experience that comes with age.

Instead, seniors are gently shepherded into old-age institutions where they’re expected to quietly slip into oblivion and pose no burden on their younger offspring who have no time for them in their busy lives and who see no value in the transference of information from them.

If there’s something that the younger generation really needs to know they can Google it or find it on YouTube.

So, in this way, even the most basic experiential learnings and nuanced wisdom that could have been passed down over a lifetime – that only lasted 70 years – is even further forgotten and virtually guarantees that the mistakes of the past are many times more likely to be repeated.

My friend maintains that aging in its current form is a totally useless process and a kind of torture that actually holds back human progress.

His eyes twinkle when he says that if he were to run the world, that he would have people first age to 35, and then reverse age to the age of 19, and then once again progress forward to the age of 35 where they would then die.

His thought is that everybody deserves a chance at being 19 at least twice, where they can go back to have a second chance at youth, but where they can do it with the accumulated wisdom of their more advanced years so that they can really take advantage of the height of their physical, mental, sexual, and energetic capacities. He then laughs as he says that the biggest lie anybody would then ever tell each other was that, “Yes, this is my first time at 19.”

But again, and even in this vision of aging that he envisions, the average lifespan that he imagines is still really only about 70 years in total.

To his way of thinking and in his worldview, there really is no great advantage to being here any longer. He feels that 70 years is long enough to accomplish anything a person needs and that this short lifetime forces people to be their most productive and live their lives to the fullest.

But is 70 years really enough?

For him, he first was a child of the 60’s intent on free love and sex and peace and harmonious awareness. Then he became a capitalist in the 1980’s where, as epitomized by the 1987 movie, Wall Street, his motto became, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

Then he became a health fanatic where he tried to convince everyone including himself that 50 was the new 30. And now he just doesn’t really care all that much and recognizes that future generations will have to pay for his largess, but sadly for them, they’ve been left with an almost insurmountable bill of environmental and ecological damage to pay.

But would he have lived life the same way if he knew that he wasn’t getting off this easy, that he would have to live his life – just like a couple of Royal Grammas entirely confined to a small 20-gallon tank that never got cleaned – if he knew that he was going to have to live and survive in the biproducts of his own existence and excrement for the next 930 years?

Humans Will Live Hundreds of Years

This is why I have such an underlying interest in human longevity. This is why I invest in and live a life that utilizes the very latest in life extension technologies. This is why I admire the so called “crazy” people like Bryan Johnson, the creator of Blueprint. 

This is why I know that the next revolutionary generation of people that will live to be at least 200 have already been born.

Instead of a 70-year lifecycle, all indications seem to be that through genetic research, human engineering, diet, supplements, and lifestyle, that there’s absolutely no reason why a person shouldn’t be able to live, right now, to see 200 or even 250.

From there, especially given our current rate of technological progress, 1,000 should be easily within reach, as I’ll later explain.

Instead of seeing aging as a natural and unavoidable process, the new way of thinking and its associated research is addressing aging as a disease. And, just like any disease, people are seeking and finding cures at unprecedented speed.

I mean think about it. In the last 250 years we’ve come from a purely agricultural, farm-based civilization where the weaving machine was the height of technology, to one where we’re about to colonize the Moon and probably Mars with permanent bases.

So, if we can get humans being born today to survive to even 200, it’s no doubt that during their 130 added years that newly developed technologies and better understandings of our genetic capacities will not only extend everyone’s lives but the quality of them as well.

I then have no doubt that in a very short period those people who live to be 200, given advancing life extension technologies and A.I. and other applications, will rapidly be able to live to be at least a thousand years old, especially through the merging of brains and technologies or other artificially induced hybrids of the human equation.

Looking at people like Elon Musk, who are already working on brain interfaces such as Neuralink, and that even today are able to interact with our thoughts and exchange information through presently rudimentary implants, gives an indication of the future that is rapidly speeding towards us.

And, if we can make it over the next 20 years without actually blowing the entire planet to bits, and forcing civilization to start all over again from scratch, probably for the 4th or 5th or 100th time already, then there might be a chance that this present incarnation of humanity might achieve true wisdom and perhaps the opportunity to be better stewards of ourselves as well as acquire the knowledge to eventually drive the entire universe.

Throughout history and through some of our oldest written texts there are examples of people describing the passage of time using the expression 40 days or 40 nights, or the size of a gathering in a manner such as Alibaba and the 40 Thieves, where 40 was never an actual indication of true time or size but rather a term that was meant to express that a long period of time or vast size had happened. This was because as the average age of somebody 2,100 years ago was roughly 25 to 30, where 40 truly did represent a very long time in the passage of a human life.

So when you hear stories of historical figures or biblical figures such as Noah who lived to be 900 or more years old, or Abdul Azziz al Hafeed al Habashi reaching 674, or more recently Devraha Baba reaching 750 years, the question becomes if we’ve actually lost access to more advanced technologies that allowed for such long life spans, or were ancient people simply expressing those numbers to represent the great wisdom and knowledge of a person by saying that they had gained 30 or 40 times more knowledge than what was possible during the average lifespan?

In the 1980s there was a movie called, “Highlander”, where a bunch of immortals that had lived through thousands of years eventually battled against each other until only one remained with the ultimate prize being unparalleled wisdom and the ability to hear and understand the thoughts of every human around the planet.

What if, as a result of our relatively tiny current lifespans, we’ve been denied this sort of knowledge? What would the world look like if we were able to live long enough to fully experience the biproducts of our own existence, including the impact of the haphazard utilization of resources as well as the contamination generated by what we produce? Would we naturally become better caretakers? Would we recognize the folly of our ways and work with increasing importance to fix things and regain balance with the planet?

Just because more than a few billion species have already lived and gone extinct and whose decomposed bodies now provide the energy in the form of the fossil fuels that currently drive our planet, it doesn’t mean that we should stand by and watch as millions more fade into oblivion. Our current rate of extinction is simply setting the stage for our own destruction as the number of species that are dying off at a clip not seen since the last time a giant meteor hit our planet is like a giant global canary in the coal mine screaming out with its very last breath that our planet and our own species is in great peril.

To the typical teenager, 30 is old – and at one time it was. Maybe it’s deeply rooted in our genetic DNA to think that way. So, to them, 70 years of age seems like some distant fantasy land filled with a yet to be lived full and complete life and set way off into the distant future.

But life happens fast.

And right now, at our current rate of consumption and the overexploitation of many of the planet’s assets, we’re kind of like shoppers at a supermarket at the start of Covid looking at shelves depleted of toilet paper – for some inexplicable reason – as well as barren of a lot of the foodstuffs and other essentials that we take for granted in the modern world.

This is going to leave us with some very hard choices and a lot sooner than we think.

We can either all agree to do a “Logan’s Run” type of scenario where when people reach 21 they magically float up into the top of a giant stadium to the cheers and excitement of the crowd and then get zapped into oblivion, or else we look to the other end of the spectrum and do something to ensure that people live to be a thousand years old and are then forced to become truly accountable for their own actions throughout the entirety of their lifetimes. 

Evolving Beyond

Imagine that you are 500 years old right now and only halfway through your lifetime.

Would you still allow for the rampant destruction, waste, and contamination of your own environment to continue, knowing that you yourself was going to end up having to live in all of the crap you produced for the next 500 years, or would you actually take the time to put into action effective measures to ensure that this fish tank called Earth is actually treated in such a way as to become the paradise in the universe that it can be?

Would we all immediately step up and take greater responsibility and drive the actions needed to safeguard and protect our own future as well as every other creature of the planet? Would we work to ensure that future generations were also able to thrive and survive in every situation as all the best that humans can be is encouraged to come to fruition and flourish? Or would we instead live as we do now, content to sit in it and simply watch the destruction of our own species and civilization and suffer through it all for the last few years?

Maybe there’s some unwritten universal constraint that Einstein and others missed that says that lives all across the cosmos are mandated to be a maximum of 70 years of age, to ensure that on a galactic scale we’ll never meet any other civilizations, as they too, with the same constraints, will also expire through their own actions long before their technologies become great enough to allow for their interaction with us.

Perhaps it’s the way of the universe that we have an imposed limit, much like the restrictions on the speed of light, when it comes to our age that ensures we’re never able to evolve long enough to be able to discover the truth of the potential of our existence or even be able to effectively learn to manage our own planet.

Perhaps it’s the way of the simulation to ensure that we only get limited game time for our handful of quarters in the machine, because any more would reveal the truths of the illusion.

Or perhaps it’s that when we reach a state of evolution somewhere akin to the one we’re currently at, that the merging of technologies with organic organisms will create new forms of life that will rapidly realize the truth and are quick to leave this existence behind as they make their way through the cosmos in their quest for knowledge, wisdom, peace, and love.

We stand on the precipice of the evolution of the human condition.

On the one hand teetering precariously towards immediate disaster and the extermination of a once great global civilization, and on the other hand, on the frontier of new and never before imagined opportunities to expand both our wisdom and our presence in previously unattainable ways, shapes, and forms across a boundless and ever-expanding universe.

Perhaps some of us being born today will make it off of the planet and into the realm of lifetimes much longer than anyone here has ever dared imagine and will be willing participants in an unparalleled experience of exploration and imagination, living on spacecraft where generations after generations are born as they both seed and explore the vastness of space.

Perhaps others of us will simply die in a world encompassed by relentless waste and hatred created through the thought processes of limited minds that imagine that 70 years old is the height of human achievement and that taking the resources of our neighbours is the only way to save ourselves.

Perhaps some will flourish in new dimensions and with new opportunities that present themselves on time scales and distances never before envisioned, while those unwilling to experience the singularity will face an Earth that again resets itself for the onslaught of yet another new species that will rise up from the ashes of the one that destroyed itself – with the former’s existence being long forgotten to the sands of time, with maybe only a pyramid or two left behind as a clue.

Our species has existed for a mere blip on the evolutionary timeline of a universe that is anywhere from 13.8 to 24 billion years old or more, and there is no doubt that in this time frame and on this planet or even others near and far that many other civilizations have risen and fallen over the eons. So while our present species may yet evolve to the point of achieving our own self-destruction, the earth, the actual planet itself, will continue to survive for probably billions more years, itself taking on new shapes and forms as it too evolves and continues to orbit a small star in a small solar system at the far end of a tiny finger of a giant galaxy that is but a tiny spec compared on the scale of the vast amount of greater galaxies that swirl in a universe of a totally incomprehensible size.

For a species virtually totally insignificant in the larger context of the moment, especially when looking at the whole of creation, it’s remarkable the level of arrogance and self-importance that we place upon ourselves, as well as the total disregard for our own salvation and the hubris in our assumption that miraculous yet to be built technologies or the technologies of other species will come to our rescue and save us before we’re able to complete the final destruction of the only planet that we’ve ever known as home.

There is no magic panacea or alien rescue ship coming to our rescue in our immediate future. What there is is hard work and the need for a determination to start right now to cease all of the exploitations and the petty global conflicts and instead start to heavily and intensively invest the hundreds of trillions of dollars that are presently being wasted into the ways and means to restore balance and viability to our planet.

Many people dream of having a backup plan of seeding humans on other planets. And that’s all well and good. But compared to the effort that it would take to terraform an entire planet like Mars to make it suitable for humans to thrive, I contend that for a fraction of the cost and in time frames far more attainable, that we can collectively move to fix all that ails this planet and in comparatively very short order if the will to do so is there.

Maybe the impetus will come from humans destined to live to be 1,000. Maybe the impetus will come from people who might live to be 70 seeking to give their children and their children’s children a better place to live and where essentially the genetic versions of themselves through their progeny will ensure that their immortality can be sustained.

The thing is, we’ve only really got about 20 years left to start the process of restoration before total system collapse is inevitable…

But just like any good story, I believe that as the end of all that we know looms and all may appear lost, that as a highly advanced species, we will be able to find a way out.

As we approach the singularity, and indeed begin to interact with it, I believe that humanity will overcome its own short-sightedness as well as its own limited life expectancy to be able to achieve a new form of evolution not restricted to natural genetic modification through evolution and needing to be shaped over tens of thousands of years, but rather through a melding of mind and machine that creates a new breed of human capable of taking charge and enacting the proper care of our own birth environment to allow us to propel ourselves forward into opportunities and joy the likes of which we’ve never before even dared to consider or contemplate.

We indeed stand at the precipice of a great moment in the evolution of our species, and

I believe that the leaders, inventors, adventures, and the explorers that have always helped to drive our civilization forward will once again rise and unite us all in a common effort to save ourselves.

And I believe that the science to help us achieve this is already making significant progress and that a focused determination of individual will and drive will bring salvation to fruition.

The only question is how long will it take for 1,000-year-old humans to become the norm so that it never happens again?

– 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.