FirstScience Interview With Aubrey de Grey
FirstScience interviews biomedical gerontologist and radical life extension advocate Aubrey de Grey: "I always try to be quite forthright and say that the technologies we develop within the next 30 years will probably only give us another thirty or so years of extra life. It's just that that extra thirty years is a hell of a long time for the technology to grow further. It's a little bit counter intuitive to people, because I often make an analogy with simple man-made machines and that we need to perform repair and maintenance on them. As in the case of cars, it's the rare car that gets a level of maintenance which can keep it going for a hundred years. The difference in the case of the human body is that we don't have a plan for this sort of maintenance. And so we don't know what to do quite so well, and we have to boot-strap to that point even though the machine (the human body) already exists. Once people understand this concept, it does help them to be much more sanguine about the possibility that we might be able to go from the point we are at in this moment – being able to do virtually nothing about aging – to effectively indefinite life spans within a few decades, which otherwise, would just make no sense at all." The path to extreme longevity is a bootstrap process of incrementally better repair technologies for the damage of aging. You don't have to fix everything - you have to fix enough to stay in good health for the next, better technology to be developed.