Planning to Live to 110
I'll spare you a link to one of the talking heads of the "anti-aging" marketplace discussing her plans to live to 110, and how other folk might, hypothetically, follow along at home. You can find it easily enough via Google if so inclined. It puts me in mind of the following entirely made-up short exchange:
Me: I hear you are planning to live to 110?Talking Head: Yes.
Me: So you must be donating handsomely to help fund the SENS research program, which aims to repair the causes of aging, right?
Talking Head: No.
Me: You're not planning this very well at all, then, are you?
People show up every now and again in public forums with talk of planning to live for a long time in good health using nothing more than supplements, diet, and exercise: make all the right lifestyle choices, eat a good diet, don't get fat, be calorie restricted, and so forth. There's even a billionaire who was talking a good game on the topic a couple of years back. Good health practices all raise the odds of living a healthier life, but with present day medical technology those odds don't see you making it to 90, let alone 100 or 110. Living as healthily as possible gives you slim odds - perhaps somewhere a little north of 25% - of celebrating your 90th birthday under present medical capabilities. The odds get worse if you let yourself go.
The simple, unfortunate truth of the matter is this: if eating exceedingly well really could let people live to 100 and beyond with any reliability, then this would be well known, and the world population would include thousands upon thousands upon thousands of centenarians.
So plan away, planners. It won't help all that much in achieving any goal related to the number of candles on your cake, though it may well make your life much more pleasant along the way. Good health is a very underrated thing, usually by those who still have it. The only way the planner demographic will reliably hit their high-end life span targets is by benefiting from advances in medical technology, i.e. from the results of actions and initiatives that have absolutely nothing to do with their personal health practices. For the presently older demographic, those advances would have to be of the sort envisaged in the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS): ways to actually create rejuvenation in the old by addressing the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging.
The bottom line here: if you're planning to live to 110, then you aren't planning very well if those plans don't largely revolve around helping to fund rejuvenation research of the sort pioneered by the SENS Research Foundation. Advances in medicine don't just happen: they require money, advocacy, and hard work. Which of those are you helping out with?
Sens appears to me to be a rather conservative organisation - somewhat lacking in wider vision.
Their failure to recognise another community of highly 'future' oriented people is telling. I'm speaking of a certain grass roots cryptographic currency. The potential for cooperation in terms of awareness and fund raising here is ultimately huge.
I'll be keeping my money under my control for now.. and hoping to see more visionary outfits arise in the anti-aging field - most probably originating from somewhere in Asia, and hopefully as a more global open-sourced effort.
Sens can't even take donations from a large number of countries in the world. Inexcusable when a visionary technological solution exists, and anti-aging is an issue for all of humanity.
Cryptographic currency either needs to be made law-abiding and friendly to the authorities - i.e. transparent when they want it to be - or it will be persecuted and chased off the map, just as we saw with Al Qaeda funding networks after 9/11. Governments aren't just going to sit back and say, well, I guess the cryptographers have beaten us, we'll just have to accept the existence of a new medium for tax evasion and black markets.
I see that SENS has Paypal. What countries are there that don't allow donations through Paypal?