In 1900, a 30-year-old American could expect to live another 15 years, midway into their 40s. Today, the average American lives to nearly 80.
We've effectively doubled human lifespan in a century.
But even this dramatic extension of human life feels insufficient when we think about what we're still losing. Einstein and Feynman died at 76 and 69, respectively, and Steve Jobs and Marie Curie both died at 56. My grandfather lost his fight with cancer before getting to see any of his great-grandchildren. My father-in-law passed away months before his oldest daughter's wedding.
We lose great minds before their work is done. Another few decades of Einstein could have revolutionized our understanding of fundamental physics, and Steve Jobs might have continued shaping technology in ways we can't even imagine without him. And we lose the precious moments that can never be recovered. Grandparents that should have been at graduations, parents that should have walked their children down the aisle.
Beyond the loss of individual life, our lifespans distort the very incentives that drive human progress. The largest challenges we face as a species require planning and sacrifice across decades. But when the average person won't live to see 2100, long-term thinking becomes nearly impossible. Why make hard sacrifices for distant challenges? Why invest in revolutionary but slow-moving scientific research?
So if we can extend both lifespan and healthspan - the years we live without the burden of major health issues - it's obvious that we should! We should strive to extend far past an 100-year average lifespan, and keep pushing indefinitely. Imagine a world where 120 or even 150 vibrant and fulfilling years of life is the norm; where our final decades are filled with energy, curiosity, purpose, and meaning.
And yet, there are those who believe we shouldn't pursue this goal at all.
Some people simply fear the deterioration of their minds and bodies in the later stages of life.
Their fear comes from a well-intentioned place. Perhaps they've seen a loved one go slowly into the darkness, struggling every day to push past the pain and immobility. It's a haunting experience to watch someone who once lived with vitality fade into a shadow of themselves. I've felt this pain personally. Watching it happen to someone you love can plant a deep fear of the same fate, which could be enough to want an earlier (but more dignified) death.
There's another kind of fear at play here; not the fear of aging itself, but of the future we might be aging into. Some opponents to longevity might simply be scared of what humanity will look like by then. This kind of view is especially prevalent in the doomerist, seemingly-progressive archetype frequently seen on Twitter. They fear that by 2100, we'll be enslaved by our AI overlords after the post-nuclear apocalypse of World War VII, and they just don't see the point of trying to make it that far.
(This is also weaponized as an argument against having children at all, which is an argument to address some other day)
Of course, there's also the appeal to religion. 'We shouldn't meddle with questions of God and life' - as though pursuing longevity is somehow interfering with the divine plan. But if God created us with the intellect, curiosity, and capability to extend our lives, shouldn't we use these tools? Ernest Thomas Walton, the first person to artificially split an atom, made this point effectively:
"One way to learn the mind of the Creator is to study His creation. We must pay God the compliment of studying His work of art and this should apply to all realms of human thought. A refusal to use our intelligence honestly is an act of contempt for Him who gave us that intelligence."
We already accept advancements in medicine, healthcare, and surgery to alleviate suffering and extend lives by a certain amount of years, so why draw the arbitrary moral line at longer extensions of life?
The strongest (or loudest?) cohort of anti-longevity advocates comes from bioethicists and philosophers, some of which argue that extending human lifespan is 'undesirable and morally unacceptable' and a 'narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity.' From the ivory towers of academia, they warn of the impending societal collapse: healthcare inequalities, social stagnation, loss of purpose. And to be fair, they're not entirely wrong about the challenges we will face.
Look at the world today. Our current 80-year lifespan already strains the fabric of society. Pension systems, designed for shorter retirements, struggle to remain solvent as the populace lives longer. Older generations wield disproportionate influence on policies that will impact generations to come. The technological divide between old and young continues to grow. Medicare is an ever-increasing burden on the United States. Add on the looming climate crisis, another problem the youngsters inherited but did not create, and we've got full-blown intergenerational tension. This is already breeding a growing sense of fatalism among the youth.
But since when does humanity let difficult problems stop us from pursuing progress? These aren't arguments against the pursuit of longevity; these are just the challenges we will have to solve along the way.
For those fearful of aging into bad health, I truly empathize with the feeling that human life should end gracefully, before our humanity gets brutally taken away from us by old age. This fear is rooted in our raw, existential human vulnerability, and I feel these fears deeply myself. But letting these fears push us to not pursue longer, healthier lives would be a disservice to our core human impulse to push the boundaries, innovate, and redefine what's possible.
Even the doom and gloom about our current aging society is a bit overblown. Young voters are turning out in record numbers, shifting the political landscape away from the older generation's preferences. Climate technology continues to improve, with younger generations leading the charge. Even the supposed technological divide is shrinking with better and more intuitive technology - my 85-year-old grandmother sends me more TikToks than my teenage cousins, and my mother has become a big fan of her newly-found digital friend, who she calls 'CharlesGPT.' The challenges of an aging population are real, but not insurmountable.
I like Nick Bostrom's perspective from his 2005 review paper, Recent Developments in the Ethics, Science, and Politics of Life Extension. He suggests that one of the reasons we accept our current bounds of mortality as a fact of life might just be Stockholm syndrome with death itself, a psychological defense mechanism preventing us from pursuing the research that could free us.
In other words, our own resigned acceptance of what we consider a normal lifespan might be what's keeping us from looking up at all.
So of course we should strive to live as long as possible! We split atoms, caught a spaceship using chopsticks, and taught rocks how to think. Longevity is our next frontier, and we'll handle the practical challenges as they come.
I don't know exactly what 2100 will hold for humanity, or how we'll tackle each practical challenge ahead. But I do know that life on Earth has gotten unimaginably better for the average human since 1900. The tide of technological innovation and free market forces has lifted billions out of poverty, saved hundreds of millions of lives from preventable deaths, and avoided millions of infant deaths.
I'd like to think that we will, as a society, get past all of the potential Great Filters we are charging towards - runaway AI, nuclear war, civil unrest, climate change - and we will parade into the 22nd century as a more enlightened society.
The challenges we will face in our pursuit of longevity are not threats that we should fear. These challenges are an opportunity for us to evolve. And evolution doesn't mean losing our humanity; it means expanding what humanity can be.