FUTURE HUMAN
How to Get Rich and Never Die Trying
Meet the scientists and investors who want to make a killing by keeping you alive
On a recent weekday afternoon in a basement auditorium at New York University, Antonei Csoka, PhD, a professor of anatomy at Howard University, is standing at a podium, clicking through PowerPoint slides about how to live forever. Or at least how to achieve the first step toward eternal life, by killing life-ending diseases before they kill us. In the radical life-extension community, I learn, this concept actually has a name: “actuarial escape velocity.”
Before long, Csoka’s jargon-heavy remarks start running together. Admittedly, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around what he’s talking about, or its implications — I’m a journalist, not a transhumanist — but there’s a simple fact here that even my feeble human brain can understand: In the past few years, medical research has developed a host of potential ways to keep humans healthier for longer, allowing the species to stretch the human lifespan well beyond the 80 or so years people in the United States enjoy today. At some point, the people in the room agree, someone is going to bring one of these developments to market in the form of a treatment that stops or drastically slows aging. And by extending all of our lives…
