I Want To Live Forever — Here’s How I Plan On Doing It

Life extension is an exciting and controversial topic. And one that I feel a deep-rooted responsibility to write about, because I never plan on dying.

On the one hand, every human being that has ever lived has perished. Emperors and kings, visionaries and inventors — for all of their accomplishments, every single one of them have been similarly reduced to dust in the annals of time.

But on the other hand, recent advances in biotechnology are bringing us astoundingly close to understanding the exact mechanism by which human beings age and die.

We’ve only recently discovered the importance of mitochondrial health, telomere extension, and CRISPR — all in just the last thirty years! And thanks to an ever-accelerating rate of technological change, the next twenty years are likely going to be even more exciting.

Many people have wanted to live forever… but we’re the first generation that has a chance of actually doing so. Not sure what I mean? I’ll explain.

Practical Immortality 101

The basic line of immortality reasoning is as follows (adjust this with you own numbers for a better or bleaker outlook):

  • I am in my mid-twenties. Based on my North American lifespan (81), that gives me approximately sixty more years to live.
  • Between now and 2083, we will see profound developments in anti-aging technology that will increase our estimated lifespan.
  • Due to the exponential nature of technology, on average, new advancements will occur faster and provide larger benefits over time.
  • Eventually, I will live to a point at which technology adds more than one year of lifespan for every extra year that I live. At that point, I will actually be getting biologically younger (healthier, more fit) as time wears on.
  • Ergo, practical immortality.

Put another way: by the time I would have died, technology will allow me to extend my life by a few more years. Then, by the new time I would have died, technology will allow me again to extend my life. Rinse and repeat until the heat-death of the Universe.

The technical term for this concept is longevity escape velocity (LEV). It’s a fascinating idea, and one that we owe heavily to Aubrey De Grey and David Gobel, two of the leading advocates for life extension.

How to Achieve Longevity Escape Velocity

If I want to live forever, the next question becomes how to achieve longevity escape velocity.

And for most of us, the best way is going to be through instituting lifestyle changes that will increase our natural lifespan as much as possible until technology catches up.

Other, more scientifically-inclined people might consider directly joining the movement by taking up biotechnology and working for labs or the private sector. But personally, that’s not me. As smart as I like to pretend I am, there are many people more intelligent and better suited for the task.

So we’ll concern ourselves primarily with the first: lifestyle changes to make you live longer.

A note before I go further: not all of these have been scientifically shown to work. A few, like exercise, have. But due to the nature of statistics, hard science on life extension takes decades to accurately assess and carry out.

Unfortunately, we don’t have decades. We can’t remain indecisive. If you and I want to live forever, to maximize the statistical probability of achieving LEV, we need need to act now based on our (admittedly) limited knowledge.

The way I see it, even if some of these lifestyle changes don’t contribute to an increased lifespan, they will, at best, have a neutral or only slightly negative effect. Meaning you and I are almost always better off doing more than less.

So without further ado…

Here’s everything I do on a daily basis to live forever:

People ask me why I don’t want to die. I always found that peculiar — does anybody really want to die? Shouldn’t I be asking you why you don’t want to live?

We’ve been told our entire lives that death is natural and unavoidable, and to welcome it with open arms. But the older I get, the less I buy into that premise. Nowadays, when people tell me death is a part of life, all I ever say is “know what else used to be a part of life? Smallpox. Not anymore!”

Life is filled with too much joy and heartbreak — too many profound experiences — to be content with merely letting it slip through our fingers.

Not to mention the fact that we’ve only experienced a small slice of a fraction of the Universe’s entirety! All of civilization so far has existed on a tiny pale blue dot, winking at eternity. When people say they’ve experienced all that life has to offer, how could that be anything other than incredibly naive?

What about the next thousand years of human exploration and conquest? What about life on other stars? How would it feel to set foot on a different planet feel, or meet another intelligent species? You’d risk all of that, just because of the oft-quoted notion that “death is a part of life”?

Not me. I want to live forever.

Do you do anything in your life that I missed? I’d love to hear about it — more data is always better than less. We’re in it for the long haul, after all.

If you enjoyed the article, I encourage you to clap and share! More of us should learn about the possibilities of practical immortality and life extension.