Aging Gracefully, and Otherwise

At least in the drafts I’ve done so far, the work-in-progress, Grail, uses a rotating point of view from mostly elderly characters. Because I’m not elderly yet myself (though I will be if I don’t work on it faster!), and knock on wood still fairly healthy, it’s tricky to tell the stories from inside the heads of people whose experiences I can’t yet report first-hand.

Not that I’m looking forward to any of these psychological and physical experiences, but I’m forced to wonder: What does it feel like to have a stroke or heart attack, to start losing one’s memory, or to fall, be unable to get up, and have no little LifeCall pendant to summon aid? How does it feel to long for the company of not just one or two, but a lot of people who’ve passed on before you? How easy or difficult is it to shed preconceived notions you’ve clung to for sixty or seventy years — do you even know you still cling to them?

(The hardest characters to write are the ones you’ve never experienced from the inside. Which is why most writers start out with protagonists of the same sex and cultural background as the authors’ own, of no greater age. Disaffected adolescents, anybody?)

In the course of looking around for information — anecdotal as well as scientific and medical — about the experience of growing old, I came across an article on Slate from this past May, headlined Forever Young; the subtitle spells it out for us: Books and Web sites about how to avoid getting old, or at least looking old. The author, Emily Yoffe, describes a “two-prong strategy for trying to stop time. The first is to find the right combination of food, exercise, supplements, and medical interventions to extend your life into triple digits.”

Which leads her to write of the work of the Methuselah Foundation:

…headed by Cambridge University Ph.D. Aubrey de Grey (who himself has a Methuselah-looking, though not gray, chest-long beard). De Grey believes science will soon be able to achieve his goal of a human lifespan of 1,000 years. This is not because he likes to envision the feuds that will erupt over whose house the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will spend Thanksgiving at, but because he sees aging as a form of “slaughter” of once-productive people.

(That’s the earnest Dr. de Grey in the photo at the right.)

So I went to the Methuselah Foundation’s Web site.

I confess I am not sure what to make of statements like this (question #5 and its answer, on the page of questions about the foundation’s timeframe):

How long can I/my children expect to live?

Clearly that depends how old you/they are, but I feel able to give a pretty definite prediction relative to the previous milestone. I claim that the average age of death of those born in wealthy nations no sooner than 40 years before the achievement of [the first human rejuvenation therapies] will exceed 5000 years.

The timeframe for the “first human rejuvenation therapies,” he estimates — he calls this Milestone 2 — is seven to twenty years for the first successful mouse rejuvenation therapies (“Milestone 1”), plus around fifteen years, for a total of 22 to 35 years.

He goes on:

Of all my predictions, this is the one that most thoroughly stuns most people — and, I claim, for the least justified reasons. My logic here is pretty simple:

1. When we reach milestone 2, those with access to the relevant therapies will have an absolutely non-increasing risk of death per unit time — they will not age. This is because we will be identifying, characterising and solving aspects of aging that appear at progressively later ages, faster than they progress to a life-threatening state. We have no idea at present what we will need to do to keep 200-year-olds hale and hearty, but that’s OK, because we won’t need that information for at least another 100 years. If we just pay attention to things that begin to appear in 180-year-olds as soon as we have any, as well as in 80-year-old chimpanzees as soon as we have them, and given the amount of effort we’ll be putting in, our chances of perpetually keeping one step ahead of the problem are very good.
2. At present, the risk of death per unit time that Westerners experience in their early teens is such that if it were maintained indefinitely we would live to around 1000 years on average. (This calculation has been done many times with different data and some people get 700, some 1200; 1000 is a fair consensus.)

After some paragraphs of basic but intense mathematical prose having to do with what Dr. de Grey calls the “life extension escape velocity,” he says:

If you’ve read this page from the top, you will now understand my frustration when people persist in ridiculing me for saying that we will in a few decades have therapies that will let us live to 1000, when I don’t say that at all.

Er, okay.

If you’re interested further in the work of the MFoundation, as they call it, I encourage you to visit their site; they’ve made a lot of information available, including explanations of how achieving this goal will not — or need not — effect an overpopulation crisis.

Myself, well, maybe I’m already too old to appreciate this. I’m not interested in dying anytime soon, y’know, but I love having lived — having lived with the knowledge that I will eventually die, and die (in the grand scheme of things) within a fairly short time. It provides incentive, see? It impels me to do certain things and to avoid others — to be selective. If I could live for 5000 years, and even if I remained physically and mentally healthy, and even given my natural state of restless curiosity, I still just don’t think I’d find the last millennium, say, as interesting as any of the ones that came before it.

I know, I know. Fuddy-duddy.

[If you’re less interested in philosophy and the science of (not) aging than you are in its tabloid aspects, you might prefer the ghoulish satisfactions of another site to which the Slate article points us: the (New York) CityRag ‘s gallery called the “Celebrity Plastic Surgery Explosion.”]