Satyajit Das: Staying Alive! The Quest for Longevity

Yves here. New Year resolutions often focus on health, like eating better or less and exercising more. The underlying motivations are vanity and longevity, or at least a higher quality of life in what would normally be one’s dotage. The medical industry has been focusing even more on “healthy aging” as well as (for those who can afford it) life extension medications and technologies, like regular blood transfusions from young adults. Satyajit Das takes a suitably jaundiced look at this trend.

One interesting side effect of this effort to conquer or hold back death, a side effect of the rise of secularism, is that it’s a new super-rich form of denialism. I sometimes repeat this tale:

In the Indian epic Mahabharata, Yudhisthira goes looking for his missing brothers, who went searching for water. He finds them all dead next to a pond. In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first.

The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?” Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.” The crane reveals himself to be the Lord of Death and, after some further discussion, revives the brothers.

Satyajit Das is a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives  (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), A Banquet of Consequences RELOADED (2021) and Fortune’s Fool: Australia’s Choices (2022). His latest book is on ecotourism and man’s relationship with wild animals – Wild Quests (out 1 May 2024) 

Woody Allen wanted to achieve immortality by not dying rather than though his work. Recently, China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin (both septuagenarians) were caught on a hot mike discussing human lifespans, including predictions that life expectancy could extend up 150 years and how 70 years old is young compared to the past. Silicon Valley’s mostly superannuated entrepreneurs, including Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle), Peter Thiel (former PayPal CEO), Larry Page (co-founder of Google), and Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI have invested in anti-aging projects.

The primarily white male tech-bros’ interest in longevity is linked with their obsession with space travel. Having actively helped destroy the earth, they seek to leave it to the plebs. Given that the nearest habitable planet is hundreds perhaps thousands of years away, longevity and ideally immortality is necessary to reach sanctuary.

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The quest for long or ideally eternal life involves a deep-seated belief that death can be conquered. The early efforts include the search for the ‘fountain of youth’, mentioned in Herodotus’ histories written around the 5^th century BC, a mythical spring which would restore youth by drinking or bathing in the water. The Epic of Gilgamesh speaks of The-Old-Man-Will-Be-Made-Young plant. Since the 19^th century, the focus has shifted to scientific approaches.

Average life spans now approach 80 years or more in developed countries. In 1900, they were the 30-40 years. The improvement is driven by reduction in infant mortality, early-life deaths, control of preventable deaths and infections, and delaying the effect of chronic diseases central to mid- and late-life mortality. Key elements are higher living standards, including sanitation, clean water and better nutrition. Medical improvements include improved knowledge of diseases, medical therapies, vaccines and especially antibiotics.

While average life spans have risen, claimed improvements in life expectancy are debated. Pliny’s Natural History has a chapter devoted to long-lived people. Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, lived till 75 while his wife Livia died when she was 86 or 87 years old. Roman emperor Tiberius died at 77. The 6^th Century ruler Empress Suiko, Japan’s first reigning empress, died aged 74 years of age. Individual life expectancy, the statistic that interests most people, may not have changed significantly.  Average life span increases reflect that more individuals are living longer.

Lifespans are affected by differences in income which determine living conditions, hygiene and access to medical treatment. Queen Elizabeth the First died at 70 when the life expectancy of her subjects was around half that figure. A study of 2,000 ancient working-class Roman skeletons buried in common graves found that their average age of death was 30, due to trauma, hard labour, and diseases.

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Today, ‘longevists’, ‘immortalists’ or ‘extensionists’ rely on a mix of scientific and more dubious technologies to achieve eternal life or, at least, extend it beyond the estimated 125-year biological limit.

Available approaches include tissue rejuvenation, molecular repair, regenerative medicine, and gene therapy. There is organ replacement using either artificial or live organs. The latter included xeno-transplantations, the grafting or transplanting of organs or tissues between members of different species. Human organs, donated by or ‘harvested’ from young donors, are another potential source of replacement parts. There is plasma exchange or plasmapheresis, which addresses autoimmunity by cleaning the blood using a centrifugal filter to remove ageing and inflammatory molecules and proteins. These are replaced with fluids containing albumin (a protein found in plasma) from human beings and transferred back into the body. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson injected himself with plasma from his teenage son, Talmage. He discontinued the practice citing a lack of benefits.

Pharma-nutritional tools entail drugs or diets to rejuvenate the body or eliminate major diseases. There are obligatory apps that track vital signs to detect pre-disease states. Alongside vitamins and other health supplements, purported anti-aging products are now a lucrative global industry, despite a lack of evidence of efficacy. The side effects of many of these strategies remains uncertain.

A more radical technique is cryonics where your body or a part (usually your severed head to preserve the brain) is frozen at ultra-low temperatures, below −130 °C. The remise is that you will be revived at some time in the future when there is a cure for your terminal condition or the formula for eternal life becomes available. It is a risky strategy given that there is the technology for revival remains uncertain. The freezer could also fail from mechanical or electrical breakdown. At a fee of up to $200,000, it may be the ultimate example of beezle, a robbery where you do not recognise your loss until much later, though in this case that might never since you are dead and/or frozen.

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Two recent books examine the debate surrounding extending life from different perspectives.

Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer (2025, Princeton University Press) by anthropologist Michael Gurven asserts that humans are built to live for around 70 years, mainly because of homo sapiens evolutionary path, rather than advances in sanitation, clean water and medicine. Longevity developed among our hunter-gatherer ancestors around 50,000 years ago. A lifespan extending beyond reproductive years, unusual in the animal kingdom, evolved because of advantages in co-operation within communities and across generations.

Gurven examines indigenous diets and lifestyles, which resemble Western pre-industrial civilisation, highlighting the absence of chronic aging diseases like cardio-vascular complaints, diabetes and increasingly dementia. In several spirited, provocatively titled chapters on loneliness, the psychology of aging and geronticide, he contrasts the experiences of older individuals in these societies with modern atomistic advanced ones. He identifies the isolation, loneliness and sedentary lifestyles of the aged in Western cultures arguing that the lack of continued usefulness and feeling of obsolescence is damaging. In indigenous worlds, the concept of retirement is largely irrelevant with the old expected to contribute till their death.

Gurven’s ideals, drawn from the limited sample of cultures based on his fieldwork, among pre-industrial subsistence communities, may not be universal. Encouraging inter-generational co-operation as well as simpler values and modes of living, while laudable, may be difficult to transfer into many modern societies. Not everybody is likely to share the author’s view of what a healthy, happy, and productive old age should be.

Seven Decades’ blend of vivid first-hand experience and science is eminently readable. The mixture of evolutionary biology, ethnography, comparison of different cultures and hard data provides rich insights into lifespans, aging and living well.

In the lighter-hearted The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life (2025, Bodley Head),journalist and social scientist Aleks Krotoski takes aim at the billionaire technocrats’ pursuit of longer lifespans, an easier and obvious target. Based on his reporting and interviews with key suspects, the author outlines a predictable mix of unlimited ambition, religious faith in divine technology and hubris.

Aldous Huxley anticipated the confused combination of technology, spiritual positivity, youth and fantasy in his 1939 prize-winning novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. The book, whose title is from Tennyson poem about a mythological figure given eternal life but not eternal youth, satirises American narcissism and superficiality through the central figure – Hollywood millionaire Jo Stoyte, who desperate to stave off death, hires a doctor to research the secrets to long life. Like Huxley’s character, some of the very rich regard death as a solvable problem. They are pouring billions to reverse human diseases much like fixing bugs in a computer program. Given the quality of current software code, the metaphor unwittingly identifies the challenge.

Macabre theories and sinister experiments mean there is plenty to work with. There is a planned ‘Longevity Network State’ where the rich can bio-hack their bodies without interference from the state. AI will apparently be an important enabler. Alongside dedicated engines like AlphaFold, OpenAI is developing a version of its large language model adapted for longevity science. Super-smart systems will provide approaches beyond what human minds can produce.

In Krotoski’s analysis, the principals suffer from “engineer’s syndrome”, the belief that any complex problem can be solved using engineering. Despite a palpable lack of knowledge about basic biology, tech moguls, who believe that there is a technological fix for every problem, see life as somehow repairable allowing them to cheat death. For this sect, acceptance of a fixed, natural lifespan is defeatist “death-ism” preventing them from realising their full potential. Max Chafkin’s biography of Peter Thiel The Contrarian outlined the subject’s view that acceptance that the future is unknowable is an abdication of human agency. This perspective is grounded in the approach that made them rich in the first place. The central characters lack of self- awareness, absurdity and naivete provides unintended humour.

The Immortalists is entertaining but the billionaire tech bros’ underlying motivation is never explicitly addressed. The obsession with disrupting mortality may have something to do with wealth that cannot possibly be spent in a normal lifetime. There is narcissism. Bill Gates thought: “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.”

Opportunities for prolonging life perhaps indefinitely will be mostly the preserve of the rich and perhaps the selected, chosen by Dr. Strangelove to procreate creating a superior strain of the species. The plan for their extended time is unclear. In Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, a ship’s captain, cursed with immortality after attempting to sail in a terrible storm, is doomed to glide around the seas. Given the deteriorating physical and social environment, the immortalists’ safety is uncertain. The BBC reported the former bodyguard of one tech billionaire advised that the first thing he and his team would do in case of an apocalypse is to shoot their employer and take over his bunker for themselves.

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There are practical, economic and ethical aspects of extended lifespans. Estate planning is complicated – if you chose to be cryogenically preserved with a possibility of resurrection then what happens to your assets? Wealth is trapped with delayed or no inter-generational transfer. The effects on overall population levels are unknown. The cost of an aged population living for longer periods is unwelcome. Advanced societies are already struggling with demographics and the cost of supporting older citizens weighing on public and private finances. There are complex ethical issues: should advances in life extension be equitably distributed rather than restricted to the privileged few? The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf bluntly argued that: “Nobody is entitled to clutter up the planet forever.”

Japan, amongst the oldest societies on earth, reveals some of longevity’s problems including geriatric crime. Lonely and destitute elderly commit crimes to be jailed for shelter, food and company. In one incident, a man in a wheelchair armed with a sharpened umbrella attempted to rob a convenience store. The wheelchair tipped over and required the attendant to help the would-be robber to continue the act. There are high rates of recidivism because elderly criminals prefer comfortable incarceration. Jails have had to modified with disability aids for these aged prisoners.

The Roman Empire feted successful generals with parades. During the triumphal procession, a commoner sat next to the commander whispering in his ear to remind him of his mortality; “memento mori” meaning remember that you must die. Jorge Luis Borges in his short story the Immortal wrote that death give life’s meaning. Without limited to lifespans, there is no motivation or urgency. Good lives do not need to be long as they contain everything that is worthwhile.

© 2024 Satyajit Das All Rights Reserved

A version of this piece was published in the New Indian Express