🍄 Can we live long enough to live forever?

Does your Instagram feed make you feel #transhuman? Are you popping NAD+ at breakfast? Do you see old age as reversible? Riff with us on our speculative future...

From the minds of Sputnik Futures. Exploring every rabbit hole there is. For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it's free.

🍄 AudioDose: this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Reverse destiny here.
🎧 Alice in Futureland Podcasts
📘 ALICE book Hacking Immortality: New Realities in the Quest to Live Forever

Hello, we're Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. Humans have been searching for centuries for the secret to living longer, but the answer may be as simple as maintaining a positive state of mind. Research suggests that optimistic men and women may live longer than those who are pessimistic. While the association is clear, scientists still do not fully understand why. If you ask us, we would say it is the gift of being human. In his first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Silicon Valley visionary, composer and musician Jaron Lanier explains why humans still matter in an age increasingly mediated by computers. We agree, biology runs deep, and we are only starting to understand our evolutionary code. Mix biology with AI, add a fly named Indy and a few jellyfish, and you have plenty of reasons for optimism.

About that fruit fly named INDY—short for “I’m Not Dead Yet.” There’s a gene found in fruit flies that, when it is altered, can extend -- in fact, double -- its lifespan. Researchers dubbed the gene Indy (for I’m not dead yet, a well-known comic line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). The protein encoded by this gene transports and recycles metabolic byproducts. But occasionally, defects in the gene lead to production of a protein that renders metabolism less efficient, so that the fruit fly’s body thinks and functions as if it were fasting, even though its eating habits are unchanged. This defect appears to create a metabolic state that mimics caloric restriction. There’s a large body of evidence that a calorie-restricted diet can provide substantial health benefits, including delayed aging.

Have you ever wondered what the future may hold when we can live past 120 healthfully? Will we all be lining up for some form of human augmentation that supersizes our senses or gives us X-Man abilities? Mind uploaders are looking for a possible new human through technology. But theoretical physicist John A. Wheeler told us in a Sputnik Futures interview that it is “fantastic that evolution would have ended up with us. What other kind of creature could it have been?” Wheeler was excited about a recent discovery, in China, of dinosaurs that had wings like birds, and he asked, “Do we have something, some faculty that we haven’t put to use, the way the dinosaurs had put to use these feathers of theirs until later?” We wonder!

Follow us for a moment through the looking glass to imagine what new possibilities await us in the next thirty years. It will be the era of truly personalized, regenerative medicine in which tech-driven therapies deliver precise solutions where and when you need them. It will also be the era of connected health, as AI is expected to proliferate in our everyday lives by 2030, setting the stage for an automated life. Perceptive technology may anticipate our health needs before we even realize we have them. Finally, we will have the opportunity to be constantly well. If we offset age-related diseases, thereby slowing and perhaps reversing our biological age, we will have extreme generational spread and large populations of supercentenarians. The old infrastructures of government, society, family, business, and education will have to adjust to this new reality. Yes, there are a few unknowns and challenges, but the hope is that as society adjusts, we will make this longer life a happier one.

“The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way – but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man, remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.”—Julian Huxley, distinguished biologist (and brother of Aldous Huxley, from In Religion Without Revelation (1927).

The great transformation to radical longevity will be a delicate and nuanced balance of humanity and technology. We use tools to improve our lives, and the evolution of our tools will drive our own evolution. A new chapter in humanity’s story has begun, and we — living together symbiotically with machine intelligence —get to write what happens next. It’s an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live.

The advances result in humanity surpassing the limits of physical and cognitive capacity. We become part of the internet of everything, evolve in relationships with automated personalities who are our teachers, companions, and lovers. The lines between technologies that enhance our physical, digital and biological environments have blurred. Where do we go next?  To the galaxies, my friend!

Starman Waiting in the Sky

Will microgravity unlock the longevity code? The space industry is looking beyond the idea of colonizing the moon, or Mars, towards the possibility that the zero-gravity landscape of our solar system may hold some keys for targeting aging.

According to NASA, it seems that some types of stem cells grow faster in simulated microgravity. This is important not only for aging here on Earth, but for our venture beyond. For humans to live on Mars, the moon or another other planet, we will need to grow a significant number of human stem cells to treat diseases and repair tissue throughout a person’s lifetime.

But we may not need to physically travel to find immortality—there are some experts in the field of human consciousness that propose we may already be immortal through our consciousness. Studies in near death experiences and the vivid recall of activities the patient sees while clinically dead, are awakening a new look at the energy that sustains our bodies and our thoughts, and the fact that we may be connected to a universal wave. The first law of thermodynamics, also known as Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another. We have an energetic body; our biology runs on molecular energy; our nervous and circulation systems and heartbeats and neural exchanges are all an energetic exchange. If our consciousness is energy, and that energy is already immortal, perhaps we need to set our sights beyond biological reprogramming to devise ways to harness the electrical fields that are within and around us. (More on that in our book Tuning into Frequency)

If only one person at the end reaches immortality, will the experiment of human existence on this planet be successful? Perhaps we will know the answer by the time we are 120. Stay tuned for the Generative Human!

What Else We Are Wondering…

🔍 Biohacking death
Want to cheat death? There’s a club for that. Remedy Place social wellness club memberships include unlimited Tech-Remedy Benefits like cryotherapy and hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Or you can upgrade your human performance with Aperion Zoh which uses individualized, epigenetic precision performance optimization to achieve a state of limitless human potential.

🔍 Longevity is like oxygen
Turns out oxygen is more than just the air that we breathe—it’s the latest longevity treatment. Hyperbaric that is. Hyperbaric medicine uses 100 percent oxygenated air at an elevated ambient pressure to treat a variety of conditions. By breathing 100 percent oxygen at elevated pressure, 20 times more oxygen travels through the body's bloodstream to injured organs and tissue. Hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy stimulates the production of new blood vessels, reduces inflammation and activates vital cellular repair mechanisms. These effects have the potential to slow down the aging process, improve cognitive function and enhance physical performance.

🔍 Starting young
Imagine if you could live a life without allergies or having to take antibiotics? That’s the goal of Melio a health technology startup pioneering a groundbreaking platform for infectious disease diagnostics—starting with infants. It focuses on longevity and healthspan with its diagnostics solution that rapidly identifies bloodborne pathogens to eliminate unnecessary prescriptions.

🔍 Digital Immortalist
A new wave of AI-based ”grief tech” offers us all the chance to spend time with loved ones after death—in varying forms. Avatars for the dead are available today— like Re;memory lets you have conversations with your loved ones once they have passed. The HereAfter app interviews you about your life now, so loved ones hear meaningful stories by chatting with the virtual you after you are gone. As avatars become more realistic and Generative AI can recreate our thoughts, the real concern is not how your ancestors may think of you, but who then owns your avatar once you’re gone? Or how will generative AI represent you after life? (especially when you are not around to press delete.)

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland Books
🎧 Alice in Futureland Podcasts
🎧 Rejuvenation and Longevity with Dr. Mickra Hamilton, Human Performance Expert and C.E.O. of Apeiron Zoh Corporation.

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