Longevity Escape Velocity
150, 000 people die every day; 150, 000 shattered dreams, broken hearts, grieving families, and lost friendships. Amongst them are our best friends, families, scientists, engineers, doctors, and humanitarians. 150, 000 people today took their last breath, eternally in darkness, their pains and joys forever gone. The whole spectrum of human experience, in one dreadful moment is gone, nullified, never to return; empty void. The fight against entropy is lost.
It takes decades to train a civil, useful, and rational member of society. We had to learn from numerous mistakes, pass thousands of tests, and read a mountain of books. All that effort, stress, and time is nullified in one moment of sinister injustice to sentience.
Until recently, death was something that had to happen, but we are coming of an age when death becomes an irrational choice. Avoid dangerous areas, and you can avoid homicide; take antibiotics and you can avoid death from infections. But let us not ignore the horse on the dining-room table, the number one cause of death, namely aging and its gang: cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, cataract, osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and Alzheimer’s disease. These are the true mass murderers. Cancer alone kills 500, 000 people a year in the United States.
Stopping aging may seem like science fiction. It is indeed impossible today, but our jobs are not to prevent it, but to live long enough for Longevity Escape Velocity effect to kick in. All we have to do is slow it down enough to reap the benefits of ever improving medical technology and science. If you get cancer AFTER the cure for cancer is found, then you will not have to die from it. Every year that you postpone the occurrence of aging-associated diseases, you are increasing the chances of the damage being repairable when it occurs. Even if we are only able to at best extend our lives by a decade, there is a good chance of important medical technology developing in that time and saving your life. Each advancement in preventive as well as emergency medicine extends our life indefinitely. The hope is to develop technology fast enough, so that with each new biological problem, we are able to repair it in time before death.
Think how different the world was just 20 years ago, and now imagine how different it could be in 20, 40, and 60 years from now, keeping in mind that progress accelerates every year. If your knowledge and execution of anti-aging nutrition, lifestyle, supplements, etc… could extend your life by a decade, there is a good chance that that decade will turn into three more decades, and so on indefinitely, due to ever increasing medical progress. So our outmost goal as of right now, in terms of investment into ourselves, should be educating and following a strict regime of preventive measures to have enough fuel to reach the next revolution in medical sciences. The problem is that no one knows when it will come, and so we have to maximize our chances, assuming the worst.
The path to a significantly extended lifespan starts from education. That means biochemistry, nutrition, anatomy, etc… These are indeed hard, time consuming, and frustrating, but with effort you should have a good idea of at least the foundations of the proper lifestyle within months. These months you ‘lost’ will be generously repaid with indefinite years down the line, so it is well worth it.
Majority of people think that self-educating yourself on the topic is a superfluous endeavor, and that we should just trust the experts in relevant fields. The idea is while alluring, is largely based on naïve conceptions of current state of medical and nutritional sciences. The first problematic assumption is that there is a consensus on these topics waiting to be uncovered, or even that the consensus is a reliable guide. If you think that there is a consensus on any of the nutritional topics, you may have fallen under an illusion created by the media. The media picks its favorite side, and completely ignores the constant debate between scientists, thus through availability bias, creating an illusion of consensus to the public. Almost every article you read on nutrition will not be written by someone who has the authority to make claims on the topic, including me. The internet and popular culture creates a kind of status-quo bias on its own, independent of scientists. To figure out who has fallen under status quo bias or confirmation bias, and who is actually someone who bases his claims on evidence and can be trusted is a task requiring thorough education on the topic. There is no way around it. Fortunately, most evidence is simple correlation studies that do not require much biochemistry to understand.
Which side of the controversy do we trust? Ideally – none. Realistically however, we have to trust someone, and then with accumulation of knowledgebase, keep reevaluating our chosen representatives until one day we can solely rely on our own conclusions from evidence. For now my trusted source is Gary Taubes, because he not only provides reasons, and evidence for his viewpoint, but provides historical and psychological influences for how scientists and the public were led astray. Stephan Guyenet is another person I trust, because he takes each study relevant to his conclusion and dissects it point by point right in front of you.
After personal safekeeping, we can turn to educating others and spreading the word. If you believe that there are far more important problems to tackle, I challenge you to look at death statistics and make your own conclusions. While I do think socio-economic-political change is important, it doesn’t just come from anywhere; behind every revolution there are people of extremely rare intelligence and determination. Unfortunately they age and die just like everyone else, but just envision for a second that Einstein, Carl Sagan, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Gandhi, etc… were still alive. We need every savant we can find, and we can’t afford to lose them to aging.
