Should We Cure Aging?

For five days I sat in a ballroom full of the most cheerful people I have ever met, and every one of them was working hard to cancel the thing I have looked forward to my whole life.

The event was Peter Diamandis’s longevity conference with Abundance360, and the agenda read like a dare. Is aging a disease? Can we eliminate menopause, and should we? Will we reach longevity escape velocity, the point where science adds more than a year of life for every year you live, within the decade? What do stem cells and mitochondria have to do with getting old, and can we stop it?

Somewhere in the middle of the week, I learned why bringing back the woolly mammoth matters to your grandmother. The short version: the same gene editing tools that might rebuild an extinct elephant could someday rewrite an aging human cell. The long version had more slides.

Then came cryonics. Freeze yourself, thaw out every few hundred years, and call it time travel. Or wait on ice for the cure. Or, for the budget-minded, freeze only your head and wait for someone to figure out how to grow you a new body. The room nodded the way you nod at a sensible retirement plan.

A lot of the science on stage leaned on David Sinclair’s Information Theory of Aging. His argument, roughly, is that our cells don’t age because they lose the genetic code. They age because they lose the instructions for reading it. The code is still there. The cell just forgets what kind of cell it is supposed to be. If he is right, aging isn’t wear and tear. It’s data loss. And data, in theory, can be restored.

It is a genuinely beautiful idea, and I kept waiting to want it.

The research is exciting, but the homework was a lot. By day two I had a list of supplements, powders and morning elixirs long enough that staying young started to look like a full-time job. To the conference’s credit, the unglamorous answers made it onto the slides too: sleep, movement, community. There was an open gym and boxing classes. I chose community and sleep, which left me just enough time to shower before the first session. Two out of three aren’t bad, and I’m counting it.

I waited my whole life to get here, to my fifties, and the room was offering me more of it, with better health. That isn’t a bad offer, so why couldn’t I take it? Partly because I never want to look twenty again. I did a lot to earn these wrinkles. And partly, I suspect, because some part of me doesn’t want to mess with Mother Nature, even on the days Mother Nature could clearly use a little help.

Still, I tried the offer on for size. What would I do with twenty more years or even fifty? The list came fast. Fly around the world. Learn to rock climb. Go to the moon. Then I looked at it and noticed every single item was risky. Which raised a question nobody on stage asked: if you finally can’t die of old age, do you still climb the rock?

And if you can’t die at all, you get Death Becomes Her. Two women drink a potion, live forever, and spend eternity holding their bodies together with spray paint. The hero of that movie is the man who said no. He gets the long, ordinary, full life. They get forever, in pieces.

I didn’t ask one question all week. Not because I didn’t have any. Because I knew how they would land. In that room, a question sounded like negativity, and negativity was the one thing you could not bring to a conference about living forever.

I have felt this particular brand of optimism before. Years ago it was the Uber Elevate Summit, a ballroom of brilliant people certain about the sky. I sat quietly there too.

In my next book, out next year, I call this the Consensus Room. It isn’t a room full of bad ideas. It’s a room where agreement arrives before the evidence does, and then quietly starts doing the evidence’s job. One line from the book ran through my head all five days:

Consensus is not a customer and agreement is not a proven track record.

I don’t want the explorers to stop. We need them. Nobody reached the moon by forming a committee on whether to go. But I grew up around test pilots, and I married one, and test flying is the place between the explorer and the scientist. You go farther than anyone has gone, one point at a time. You widen the envelope in small steps. You read the data after every flight, and you don’t take the next step until the last one tells you it’s safe. The courage is real. So is the discipline. Neither one works alone.

The longevity room had plenty of courage, and a fair amount of frustration with how slowly medicine moves. I understand it. I should also confess that I am terrified of doctors, so a room cheerfully discussing new ways to rewire my cells was never going to be my comfort zone. That’s my problem, not theirs. When the question of whether we should risk shortening a life in the effort to extend it came up, I wanted it to stay up longer. Not because anyone was being reckless. Because I’m the person who needs to hear the safety briefing twice. In flight test, that’s built in: someone on your own team whose job is to call it when the data says stop. Not never, just not yet.

Then there is the question I kept asking myself on the way home: what about everyone else? Who gets the extra fifty years first, and how long before the rest of us do? What happens to Social Security when the people collecting it outnumber the people paying into it, and plan to keep collecting for another century? The room’s answer, I suspect, would be to reinvent the whole system. Having watched Washington try to fix Social Security my entire adult life, I’d bet on curing aging first. And what happens to a career ladder that only moves when someone steps off? Max Planck once observed that science advances one funeral at a time. What happens to progress when the funerals stop?

Peter’s answer to all of this is healthspan: more good years, not just more years, and he believes AI is how we get there. Earlier diagnosis. Drugs discovered in years instead of decades. Care that catches the problem before it becomes the story. I’m with him. I would sign up for that tomorrow. Fewer people losing their last decade to dementia, frailty, and the slow narrowing of a life. My question is what happens when more good years become 150, or 200, and what we trade to get there.

I came home from five days of optimism not wanting to live forever. I came home wanting my fifties to be as long and clear as they can be, and then my sixties, and then whatever comes after, with my mind intact and my wisdom earned the slow way.

Should we cure aging? I’m still not sure. But I grew up in Mojave, in the town where Voyager was built, surrounded by people who were told an airplane couldn't fly around the world without stopping for fuel. It did. Eighteen years later, the same town sent a privately built spaceship to space and won Peter’s XPRIZE. The impossible has a long habit of showing up late and without apologizing.

And a cure for Parkinson’s could have helped my mother. If someone in that ballroom finds it, I will be the first one on my feet, cheering, probably holding a morning elixir.

So here’s to the positive minds in the room. Keep going. Keep building. I only ask one thing: listen to the whole room before we freeze anybody’s head. Including the quiet one in the back who never raised her hand. She was thinking, and she’d like to be invited back.

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