"Imagine a world where your 300th birthday looks more like your 30th." "Sounds good, right?" "Oscar, I'm done." "Do you need the VR?" "Surprise!" "Well in the future radical life extension technology will make our current life span seem like a mere blink of an eye." "Happy birthday." "We'll stay healthy and active for centuries, putting plastic surgeons out of a job." "So, it's not every day your wife turns 300." "So, to Eva, who is as beautiful as the day I met her." "Adding centuries to your life will radically redefine how we view relationships, work, childbirth, and the fabric of society itself." "And those who choose immortality will have to rethink the very idea of what it means to be alive at all." "It's the deep future." "Your body?" "Gone." "You're all computer, all the time." "Your brain is way more powerful than even a billion supercomputers." "Jobs, food, language, water, even traditional thought, all of humanity's building blocks?" "All that's done." "And you are immortal." "Squirming in your chair yet?" "You should be." "This isn't science fiction." "Today's visionary thinkers say it's a strong probability that this is what your world is going to look like." "Tonight, they'll guide you toward that spectacular future, and we'll see how one family navigates it, one invention at a time." "This is the story of your future." "This is the road to Year Million." "Just so we're clear, the Year Million is not literally the year one million." "It's another way of saying the far, far future." "The Year Million, it's really not one million years." "It is a concept of an age." "The Earth is about, what?" "4.5 billion years old." "So the Year Million is a literal..." "That's right." "A blink of an eye." "And human life has been around for less than that." "But it hasn't stopped us from obsessing about how we can extend it, since, well, since the beginning of time." "The nature of human mortality is one of the most poignant parts of existence." "We're born, and we know we're going to die." "Great thinkers, from Einstein to Freud, have long since come to the conclusion that the fact that we are born with the knowledge that we are going to die is what shapes how we live." "If that changes, then I think we'd fundamentally change what it means to be human." "Thank you, Brian." "Folks, let's be clear, it's no longer a question of if, but rather when, we as a species will have the choice to become immortal." "So for those of you who've played your part in the billion-dollar spend on anti-aging creams, diets and gym memberships, hoping you can turn back the clock and extend your lives, get excited, because the real revolution" "in radical life extension has already begun." "And it's way beyond just skin-deep solutions." "Let me show you what I'm talking about." "The first stage towards immortality lies in the advancement of nanotechnology." "In the near future, we'll send tiny microscopic robots coursing through our bloodstreams, fixing mutations in our cells, so that they never get old or fall apart." "Next, we'll not only re-engineer our DNA to resist all life-threatening diseases and viruses, we'll be able to create super-intelligent children, designed to our exact specifications." "Now it's time to get weird." "If creating the ultimate sustainable biological body isn't enough, there may be a time when our descendants will choose to discard their physical bodies, and upload themselves into a digital world." "And for those of you who might not live long enough to see the beginnings of these breakthroughs, you can make a long-shot bet on the future in the form of cryonic preservation." "Freezing yourselves until the day we wake up to a world where technology has caught up with our dream for eternal life." "Our journey to immortality will transform the way we live, the relationships we have, and the very meaning of life itself." "But let's rewind to a more recent future." "Remember that birthday party?" "It's just getting started." "But what's the perfect gift for the person you love, when she turns 300?" "Something more precious than diamonds or gold." "You know what I want for my birthday, don't you?" "What's that?" "The only thing that I want is more time with you." "Time, it's what everyone wants but never has enough of." "So how do these two lovebirds get a marriage that lasts 200 years, let alone survive it?" "The answer might be found in the most unsuspecting of places." "Yes, whales." "The bowhead whale lives, we think, on the order of 200 years." "In 2007, a giant bowhead whale was caught off the coast of Alaska with a harpoon point embedded in its neck." "That harpoon was dated back to approximately 1880, making that whale around 130 years old." "The Greenland shark can live up to 400 years." "What are they doing that we're not?" "Organisms age at different rates." "Some so long that we don't even know what their life span is." "Like crocodiles and alligators." "I've visited many crocodile farms, and I've talked to the trainers there, and they all say the same thing, that, yeah, crocodiles that are older than them, they're just as vigorous and as energetic as youngsters." "Aging is not necessarily a given for all organisms on the planet Earth." "We don't know exactly why some animals live longer than humans, but one theory is that our biological clock is determined by parts of our cells called telomeres." "As we get older, our telomeres fray, they stop dividing and decay, and that's what causes aging." "So what if we could somehow stop the fraying, or reverse the cycle?" "In medical school," "I became enamored with the idea that there are species on Earth that live for hundreds of years." "If they can, why can't we?" "Enter nanotechnology." "Scientists are already hard at work developing microscopic medical devices known as nanobots." "In the deep future, these tiny robots will be injected directly into our bloodstreams." "And they'll be able to repair our cells from the inside." "They'll be able to reverse the telomere cycle from fraying." "Nanobots will eventually be so effective at curing disease, and even genetic mutations, that we'll never get sick, and we'll never get old." "Wow." "Imagine little robots that are able to go into your cells, look for problems, and actually correct them." "We really believe that nanotechnology might be the future for treating a lot of our ailments that we've been unable to treat using conventional therapies." "Those tools is something that is in our future." "It's just a matter of when, not if." "As it is right now, you can get your Botox and your butt lift and just look like Gisele even though you started out, you know, looking like a some sort of a frog." "Forget facelifts and knee replacements." "In the far future, nanobots will be able to heal a gunshot wound, or treat the very first cell of a lethal infection." "And even as we speak, scientists are using nanotechnology to help treat disease more effectively than ever before." "Now, I know what you're thinking, but let's be clear... when we say nanobots, we're not talking about little C-3POs." "They'll be made of something organic, so the body won't reject them." "And a precursor to these future bots is already being developed." "It's a kind of messenger cell that delivers life-saving drugs directly to the cells that need it." "The first step is just getting particles of medicine that small." "What we can see here is a reaction that we've created in the lab that can make nanoparticles of selenium." "In larger amounts, the mineral selenium is toxic." "But at the nano scale, selenium can treat cancer." "Scientists inject these tiny amounts of selenium into special synthetic immune cells, that are capable of delivering it to the precise place in the body that needs it." "So if there's a mutation in a cell that might be cancerous, we deliver selenium to that cell to kill it." "You can use this as a mechanism to selectively kill unwanted cells in your body." "There's no fundamental law of physics that says that our bodies have to decay if we're constantly repairing them." "When you have nanobots coursing through your blood, continuously repairing everything back to its original condition, ultimately, that's the end point of medicine." "The end point of medicine." "That is huge." "It'll be a transformative day in the history of humanity." "I see advertisements promising a glorious, extended future," "10-year vacations being marketed, and new properties, and what to do with this extra time." "But nanotech is just a Band-Aid." "It's step one." "If we're going to crack the code to immortality, we're going to have to go deeper into our own code, our genetic code, and alter the very building blocks of human life." "In the future, we're going to be able to get rid of a lot of pesky genes, like the genes that give you horrible diseases like Alzheimer's, but also the gene that makes you, like, be one of those people" "that give weak handshakes, you know?" "That's a terrible gene." "That is a terrible gene!" "And if you had the option, you definitely wouldn't want to pass it on to your children, right?" "And that will one day be an option." "The first stage will be treating unwanted genes, once they've expressed themselves." "Ultimately, we'll go into the DNA of embryos and select genes before a child is even born." "I have two boys, and as my wife and I think about their upbringing, we want them to have the best education, the best clothing, the best healthcare, the best of everything." "But why wouldn't you want to start with the best genetic material?" "We're going to go from having a family by random chance, like, you have sex and randomly rearrange the genes, to a point where it's like, I would never, ever do that." "I wouldn't leave that to randomness." "That's, that's immoral to leave it to randomness." "I'm going to select the best genes I can for my child, give him the best start from day one." "Say goodbye to evolution and say hello to genetic engineering." "But is humanity able to cope with this kind of responsibility?" "We'll be making stronger, faster, more intelligent versions of ourselves." "It may sound awesome, but playing God has rarely gone well in the past." "If we're not careful, in the process of making the ideal human being, we may just destroy our own humanity forever." "Welcome back to the future, where nanotechnology has brought us one step further in the quest for immortality." "But nanotechnology is just the beginning." "The next era will be when we tinker with our genes." "We're going to start building these perfect humans that don't have any problems." "You know, kids aren't going to have acne, like, that's not going to be a thing." "There won't be an awkward phase." "Like the genes that, like, make your mom call you too many times in a week, they're going to get rid of that, so I think in some ways that's very exciting." "Scientists are already beginning to take their first steps towards changing our genetic code, with gene editing." "Using restriction enzymes, also known as molecular scissors, it's possible to actually snip apart DNA, and then either splice in or remove small parts of the strand." "Where we can actually take snippets of this code, and change it out, either in embryos or in adults." "So the first one just happened in China." "Things that were thought to be impediments are falling left and right." "Like the fact that you never grow new teeth, or the fact that we thought, until relatively recently, that you never grow new brain cells." "We have now grown new teeth in people's jaws, starting from germ cells." "We've discovered that neurogenesis in the brain is normal into adulthood, and can be stimulated." "Those are things we're going to crack." "We're born with an expiration date." "Our genetic code is set to expire in a certain range." "The question I have is, why?" "Can we program that so it extends the expiration date?" "Can we program that so it eliminates the expiration date?" "Manipulating the very building blocks of life may be the key to unlocking the fountain of youth." "We will use science to begin the process of slowing, and perhaps even stopping, the aging process." "Perhaps our children, our grandchildren, will hit the age of 30, and simply stop." "I'm vain." "I am very vain, okay?" "So if I can look like I'm 30 for 100 years, guess what." "I'm going for that." "Who wouldn't?" "In the future, genetic engineering will let us notch many more years on our belt." "But even now, some humans have been lucky enough to be born with genetic code that allows them to live extremely long lives." "If your health is your most valuable possession, it's like winning the genetic Powerball jackpot." "Emma is the oldest person in the history of Italy." "Emma is a rare case." "She was born with longevity encoded in her DNA." "But even so, she would never have gotten this far without a really good and attentive doctor." "Sadly, Emma passed away just as we finished production." "But imagine a future where genetic engineering will treat the causes of aging itself." "A 117-year-old like Emma would be able to hear perfectly, walk, even dance the tango." "We're going to completely transform medicine." "It's going to become personalized." "This is perfect for you, for your genomics, for your exact situation." "It's predictive." "Your genes tell us you're likely to come down with this cardiac syndrome or this cancer, and we're going to stop it from happening in the first place." "Remember those designer babies we'll all be making in the future?" "Well, at present, genetic engineering hasn't gone down that path." "But scientists have already made great strides in gene therapy to help cure disease." "All human disease is a product of molecular defects." "What we've invented is a way to look inside the cells, and we actually see what mutations are present." "Once we understand the problem, then we can say, oh, here's a drug that will turn that gene back on or fix that DNA mutation." "Once we are able to pinpoint and change issues at a genetic level, humanity will be able to avoid terminal illness." "And that will revolutionize our entire approach to how we live." "Yeah, I'd like the metabolism and desire to eat of a long distance runner." "That's what I'd like." "That's sad?" "That's what I want." "I can see people having the time to avoid regret, try to make good on mistakes that they've made." "Think about the people you've lost." "What would be different if they had lived an extra year, or five years, or a decade?" "What would you have told them?" "So there is a very emotional and sentimental component beyond the science." "But with genetic engineering, we may just be opening a Pandora's box that we're not prepared to handle." "In the process of making a better version of ourselves, we also might be taking away some of the very characteristics that we value the most." "It would take away a lot of the things that I think are important about myself and my place in the world." "The big moral question will be designer babies." "The only people who are worried about designer babies are the people who don't have babies, 'cause I have three, and I wish to God" "I could have designed each and every one of them." "Genetic engineering is such a loaded, politicized term." "I think the biggest risk is there is a great tendency for uniformity, and I think that's very dangerous." "There is definite concern that if you start to eliminate conditions like autism, or even depression, what kind of diversity would we be losing as a whole?" "Some of the world's most famous artists and some of the world's greatest scientists have had some of these conditions." "I think, as time passes, and as we harness our genetic technologies, we will and we should come to appreciate what's regarded as neuro-diversity, that there's more than one way of thinking, there's more than one way of looking at the world." "That will be our greatest challenge, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater." "As we eliminate traits we deem unhealthy or bad, we're going to have to make sure we don't eliminate the very things that make us individuals." "It's going to be a real balancing act." "Our genomics is a way to really extend the healthy human life span at least a couple of decades." "And then it starts getting interesting." "In the future, nanotechnology is going to fix our cells and our bodies." "Genetic engineering will pick up the slack and enable us to eradicate disease and to pick out the very traits that will keep us fit and healthy." "All of this is amazing." "But when we start talking about immortality, that's a whole other can of worms." "If we really are serious about getting to forever-land, we'll have to replace our carbon-based human bodies and upload ourselves to a supercomputer." "Now that's going to raise some serious issues." "No, that's insane." "I spend all my time there anyway." "We both do." "There are boundaries, Eva." "There are lines you can't cross, even for us." "We don't even know all the risks." "What's to stop you from being copied or hacked?" "And if the only place I live is here," "I could fall off a balcony when I'm not paying attention." "I want to live in the digital world permanently, Oscar." "Why worry about pain and death, if we can live forever there?" "Does it even count as living if your physical body is dead?" "I know what I've got to do, but I would rather do it with your support." "It may look like sci-fi, but this is your future." "These are your new, unimaginable choices." "So, given the chance, would you upload your brain?" "Okay, in the deep future we're going to have tiny robots in our veins carrying medicine to our cells and fixing them, which sounds pretty cool." "And on top of that, we'll be able to alter our genetic code to make most diseases simply disappear, and deliver drastically longer lives." "How long?" "Who knows?" "Centuries, maybe more." "Over the past 150 years, we've basically doubled life expectancy." "And that's happened through vaccines, through, you know, hygiene, through understanding how disease works." "I mean, that is incredible." "But we are still biologically hindered by the squishy computer in our heads." "There are facets of our human brains that hold us back." "But no matter how advanced our medical technologies get, there will always be new viruses, cells will always decay, and you can always just simply fall, hit your head, and lights out forever." "In the deep future, failing organs will be replaceable or fixable." "Even now, we can live without arms and legs, kidneys and lungs, but there's only one body part we can't live without." "You run into this limit where it becomes necessary to do something about the brain and the mind." "And that's where you get into all this business of mind uploading." "If we want to live forever, humanity may have to become at least partly, if not completely, digital." "If we want to bridge the chasm separating longevity and immortality, we may have to make the giant leap of uploading the information from our brains into a digital network." "We've had these multibillion-dollar projects to break open the boundaries of science." "The next big program is the Connectome Project... to map the entire brain." "So mind uploading will initially be a technology that's used for life extension, for someone who is near death, or for someone who has recently died." "And the idea is that, you take all their memories and their personality, and you can somehow copy that and then transfer that into a digital medium, for life in a supercomputer." "I understand the attractiveness of it." "Like, it's fun to think about." "Because it's immortality." "That means by the Year Million epoch, there will be humans who are all computer." "It's a far-out idea, and it's also far off." "Scientists are just starting to tackle the problem of how to make this technology a reality." "Getting the information out of your brain is a problem that nobody knows how to solve yet." "The technologies that you might use to go inside a living brain would destroy it." "A lot has to get done before we can figure out whether we can take a pattern of connectivity from a brain and upload it or copy it." "It's going to happen, I'm positive of that." "Everything is moving that direction." "Believe it or not, we can actually upload memories and record memories in mice." "Eventually we'll do it with primates, and after that, perhaps Alzheimer's patients." "You'll have a brain chip, you'll push it, and memories come floating into your hippocampus." "The most likely early method of creating a brain emulation would start with taking a brain and then slicing it up and scanning it." "From this data, you would reconstruct the neural network, which would then be run on a suitable supercomputer, connected to a virtual body." "Boom!" "You now live in the computer." "You, your essence now lives in the computer." "Once we shed our physical bodies, we will exist only as a computer copy of our brains." "It's hard to imagine exactly, but basically you'd be digital information stored on a server." "But will we still be human if we aren't made of flesh and blood?" "I think mind uploading is one of the most easily understandable steps where we could go from human to post-human." "Okay, hold on a minute." "Post-human?" "How's that going to work?" "What does that even look like?" "A post-human is a completely digitized human that might still retain many human attributes, but has shirked their biological lineage, living in a digital existence." "Those post-humans would still laugh at jokes, they would still love, they would still remember their childhood as biological humans." "It's just that an uploaded post-human will also be potentially immortal, able to copy himself, and edit their brain." "I mean, listen, I know that right now everything that I touch, feel, taste, see, is nothing more than a chemical and electrical exchange happening synaptically inside this brain." "So why not allow that to happen inside of a computer?" "Okay, that sounds all well and good." "But wouldn't you miss your body?" "I certainly would." "What does it mean to feel when there's nothing to feel with?" "The pursuit of what it is to be human is to achieve a higher level of consciousness, and like, is a human without a body, is a mind only being, in some ways more conscious?" "Or is the body, is that of what it means to be human?" "I, I don't know, man, this is weird." "In this Year Million scenario, we could achieve everlasting life by unshackling our consciousness from our bodies." "It's either the end point for humanity, or it's the beginning." "And some believe that humanity will have entered what religion has called heaven." "This has been the goal of our species since we first started to wonder is there life after death?" "Imagining that the end state, whether it be ascending into heaven or achieving a state of nirvana, would be this perpetual state of bliss." "I mean, this living forever in paradise, that could very well be the end state of civilization." "Like the technology that we're working on will enable something that's almost indistinguishable from what we've been describing as heaven and the afterlife for millennia." "That's funny that some people feel like that may be what heaven will be, is that we've found a way to upload our consciousness to a computer, and then we create constructs, ones that we know we would love," "where we're around family and loving friends and having experiences into perpetuity." "My only caveat:" "I want to be able to pull my own plug to self-terminate when I want." "Otherwise you're trapped in that computer." "Heaven on Earth?" "More like heaven in the cloud, but a very different cloud than the one with cherubs shooting arrows at each other." "We're talking about everlasting life in a digital paradise." "Humanity may be heading in that direction." "But should we let it?" "There are some ethicists who think that if we totally curb aging, that we're actually messing with evolution in a way that we've never done before, and that we should not mess with." "You've sort of sold your soul to the devil, in a lot of ways." "You've given up some essential humanity." "It starts to drastically change what it means to be a person and a human being, and have, you know, even metaphysical stuff, what it means to have a soul." "So much of what it means to be a person is connected to the end of personhood, that we try to live as hard as we can, and do as much as we can, before we can't anymore." "It's going to require a complete internal redesign of the self, because every way we think about ourselves is calibrated against the milestones of a life of a certain span." "I'd like to think that what makes us who we are transcends our physical form." "It transcends whether we're made up of molecules and atoms and cells and neurons, and if we evolve to a digital form, the essence of who we are will stay with us." "Human desire to contribute, for love and for connection, to learn." "Will those things come with us?" "Is it genetic, is it in the structure of our brain?" "All of this stuff is insane, until it happens." "I think without death, our life still does have purpose, because we always seem to seek to do great things." "And I bet that we do that even, you know, with infinite life spans." "In the far future, when we find eternity, we may lose our bodies, but hopefully, we will not lose our humanity." "And until that day arrives, for those desperate for a shot at immortality today, their only chance may just be to go into a deep freeze, until the deep future arrives." "Once scientists perfect nanotechnology, gene therapy, and mind uploading, we'll live a whole lot longer." "But what do we do now if we want to live to see that future?" "There's really just one thing that might give us that chance at immortality." "It's a long shot, and it's expensive, and no one really knows if it will even work." "It's something called cryonic preservation." "Cryonics is the idea that you can take somebody who's dying and freeze them, in the hope that future medicine will be advanced enough to both treat whatever they were dying of, and the damage we got from the cryonic suspension." "I'm signed up for cryonics because I like being alive," "I want to have that small extra chance." "Maybe it's between 1% and 50%, but that's still much better than 100% chance of dying." "It sounds crazy, and many people think it is, but it's kind of like playing the lottery... the upside would be huge." "It's a way of time traveling." "Put me to sleep when I'm at my cutest, and then I'll wake up like, you know, 100 years from now, maybe 1,000 years from now and then I'll see what it's like out there." "Like is my favorite brunch place still open?" "Of course that doesn't mean there might not be some major issues facing you even if you hit that jackpot." "One of the huge problems of waking up in 150 years, regardless of how intact or un-intact your body is, is that things will be so different, it's going to be very difficult to acclimate." "You'd be revived into a completely alien world." "The question is, what would they do with you?" "Would they put you in a zoo?" "Would they look after you?" "And how would you feel?" "Yes." "No, thank you." "Not for me." "I'm not planning on being a spectacle in someone else's zoo, that's for sure." "But the truth is, we don't know what life will be like, and for some people, cryonics offer the only glimmer of hope, no matter how slight, for continued life in the future." "The letter to a British judge from a teenage girl suffering from cancer was heartbreaking." "'I'm only 14 years old and I don't want to die, but I know I am going to die." "I think being cryo-preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years' time.'" "After consulting with her family, the judge agreed." "In this particular case, a young girl wanted to have a cryonic suspension, because she was 14 years old and dying of cancer." "Unfortunately, her father disagreed, so it ended up a court case, which caused a bit of attention." "When the judge found that yes, of course she is allowed to be suspended." "She was very pleased with the decision to allow her to be cryo-preserved, which gave her great comfort in the last days of her life." "Who can blame the poor girl for wanting one more shot at life?" "Of course, cryonics has many skeptics, but that hasn't stopped people from planning for the best-case scenario." "Take these guys in Sheffield, England." "They're part of a non-profit organization called Cryonics UK, dedicated to preparing the recently deceased, who desire it, for cryonic preservation." "Millions of things come from dead people." "Hearts, livers, kidneys, corneas." "I mean, the fact is, they're not dead." "I've never been happy with the fact that we have to die." "I heard that there were people who were interested in cryonics, and so I, I went with my family, just to find out more." "And suddenly it was a eureka moment for me." "It was sort of, ah, it's a possibility." "These guys aren't speculating, what you're seeing here is just a test run for the real thing." "Once you get past the cooling-down stage, you then go into surgery, where you wash the blood out, replace it with the antifreeze." "After that, it goes into the body bag, and into the dry ice cooler." "Some people opt to have their whole bodies preserved, and some people just simply opt to have their heads preserved." "That's where your memories are, and that's where you are as a person." "You know, of all the short television movies, there's one I am constantly thinking about." "It's Welcome Back, Mr. Fox." "Your Cryonics Society filed for bankruptcy yesterday, and they were all set to move you out into the street." "It's about a man who's cryogenically frozen." "He comes back, and he's a head in a jar." "Even if the body could be revived..." "What's going on here?" "...it's the separate question whether the brain's memories would be revived." "Don't do this to me." " It's alright." " Don't put me in here!" "Whether you'll be the same person, or not at all." "No!" "That's a very cautionary tale." "You don't know what you're in for if you're going to cryogenically freeze yourself." "Like Ted Williams' head is frozen in Arizona somewhere." "I don't know what, if their plan is to put him onto a robot baseball body at some point, or to thaw him out, reattach his head to something, and then have him teach hitting clinics." "Maybe at some future date, the technology will be there to read the brain, or put your head on another body, or upload you to a computer, or something like that." "So that's the hope there." "It's a little bit exciting, and a little bit terrifying." "You can either give in, or you can fight the fear and move through it." "It's just like doing anything." "You learn to control it, you learn to understand it." "Identifying things that you could improve on." "I was 14 when my dad died, so I think that might have had something to do with it." "It's not, doesn't seem right somehow." "All those years of knowledge and experience, just gone." "I suppose we are playing God, but so what?" "I just want to be alive." "I think that eventually you run into an issue where if you keep prolonging life, is it worth prolonging?" "Is there a point where we're just a head in a jar like in Futurama, where, you know, you can just pull up the Richard Nixon head and have a conversation with it?" "Is that worth living?" "Do I want to be a head in a jar?" "Sounds like Matt's not sold on cryonics, and in the future, it's possible not everyone will be sold on all the technologies available to prolong their lives." "That means time will begin to catch up with them." "Dad." "Like a heart attack while you're gardening." "You said I was stabilized three hours ago." "Arterial plaque stabilizer dosage, Oscar." "Why do I need more shots?" "Stable doesn't mean better, Dad." "And a minor heart attack is still a heart attack." "Feels a bit better." "This is why you need your treatments." "Look, Mom's been taking them for years." "I don't see why you couldn't take them." "You know I'm not like your mother, honey." "I'm not sure I want to live forever." "Well, you won't." "According to my scan, if you don't start getting treatments, you're looking at another seven years." "I mean, for me, the choice is simple... get those treatments, and maybe live long enough to see the Cubs win another World Series." "Radical life extension might come too late for you and me, but it's on its way, and once it arrives, we're going to have a lot of time on our hands." "It could mean total freedom, or endless stagnation." "In Year Million, we're going to find out." "Okay, in the deep future your life span will be exponentially longer than it is now." "But what does that really mean in your day-to-day existence?" "Let's take the best-case scenario." "Everything you've always wanted to do... learn a new language, play the piano, learn to paint." "In the future you'll have all the time in the world to do those things and more." "That will change everything about how we approach our lives." "It's unconscious, but you think about the day you're going to die when you do anything." "Going to college, getting a job, retirement, all these things are predicated on one fact, the day you die." "We could have a really long lifespan." "1,000 years, 100,000 years." "100,000 years?" "That's hard to even imagine." "Once we achieve this radical life extension, what some futurists refer to as negligible senescence, where we've ceased to age, society as we know it will change quite dramatically." "We will continue to evolve as individuals, you know, find new ways of interacting with the world, develop new skills, new relationships." "Currently, our relationships are based on the idea that we are supposed to stay together till death do us part." "But if that is indefinitely, they might not last that long." "I mean, I'd like to think that, that there are marriages that could last five centuries and everyone would be happy." "But, you know, a marriage that lasts five decades seems to strain the emotional resources of most people these days." "People will have a much more do-it-yourself approach to relationships, so kind of building the kinds of relationships they want to have, building families that they want to have." "Unlimited relationships of every kind." "Yes, I bet a lot of you can get on board with that." "But now let's look at the not-awesome possibility of radical life extension." "The danger facing a society that lives forever is stagnation." "Without death we may just stop wanting or needing to do, well, anything." "I feel like the idea that you could die, you know, gives you some kind of urgency about what you do with your life." "Like are you going to achieve your goals?" "Are you going to finally take that trip to Barbados?" "On the other hand many futurists disregard the idea that death is what gets us out of bed in the morning." "There's this common argument against radical life extension that I hear constantly, and that is, oh, why would anyone want to live forever?" "We'd be so bored." "And I'm like, are you serious?" "If anything, we're going to be paralyzed by choice." "Like what are we going to do with ourselves, given that we have all these ways of, you know, engaging in the world and playing and relating to each other." "Whether we learn to kite surf and play the guitar or lay in bed all day, there are some practical consequences to our radically longer lives." "Without death, the world could face a whole new array of population control issues." "That's where longevity gets really sticky, because if we're not going to overrun the planet with a bunch of 100-year-old people, we really have to rethink how we manage populations on the planet." "If we've suddenly got 6 billion people that aren't going anywhere, why do we need to have more children?" "Can this planet support increasing numbers of people, as more and more babies are born?" "What does it do to us if we are nothing but adults, we don't have kids around?" "I think that's harmful." "Yes, there are many challenges that will arise as a result of radical life extension, such as the overpopulation problem." "But I suspect that in the future, we will increasingly come to possess tools that will allow us to fix those problems." "But some of those Year Million solutions could be as frightening as the original problem of death once was." "In 500 years, you could imagine a culture where we have a regulatory agency that's in charge of who gets to have a kid, because we got to keep the population low enough to allow people to live for a really long time." "I don't like the sound of that." "But that might not even be the half of it." "It could get worse." "People are worried about the inequality of this technology." "That it's going to come to the wealthiest people first." "If you're looking at prolonging your life, and it's a technology that only the super rich can afford, what are you going to end up with?" "You're going to end up with... pretty much what happens now." "We already have life extension right now, it's called being white." "Because of the health outcomes and the level of care." "Like regular doctor visits is a, is a form of life extension." "Healthcare is life extension." "These are the same issues we're dealing with today." "Seems like if we don't find solutions for them now, it's only going to get worse in the future." "So what we need now is to find equity so that all human beings can live well." "But here's the fact." "We're heading towards a world of extraordinary abundance." "You have access to the world's information on Google, you have access to megabit connections." "So the poorest people on the planet, 8 billion people within the next 10 years, will have access to all of this capability." "We are dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing." "That certainly would be the hope." "That as we extend our life spans further and further into the future, perhaps even into eternity, we also ensure that society advances at the same rate." "Otherwise we're going to be in for some serious problems." "We've seen that the quest of immortality raises all sorts of sticky questions." "It forces us to confront the very fundamental question about what our purpose is here on Earth, or beyond." "Our desire for eternal life could liberate us or destroy us." "So the question does become, when immortality arrives, what are you going to do with it?" "The final step toward eternity will be a complete paradigm change." "It's when you step into the screen you are watching, and it becomes your everything." "All of society will live digitally, in a virtual world called the metaverse that is 1,000 times more intense than the one around you now." "It sounds like The Matrix, but it's the Year Million."