The Necessity of Longevity

THE NECESSITY OF LONGEVITY

by Kali Carrigan, 5500 words

I. THE RATIONALIZATION OF DEATH

For an unfathomable number of years in our cosmic history, death has kept house in indissoluble partnership with birth. The heated creation and subsequent cooling of stars, the condensation and dissolution of planets, the impermanence of youth, have evinced in us the notion that the natural state of affairs abides in the succession of living systems by a self-contained and gradual extinction. For the first few billion years of cosmic time, all matter seemed to roll forwards in a groping waltz of atoms, gas, and dust.

Even to this day, the implacable collusion between birth and death continues to dominate our minds as iron parentheses to the human condition. We have hung our hat in the quarters of death for so long, that our initial anxiety has transmogrified into fidelity for our captor. Not only have we learned to see death as necessary, but we have begun to cherish it, more so, to rationalize its crimes. We have gotten so used to the horrors of death that we have ceased to see them as exceptional: "a recurrent tragedy has become a fact of life, a statistic" (Nick Bostrom). A sense of apathy surrounds its insatiable demand for human lives, and what should be seen as our most deadly predator has been demoted to a demographic curve, the impersonality of a number, the bureaucracy of a death certificate.

In these last few milliseconds of the cosmic clock, however, we are fortunate enough to live in truly exciting times. Our modern biological understanding of what it means to be human, coupled with our desire to modify the human being as one aspires to straighten crooked timber, has allowed us to reimagine the once intractable problem of death and its chief accomplice, aging, as something more than simply the natural end of life. Our modern inclination for the enhancement of our biologically predetermined condition, coupled with the galloping progress of new medical and preventive therapies in the last century, have set the groundwork for a new vision of aging which would have been impossible to imagine merely a century ago. Notwithstanding the emergence in the last twenty years of a host of truly ground-breaking technologies which could delay, and even halt the effects of aging, however, we continue to ardently persist in neglecting aging as a primary concern of every human being. This deceptive trend towards naïve naturalism is not only shortsighted, but detrimental to the attainment of our long-term goals as a species.

Our modern theories of aging, particularly that defined by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae in their 2007 book "Ending Aging", redefine aging not as an inevitable by-product of living, but as a disease, not so different from cancer, heart disease, or AIDS. Aging, analogously to these diseases, can be seen as the accumulation of damage leading to deterioration and loss of function in the organism. Yet by and by, the disparity between the efforts being carried out to 'cure' aging versus the numbers for heart disease or cancer -which in most cases are a product not a symptom of an aging body-is genuinely discouraging.

Aging and disease are wired together in an inescapable cycle, and when asked the topical question "what do most people die of?" most of us would agree that above all other ailments, aging is our most active executioner. Yet when we embark on a search for the endeavors undertaken to promote rejuvenation technologies, a veil of pessimism tends to overcast our spirits. We find, instead of a global concerted struggle against the suffering incurred by aging and age-related diseases, a handful of segregated and marginal figures standing at the ranks of a largely profitdriven and populist biomedical industry. Too often, the trumpet calls of scientists working on the advancement of rejuvenation technology are drowned out by the hollow din of an unavowed conservative mentality, a trend which cannot continue if we are to attempt to fight the causes of aging in the coming decades.

II. COMMON ARGUMENTS AGAINST LONGEVITY

A common argument against the development of life-extension and rejuvenation technologies is the idea that aging and death are "natural", or that there is some ecological balance which we must preserve by dying to make way for the new generation, as old wood gives way to new fires. For many, the belief that nature contains within itself an 'innate disposition', or some hidden divine truth which is above and beyond our understanding of its mechanisms, is still a prevailing point of view. In the Gay Science, Nietzsche puts forth the idea that were we to imagine for a moment a "being like nature" we would quickly come to the conclusion that it is "wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purpose and consideration, without mercy and justice" 1 . Nietzsche, for one, saw nature not as good nor evil, but simply amoral. There is indeed nothing "natural" about the natural world. The meaning or moral necessity of aging and dying abides not in some overarching extrinsic moral law, but stands firmly in the realm of human affairs, which places the belief back in our court and underscores our need for individual action. In any case, this external self-limitation shows itself inapplicable when we consider our contemporary world. Everything about our modern lives is a testament to an enduring artificiality. The processing and chemical modification of foods, vaccines, synthesized drugs, to name a few, are only a minute part of the enormous enclosure of "unnatural" interventions which we have devised in order to protect ourselves from a premature death. Rejuvenation and longevity therapies, if apprehended the right way, would in fact be no less "unnatural" than most medicines produced and sold by our current biomedical industry.

For a long time, the notion of immortality is another concept which has been made to stand as a straw man against the pursuit of longevity. The interchangeability of these two ambitions in the collective unconscious has historically served to obscure the problem of longevity by placing it in the realm of a narcissistic desire to live forever. Any time a serious debate about longevity is raised, it is often met with cries of self-indulgence, God complexes, or outrage at an unjustified desire to "live forever". Indeed, immortality, as the indefinite extension of human life depicted by the dreams of early prolongevists -who advocated ridiculous cures such as sleeping with young virgins, yoghurt-eating, or searching for the philosopher's stone-is a chimera belonging to the spheres of myth and utopias. Longevity, on the other hand, or the extension of average life expectancy, is a very real problem which concerns us all. This confusion has not only cast a long shadow over the existential and individual benefits of a longer life, but has obviated our mutual comprehension of what is at stake here, that is, not some mythological utopia, but the real death and suffering of billions.

Finally, the common misconception that life extension will lead to an unsustainable population explosion, is another bias which must be dispelled if we are to move forward. Overpopulation is already a clear and present danger which must be addressed if we are to avoid an exponential rise in our levels of existential risk. And this is happening regardless of the rise in longevity! The crux of the problem of overpopulation lies not in the fact that our lives are getting longer, but in the extensive number of people being born in an already untenable world. The drastic reduction in population is the only way towards a more enjoyable life for every human being on the planet, and presently longevity plays an almost negligible part of the global rise in population compared to decreases in child mortality and the bulging birthrates of developing countries. In terms of population, we're seeing two opposing forces: increasing birth rates in developing countries, standing back to back with sharply decreasing rates in developed ones. According to William P. Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau "chronically low birth rates in developed countries are beginning to challenge the health and financial security of their elderly" 2 . It is my conviction, therefore, that a strategy which would support longevity coupled with a reduction in population in developing countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia would bypass this challenge by allowing the elderly to take care of themselves for longer, while reducing the already untenable burden on the young to uphold disproportionate fiscal dependencies.

In essence, the prejudice toward understanding aging and death as intrinsic properties of life, together with a misconstrued notion of the goals of longevity research, are biases which have yet to be eradicated from the collective mentality. We have indeed told each other stories for so long, that those stories have become reality and our intuitions myths. Our common sense has been demoted to second-rank reasoning, and in the process we have become the victims of our own bemusement. Of course, as long as a viable option is not brought forward we are likely to continue opposing obvious scientific progress in light of a mitigating ideal. Notwithstanding these initial fears, the outlines of a solution are unequivocally beginning to take shape, but as long as we continue to adopt the question of longevity as a moral issue, and not a scientific one, we will not gain purchase on the far shore. There is no way to predict whether these technologies will be useful in the long-run until we try them out, but we must stop thinking about longevity and rejuvenation through the lens of individual prejudices and work towards integrating it as a viable long-term goal for the advancement of the species. I am willing to argue here that the pursuit of viable rejuvenation is the most desirable course of action in terms of the active prevention of senescence, disease, and eventually, death.

III. AGING "DESPITE OURSELVES"

When William Hurrell Mallock asked "Is life worth living"?, the jocose answer that "it depends on the liver" gathered great popularity in the newspapers 3 . The question itself, however, is no laughing matter, and constitutes one of the most existentially thorny questions ever asked. The newspaper remark proves witty on multiple levels: not only does it obviously point to the Epicurean argument that life, the pursuit of pleasure, and our organic health are inextricably linked, but alludes to the fact that a concrete answer concerning the worthiness of life is in fact so unworkable as to be comical, as our judgement of life can only rely on the experience of an irreducible subject (i.e. the "liver").

This difficulty in determining whether life is worth extending at all, or at any rate the incalculable variety of stances on its merits, stands as a great albatross over the scientific pursuit of a prolonged life. No matter where we look to, whether the stars, the Gods, or our own inner intuitions, our bumbling perspicacity continues to stumble with the question of whether, on the grand scheme of things, life is worth preserving at all, or whether this callous cycle of birth followed by death is not the best solution to a much bigger universal problem. Despite this realization, we very well know that in the realm of human affairs, we do not reason in cosmological terms. As humans, we are generally pretty intent on believing that our own life is worth preserving, regardless of universal constants or the law of conservation of energy. As far as we are concerned, a man about to be executed would never pick death over freedom, a soldier wounded in battle would not rather die in the battlefield than recover and return home, an old man would not elect to die before finishing his last thought. It is dehumanizing to weigh the worth of human life with the scales of the Gods, to lower us to mere constants of change, as the value of life can only be determined by the earthly subject which bears its weight.

In Otherwise than being or beyond essence, Emmanuel Levinas describes aging, in its relation to the individual experiencing it, as something which happens 'despite ourselves' 4 . He brings forth the idea that "life is life despite life", that there exists within each of us a great divide between life as it is lived by the individual, and life as an external force which acts upon us. For Levinas, we are constantly guided towards death by a tenacious passivity which manifests itself as aging. There is a certain inherent "patience" in our corporality which turns us against ourselves, makes us suspicious of the alien body which we inhabit. In any case, we are not only the actors of our subjective experience, but also the spectators of a play which demands us to act as a changeable phantasmagoria of ungracious characters. Through aging, we become obedient to the ills of an aging body, and ultimately, all of us suffer the mocking cries of this inadequateness towards life. It is this passivity which we must remember when we think of growing older. The rolling swell of time makes children of us all. Le temps d'apprendre à vivre muttered Aragon in the midst of the Second World War, il est déjà trop tard 5 .

So why is it that we continue to see aging as necessary, and willingly oppose its defeat in defense of some nameless "higher power"? We have draped over our eyes a veil of ignorance which, under the guise of reverence, has obscured what we have known to be true since time immemorial: Aging is suffering! Death is tragedy! We continue to speak of life metaphorically as something we "have" and "lose", an external, not something which belongs to us. We count the lives lost in battle, we gain a new member of the family, we have a lifetime to realise our goals, but rarely do we speak of life as something which we "are", an intrinsic condition for which we must be held personally accountable for. We have for too long used this self-imposed simplicity to free ourselves from our essential responsibility toward life. But this cowardly divesting of duty, this extirpation of the authority of the human being over the affairs of life is like losing the battle before putting on the uniform.

Before any metaphysical considerations, each of us knows that the abolition of aging and death would amount to a much better life for all, free from the paradoxes and distress of a body which decays despite ourselves. The next step, however, is to realize that there is no Elysian hand, no deus ex machina which will come down to lift us from this earthly vale of tears, but that the hand of God is made of flesh and blood, and it is left to us to be the architects of our own future. Salvation, as condemnation, exists only in the hand of man. Aging is a threat to humans both at the biological, and existential level. In both cases, we are the unwilling proselytes of a cruel fate from which there is no escape. The pursuit of longevity should thus be supported not as a goal-oriented quest of reason, but because of an enlightened concern and care for life which by the mere act of reducing suffering, proves itself worthwhile.

III. SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS OF AGING

"Why we age?" represents one of the pressing problems in the field of biology today. To any wellversed biologist, aging is still a pretty baffling phenomenon, not only in terms of defining "what" it is, but also "why" it occurs in the first place. If we follow a Darwinian model of aging, we inevitably come to an impassable paradox: if evolution's job is to increase the fitness of individuals with time, then why do we find exactly the opposite? With the exception of some species which exhibit negligible senescence such as tortoises, sturgeon, and some bacteria, we find that most species across all phyla tend to suffer a drastic reduction in fitness with time (that is, aging) and that this degradation coincides with the end of the average peak reproductive years in all species. So the question remains: is aging useful at the group/organism level, or is it merely the result of evolutionary forgetfulness, even a deliberate effort to replace us after we've reproduced? Some early theorists, like Malthus and Darwin supported a theory of aging which predicated negligence as its primary consideration. Since the life expectancy of most of our hominid ancestors was relatively short in the wild (15-20 years for early Homo subspecies), they argued that the predominance of such a high mortality rate would have naturally diminished the efforts of natural selection beyond early adulthood, and thus lead to a proportional reduction in fitness. Peter Medawar, in his seminal essay "An Unsolved Problem in Biology" 6 sought a similar explanation based on evolutionary merit, and formulated the "Mutation Accumulation" theory, which for a long time stood at the foreground of the evolution of aging. Mutation Accumulation posits that the highly competitive nature of our environment would naturally reduce selection pressure for traits which remain viable past the time when most of us would have reproduced, or killed off by predators, disease, or accidents anyhow. In other words, evolution simply never bothered to select for genes which would continue to ensure fitness beyond our peak reproductive age, allowing us to accumulate mutations in our adult years which eventually, like an overflowing well, become apparent as the damage and decline we associate with aging.

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, with the aid of hygiene and advanced medical intervention, our "natural" life expectancy has begun to reach almost four times that of our adolescent ancestors. In addition, like our new vision of disease, our theories of aging have begun to focus more and more on intervention, as opposed to a fully-fledged cure. A growing number of new theories as to the causes and evolutionary function of aging have come to dominate the current biogerontological landscape. I will discuss some of these briefly here.

The first, and in my opinion by far the most promising, is the accumulation theory proposed by Aubrey de Grey, founder of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation. De Grey argues that aging is caused by the gradual accumulation of cellular and metabolic damage, incurred by the buildup of molecules which lodge themselves between our cells, as well as mitochondrial mutations and a faltering immune system. He proposes a multi-faceted approach to aging, and infers seven primary types of damage which he calls the "seven deadly SENS" 7 . In terms of action, De Grey proposes to clean up these waste-products by means of "regenerative therapies that remove, repair, replace, or render harmless the cellular and molecular damage that has accumulated in our tissues with time." 8 In this way, his strategy is very exciting in that it proposes not only to prevent new damage from accumulating in our cells, but to literally clean up existing damage, thus allowing us to 'turn back the clock' and regain years of health.

A second approach, popular with Russian biological schools, conversely suggests that aging might not correlate with metabolism at all, but that it is largely guided by gene expression changes in our cells. In other words, it is possible that nature has embedded the blueprints for death right into our genes. Vladimir Skulachev, a proponent of the programmed theory, recently put forward the phenomenon of phenoptosis -the "genetically programmed death of an organism" 9 -in order to explain the processes of aging. This idea that there exists a programmed set of genetic instructions which control our 'patterns of aging' is, albeit relatively new, quite compelling. Indeed, phenoptosis is seen to occur across many species, including Atlantic salmon, as well as a dozen different species of the Australian marsupial mouse, and recently vascular disease, menopause, cancer, and osteoarthritis have all been implicated as examples of phenoptosis in humans 10 . Alternative factors, such as genetic instability have also been proposed as important For proponents of the programmed theory, the road to longevity is not based on cleaning up metabolic buildup in cells, but on changing patterns of gene expression so that they mimic more youthful ones, such as lengthening telomeres. There is a running debate however, as to whether aging can be solely described in terms of genetic programming.

A third theory, and probably one of the most well-known today, is the Hallmarks Theory of Aging, proposed in its most concise form by Carlos López-Otín and Maria A. Blasco in 2013 14 . The Hallmarks theory bases its suppositions on a practical "common denominator" approach, in which the global processes of aging are categorized into nine primary "hallmarks" which have been shown to contribute to aging in a variety of organisms. They include: genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, deregulated nutrient-sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and altered cellular communication. The most appealing aspect of this approach, however, is its insistence on the experimental suitability of each hallmark. This theory addresses a major challenge of aging research in contemporary times, in that most of it still occurs in model organisms, making its applications in human medical interventions a near impossibility. By focusing on experimentally-relevant processes, López-Otín and Blasco hope to speed up the rate of research which may lead to viable human trials considerably.

The fourth and last wave proposes environmental stresses as the primary agents of aging. These "error theories" posit that cumulative damage in our cells is caused by interaction with our environment (such as breathing the air, or eating food), which eventually leads to the "wear and tear" of the body's cells. This view includes theories such as the Free radicals theory 15 proposed by Denham Harman in the mid-1950s, and crosslinking theory 1617 , among others.

Before we can begin to understand the necessity of longevity, we must be aware of possible avenues of action, and that includes coming to terms not only with the economic, but also the scientific viability of future technologies. When it comes to understanding ourselves in the world, there is a common tendency to leave the science to the scientists, to self-restrict knowledge so that we may not barter truth for insincerity. Notwithstanding, if we are to regain our responsibility towards life, and place aging and death firmly into the hands of human agency, we must be careful not to step into a fool's paradise of blind optimism. These new therapies will certainly not be free of dangers, imperfections, and limitations; we must be aware of these if we are to prevent longevity from falling back into the inertia of wishful thinking.

IV. LONGEVITY: A SOUND ECONOMIC CHOICE

In today's biomedical world, the active pursuit of longevity is thus no longer just a personal, but an economic solicitude. The prolongation of our active years is not only useful in terms of how much an individual can contribute to their society, but how much their society is able to offer the individual. In 2013 alone, the National Institute of Health spent $5,274 million dollars on cancer research, and another $2,429 million on the blanket term of "aging" research. This seems like good news at first sight, but upon closer inspection we find that most of this "aging" budget is still spent on preventive cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular complications, while not a single cent is diverted towards rejuvenation therapies. Instead of tackling the problem of aging from the bottom up, we continue to focus our disparate efforts on promoting vague aspirations to "successful aging" which reads like a contradiction in terms.

So, what would happen if we were to spend this much on longevity and rejuvenation research? Aubrey de Grey calculated, a decade ago, that if we were to actively invest on the development of rejuvenation therapies, it would take about 20 years for the first wave of these to begin to be safely used on humans 18 . So far, however, to the chagrin of leading biogerontologists, most scientific efforts towards longevity are still funded by private or philanthropic agents. In 2013 Google launched the "Calico" project 19 , a major investment venture which will tackle aging and life extension. In 1997, Oracle CEO and multi-billionaire Larry Ellison founded The Ellison Medical Foundation 20 to support biomedical research on aging and age-related disease. So far he has donated about $445 million to this foundation, while government organizations remain deeply resistant to support it. On the other hand, military budgets ($62,3 billion! in the United States alone) continue to rise every year. Were we to divert even 1/10 of our annual military spending towards the advancement of rejuvenation therapies, we would be giving researchers a realistic fighting chance at developing technologies that would not only drastically reduce the incidence of many age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, but would allow every person to radically increase their healthy lifespan by as much as a decade. So, what are we waiting for?

Indeed, considerable increases in life expectancy are no longer just a castle in the sky, but an overt reality. As late as 1850 in the U.S. (Massachusetts), life expectancy was approximately only 38.3 years for "white" males and 40.2 years for "white" females. Among "non-whites", it was 32.5 years and 35 years for males and females, respectively 21 . One century later, however, around 80% of people in the developed world already lived to see their 50th birthday, while by the late 20th Century, this figure has increased to as much as 80% reaching their 70s in the developed countries. This amounts to almost four months of life added every year since 1950! If we play our cards right and support longevity research, the prediction should be that our life expectancy will continue to rise sharply well into the 21st Century. Living a longer, healthier life will be a reality for all in the coming decades. There is a running debate as to whether rejuvenation therapies will only benefit the rich. Previous examples have shown, however, that once these technologies become available, the cost of reproducing them decreases as generic forms are manufactured in less well-off countries. In the U.S, for instance, the cost of production of drug treatments to combat HIV amounts to approximately $30,000 per person a year. In India, these same drugs are being synthesized for a cost of $300 per person per year 22 . However, we cannot stand back and wait for this technology to develop itself, we must find ways to support it, whether it is by donating to research foundations or by raising awareness, the best way to win the lottery, as we all know, is to buy a lottery ticket first.

In monetary terms, and contrary to common preconceptions, longevity is positively correlated to economic growth. Living longer is a tangible advantage, not only in terms of benefiting society at large (i.e. in the rise of a highly trained workforce with decades of experience) but also the personal growth of the individual (i. e. less money spent on health, more time to follow individual pursuits, and maintaining an active role in society). Put in simple capitalistic terms, the longer we live, the longer we have to invest and acquire capital which we may leave to our families and loved ones after we die. Every year we can stave off retirement, or be healthy enough to work, means more money, both for our own benefit and for that of the economy at large. Compare this with the increasingly futile cost of reproduction. Today, the average parent in the U.K spends £51,000 on each child before they reach 18 23 (not factoring in the cost of sending them to University). Every child that is born today takes an average of 20 years to educate before they can begin to contribute to society. This is an awfully long time! It is not the quantity, but the quality of new minds we create that will allow for the best solutions to new problems and challenges. Were we to have extended life and learning well into our 100s, we would be in a position of expanding our level of thought to unprecedented heights, instead of insisting on fostering this reckless proliferation of children born into a frightening and increasingly unstable world. Imagine how different the world would be if Einstein, Turing, or Nietzsche had lived to be 100? Only once we have been able to acquire this richer understanding, may we allow for a far superior education to be provided to the next generation, and this is what should matter most.

V. THE FUTURE: LIVING A LONGER AND HEALTHIER LIFE

Unlike overpopulation, itself preventable before it occurs, longevity is a retroactive problem which cannot be solved by avoidance, but solely by a parallel acceleration of technology which can match the exponential degradation of a body which is already aging. For longevity, the problem is a race against time. This is why the efficient allocation of resources is of the utmost importance, and this includes not just the monetary funding to buy the necessary research and laboratory equipment, but also the human capital of educated people which can work on finding innovative shortcuts to the problems we are doubtless bound to encounter. This could be done by implementing incentives in the form of academic grants to encourage researchers, or allowing biogerontology courses to be taught at the university level as part of the undergraduate curriculum for students of the biological sciences, or medicine.

Finally, it would certainly be short-sighted to say that rejuvenation will not be appealing to a vast majority once it is presented as a real possibility. Most of the time, people don't know that they will want the things that they later deem indispensable until they see them as a real possibility. Certainly nobody ever "needed" an iphone before it existed, a television, or the internet for that matter; new technology carries with it the necessary rationalization of its usage. I call it the Haldane Bias, In 1963 J. B. S. Haldane wrote that the acceptance of scientific ideas goes through four usual stages:

(i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so.

If one thing is true of our species is that "man is not a rational animal, man is a rationalizing animal" and I'm willing to stake all my claims that the unveiling of life-extension therapies will fall prey to this same phenomenon. As we have long observed, it is only on rare occasions that progress will challenge the status quo; generally it goes willfully unnoticed, but good ideas tend to follow a bandwagon effect. Once longevity is presented as a viable option, or lifestyle choice, everyone will be asking different questions, such as "why didn't we do it sooner?" or "which kind do I want for myself?". It will indeed be perceived as something obvious which everyone has always believed as being irrefutably worthwhile.

Our next goal from this point on should be to build not a great world, but the "best of all possible worlds". The problem with reaching these advanced stages of human capability, however, is that insofar as it remains an economically-driven matter, action will continue to be woefully determined in terms of dualisms. Expectation vs cost, feasibility vs desirability, profit vs loss will all be forces tugging at the economist's sleeve when the time to make a decision finally arrives. We must therefore try to refrain from thinking in terms of dualisms, because just as we can't quantify how much suffering we might prevent, we cannot yet qualify how complicated the pursuit of these technologies might be. We must refrain from using two-valued true or false ethics to arrive at our wrong conclusions and assume that this mightn't work, because the human mind is not omniscient and does not see beyond itself. The problem we are left with in terms of aging is not how "best to die", but how to allow for a society that promises to offer "the best form of life" free from fear and trembling, aging, disease, and suffering.

As much as I believe in the cause of supporting rejuvenation therapies, it is impossible to argue that everyone will want to benefit from a longer life. Personally, I'm inclined to think that the abolition of aging or eventually death coupled with a reduction in population and a drastic amelioration of our experience of life on earth is the way towards the "best of all possible worlds", but I might be wrong. Notwithstanding, the horrors of death and the suffering of aging are afflictions we are all personally touched by, and the reasons for standing up to fight them appear to me to be self-explanatory. I have attempted in this article to show the many biases which have so far prevented us from clearly seeing the necessity of the pursuit of longevity for all humans, and I hope that with new knowledge will come a new voice that will no longer be content to be a passive spectator of a callous fate, but the active architect of a better one.