It’s no secret that the human body is not perfect—right now. But each year, experts are getting better at predicting the future and measuring the rates of new scientific advancements and breakthroughs that could allow humans to live longer. According to Norwegian scientists, advanced technologies can manipulate our bodies down to the cellular molecular level. This means that while life expectancy currently tends to decrease as humans get older, in the future, better technology will presumably cause life expectancy to actually increase as we get older. That means, the older you get, the longer you can expect to live to see your great-great-great-great grandchildren.
How do we know this?
Thanks to the scientific principle of Moore’s law, we can calculate that technology doubles in its power every two years. Technically, this means that if you’re alive in 40-50 years, technology will have advanced enough for you to live 1000 years, because the scientific advancements will have developed enough to stop the process of aging. Even if technology doesn’t advance at such a rapid pace (which it most likely will), medical technology would only need to advance enough regularly to make people 10-20 years younger, biologically, so a 70-year-old can receive the body of a 50-year old.
According to researcher Michael Bonaguidi from the University of Southern California, we only need a few small breakthroughs and then there’s a “big leap forward that happens.“
So how much can we lengthen the average life span?
According to Bennett Foddy, the “sky’s the limit.” Over the last 150 years, humans have extended our average life spans from 40 years, to 80 years, and average spans keep rising.
Yuval Noah Harari from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem believes that through technology, humans could “become God-like cyborgs within 200 years” because we are constantly attempting to improve and upgrade ourselves. According to Prof Harari, human desire for improvements could eventually lead us to use biological manipulation and genetic engineering to create a human race of cyborgs: half man and half machine!
But this wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing.
According to experts, a longer human life span could lead to a real-life Hunger Games, since there would be more competition for resources like water or oil. The world’s population could double or triple up to nearly 21 billion, and this would put a huge strain on the health care systems and on the environment.
Also, the rich would get richer and the poor would only get poorer. According to Foddy, the consequence of people living forever would mean there would be greater wealth gaps between people: “The story of industrialization is that the people who could afford the cars and machines and factories in Western countries were able to produce a lot more and generate a lot more wealth than people in poorer agragrian economies.” This means that those in poorer countries like Nepal would still die at younger ages, while only people living in developed first world countries would be more likely to live up to 200 years.