“Hey, tomorrow’s just a DAY away!”---Little Orphan Annie
Everyone has that friend, unathletic and overweight, perhaps disposed to smoke and drink, who will accept no counsel. He laughs at the thought of the Grim Reaper riding through the skies, fetching souls. “Everybody has to die of something,” the friend chortles glibly, presuming to live in the land of the Biblical tomorrow, a date which resides in the distance, hidden by clouds, unthreatening, content to bide its time.
But what if he actually lives in Annie’s tomorrow, which often arrives unseen, like a runaway bus, smacking down unsuspecting pedestrians and dragging them off to the Reaper’s landfill? For some, life’s annoyances are to be put on the back burner and only dealt with when they reach crisis level. For wiser men, they are foreseen, abnegated prior to birth, never of consequence. Life is a long series of choices. Make too many of the wrong ones and you’re on the bullet train to perdition. It’s all well and good to express a cavalier attitude toward a distant fate, it’s a starkly different story when The Man With The Scythe is rat-a-tat-tatting on your door.
When we were kids, the days were long, you couldn’t find tomorrow with Tiffany’s binoculars. The school day was akin to breaking rocks in the hot sun for seven snail-paced hours, the blessed weekends but a faint mirage in the gloaming. Summer was a barely-remembered tiny oasis of joy which could only be reached by trekking the endless desert of Winter. Tomorrow? Tomorrow was a fraud that slogged through quicksand, a promise which would never be kept, a cruel rumor spread by sadists. Don’t talk to us about this tomorrow.
In high school, things moved faster. There were life choices to be made, schedules to be met, colleges to solicit. Tomorrow was still down the road a bit but you could spot it from your grandmother’s second-story porch. Time seemed to move faster and there was less of it to waste. Grade school report cards which measured class attendance and your ability to work well with others were replaced by serious reviews of your talents in Calculus and your abilities to translate Caesar. GPAs dictated whether you would celebrate a prosperous future at Harvard or a ponderous one at Youngstown State. There was this quirky new minefield of girls to weave through, new emotions to confront, friends with automobiles to recruit.
College years passed like a shooting star on a clear night. You were twenty, thirty, forty years old and each decade the man in charge of the moving sidewalks leaned harder on the speed lever. Addled passengers vainly searched for a rest area but there was no getting off, not even a slow lane. The once minuscule possibility of tomorrow loomed like the Grand Tetons, close on the horizon. And now we are finally all at the station. The shingle on the depot reads “The Days Of Living Dangerously.” Is it possible the coyote will finally catch up with the roadrunner?
Tomorrowland
Those of us who enjoy celebrating the propitious timing of our adolescence might not be getting the last laugh after all. Seems that those of you under 40 out there will only die with the assistance of explosives or a nasty disease. At least, that’s what futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson thinks. Dr. P. realizes, of course, that nobody is enamoured of an immortality in which they look like the “after” portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray or even a ninetyish Keith Richards, but he’s got an App for that.
“A long time before we get to fix our bodies and rejuvenate them every time we feel like it, we’ll be able to link our minds to the machine world so well that we’ll effectively be living in the cloud,” Pearson says. “The mind will basically be in the cloud and able to use any android you wish to inhabit the real world.”
Doctor Pearson claims that in 50 years time we should be able to rent an android anywhere on the planet, so maybe Mr. Hertz will still put you in the driver’s seat. “If you want to spend the evening at the opera house in Sydney, you could use an android. Even when your original body dies, you’ll still be able to use your digital mind stored on a computer and live in the world using highly realistic robot bodies. The current state of sex dolls is looking quite human-like. Give them another thirty years of development and they’ll be extremely improved. You can take any android body and download any mind you want. You could share one with someone else or own dozens of them yourself.”
The doc says we’ll have to wait around until 2045 or 2050 before these critters are created and the initial cost will be very high, ceding the original field to the very rich. As with everything from TVs to Teslas, however, the cost will gradually come down. By 2060 or 2070, they’ll be selling them at Walmart or droning them in to you from Amazon. Of course, we’ll need rules limiting the number of androids people can own. “You wouldn’t want a world,” says Pearson, “where there are millions of Kardashians walking around and virtually nobody else.” I think we can all agree on that.
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| Sirtuins to the rescue. |
Offense Wins Championships
The University of North Carolina Population Center analyzed data from the Centers for Disease control and found that in 1910, infectious diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea accounted for 46% of all U.S. deaths. In 2010, those factors accounted for only 3%. Accidents, kidney disease, senility and cerebrovascular disease (a fancy term for problems with the brain’s blood supply) were top-ten causes of death in both time periods but the total numbers of deaths from these conditions declined 61% from 1910 to 2010. By far, the biggest killers in the developed world today are heart disease and cancer, maladies directly related to length of life. It’s not that cancer is becoming more common, just that more of us are living long enough to get it. We’ve made it this far by playing defense but researchers feel it’s time to take the offensive. To do this, we must snuff out our greatest killer: the fact we get older.
Leonard Guarente, replete with a scientific advisory board consisting of seven Nobel Prize winners and a dozen more luminaries in the fields of genetics, neuroscience and the microbiome, is ready to take on the challenge. Guarenete’s lab at MIT spearheaded early research into sirtuins, cellular proteins that have the ability to slow the mechanisms of aging within individual cells. An early discovery proved that these proteins are most active in cells during times of stress or limited food. Guarente’s work established the generally conceded benefits of caloric restriction on life extension.
When the lab discovered ways to activate the sirtuins without a subject having to live in near-starvation conditions, Guarente founded the natural supplement company Elysium to sell that technology directly to the public. His company’s product, Basis, is a pill containing pterostilbene, a polyphenol similar to red wine’s resveratrol, an nicotinamide riboside, a NAD+ precursor that helps increase available nicotinamide adenine dinucleotides in the blood. These compounds are proven to help kick-start cellular sirtuin production.
Guarente considers himself to be in the business of improving health outcomes, “but since this approach attacks the mechanisms of aging, itself, and people live longer because of it, that’s a good thing,” he says. “It might make people worry a little more about things like climate change if they’re going to be living in it themselves.”
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| Leonard "Live Forever" Jones |
From the dawn of time, the quest for immortality has been the Holy Grail for many, including Qun Shi Huang, the first emperor of unified China, who somehow got the notion that drinking mercury might be a good idea. The emperor made it to age 49 before his magic elixir took its toll.
Buddhist monks have sometimes resorted to self-mummification, a grim practice beginning with a special diet designed to preserve the body and winding up with a foul-tasting liquid embalming solution (not Dr. Pepper, as has been rumored). The monks seal themselves up in a chamber and are buried there with just the tiniest airhole protruding from their bandages. Then, they ring a bell continuously to signal that they are still intact. When the bell stops ringing, the chamber is closed. Hundreds or even thousands of years from now when their great wisdom is needed, many followers believe these monks will wake up and come to the aid of humanity. But first, they’ll need a little coffee.
In 1889, when people were strange, a scientist named Brown-Sequard told a shocked crowd he had discovered an “elixir of youth.,” which consisted of the crushed testicles of a dog in water. He injected the stuff into his thigh and began to feel stronger almost immediately. Flat out of dogs, he tried it again with guinea pig testicles. Same result. Apparently, however, Brown-Sequard was confusing a quirky cure for erectile dysfunction with a life-extending brew. He died, of course, but with a smile on his face.
While human beings flail away in desperation, the box jellyfish has this immortality business all figured out. This character, under stress or pain, will start to reverse its aging all the way back to it earliest stages. Then, after a quiet period with tea and crumpets, the jellyfish starts to age forward again. The very few scientists who have studied this phenomenon are baffled but funds for further studies are so far unavailable. Where is Elon Musk when you really need him?
The Quest will never end. Ponce De Leon searched the hinterlands of Florida with no luck. And no, the water from that place in St. Augustine doesn’t work, I tried it. Isaac Newton knew a lot about gravity but his eternal-life-granting philosopher’s stone was a fraud. Charles Lindbergh financed Dr. Alexis Carrel’s efforts to make human organs as replaceable as automobile parts, alas, to no avail.
The inimitable Leonard Jones ran for just about every political office extant back in the 1800s. A Kentucky gentleman, Jones became rich in the land-speculation business, but as time went by he gradually became more and more obsessed with immortality. He established the High Moral Party, of which he was the only member, and believed that a person who fasted and prayed enough could live forever. When Abraham Lincoln died, Jones claimed that it was because God was pissed off that Leonard had not been elected.
In 1868, Jones contracted pneumonia. Having fasted and prayed a whale of a lot, he refused treatment knowing that God had surely made him immortal. Jones died anyway. As has everyone else, brilliant or boneheaded, rich or poor, fasting or non. Humanity can’t seem to get over the hump, although Willie Nelson is trying real hard. Maybe, as Ian Pearson speculates, one of our under-forties will be the first. This is little solace to the rest of us who march on to oblivion with The Cure smirking just over the horizon.
I have a secret plan, though. Since neither Time nor Circumstance has been able to dislodge the hallowed halls of Fenway Park and probably never will, at the first signs of wobbling I am fleeing to that retreat, probably to Section 13 in back of first base which my father introduced me to at age 5. I will sit there under the old ballpark’s gigantic invisible bubble, protected from death and destruction, fortified by the magical benefits of Fenway Franks, singing Take Me Out To the Ballgame until my lungs turn blue. If I do happen to cash it in, they can immolate me and cast the remnants in the aisles. Nobody will even notice. It’s a little dusty there already.
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| The view from Section 13. |
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
