Forever Young

By the digits

108,988,552,251: Number of people who have died since the beginning of time

150,000: Number of people who die every day

385,000: Number of babies born every day

$610 billion: Estimated size of the immortality industry by 2025

969: Years Noah’s grandfather Methuselah lived, according to the Bible

300: Number of bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen in America in the hopes that science will one day bring them back to life

30,000: Years the Pithovirus sibericum virus spent in the permafrost before being revived

120: Age that some researchers expect people will live to in the future

30: Seconds before and after death during which unique brainwaves replay your life

 

Humanity’s quest to achieve immortality has been documented as early as the 3rd century BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ingested mercury in the form of elixir poisoning to gain eternal life (spoiler: it didn’t go well). Instead of boosting longevity, these elixirs shortened lives and led to painful deaths. At least five power-hungry Chinese emperors died because of elixirs meant to help them rule forever.

The arguments for and against immortality can get pretty metaphysical. In the final argument of his book Phaedo (pdf), or On the Soul, Greek philosopher Plato recounts the last hours of Socrates’s life. Plato concluded that the soul is most like an intelligible being, and that the body is most like a perceptible and perishable being. He believed that after a person has died, the soul still possesses some power and wisdom.

But there’s a scientific element woven into the idea of eternal life too. There’s evidence that slowing or pausing the aging process could happen in the near future, and that advances in biology and medicine will allow us to extend our lives far beyond our current life expectancy.

Today, people like Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are leading that quest. They heavily invested in Calico, a medical anti-aging research venture, and Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos has thrown his weight behind technologies aimed at conquering aging and defeating death. Last February, Bezos backed a startup called Altos Labs, which recruited GlaxoSmithKline’s top scientist Hal Barron as its CEO. The startup secured more than $3 billion in funding.     Brief history  2100-1200 BC: The poem Epic of Gilgamesh details a quest for both physical and mental immortality. 3rd century BC: Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ingests mercury to live forever, but dies instead. 1492: Pope Innocent VIII reportedly gets injected with blood from children to keep spry. 16th century: Diane de Poitiers, supposedly the most beautiful woman in France, drinks gold to stay youthful. 1940: The movie Experiments in the Revival of Organisms documents Soviet research into resurrecting dead animals. 1951: Henrietta Lacks dies of cervical cancer, and her malignant cells are cultured and used to start a cell line, called HeLa, which lives on to this day in research labs around the world. 2000: The global human life expectancy is 66.8 years. 2019: The global human life expectancy increases to 73.4 years.