Superhuman by Rowan Hooper

Author:Rowan Hooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Part III

BEING

8

LONGEVITY

For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

At 70, you are still a child. At 80, a young man or woman.

If at 90, someone from Heaven invites you over, tell him:

“Just go away, and come back when I am 100.”

—Saying carved into a rock facing the sea near the village of Kijioka, in Okinawa, Japan

As I write this, I am 16,931 days old. My life expectancy comes in at 30,736 days. So, to a good approximation, I have 13,805 days left.

In more conventional notation, that means I’m forty-six, can expect to live until I’m eighty-four, and have thirty-eight years left. But reckoning your life in days is a quickening thing to do. Try it. Calculate how many days you’ve already lived. If you’re like me you get a feeling like sand slipping through your fingers. You’ll probably think, oh my God I should do more with my days. Don’t worry, this feeling will pass, and you’ll carry on living your life as usual. There aren’t many people who can live a breathless, carpe diem life. It’s just too much effort, constantly seizing the day. What we’d like, what we’ve wanted for thousands of years, is the promise of limitless days, so we can waste them as we like, but use them as we like, too. I don’t want much, I won’t even ask for immortality, just more than my predicted 30,736 days. And I’d like them to be healthy days.1

Elizabeth Love has already lived for 37,164 days. She’s 101 and is the oldest person I’ve ever met. But centenarians are becoming more common. In 2000, there were an estimated 180,000 centenarians worldwide and the United Nations says there will be 3.2 million of them by 2050.2 Life expectancy has been increasing for decades now. It’s why my daughter has a longer life expectancy than me, coming in at just over ninety-five years. As I write, she’s only lived 1,546 days, and has a projected 33,180 left. In Japan, life expectancy is even higher: a child born in Japan today has more than a 50 percent chance of living to be 107.

That’s all very well and good for them, isn’t it? But we want that longevity here and now. We want to have youth and vigor now and into our old age. Many scientists and research institutes are working toward this. One, the Methuselah Foundation, based in Springfield, Virginia, aims explicitly to slow the clock. By 2030, it says, technology will have us looking and feeling fifty when our chronological age is ninety. Aging, to a growing number of scientists, is a disease—a genetic one we all suffer from. It is the number one cause of death, because all the diseases we die from—cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes—are those sprung from a common cause: old age. Old age is a disease we can cure.

You might not care about bravery, you might not care about singing ability.

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