What Will a Post-Aging World Really Be Like? Finally,A Tool to Help Us Predict

Readers who have encountered interviews with me, or indeed my various outbursts in this space over the years, will know that I spend a huge amount of my time attempting to disabuse journalists of a variety of knee-jerk misconceptions concerning alleged undesirable consequences of bringing aging under comprehensive medical control. Moreover, it is doubtless apparent to most readers that I am decidedly irked by the need to do this, and increasingly so as the years pass and my (as I see them) iron-clad rebuttals of such concerns continue to fall on largely deaf ears. If the literally hundreds of interviews I have given over the past decade have had such little impact in this regard, what else can be done that might work better?

As for almost any topic, a reasonable approach is appeal to authority—if people won't listen to me, a professional biologist but ultimately only a recreational forecaster, then maybe they'll listen to professional forecasters. Thus, several years ago I worked with some prominent demographers to survey the range of available tools used by groups that base their activities substantially on long-term forecasts of demographic and economic change. After all, if a tool is good enough to be used by governments, insurance companies and the like, it should be good enough for anyone— right?

But the survey yielded a remarkable, even astonishing, finding. Not only had none of the forecasters ever published any predictions arising from the development of truly effective anti-aging medicine: Their systems were constitutively incapable of generating such predictions. In other words, the exponential increase in risk of death as a function of age was hard-wired into these systems so deeply that they simply could not be used to explore the scenario of interest.

This discovery so astounded me that for a while I shelved the topic entirely. A few years ago, however, the opportunity arose to revive it, courtesy of an introduction to the Denver-based team that have for the past 30 years been developing International Futures, one of the most respected forecasting packages around. Their system was just as incapable as all the others of performing the computation that I required, but I was able to interest them sufficiently in the topic, and SENS Research Foundation to allocate sufficient funds, that they embarked on a 2-year effort to re-tool their system to enable it to examine the transition to and evolution of a truly post-aging world.

The outcome of that project is now in print. ¹ I am gratified to say that the findings reported in this article accord very strongly with my historical intuition. The conclusions are presented in a suitably cautious manner, incorporating stern warnings of the consequences if humanity fails to anticipate the impact that the arrival of these medicines will have on demands for food, sustainable energy, and, of course, the medicines themselves. However, that is indeed the purpose for which we sponsored this work—for two reasons.

First, by setting out properly evidence-based projections through to the year 2100 of a few sample scenarios of how the various regions of the world will fare and what they will experience in a post-aging world, the paper lays to rest the far more pessimistic knee-jerk assumptions so vocally expressed by so many when the topic is discussed. The actual, plausible trajectory of population growth following the arrival of effective rejuvenation biotechnologies only rather modestly exceeds the “base case” in which such technologies are never developed, and it is vital that opinion-formers and policy-makers should understand that fact if they are to make wise decisions concerning near-term investment in the long-term future.

Second, it must be stressed that what was performed here was not a single projection. Rather, the deliverable is a robust forecasting system that can be used to determine the likely consequences of a vast range of scenarios, permuting parameters as diverse as the timing of development of these medicines, their rate of global dissemination, their cost, the response of various societies to their arrival in terms of number of offspring and maternal age, the investment in renewable energy and intensive food production, and the impact of other dramatic technological advances, such as automation of a level of sophistication that will eliminate most of today's jobs. As data become available that can inform the reliable prediction of those parameters, new forecasts will need to be made accordingly. And now, thanks to the sterling work of the Denver team, each such forecast can be computed not in 2 years, but in the time it takes for expert users to enter the desired parameters.

I have been saying, loudly, for over a decade that the transition to a post-aging world is likely to exhibit a level of turbulence comparable to, if not exceeding, that seen in the Industrial Revolution, and that that turbulence can be minimized if policy-makers are properly informed well in advance as to what is coming so that they can invest accordingly. Now, at last, they have the tools with which to obtain that information. But that, of course, is only one pillar of the required need. The other is to give those policy-makers reliable information with which to set the parameters mentioned above—of which the most critical, and yet the most controversial, is the timeframe within which comprehensive rejuvenation biotechnologies will in fact arrive. Thus, it remains for experts on the biology of aging and on the various fields that may in due course contribute to that breakthrough to continue and intensify their efforts to communicate these vital truths to those in the corridors of power.