"Longevity Escape Velocity"

Ray Kurzweil is a child of the 40s.

Perhaps you’ve heard, but Joe Rogan has a podcast. He recently hosted everyone’s favorite futurist and Google AI “visionary”, Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is looking forward to technology achieving for humanity what he calls “longevity escape velocity”. (Fast forward to the 25th minute of the episode to get right to it.)

What is longevity escape velocity? The concept is fairly simple: we have reached longevity escape velocity when technology is extending our remaining life more quickly than we’re living it.

Right now, according to Kurzweil, for every year we live, we’re only getting about four months closer to our deaths. That’s because technology is adding eight months to our remaining life expectancy. But someday, the thought goes, technology will add more than a year of remaining life expectancy for every year we live. In that way, our expected death gets further away. That’s longevity escape velocity.

And Kurzweil has good news for you: we’ll achieve this in 2029. He means it. 2029.

Kurzweil is currently 76 years young. Famously, he takes a lot of supplements in an effort to forestall what was once inevitable. (I’m talking about death.) Just how many and which supplements changes over the years, as you would expect. We’re learning what works and what doesn’t, and Kurzweil updates his behavior in light of the evidence. He told Rogan he’s down to about 80 a day.

Anyway, Kurzweil isn’t the first to think that longevity escape velocity is at least theoretically achievable. A check of wikipedia suggests that the term was coined in 2004 by Aubrey de Gray, but that the concept goes all the way back to, at least, the 70s.

I did a little digging, and it seems to me the concept goes back a bit further.

In the 40s, an Englishman met a Frenchman in Egmond, the Netherlands. The Frenchman told the Englishman (at least according to the Englishman) that he was working on solving the problem of death (my words, not the Englishman’s or the Frenchman’s). Here is an account of the Englishman’s actual words, related through a different Frenchman:

He [the first Frenchman] had already consider’d that matter [human longevity]; and that to render a man immortal, was what he would not venture to promise, but that he was very sure it was possible to lengthen out his life to the period of the Patriarchs.

The Patriarchs are, of course, the first humans recorded in the Bible. (Genesis 5 gives the inventory.) This includes folks like Kenan, who lived 910 years, and Enosh, who made it only to 905.

This encounter in Egmond happened in the 40s, as I mentioned.

More precisely: it was 1641.

The Englishman was Sir Kenelm Digby, who relayed his encounter with René Descartes to Charles de Saint-Évremond.

Descartes, it turns out, was slaving away on the problem Kurzweil thinks we’re about to solve. And he believed he was close to solving it. Indeed, Descartes, too, was on an unusual diet. He thought that his diet would help him live long enough to unlock the true secrets of the human body.

It’s fair to say that Descartes was singularly focused on the preservation of life by the mid-1630s. The end of the Discourse on Method (published anonymously in 1637, written earlier) goes like this:

I have resolved to devote the rest of my life to nothing other than trying to acquire some knowledge of nature from which we may derive rules in medicine which are more reliable than those we have had up till now.

How far this can take us Descartes does not say in the Discourse. But in generally cagey private correspondence, he goes a bit further. In December 1637, Descartes wrote to Constantijn Huygens,

I have never taken greater care in looking after myself than I am doing at the moment. Whereas I used to think that death could deprive me of only thirty or forty years at the most, I would not now be surprised if it were to deprive me of the prospect of a hundred years or more. I think I see with certainty that if only we guard ourselves against certain errors which we are in the habit of making in the way we live, we shall be able to reach without further inventions a much longer and happier old age than we otherwise would. But since I need more time and more observational data if I am to investigate everything relevant to this topic, I am now working a compendium of medicine, basing it partly on my reading and partly on my own reasoning. I hope to be able to use this as a provisional means of obtaining from nature a stay of execution, and of being better able from now on to carry out my plan.

Word on that street was that Descartes was succeeding. The quote about Digby’s Egmond encounter with Descartes up above is from Pierre de Maizeaux’s introduction to the works of Évremond, and de Maizeaux goes on:

When M. De St. Évremond told me this particular, he added, that they were not ignorant in Holland Descartes flatter’d himself he had made this discovery [of extending life], and that he had heard several persons talk of it who had known that philosopher; that Descartes’s friends in France also knew it, and that the Abbot Picot, his disciple and martyr, being persuaded that he had found out this great secret, would not believe the news of his death, and that when he was ashamed to doubt of it any longer, he cry’d out, ‘Tis done and over; the world will soon be at an end!’

Descartes died in early 1650, not much more than a decade after he intimated to Huygens that he was on the way to achieving longevity escape velocity. Europe was shocked. But in the timeless words of Sufjan Stevens, “We’re all gonna die.” Just like Descartes, so you and I. And so Kurzweil.

FYI, by subscribing you’ll hear more about this sort of thing. At the moment, my central long-term writing project concerns the consequences of a key passage in Descartes’s Discourse concerning the impetus and purpose of modern science. In Discourse 6, Descartes says this:

But they [Cartesian discoveries in physics, etc.] opened my eyes to the possibility of gaining knowledge which would be very useful in life, and of discovering a practical philosophy which might replace the speculative philosophy taught in the schools. Through this philosophy we could know the power and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans [craftsmen, tradesmen]; and we could use this knowledge—as the artisans use theirs—for all the purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature. This is desirable not only for the invention of innumerable devices which would facilitate our enjoyment of the fruits of the earth and all the good we find there, but also, and most importantly, for the maintenance of health, which is undoubtedly the chief good and the foundation of all the other goods in this life.

Descartes believed he was founding a movement that would roll back the Fall and, in that way, would allow us master death. So much good has come from this movement we call modern science. I am not nostalgic for bygone days before novocain and grocery stores. But there is bad mixed with the good. In particular, Descartes’s movement has disrupted our understanding of humanity, and with it our access to the deep things of the world. No one, so far as I can tell, has worked out how to keep the good and jettison the bad. Likely I won’t either.

But I’m gonna try.

Pancake Victim Speaks is where you can watch as I do.