Longevity experts apparently view this as a laudable end goal. AI image by ChatGPT.
Dhruv Khullar’s article in the April 6 New Yorker, “Why are people injecting themselves with peptides,” and the breaking news that our secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is pressing his U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ease restrictions on peptides, serve as on occasion to ask a few longstanding questions to the longevity gurus/influencers (Gary Brecka, Valter Longo, Peter Attia, Bryan Johnson, Aubrey de Grey, Laura Deming…), tech bros, and others who seem to want to live forever/have their disciples do the same:
- Besides you, does anyone actually want you to live to 150?
- Are you that special that the rest of us should be excited about keeping you around?
- Do you think a 125-year-old in phenomenal shape will be physically or cognitively in any condition to societally contribute (beyond, one supposes, participating in interviews about what it’s like to be 125)?
- Is there any actionable knowledge you possess that can’t be preserved and transmitted through the written word, audio, or video?
- Do you suppose a class of elites lingering on for extra decades, even if healthy, could potentially infect various fields with the realities of Planck’s principle? (Science, it states, advances one funeral at a time.)
- Do you think that eons of evolutionary adaptation that has kludged together a bodily system that we still don’t fully understand will be unduly influenced by whatever (typically expensive, usually unproven) tweaks you’re proposing?
- Could the masses who won’t be able to afford such care potentially resent the lifespan disparity they face? (Granted, this disregards the reality that there’s already a rich-poor health gap that, in our present societal and health care system, has yet to lead the poor to rise up, pitchforks in hand).
- Are the graveyards not full of indispensable men?
We eagerly await your responses.
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