Guest Post By Jake Anderson. Follow Jake to read more of his musings.

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The 100-Year Starship Project was launched in 2012. A joint project sponsored by DARPA and NASA, the goal of the initiative is to facilitate human interstellar travel within the next hundred years. “Given our current technology arc,” says Principal Director Mae Jennison,  the goal is attainable.

Of course, the primary challenge to this endeavor is the extraordinary distances involved in traveling to another solar system. The nearest star to the Earth, besides our own Sun, is Alpha Centauri, which is approximately 4.22 light years away. Traveling at the speeds of our current space vessels using Ion Drive Propulsion, a trip to Alpha Centauri would take about 80,000 years.

A trip at this length would require hundreds of generations of humans to live and die on what would be a veritable space ark, something scientists call an O’Neill cylinder. The ark is not a very realistic option for various reasons, not the least of which is the massive uncertainties that would arise during an extreme long distance mission.

Assuming that wormholes, warp drives, and teleportation don’t reveal new options regarding faster than light travel (which could very well prove to be a misguided assumption), the most hopeful–and, at this time, still theoretical–technology needed to expedite an Earth-born ship to Alpha Centauri is Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. This form of travel could hypothetically attain velocities of 5.4×107 km/hr, or 5% the speed of light.

At this speed, it would take a ship 85 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Many scientists believe we may be able to push the speeds closer to 10% or 15% of light speed, but for now we’ll stick with 5%.

Even at this most fortunate–and mind-numbing–speed, it would still be a two-generation voyage with today’s life expectancy. To this point, many scientists believe life extension and life augmentation will be necessary prerequisites for our journey to the stars, that for us to master interstellar travel, we must first master certain intractable biotechnological hurdles.

They believe this for a myriad of reasons, but principally: one) we will need to augment the muscle and bone of the crew member bodies, which will be significantly weakened by a prolonged exposure to weightlessness, two) as of right now, this is a one-way trip for any cosmonauts who take on the challenge, and three) Alpha Centauri is not our ideal star system (or, the one most likely to have habitable planets), just the closest. To travel to more life supporting stars that we can ascertain beforehand have the Goldilocks zone of Earth-like, habitable planets, we would need to travel upwards of 12 light years.

So, in order to realistically travel to another star in the span of a single human lifetime, we will need either A) Faster Than Lightspeed travel, which is currently still considered impossible, or B) Aggressive life extension and augmentation.

In scenario B, it is increasingly looking as if we will need both life extension and life augmentation. Associate Professor Robert Hampton of Wake Forest University notes that because of risk factors such as stroke, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease, “if we launch 100 people on a 100 year journey, 25 of them will be incapacitated by the time they arrive even if we can extend their lifetimes significantly. Interstellar flight, then, demands that we learn to predict and prevent degenerative diseases.”

With significantly extended lifespans, coupled with augmentation against disease and atrophy, new options emerge in our quest to Alpha Centauri. Medical breakthroughs in hibernation might allow the crew to spend most of the journey in stasis, to be reawakened by automatic ship systems.

The core point here is, of course, not how long it will take us to build a 100-year starship, or how long it will take that starship to drop us on the doorstep of Alpha Centauri, or even if such a journey is possible by humans–it’s that in order to even approach these questions, we will have to understand far more about the human brain and body, questions that share many common links with the pursuit of biotechnological revolutions in life extension and augmentation.

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Big news! The Immortalists is heading to Austin for the 2014 South by Southwest Film Festival! We couldn’t be happier. This has been the dream from day one: to World Premiere at SXSW, because the audience, venues and topic. This is a great launching pad to kick-off the release of our film.

We’ve come a long way since dreaming up the idea in the summer of 2010, when David and I were in a basement working on an experimental video installation project at CCRMA (Stanford’s computer music department). Our first shoot was in a hotel conference room near the San Francisco International Airport on 10/10/10 and we are now able to finally say that the film is done! At times, this film seemed like the only thing that would live forever and truly never die.

Screening dates, times to follow.
Onward and upward!

Guest Post By Jake Anderson. Follow Jake to read more of his musings.

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First, it was driverless cars. Roboticists everywhere got a little spring to their step, imagining a future in which the one-time search engine with more money than the 28 poorest countries combined invests heavily into the development of automation and robotics.

Then Google Ventures began to invest in biotech startups, dumping around $10 million into protein-based drug manufacturer Adimab. Even before Ventures, Google was investing in personal genomics companies 23andMe and Navigenics.

In 2012, futurist Ray Kurzweil joined on with Google as the Director of Engineering. One of his projects there entails building an artificial mind, which Kurzweil says will eventually become a powerful artificial intelligence.

Last year, Google unveiled Calico, a company which they say will ambitiously pursue longevity research and the development of life extension technology. It is headed by a veritable dream team of anti-aging scientists, the latest acquisition being legendary geneticist David Botstein. The team plans to “shoot the moon,” aiming even higher than cures to cancer.

How does Google’s feverish investment in the Singularity affect the once small world of transhumanism and anti-aging? SENS Research Foundation co-founder and bio-gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who for the last couple decades has worked to bring life extension research into mainstream scientific circles, reacted with a kind of wistful optimism.

“The ‘beginning of the beginning’ of the war on aging began in the 1990s. Since then, the battle for hearts and minds as to that quest’s feasibility has been proceeding at full tilt. With Google’s decision to direct its resources toward aging, that battle may have been transcended. The curmudgeons no longer matter,” said Aubrey. “It’s no exaggeration to state that the end of the beginning may have arrived. I won’t go so far as to say that my crusading job is done, but for sure it just got a whole lot easier.”

So, can Google actually defeat death? And what would this mean for the future? Is there a sense in which a company or companies could privatize the Singularity?

On practical level, Google Ventures taking on life extension makes sense. As Time magazine, notes, “Medicine is well on its way to becoming an information science….and Google is very, very good with large data sets.” On an investor level, one shouldn’t expect Calico to influence any industry for several years at least, but its aim definitely remains high. Google wants to increase the average human lifespan by anywhere from 20 years to a hundred years, states CEO Larry Page, who is now well known for investing in long term R&D.

So, to answer the original question: when will Google become sentient? That used to be a question relegated to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who believes that by the year 2045 computers will be billions of times smarter than us. Now that Google has ordained the field with its corporate knighthood, it seems likely it will become a question for the marketplace. Will there be an affordable anti-aging medicine that allows people to not only extend, but enhance their lives and health? Or will gene therapy, cybernetic enhancement, and nano-augmentation prove to be so complicated that only the very rich can afford the treatments?

Personally, I foresee a world in which people apply for corporate scholarships to subsidize the cost of life extension medicine and treatment in exchange for labor.

Ben Franklin once said, “In the world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” We may be revising that aphorism in the coming decades to be “Google and taxes”. And the taxes probably won’t apply to Google.

It looks like Bill’s ultramarathon running habit is a virtue for long life, but what about Aubrey’s penchant for imbibing beer?

As Aubrey points out in the film, he drinks about four pints of beer a day and maintains a perfect bill of health. During production, Aubrey would start drinking ale as soon as the pubs would open and continue well past when the camera turned off. Well, it turns out that heavy drinking might be more virtue than vice, if long life is the goal. A study out of University of Texas Austin contends that those who drink alcohol outlive teetotalers. Even the heavy drinkers in the study outlived the abstainers. That said, the study points out that moderate drinkers (defined as 1-3 drinks/day) had the lowest mortality rate.

Of course, alcohol does nothing to cure aging. Drinks on the house if Aubrey’s approach cures aging!

The title of our film did not come easy. The film was born with an imperfect name (The Methuselah Generation: The Science of Living Forever), in an imperfect format (3D!). After finding our subjects and story, we canned the 3D for the more practical and cheaper Canon 7D (and later the 5D), and changed the title to Long for this World. We never fully committed to the title because of the book, by the same name, penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner.

After temporarily calling the film Live Forever or Die Trying (a riff on Bill Andrews’s motto at Sierra Sciences, which sounds a little too much like a Die Hard or James Bond flick), we settled into the title The Immortalists. This is the lesser of many evils. The title has its flaws (for one, it isn’t a real word) and it shares the name of at least two books and a short film.

Aubrey de Grey isn’t a fan of the title. This is an excerpt from an interview where he explains that calling the film The Immortalists trivializes the seriousness of the science and the urgency of curing aging. He fears that it will make the quest to cure aging more about entertainment, jeopardizing his ability to raise money and be taken seriously. Aubrey says as much in an article on Slate (which is publishing an on-going series on longevity),

“I do not like to use the word immortality. It gives a very bad, a wrong impression about my work. I work on health. I am interested in ensuring that people will stay completely youthful, like young adults, for as long as they live.”

There is a fundamental difference between aging and mortality and we don’t want our film to confuse and conflate. Obviously cellular immortality won’t stop a visit from the reaper if you wander in front of a bus. We thought long and hard about this, but stuck with the title because it captures the essence of the story we wanted to tell. We want to make the subjects seem like mythological larger-than-life figures on a timeless quest to slay a mortal enemy: aging. Which is why we titled the subjects as “The Crusader,” “The Marathon Man,” and “The Alchemist.” We want to treat the science with elements that recall the human interest across culture in stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh . This is what science fiction always strives to do– and we wanted to apply that idea to the craft of documentary. One of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” lurked in our minds when animating the science portion of the film.

We set out to make a timeless film that is not just about the science of curing aging, but about the personal lives of the scientists. In doing so, we hope Bill Andrews and Aubrey de Grey become immortalized.

Since Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was yesterday (Monday 1/21/14), it seems appropriate to examine the effects of racism on aging. Perhaps not surprisingly, racism has biological consequences. In an article posted by PBS Newshour, researchers believe there is a link between racism and the shortening of telomeres. The Immortalists goes into great detail on this topic of telomeres: the division of cells leads to the shortening of telomeres, which leads to age-related health problems like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. As Bill Andrews says, “When telomeres get short, bad things happen.”

The article sites research  indicating that stress causes the release of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol causes cellular damage and thus results in critically shortened telomeres.

“Dr. Chae [a social epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Public Health] found that men who experienced more frequent discrimination and internalized an anti-black bias had shorter telomeres than men who faced prejudice and still had positive views of their race. Even when controlling for other factors — chronologic age, socioeconomic status, overall health — those who internalized the experience were one to three years older biologically than those who had not.”

While racial prejudice takes a more visible toll on society in the form of police brutality and workplace discrimination, it’s also wreaking havoc on a cellular level as well.

It should be noted that the co-directors of The Immortalists are runners, not in the hope of living forever but for health and recreation. In fact, a lot of the brainstorming for the film happened on foggy jogs through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and sweltering runs through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Our lazy jogs are child’s play compared to Bill Andrews’s epic 100+ mile monthly ultramarathons. The film covers one such 126-mile ultramarathon (I wrote about it at the time) that takes place in the most extreme conditions, including running over two passes greater than 18,000 ft in elevation.

Bill runs not merely as sport, but to combat aging. There has been several recent studies to back up Bill’s claim that endurance exercise increases the lengths of our telomeres. In fact, popular running magazines are taking notice of the length of telomeres in ultrarunners and its relationship to aging too.

While Bill Andrews runs to slow the aging process down by increasing the chance of having longer telomeres, there are nasty health consequences of running ultramarathons, as the New York Times pointed out, but the reduced risk of cancer and diabetes might outweigh the odds of getting a foot injury or hay fever attack.

Welcome to the blog for “The Immortalists.” Stay tuned for information about the film, screenings, observations, news about our documentary subjects and other musings…