“He chose poorly.” That’s what the knight tells Indiana Jones after the Nazi drinks from the wrong Holy Grail, and ages in seconds – sprouting long white hair before turning to bones and then dust. Of course, our whip-smart hero chooses wisely, liberates the grail, and forgoes his chance at eternal life to save his father.
As Henry Jones Sr broke the Holy Grail’s T&Cs, movie lore dictates that he died before his 80th birthday. Yet the oldest person whose age has been verified – Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment – lived to 122 years and 164 days.
Life expectancy has roughly doubled over the past 150 years thanks to better medicine, nutrition and living standards, but maximum life span is another matter. Many geneticists think there’s a hard limit of about 115-120 years that’s pretty much programmed into our DNA – although this is contested – and going beyond that would require a miracle. (We wish we could ask Jeanne her secret to long life!) But some people have always lived long lives, such as artist and all-round-genius, Michelangelo, who lived until almost 90 during the Renaissance.
As there aren’t enough ‘Holy Grails’ to go around, scientists have taken matters into their own hands to increase human longevity and live on in one way or another. Some scientists are inspired by nature.
Time-stopping tentacles
As we age, our DNA mutates, cells stop dividing and cells and tissues that accumulate with age cannot be repaired by the body like they used to. But some of Mother Nature’s other creations seemingly don’t have these problems, making them of huge interest to geneticists and scientists interested in aging.
For example, tortoises, salamanders and certain types of fish have a ‘flat’ risk of death, meaning that unlike humans, a 150-year-old tortoise is as sprightly as a 50-year-old one. Another animal of interest is Turritopsis dohrnii, which you may know as the immortal jellyfish (particularly if you have a kid that loves The Octonauts). Incredibly, the pink gelatinous blobs of the Mediterranean can revert to a juvenile form when injured or dying, effectively becoming young again. That does not stop them being eaten, however, which is why they are described as biologically immortal rather than truly immortal.
Aside from revisiting the awkwardness of teenage years, we wouldn’t want to return to a juvenile form like a jellyfish, because all our cells would turn into stem cells. Andrew Steele, author of ‘Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old,’ told a panel our brains would “turn into a stem cell-based mush” so that anything that was important including personalities would disappear.
However, scientist Shinya Yamanaka identified a series of genes, now called Yamanaka factors that can turn back the clock inside cells. He discovered that by introducing only a few genes, he could reprogram intact mature cells in mice to become pluripotent stem cells, i.e. immature cells that are able to develop into all types of cells in the body. This can rejuvenate the cells in the mice, and it’s kickstarted a new area of research that could one day help humans.
João Pedro de Magalhães, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the University of Birmingham has studied the genomes of long-lived animals like the bowhead whale – that can live to 200 – and the naked mole rat, which can hit 40, living about 10 times longer than other similarly-sized rodents. He told Scientific American that if scientists could eradicate aging at a cellular level, humans might live for maybe 1000 or even up to 20,000 years. (That would be like someone today remembering gladiator matches in Ancient Rome, or even reminiscing about their childhood playing hide and seek with woolly mammoths!)
Unfortunately, the technology doesn’t exist yet, so ‘biohacking’ is the most obvious way to try and extend life for now, whether that’s exercising more, sleeping more or adopting other health ‘hacks’ such as cold plunges and strategic calorie restriction to optimise the body’s performance. Eating less (under specific circumstances) for example, has been shown to elongate life across a number of species, if they are young or middle-aged, although its long-term effects in humans remain uncertain.
Tech to freeze time
If exercise and healthy eating sounds like too much effort, and you can’t wait for gene-tweaking, you might consider cryostasis to live ‘forever’ or at least get another shot at life.
Cryonics involves preserving a body or brain at about minus 196C (minus 321F) in liquid nitrogen after death, in the hope that future medicine may be able to treat the condition that killed the person and revive them.
Cryonics is the brainchild of Robert Ettinger, an American physics professor and sci-fi fan, who penned ‘The Prospect of Immortality’ in 1962 and worked to made cryonics a reality. James Bedford – a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley – who died of cancer – was the first person whose body was cryopreserved on 12 January, 1967, while Ettinger is another ‘cryonaut’ who is currently chilling with his mother and first and second wives, waiting for a second chance at life.
There is no evidence that it will be possible to revive someone who has died and been frozen, but it’s worth remembering how far medicine has come over the last century. Heart transplants belonged between the pages of sci-fi-type books not so long ago. So, if you want to gamble and possibly wake up in 200 or 1000-ish years, cryonics may be for you, and the Cryonics Institute says that suspensions are “surprisingly affordable”.
You, version 2.0
Technology might also offer us another shot at immortality – or close to it – by making a digital twin.
While the sci-fi-tastic idea of uploading our brains to a computer isn’t currently possible, not least because scientists haven’t yet mapped the human brain’s complete wiring – AI enables us to live on as a “generative ghost” which might bring comfort to friends and family (or freak them out, depending on how convincing it is).
Generative ghosts are AI-generated voice, video avatar or text-based chatbots trained on personal data. They are capable of generating novel content rather than merely parroting content produced by their creator while living, and will likely be able to impersonate us better as time goes by. One offering, Afterlife.ai allows users to preserve their voice, memories, values, stories and future messages in a ‘digital legacy’ so they can live on digitally beyond the grave… kind of.
The “digital afterlife” industry, which includes deathbots, griefbots and generative ghosts is already reportedly worth more than £100bn and could expand. Google DeepMind researchers wrote in 2024: “We anticipate that within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create custom AI agents to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death; indeed, the past year has seen a boom in startups purporting to offer such services.”
So, while you may not be able to eat, sleep and exercise yourself to immortality, or borrow some genetic tricks from a jellyfish for now, you could freeze yourself and hope for a warm reception in a couple of centuries, or live on as a chatbot.
Or, you could heed the wise warning of Indiana Jones’ dad (as the archaeologist tries to keep hold of the cup of eternal life as a temple crumbles around him) and let it go.
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