The Death of Alfred Russel Wallace

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The idea is that there's more people living into their eighties and nineties than there used to bea, because of these public health measures. So that upper ceiling is probably never going to be a broken. But if it was, you'd take someone like aubrey de grey, who, to me, is one of the more fascinating characters in this old thing. I mean, hes hero worshipped by a lot of them. He is sort of almost a defactor leader of the entire immortalist movement.

Shermer and Ward discuss: religious immortality • Church of Perpetual Life in Florida • what it means to live forever • why lives have doubled in length the past century • Stein’s Law: things that can’t go on forever won’t • Why do we age and die? • how to live to 100, 1000, 10,000 years • escape velocity to reach immortality • Aubrey de Grey’s program • tech billionaires programs • transhumanists/extropians • diet, exercise, supplements, stem cells, telomeres, and other aging hacks • Ray Kurzweil • cryonics • nanotechnology • brain preservation • mind uploading and digital immortality • Ernest Becker and Terror Management Theory

Peter Ward is a British business and technology reporter whose reporting has taken him across the globe. Reporting from Dubai, he covered the energy sector in the Middle East before earning a degree in business journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Economist, GQ, BBC Science Focus, and Newsweek.