Mark Stevenson - An Optimists Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer Whats Next?

One curious man sets out
to answer Whats next?

Mark Stevenson

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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Copyright Mark Stevenson, 2011

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ISBN 978 1 84668 356 5
eISBN 978 1 84765 433 5

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For Charlie (no. 23) and Philip (no. 55).

The future is here.
Its just not widely
distributed yet.

WILLIAM GIBSON

Getting older is no problem. You just
have to live long enough. GROUCHO MARX

Im on a train to Oxford wondering how long I am going to live. This isnt because I think were about to crash, nor is it a reaction to the sandwich First Great Western has just sold me. Its because a few weeks ago the stalking horse of Mortality popped into my head and, without invitation, asked, What are you going to do with the rest of your life, then? (Mortality, it turns out, sounds a lot like my father.)

Whatever the answer, one thing I know is that my future will play out in a very different world. Because lets be frank there is a revolution going on. The population is rocketing, the planet is becoming urban (over half of us now live in cities), medicine is curing the previously incurable, ninety-year-olds take parachute jumps, spaceships are owned by businessmen, the climate is shifting and the worlds knowledge is becoming available to anyone with an Internet connection.

So Im setting out on a journey that I hope will tell me what the world of my future will look like. Are we going to cure cancer? What is the biotech revolution? Are the robots finally coming? Whats all that nanotechnology stuff about? How will the Internet continue to shape society? How do we handle a growing population? If the climate is changing, how will that affect us and can we do anything about it? Are we going back to space? Is technology going to be our friend or run off into the distance, leaving us dazed and confused? And how will the answers to all these questions tangle together and change the way we live, work and play?

I want to find an answer to the most personal and yet the biggest of questions, a question all of us ask: Whats next? But first I need to work out how much next Im likely to see. Or, to put it another way how long have I got? How long is my future?

The UK Office for National Statistics states that average life expectancy at birth for a man born in Great Britain in 1971 (thats me) was just over sixty-nine years. It also informs me that, as a thirty-nine-year-old male in 2010, I can now expect to live ten years longer. The mere act of staying alive, it seems, has given me more living to do.

Life expectancy creep is well documented. Average age at death has been steadily edging upward by roughly a quarter of a year for every calendar year thats passed since vaguely reliable records began (around the mid-nineteenth century). Some say this trend is likely to continue, even accelerate, in tandem with medical advances, and that centenarians will soon become commonplace. Others argue that the rise in statistical life expectancy is due more to rescuing the young (by fighting infant tuberculosis, for example). Hinting at a natural limit to our longevity, Stuart Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois School of Public Health points out, You cant save the young twice.

With a few notable exceptions Ozzy Osbourne, Keith Richards, all of Aerosmith there is also a well-established link between the way someone lives and their expected life span. Accordingly Ive answered a variety of lifestyle and family history questions at the request of several Internet-based life expectancy calculators. My favourite, Death Clock, produces a personal death date based on normal, optimistic, pessimistic or sadistic calculations (the latter announcing youre already dead) before displaying the number of seconds you have left to live and then counting down. Theres something ironically mesmerising about literally watching your life tick away. I wonder if anyone has actually died doing it?

The consensus is that, if I maintain my current lifestyle, Ill live past eighty but not eighty-five (so, roughly in line with government statistics). However, if I improve my diet, get more exercise, continue working (according to some studies, a key strategy for keeping the grim reaper at bay) and drink less, Ive a good chance of pushing past ninety. And if life expectancies keep creeping up the way they have been, fifty years from now I could have up to another twelve years on the planet. Its not infeasible Ill make it past a hundred. I find this encouraging: Im still single with no kids, but it appears theres plenty of time to raise a family, maybe even understand cricket.

Nick Bostrom, founder of Oxford Universitys Future of Humanity Institute, agrees. In fact, he thinks I could live not for a hundred years but for thousands. And hes not joking.

Bostrom is an advocate for transhumanism. Described as the worlds most dangerous idea, the concept got its modern name in Religion Without Revelation, written in 1927 by Julian Huxley. The brother of Aldous, Julian Huxley was a leading biologist, the first director-general of UNESCO and founder of the World Wildlife Fund. Busy chap. He wrote:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief.

The term Huxley came up with was Transhumanism the idea that man could remain essentially human but transcend what nature had given him. Skip forward seventy-seven years to 2004 and you get Aubrey de Grey, a biogerontologist who declares, I think the first person to live to a thousand might be sixty already.