Published April 1, 2025
Nobody wants to live to be a hundred, except the guy who’s ninety-nine. Or so the saying goes. But it’s not true. Plenty of people have an appetite for life well beyond a century, and they look to science to make it possible. And understandably so. The average American life expectancy in 1900 was forty-seven years. By 2000, it was seventy-eight years. These improvements were the result of better diet, public safety, sanitation, and breakthroughs in the treatment of disease. One might take this as proof that life can be extended indefinitely.
But long life is not without precedent, even in the ancient world. Under good conditions, as Scripture noted more than two millennia ago, people could and often did live into their seventies and eighties. The question is whether nature has a genetically wired “hard stop” for the human lifespan. The bioethicist Leon Kass, among others, has argued that such a limit seems to exist at around a hundred. Exceptions obviously occur. The oldest verified human lifespan was a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122. But anything beyond a century as a goal for the human species appears biologically fanciful.
Saying that, of course, invites scientists to prove the opposite, or at least to try. And they do earnestly try.
As the Wall Street Journal reported in late March, today’s “antiaging movement has raced ahead amid fierce debates,” and moved “from the fringes to science’s hot center.” Much of the current anti-aging research, and the businesses seeking to profit from it, focuses on the family of genes that govern human aging, and on ways to slow or shut down the process. The result is a brisk market in vitamins, supplements, and various chemical compounds for ingestion that seek to retard physical and mental deterioration; and to add not just years to the lifespan but to the quality thereof. The “fierce debates” in anti-aging research don’t dispute the goal. Indefinite life extension is the commonly shared hunt for the holy grail by all scientists involved. The debates flow instead from whether any of the current medicinal products actually work, and whether sunny claims of progress and imminent breakthroughs in the field have substance.
The movement now has influential friends in Washington. In January, the Journal noted that various members and allies of the Trump administration have taken “[the] longevity movement mainstream,” hoping that “the new administration will make it easier to develop antiaging treatments and boost research funding.”
All of which should be good news for the movement’s veteran prophets and boosters, prominent among them Google futurist Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity Is Near (and more recently, The Singularity Is Nearer) and a National Medal of Technology and Innovation award-winner, has long argued that this-world immortality is not only attainable, but that “longevity escape velocity”—the point where “scientific progress undoes the passage of time [so] you don’t use up time as you age”—is imminent. Now seventy-seven and a true believer, he takes upward of eighty pills a day (down from roughly two hundred a few years ago) to ensure that he’s around for the big breakthrough.
In a 2024 Wired interview, he described the scientific horizon this way:
There’s nothing inevitable about dying, and we’re coming up with things to stop it. Basically we can get rid of death through aging. . . . Once we get past the singularity [as in, the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence], we’ll be able to put some AI connections inside our own brain. It’s not going to be literally inside the brain, it’s going to connect to the cloud. The advantage of a cloud is it’s completely backed up. . . . We’re going to combine [with various forms of AI]. People will still look like humans, with normal human skin. But they will be a combination of the brains we’re born with, as well as the brains that computers have, and they will be much smarter. When they do something, we will consider them human. We’ll all have superhumans within our brains.
What to make of all this?
My wife and I have a son with Down syndrome. Several of our grandchildren have disabilities ranging from the moderate to the severe. In our family, the prospect of neurological implants to help the cognitively impaired or remedy physical incapacity sounds, on balance, more like a blessing than a curse. Genetic research, properly conducted, is surely a gift. And since we both turn seventy-seven ourselves later this year, the issue of mortality is no longer quite the abstraction it once was. More life with good health sounds more appealing every day.
And yet I can’t get the issue of “why” out of my head. Healing disease and improving the quality of life obviously serve human dignity. But why would I, or anyone else my age and in sound mind, want to live in this fractious world for another seventy or seven hundred years? Kurzweil has argued that we’d never get bored with endless earthly life because things would always be changing. They’d be getting better and more interesting all the time. When our bodies wore out, we’d simply download our consciousness into sleek new models of the same old you and me. Except, of course, we wouldn’t really be the same old you and me. We’d be different. We’re fundamentally carnal creatures, a blend of spirit and flesh, each essential to and penetrating the other. The body is key to who we are. It’s not a disposable meat sandwich. Simply put: Nothing in the history of human behavior suggests that any of Kurzweil’s imaginings are plausible.
Science produces results, which is why we venerate it. It’s a tool to subdue and manipulate nature. Thus inevitably, in the words of Leon Kass, “victory over mortality is the unstated but implicit goal of modern medical science, indeed of the entire modern scientific project”—including the anti-aging movement. The trouble is that science, however benign, cannot produce purpose. And humans cannot live without the kind of higher purpose that gives life meaning and makes its burdens bearable. As a result, writes Kass:
We are, quite frankly, adrift without a compass. We adhere more and more to the scientific view of nature and man, which both gives us enormous power and, at the same time, denies all possibility of standards to guide its use. Absent these standards we cannot judge our projects good or bad. We cannot even know whether progress is really progress or merely change—or, for that matter, decline.
An endless more of that, an eternity of that in this world or elsewhere, seems rather short of heaven.
J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote that we humans are “soaked with the sense of exile” from our true home. And “death—the mere shortness of human life-span—is not a punishment for the Fall but [an] inherent part of Man’s nature. The attempt to escape it is [both] wicked because ‘unnatural,’ and silly because death . . . is a gift of God” and “a release from the weariness of time”; a freeing for the home we were made for.
So I suppose the lesson I’ve come to accept in my seventies is this: We all, no matter how deeply we believe in a loving and forgiving God, tend to fear death. But an empty and meaningless life, no matter how long, is worth fearing more.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
