Hello, I’m Andy: maker of websites.

Question:

You have all the money, resources, and freedom you need, now and in the future.

What will you do with it? From this moment forward, how will you live your life?

My Answer:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

–Roy Batty from Blade Runner

With every nanofiber of my being, I’d learn and research human longevity and negligible senescence. I would hire all the specialists and create thirteen teams within a massive research facility: one team each to focus on their respective aging hallmark: telomere attrition, dysbiosis, genomic instability, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, disabled macroautophagy, deregulated nutrient-sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, altered intercellular communication,and chronic inflammation. We may not actually need 13 teams given David Sinclair’s Information Theory of Aging that sees epigenetic alterations as the linchpin, but given an infinite bank account: the more smart people, the better.

The eventual expected output would be new gene therapies, senolytic drugs, benevolently-designed viruses to repair the cells in specific ways, and whatnot. To make this even better, I would have a team dedicated to “smart blood”: where each red and white blood cell, and each platelet perform all the natural functions, but more: they sense oxygen and blood sugar levels, they remove plaque buildup in arteries as they are guided by swarm intelligence algorithm: they coordinate as bees, or birds, or ants for the optimal health of the host’s cardiovascular system. They would be a secure IoT technology (we would find a way to ensure it can’t be hacked by hiring the best cybersecurity professionals who are also the best elite white hat hackers).

I would also hire teams where each team is assigned the task of regenerating a particular organ (heart, kidneys, liver, ex cetera) from a patient’s skins which are converted to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). So, wherever a patient needs a kidney, or new heart, there you go: they have fresh organs made from their skin cells on standby, no longer needing to wait on the right organ donor who likely had to recently perish.

Given all this is set up in the background, I would attend courses at MIT or Harvard, or whoever would accept me, learning about all the steps required in biological research, such as when a drug or gene therapy is ready for human trial. I would dive deep into organic chemistry, take calculus, linear algebra, statistics and probability courses for deep learning. Or, given my infinite bank account, why not just have individual experts in all the necessary fields to instruct me and train me to become a full-fledged computational biologist within less than four years (I’d be very busy, but I wouldn't be tired because I know my goal: to live).

We would use deep artificial neural networks and other machine learning models in our research facility to analyze all the biological data gathered from our biological research. We would work with DeepMind (now a part of Google) to further enhance their large deep learning model that predicts and models protein structures. In fact, we may have the DeepMind team responsible for AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold to collaborate with the team working on loss of proteostasis.

I would also want to invest in a team to speed up the advent of powerful quantum computers. Quantum computers can vastly outperform the classical supercomputers in computing and analyzing biology data. If we advance the quantum computer to that of a super quantum computer: this would allow us to simulate what is going on in the body in real-time (especially from the Smart Blood), and allow us to solve this aging problem much faster (before I die from it).

After all this time, once the dragon is slain (referring to Nick Bostrom’s allegory of the Dragon Tyrant), once we no longer have to worry about dying slowly: we each can now devote our lives to whatever field of study, desired at the moment. Each of us, or at least people like me, would become smarter than Leonardi da Vinci because we no longer have to worry about saving for retirement, we no longer have to worry about going to die in Florida or a nursing home. I would become an expert in marine biology, martial arts, architecture, fine arts painting, writing novels, directing movies, nanotech furniture, instant distant travel via worm-holes, terraforming, creating a Dyson sphere: I and we all would truly be on our infinite approach to godhood. Sure, we would die eventually from a car crash, a train derailment, a plane crash, a murderer, a snake bite, an avalanche when skiing in Switzerland: but we’d die on our own terms knowing the risks before we partook in any activity.

With aging no longer guaranteed to kill me I’d go to Florence to see David and the Sistine Chapel. I’d go to every non-hostile country and taste their cultures. But, if and only if, the Dragon Tyrant is slain. I’d have time to even enhance my vision, my senses to such intensity as to experience those sights of Roy Batty from the film Blade Runner (quoted at the top). Our time to die will come: we will just have more of it: much, much more.

Of course, I’d pay off my mom’s and sister’s mortgages so they can be more comfortable in case we don’t solve this aging problem before it takes their souls. But that’s the initial no-brainer easy thing to do with infinite resources. Before anything else: everything, all hands, all our greatest minds, have to be devoted to taking the soul of the Dragon Tyrant, before it takes ours.

One indicator as to the feasibility of curing aging is that the human body is an open system, not a closed system. The body takes input from the environment (oxygen, food, water) to maintain homeostasis, so it is just a matter of engineering it such that it keeps this equilibrium from the same inputs or inputs that vary within a well-defined range of matter.

A second reason we know a cure for aging is possible in our lifetime: we see it in nature: look at the Galapagos tortoise who can live over 150 years old without observable health decline as we see in humans.

Third reason: we have what are called “Blue Zones”: areas in the world that have the highest concentrations of centenarians: people aged 100 or more years. By the fact of people living past 100 (while others don’t even live to 80) suggests malleability to the aging process.

This is just to fill space while I figure out the design. It is just a placeholder and starter for thinking about how we can use AI tools such as ChatGPT and Watson to parse and analyze the vast amounts of scientific literature about the various aspects of aging. One scientific article requires at least 200 citations of other scientific articles to support or explain its findings. The only way we will achieve the negligible senescence within the next 50 years (before 2073) is to use AI and possible quantum computing, keeping in mind that the human body itself runs on quantum principles.

David Sinclair proposed a theory of aging he names after Claude Shannon’s theory, which Dr. Clair calls Information Theory of Aging. The metaphor he using is a compact disk getting scratches on its playable side. What we have to do is rub off these these scratches to restore the original function of the compact disk. In the human body, this is the epigenetic alterations through the lifetime that are the scratches on the disk. These changes to the epigenome— expressions of the genome from environmental stimuli—cause a cell to lose its identity. For example, a skin cell may become 5% heart cell, 15% fat cell, and the rest its original specialization. When this happens in every cell of the human body (also called epigenetic drift), we experience the decline in function and vitality. However, there is hope: using advances in induction of pluripotent stem cells, we can re-program cells back to their original specialized state.

It is in question whether there are only 13 causes of aging. They may be more marker or indicators rather than causes of aging from the article “Hallmarks of Aging: an expanding universe”. It may be the cause that epigenetic alterations compose over 40% of the causal pie of aging, knowing this causal pie consists of several different causes of aging all mediating the decline of health from aging.