32
The War on Aging
well. [7] If so, the main reason people are not beating a path
to cryonics organizations is not that they are unconvinced of
the feasibility of being resuscitated in a post-aging era, but
that they doubt its desirability. How long will this remain so?
We will come back to the question of cryonics later.
I like to define the War On Aging (WOA) as the period
beginning with the announcement of mammalian (almost
certainly mouse) life extension results impressive enough to
force public opinion to accept the foreseeability of serious
human life extension, and ending with the release of effective
human life extension therapies, albeit initially at a price that
only the relatively wealthy can afford.
DEFEATING AGING AS WE KNOW IT TODAY AND AS IT
WILL THEREBY BECOME
The War On Aging is only the precursor of the (indefinite)
period of rapid and sustained reduction in mortality rates.
While the WOA is in progress, there will be a sharp rise in
the number of people who adopt lifestyle changes to improve
their chances of surviving long enough to benefit from life
extension therapies. I suspect, however, that these changes
will be modest compared to what happens when those thera-
pies actually appear. They will quite probably still be ample
to destabilize many aspects of modern society avoidance of
risky but vital jobs being an obvious example but the nag-
ging acknowledgement that we still do not know how soon
the human therapies will actually materialize (and, therefore,
whether they will be in time for us) will limit the adoption of
the more extreme measures typical of wartime as we know it.
The post-WOA era will begin when appreciable numbers
of middle-aged people let us say, the richest 10% of those
in the richest 10 nations have access to medical care that