First Person to Live to 1000 and The Future Towards Ageless?

With technological advancement, life expectancy continues to rise. Vaccines are invented every day to protect us against malicious viruses. Health and hygiene standards are constantly improving. The world is reaching new heights with what science can do. Life expectancy for Americans in 1960 was only 69 years. Today, it's 78 years. Nearly a whole decade more.

There's a global trend of living beyond 100. While it's a joy and celebration of life and humans are able to do more when they're alive, the aging population has brought problems to many countries, especially the first-world countries with low birth rates.

It's not uncommon for people to live past 100 anymore. Most of them are still very healthy and fit with their memory intact. It would probably be seen as a miracle a century ago, but today, it's starting to become a normality.

Excellent healthcare systems in advanced countries boosted up life expectancy a lot. As the world becomes closer and more start to learn the importance of being a global citizen, help is sent to the less developed countries so people there can have access to basic healthcare services. Therefore, the life expectancy of the whole world is on the rise.

Food is a predominant reason for a longer and healthier life besides the good healthcare system. As society progresses, people and companies start placing heavy emphasis on the food we consume. Many types of pesticides, chemicals, and antibiotics are banned in different countries to ensure the quality of the food. What we consume in the system has a lot to do with how old humans can live.

By eating a healthier diet, humans are living longer. Also, more and more people are turning to vegetarianism which is believed to be beneficial to living a longer life. Meat is believed to have contributed to different diseases and the teeth of humans weren't designed to consume meat and the system doesn't digest meat as well as vegetables. With a lot of scientific researches backing that up, and a lot of documentaries in recent years promoting vegetarianism, people began to turn vegetarian or vegan.

Scientists believe not only that this contributed to a healthier body, but also a healthier planet that in turn helps humans live longer. 70% of greenhouse gasses come from agricultural production and with the drop in meat consumption, the situation will improve, and with a healthier planet, of course, it comes with a healthier life.

It's amazing how humans can pretty choose how old they want to live by the lifestyle they live.

Source: Guinness World Records

Kane Tanaka from Japan is the oldest person alive. Born on 2 January 1903, Tanaka is now 117 years old. She was born prematurely in the village of Wajir. Having lived through two World Wars and the Cold War, Tanaka has witnessed all of history's major events in the last century. She lost both her husband and her son in the Second World War and she continued to work in the story selling udon noodles after the war.

Tanaka visited the US in the 1970s as she had several nieces and nephews there. When she was 103 years old, she was diagnosed with colon cancer and she beat it. On 9 March 2019, she was officially recognized by the Guinness World Records to be the world's oldest living person.

Her life story has impacted a lot of people. Living for such a long time across two centries while experiencing the wars and the prosperity, Tanaka hopes to live to the age of 120. She credits all this to her family, sleeps, and hope.

Most people that lived a long life credit it to their mentality. Live a happy life and don't stress over things. Your body's physical status is in correlation to your mental status. Aside from the help of science, the best one can do is to instill positive thoughts and not let negativity take over. But when you are 100 years old, you will start to see most things really aren't worth stressing over.

Are we far away from living to 1000? Apparently not! The first person to live to a thousand years old might have been born already. According to Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge-affiliated biomedical gerontologist, the first person to live 1000 years might have already been born today thanks to science.

With society today, people growing old now are expected to live to 130 of age on average, meaning living past 100 years will be the standard. Dr. de Grey further speculates with the technology being developed, it's not surprising to live 10 times longer. Dr. de Grey co-founded the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation in 2009, dedicated to preventing diseases on humans. The goal of achieving longitivtiy is to prevent your body from getting sick. If you don't get sick, theoretically speaking, you would live as long as possible without your organs shutting down.

The biotechnology to rejuvenate, remove, repair, and replace damaged cells can successfully prolong one's life. Dr de Grey said it himself that the only thing about longevity is not to get sick. No one wants to ever get sick. And with the biotechnology advancement, people might not have to worry about getting sick is in correlation with your age.

Of course, such said technology only works in theory. There is not a known experiment on humans where anyone lived the past 200 years so far. But perhaps the future is near. Maybe one day the news will broadcast De de Grey's success in this field.

Can humans live forever? While that question may remain unsolved forever, philosophically speaking, you would have to live forever to know if one can live forever. However, ageless may not be as mythical as it seems. As mentioned before, ageless technology is used to repair and replace your old and damaged cells so you don't suffer from a weakened system that exposes you to more viral threats.

We are close to the finishing point in the era of ageless. If a human can defy natural evolution with the help of science and can live to 1000 years, what's stopping humans to enjoy immortality? If you can live for 1000 years, it's hard to imagine what could even kill you after 1000 years. Scientific advancement is progressing exponentially. In our lifetime, we may actually see someone being the first "test subjects" to become immortal.

How good or how morally correct to help humans live a life exceeding nature's allotment is highly debatable. But undoubtedly, technological advancement will be the bridge to find a cure for a lot of diseases. A lot of lives can be saved if the technology is put to the right use.

Searching for the fountain of youth is as old as mankind. Ever since the dawn of age, humans have been looking for a way to stay young and immortal. The fear of death prompted the world to unite and seek a solution so they can live longer and longer while being able to stay healthy. Finding the secrets to stay young forever may not be a movie plot in the next century. How well people will take it is unknown. Perhaps not everyone wants to live forever, or even if we do, can the world handle it if people live forever while keep having children?

There are obstacles when studying longevity. As much as it can benefit the sick and the needy, it pretty much controls the faith of mankind if succeeded. A lot of these researches are heavily regulated and managed by the government for obvious reasons. Scientists want to create a world where everyone doesn't have to worry about sickness or death. Regular people worry about what does ageless truly mean and if we are defying the law of nature. This debate will be on-going forever (no pun intended) and the only way we will know what happens is to wait for it to happen, maybe in the near future.

Living 1000 years feels like both a blessing and a curse. What could a person realistically do for 1000 years? Thanks to science, many don't have to suffer from deadly diseases that claimed the lives of many backs then. Now, science is taking it one step further by trying to make us live through a millennium. Would you and your friends be for and against the idea of living an ageless life?