George Dvorsky is a thinker looking beyond the normal bounds of human lifespan. He’s a futurist, contributing editor to the science fiction publication io9 and chair of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies — a think tank dedicated to the transformative power of technology.

To Dvorsky, aging is a problem that’s desperately in need of solving. “It’s a terrible problem, for those of us who are forty plus, we start to feel the effects of aging,” he said. “Aging is not fun, not on a physical level, and not on a psychological level.”

Dvorsky discusses what the future would look like if scientists were able to figure out the key to radical life extension.

George Dvorsky: Let’s say I reach my 70s and 80s. Ray Kurzweil, for example, has explained that we need to make it to the “next bridge.” And so the hope for someone who wants to live an indefinitely long lifespan is that we don’t have to cure anything all at once, we need to extend life only so long that we make it to the next breakthrough.

And then that breakthrough can get us to the next breakthrough, and so on. So I’m fairly confident I’m going to start to hit that chain of events that could potentially lead to a fully realized indefinite lifespan.

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Eternal youth. Living for hundreds of years. These ideas currently inhabit the realm of science fiction.

But many believe that they could be part of the not-so-distant future. The titans of Silicon Valley are building an industry around those ideas. In fact, Google recently announced a spinoff company, Calico, to disrupt aging.

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Fault Lines travels to Japan to meet a researcher obsessed with immortality and to California to meet scientists who are pushing the boundaries of biotechnology to find out how we might achieve longer, healthier lives — and asks who will have access to such a future.

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