What would life look like if you could live forever? Would you be able to eat and drink whatever you’d like, take pleasure in risky activities like smoking without consequence for hundreds of years, your body staving off disease at every corner? Or maybe you’d have to commit to a lifetime of supplements, a “perfect” diet, and a workout regime fit for an Olympian. Weirder still, there’s a chance you could live life with your own mind intact, but have to accept a new kind of body.
Humankind has been searching for an elixir of life for thousands of years, with tales of the hunt for immortality stretching back farther in time than even the first books of the Bible. And it seems like we’ll accept the secret to living forever in whatever flavor we can get it in.
With the new Popular Mechanics video series How to Live Forever, or Die Trying, we reached out to scientists and anti-aging gurus worldwide to give you an insight into the continuous pursuit of a future without death. From gene therapies that could tune our cells to resist—and even reverse—aging to sci-fi-like efforts to freeze our bodies and upload our minds to computers, the biological and technological race to live forever is very much underway.
Jeff Dengate, Test Director for Popular Mechanics, has been trying to stave off his own demise via exercise—in particular, by running. Jeff averages 40-50 miles a week and in the 40 years he has been doing the sport he completed 33 marathons. At 39 (in 2016), he was put through a battery of tests for an article by Men’s Journal magazine to determine his physiological age. The results showed he had the heart of a 27-year-old and the lungs of a 20-year-old.
Featuring
Nathan K. Lebrasseur, Ph.D., M.S.
Mayo Clinic researcher who studies the biological processes of aging in order to develop interventions that delay—if not prevent—age-related conditions
Michio Kaku, Ph.D.
Professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, best-selling author, futurist, and the co-founder of String Field Theory, continuing Einstein’s search for a “Theory of Everything”
João Pedro de Magalhães, Ph.D.
Professor of molecular biogerontology and an England-based scientist studying aging and longevity at the University of Birmingham
Bryan Johnson
Founder and CEO of Kernel, a company creating devices that monitor and record brain activity, and the man behind Blueprint, a project using scientific evidence and data to inform his daily regimen, helping him reverse aging and live longer
Brian Patrick Green
Director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, California, focusing on the ethics of space exploration and use, as well as the ethics of technological manipulation of humans
Gary Fraser, MBChB, Ph.D.
Cardiologist and epidemiologist from Loma Linda University, California, and an author/co-author of more than 100 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, plus two books
What You’ll Learn
The Science of Why We Die
The Tech That May Achieve Immortality
The Ethics of Living Forever
The Ways to Live Longer—Right Now
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Before joining Pop Mech, Courtney was the technology reporter at her hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied English and economics. Her favorite topics include, but are not limited to: the giant squid, punk rock, and robotics. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, her black cat, and towers upon towers of books.
Pavlína Černá, an RRCA-certified run coach and cycling enthusiast, has been with Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Popular Mechanics since August 2021, joining originally as a newsletter editor. When she doesn’t edit, she writes; when she doesn’t write, she reads or translates. In whatever time she has left, you can find her outside running, roller-skating, or riding to the beat of one of the many audiobooks on her TBL list.