I'm @SoniaArrison

http://www.soniaarrison.com/

I write a regular column for the tech world. I work on a public policy think tank. I have run the tech department. I have been writing a book on the implications of radical longevity. Who wants to live forever? That's not as many as I expected to see. How many of you want to live 300 years? It's only maybe 65 percent. I'm shocked. That's typically what happens when you're talking about this in a group of people. They say yeah, that would be great, or they would say, I'm not interested in living longer, healthier. It's not about extending your lifespan so that you're in a hospital bed at age 140 or 150. I wanted to give you a very quick, because I only have 10min, and I'm standing between you and the break, a real quick overview for things that I am looking at for the book when it comes out in September or December 2010. Do I press the square button?

There are 5 ways that the world might change with radical longevity. I am talking about something much less radical than Aubrey or Greg. I mean living to 150 in a healthy state. To most of you, that's not radical, but to the general population it's pretty radical. Assume we can live to 150 in a healthy state and then we drop off. What's going to happen? When we roughly doubled our lifespan, in 1850. It was 40 years. Now it's close to 80. What happened the last time we did that? If we were to double from 80 to 150 or 160? What would happen? The last time, what happened was that we grew wealthier, which is a nice outcome. There was a paper, the most talked about paper by Kevin Murphy; there was $2.1M/person, not the past population, and from 1970 to 2000, the gains from life expectancy added about 3.2T to national wealth. Life expetecancy was 30 years longer than we would have been living longer otherwise. That's a lot of cash. We're creating less resources from the health resource system. I'll keep moving on here. The second thing that happened as we extended life expectancy, we became more educated. In 1900 it was 10%; in 1940 it was 70%; in 2000 it was 95%. If we can live for much longer periods of time, we can have more time to get educated and change careers and do more things with my life. Education will be a growth sector going ahead. We'll also become greener, as has happened over time despite Al Gore, and in fact I saw Al Gore on the David Letterman Show, and he thought things were getting better. I guess he's not pessimistic. One of the charts that I put up here. A Kuzzmit curve. So, it was created to initially explain income inequality and how the environment changes the environment and our actions changes as we get wealthier. What happens is that when new tech comes along, and it helps us become wealthier, at the same time it might pollute. It helps us cook food, heat our houses, it's messy though. It's helping us live better than we were before. The environment decays for a while. We might get wealthier enough, where we may say there's a lot of black soot in the air, there's a lot of wealth now, and let's work on that. And this is when you start working on the other side of the curve. CO2, smog, some researchers estimate we hit the turning point for CO2 last year, and we'll see more of that. I think marriage will change. We've been getting married later and later. And as we live longer, that trend will continue, especially if, that's a picture of my baby, that's Mr. Henry, isn't he adorable? Especially if we're able to extend our fertility. Last year there was a woman in India. Rajo Devi gave birth to a daughter, it was not her biological daughter, she got donated eggs, and gave birth at age 70. Regardless, she used IVF, and her uterus still worked. She gave birth to a baby girl. So the question is, will be able to have our own eggs if we can live to be 150 years old? Can we use these eggs with the fertility tech that is coming along now? Researchers have been able to grow eggs in the lab, not only from mice but also from humans. They haven't tested it out because you can't force someone to have a child. They are waiting for someone who has had cancer, where they can go into treatment, and remove some of their ovarian tissue beforehand and grow their eggs later. If that works out, and it has resulted in a successful pregnancy for mice, then I fully expect we'll be able to do that for humans. And I expect to see 70 year old mothers in the future as a common thing. Any questions?

"What about shifting social stigma? Immortalists v. closet longevitists. What about making the change?"