For as long as Homo sapiens have existed, we have been trying to snip the gnarly snares of mortality: myth, religion, cults— heaven, Elysium, Valhalla, Nirvana, Heaven’s Gate.2 Alcor is just the latest example. Everyone knows Alcor’s Final Protocols are a last-ditch effort to avoid death: a hedged bet, plan B. Even Max More admitted he didn’t long to join in Alcor’s Final Protocols. Better to enjoy a life where aging and death didn’t exist: plan A.
No one yearned for plan A more than baby boomers. Just as they began hitting their 60s, the idea of super-longevity began rising up like some collectively unconscious Greek chorus. That was just around the time the Pew Research Center poll came out, and all those magazine covers began showing up on newsstands. National Geographic’s cover read, “This Baby Will Live to Be 120.” The Atlantic asked, “What Happens When We All Live to Be 100?” Time proclaimed: “This Baby Could Live to Be 142 Years Old.”
Truthfully, the Time article didn’t reveal anything terribly new about how one might live 142 years. It rehashed information about telomeres, dispensed advice on the best places to live in your later years, nodded to the ways diets low in red meat and sugar and high in good fat seemed to slow heart disease, and revealed how rapamycin, a drug developed to reduce organ rejection in transplant patients, helped a lab mouse named UT2598 live eight months longer than normal. That sort of thing. All good and useful information, but certainly nothing that warranted the proclamations on the magazine’s cover.
Why all the hoopla? Because the articles, books, and studies were tapping into the deepest fears of baby boomers. Boomers were a peculiar generation. They had emerged as the result of a massive case of pent-up, postwar lovemaking. For decades, child rearing had taken a weary backseat to the scarcity and menace of the Great Depression and World War II. But then, years of coitus interruptus gave way to a great blossoming of coitus semper.
In 1945, for the first time in nearly 20 years, the future looked like one lovely bed of roses, at least in America. The U.S. economy boomed, jobs soared, money flowed, and newborns arrived in great cherubic waves. By 1957, an American baby was being born every seven minutes, and by 1964, the statisticians had counted 76.4 million new children in the United States since the end of the war. Boomers soon made up almost 40 percent of the nation’s population—and not one of them had yet reached age 20! In 1966, Time magazine made boomers its “Persons of the Year.” Fifty years later, they were still plowing their immense demographic girth through the world’s markets and culture like a pig through a python.
But now, boomers were growing—how could one put it delicately?—old. Between 2020 and 2035, the population of Americans age 55 to 64 was projected to grow a whopping 73 percent. The ruddy, glowing complexions and slim bodies of their Woodstock days had deserted them. And being a group that associated itself with making (or breaking) the rules and discarding the status quo, they did not much care for that. The very idea that they were actually mortal collided with their self-image as game changers: a generation whose youth and energy and power had always allowed them to accomplish just about anything.
What boomers didn’t invent, they popularized to the point of transforming the very idea of youth into an immense and ever growing industry. In 2012 when Arianna Huffington, president of Huffington Post, hosted a roundtable on aging with celebrated authors like Gail Sheehy, she called boomers the wealthiest, most active generation ever. All their lives, they grew up genuinely expecting the world to improve as time passed. And obstacles like aging and dying just didn’t fit in with the picture.
A fierce fusion began bubbling up, a boundless, generational desire for an all-out assault on the most hated enemy of humankind: aging. There was the vague but palpable hope that death and decrepitude didn’t have to be inevitable, that living not simply longer (like their parents), but better, stronger, wiser, and happier could somehow be in the cards.
And every day, more attempts surfaced. You only had to look at the World Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine for proof. In the early 1990s, the convention amounted to nothing more than a trickle in the domain of medical purveyors. These days visitors arrive at the Congress by the thousands, and the marketeers make it clear that nothing is beyond the reach of modern medicine as it marches forward to advance “scientific and medical technologies for the early detection, prevention, treatment, and reversal of age-related dysfunction, disorders, and diseases.” In 2014, the convention was such a big deal that J. Craig Venter, the master of genomics himself and winner of the 2008 National Medal of Science, delivered the keynote.
By the end of 2015, the once tiny trickle of the global antiaging market had risen to $292 billion. Americans were turning 50 every seven seconds—12,500 people a day—and they wanted rejuvenation! Three out of every five consumers were taking supplements on a regular basis, with global sales topping $132 billion and growing at an 8 percent clip every year. Botox, the number one cosmetic procedure, was performed 2.8 million times in 2014, up 157 percent since 2002. And more Botox was in the pipeline. The same year, 54 million exercisers were zipping around the strip malls of America to sweat over row after row of ellipticals and bodybuilding machines.
Boomers themselves were not alone. Forty-five percent of all cosmetic procedures in 2014 were performed on people between ages 35 and 50—gen Xers and gen-Ys. Could gen-Zs be far behind?
But the real headline was that people over 50 now controlled 70 percent of America’s financial assets, and 50 percent of its discretionary income. Even the financial analysts over at Merrill Lynch couldn’t quite believe that the U.S. longevity investment sector would top seven trillion dollars in 2017, making it the world’s third largest economy. It was like a great and ever inflating balloon.
Except that no one had yet found a way to truly stop time’s clock. Alcor, after all, was clearly not delivering a solution for life everlasting. It wasn’t as if millions were lining up for inclusion in the Chill Chamber over on East Acoma Drive. People wanted something more: They longed for the Big Breakthroughs.
But to be blunt, no such breakthroughs existed. Boomers and their descendants may have wanted them, and the media certainly wanted to see them delivered, but desire—no matter how ardent—hadn’t yet provided anything that said, “Ah-ah! There is the path! The cure!” It wasn’t even clear such a thing was biologically possible. As recently as 2015, articles in magazines like Science were still quoting researchers like Derrick Rossi at Harvard saying, “We age so completely and in so many ways. We are programmed to die.” Well, who wanted to hear that?