Soon People will Live for a Thousand Years

The first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born–at least that’s what longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey thinks. He also thinks that scientists are about to be able to "cure" ageing.

Even more incredibly, he believes that the first person to live for 1,000 years will be born in the next two decades. The biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research claims that within his own lifetime doctors will have all the tools they need to ‘cure’ ageing. The Daily Mail quotes him as saying, "I’d say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing ageing under what I’d call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so. And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today. This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health. This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age.

"The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic."

An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year and experts think there could be a million centenarians worldwide by 2030. So far, the world’s longest-living person lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010. However, other researchers think that the obesity epidemic, which is now spreading worldwide as more and more countries adopt a Western diet, may mean that a longer lifespan is not possible.

One of the keys to staying young is eating right and exercise, which can be as pleasant as a brisk daily walk. In Anne Strieber’s diet book, she has a special chapter on exercise titled "The Tyranny of the Body," in which she states unequivocally that walking is the very best exercise there is.