aubrey de grey

Aubrey de Grey and, for that matter, anyone else who plans to live forever, is probably feeling very relieved today. Astronomers announced that they have observed a planet that survived the fiery ballooning of its local star. This outcome is inevitable: Eventually, even our Sun is going to run out of hydrogen and blow up to 100 times its present size, transforming into what's known as a red giant. As a result, scientists figured that Earth has only about 5 billion years left.

Now, though, it appears that our lovely little planet could survive the Sun's transformation. That said, it probably wouldn't be a very nice place to live. Any of our kind who are still around at that point will probably have moved to another locale.—Gregory Mone

(Image credit: ESA)

On this glorious spring day in Cambridge, England, the heraldic flags are flying from the stone towers, and I feel like I could be in the 17th century—or, as I pop into the Eagle Pub to meet University of Cambridge longevity theorist Aubrey de Grey, the 1950s. It was in this pub, after all, that James Watson and Francis Crick met regularly for lunch while they were divining the structure of DNA and where, in February 1953, Crick made his breathless announcement that they had succeeded.

While most of us science-literate folks are watching the biotech revolution with tentative optimism, hoping for innovations like medicines that have no side effects because they’re tuned to a patient’s genes, or livers and kidneys grown to order for people with organ failure, some intrepid souls are taking much larger leaps. Based on the fledgling promise of stem cells and brain-machine interfaces, they wonder: Why tolerate chronic pain, or suffer irrevocable injury in accidents? Why become forgetful, get sick, or grow old?