Eric Siu explores whether humans can live to 200, arguing we evolved to reach about 30 and that aging involves thymus shrinkage, stem cell loss, and declining muscle capacity. He frames current longevity research as a healthspan revolution that could extend our lifespans far beyond current limits.
I think you mentioned about wanting to live to 200 years, correct? Well, yeah. I mean, listen. What are you doing? The thing is, if you can live to 200 years, you can live to 500 years or longer. We're on the verge of a healthspan revolution. We humans were evolved to live to about age 30. You'd go into puberty at age 12, you'd become pregnant by age 13. By the time you were 26 or 27, you're a grandparent. And back 100,000 years ago, in the age of the caveman woman, before food was abundant and was scarce, the last thing you wanted to do was steal food from your grandchildren's mouths. So you would die and give your bits back to the environment. So at the age of 30, it's downhill. Our bodies were never evolved to live past age 30, and your thymus shrinks, your number of stem cells in your body go down orders of magnitude, your muscle building capability goes down. We were evolved long enough to pass on our genome, and that was it. And so our goal now is to change that.
