Aubrey de Grey operates at the extreme edges of gerontology, believing we won’t just extend life a little but essentially defeat death. But if we could live hundreds of years–or forever–what would this endless summer mean for global population? From Factor-Tech:

In a world where getting old is no longer an issue, concerns will arise about population levels and resources that the planet can provide.

De Grey admits that the world will change dramatically and that the transformation will not necessarily be a smooth one. “There may be some turbulence and obviously the more we can forward plan to minimise that turbulence the better,” he adds.

One UN report, from 2003, predicts that the world’s population could increase to more than 36bn people by 2300 – and that forecast is based on regular life expectancy. If everyone is living for hundreds of years then the resources needed to sustain them would drastically increase.

But this view does not give credit to other technologies that are developing at a faster implementation rate than anti-ageing, and people can have a blinkered view about this.

“They just don’t look at the problem properly so for example, one thing that people hardly ever acknowledge is that the other new technology is going to be around a great deal sooner than this technology, or at least sooner than this technology will have any demographic impact,” de Grey says.

“For example we will have much less carbon footprint because we will have things like better renewable energy and nuclear fusion and so on, so that it will actually be increasing the carrying capacity of the planet far faster than the defeat of ageing could increase the number of people on the planet.”•