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Interesting week last week.

 

On Tuesday, I saw Star Trek at an IMAX theatre. Saturday evening, I celebrated my 125^th birthday at my “Come as You Will Be” party. There were some similarities and lots of contrasts.

 

First, the movie was totally enjoyable but far from my favorite. Typically, it was full of warfare and destruction, crisis and triumph and aging and dying to make sure they sold a bunch of tickets. In my opinion, if we get past some societal and technological thresholds, warfare will be obsolete. So will aging and death from natural causes. But these are hard concepts for the general public to grasp this early in the game, so the producers need to deliver thrilling storylines that people can relate to.

 

For example, Captain Pike was aging, and even had graying hair in the 23^rd century. That is utterly ridiculous, especially gray hair. But without it, the story falls apart, there no succession, and people can’t relate to a non-aging Captain of the Enterprise or to a non-aging Spock. We’re not quite ready for parents and children looking the same age, for Bones McCoy having absolutely perfect teeth and for ordinary crewmembers with Terminator-like abilities.

 

When we jump from concepts to conclusions without gradually drawing people along with one small familiar idea linking to a bigger idea and so on, until we arrive at the grand conclusion, we’ll lose 99% of our audience. It’s like a tiny tugboat pushing and pulling a huge ocean liner along with seemingly little effort. If you weren’t familiar with how it happens, you might close your mind to the possibility. But once you understood the process, then it’s an easy leap for you. First, someone throws a small rope from the liner to someone on the tugboat. Attached to that rope is a larger rope, and then a larger one still and so on until they eventually have a large heavy cable connecting the vessels. From there on, it’s a simple matter of leverage.

 

You can’t jump from a small idea to a huge idea without gradually ramping up if you want to keep your audience. If you were to travel back in time one or two centuries and tell people about the marvels of technology we take for granted today, they would think you are nuts, because they wouldn’t have points of references to link to. But once they grasped the concept of electricity, the light bulb becomes easier to accept and so on until they could eventually understand miracles like the Internet, wireless communication and more.

 

It’s the same with aging and the future ability to completely reverse it. Sure, it’s been a dream for thousands of years, and the desire is not hard to sell. The believability is though, even today with all our scientific marvels. But those scientific marvels are a perfect starting point for gradually getting people to understand exactly why the dream could finally be achievable in your lifetime.

 

As more people understand the rationale of how reversing aging could evolve, we’ll have greater intellectual and financial support to pull it off and less resistance to making it happen. So the way we present the possibilities of extreme longevity could impact your life.

 

The party was upbeat and positive. No one was killed and no worlds were destroyed. The attendees of the future (2068) did not age and did not get sick. Unlike Bones, they had perfect teeth, and unlike Captain Pike and Spock, they stayed young. Let’s make that future happen for us.