I Want To Live Forever Young - By Carl Carlyle - Essay

How To Vote For The 1974 Research On Aging Act

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Co-written with Dinorah Delfin

Today, there is little worldwide mass consciousness concerning longevity as an effective solution to the world’s problems. Imagine what it would be like if this wasn’t the case. What if ninety percent of our global population was debating the positives and negatives of extending the health and life of individuals who wish to live two hundred years or more?

I envision this debate becoming a major social and political issue in the 21st century.

Now imagine, in a very near future…

Two guys walk down the street, discussing their shenanigans from last night. A young woman approaches them with a piece of paper in one hand and a writing pen in the other. She asks if they’d like to sign a petition to encourage the government to support anti-aging research. Thousands have already signed it for all of us to stay healthy for the next hundred years. The guys are stunned when they learn that 50 years ago the government passed the Research on Aging Act. The objective of this act was to research the anatomy of aging. But little has been accomplished with no widespread knowledge.

One guy says, ‘hey, if I can stay young and healthy even when I’m over a century old, I’ll sign the petition’. The other guy gushed, ‘they’ll never be able to stop us from growing old!’ The young woman laughs and tells them that she’s already been taking one of the experimental anti-aging pills. Pulling her driver’s license out of her purse she shows them her birth-date: September 2nd, 1930. She’s ninety-one-years old and looks no older than thirty-five. Without much hesitation, they share the pen to sign the anti-aging petition, hoping to increase government support for research to help average Americans reverse degenerative damage, and stay young and healthy for at least a century.

“When thousands of concerned citizens start circulating the Anti-Aging Petition all across the country, the government will be forced to back up aging research, as promised fifty years ago. There is a dire need for mass-consciousness to create voter awareness of this fact. Beyond just helping individuals to live better in this world, there is a greater need for healthy anti-aging and rejuvenation. Saving the Earth is the even greater need for our longevity.”

The woman invites the guys to a voter’s meeting to help them and the general public learn how living longer can save the world.

“It’s the next step in our evolution as a human species,” she says. “We’re creating mass-consciousness to start a mass-movement for every person to have the right to control how long they live. When a vast majority of us live a few centuries, we will be taking care of planet Ea