Latitude Escape Velocity
My Fountain of Youth
Longevity is becoming the Next New Thing. Newly minted billionaires, like most of us, don’t want to die — and so are throwing money at any entrepreneurial promise to extend human life. This includes A.I. and cryonics and just about any venture whose mission is to defeat the chronic diseases of aging.
Healthspan, not lifespan. Bio-tech. Bio-optimizer. Fuck Death, Fear Failure, emblazoned on Silicon Valley tee-shirts. Those are some of the buzzwords and jargon. But the most popular phrase in the Life Extension Movement has to be “Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV)” — sometimes referred to as “Actuarial Escape Velocity” or “Biological Escape Velocity.”
“Longevity Escape Velocity” is a playful yet serious analogy to the concept of escape velocity in physics — the speed required to overcome the force of gravity, as in launching a rocket into space. To overcome the gravitational force of aging, one needs only to extend life expectancy longer than the chronological time that is passing.
With neither the money nor hubris to think I deserve to live forever, my quest for a Fountain of Youth takes a more traditional, and thwarted, path. As with Ponce de Leon, and countless other explorers before me, a geographic destination is what I’m looking for. While Ponce de Leon trampled through the unforgiving swamps of Florida, my search will take me northward toward the Arctic Circle.
From my current latitude in Virginia of 38 degrees, I’ll cover over a couple thousand miles to a destination measured at 66 degrees. It would be even further, another thousand miles, for Ponce de Leon in southern Florida, at 24 degrees latitude. (For reference, the North Pole marks 90 degrees; the Equator, 0 degrees latitude.)
The Earth’s most ancient rock known to man is where I’m heading, located in the northernmost reaches of Quebec. It’s over 4 billion years old, almost as old as Earth itself, when it was created out of dust and gas from our newborn Sun. If time is relative, that makes me, at age 78, downright young — so young that my years being alive wouldn’t even register on any galactic clock.
But the real reason I feel young is anticipating the journey itself — reawakening my boyish thrill of adventure, testing myself against the wildness of nature. The more unknowns, especially risks and possible dangers, the better.
My guide — believe it or not — is a couple of years older than I am. A geologist, he has traveled to the rock before. Four times in fact, when very few others have ever ventured into this remote and sparsely populated region at all — “the ends of the earth,” some might say. Like Virgil introducing Dante to the many levels of the Underworld, he would be my guide to this faraway, foreign place, together with its many geological layers of meaning.
And believe it or not, he actually looks like Virgil — or at least the way the classical poet is said to have looked: the same Roman nose, the Caesar-like bowl haircut, the stocky frame.
Together, we board a small Air Inuit turboprop plane in Montreal. Small and not rocket-propelled. Will it attain “escape velocity?”
…to be continued.
