Living Longer, Healthier Lives: About the May-June 2012 FUTURIST

What if we treated the human body as well as car lovers tend their treasured old Volkswagen Beetles? It would mean continuous maintenance, repairing even the most minor bits of damage before they accumulate and ultimately lead to the body’s demise.

This is precisely the approach that biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey advises. In the May-June 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST, he describes potential treatments that could avert the cellular damage that leads to decay. As future researchers improve their work, such treatments would enable us to approach “longevity escape velocity” and live to be “A Thousand Years Young.”

The implications of this healthful, youthful immortality would be mind-boggling. Populations will grow as fewer people die off, so we’ll need even more food than we do now. That means improving agricultural technologies as well as food itself.

Bioengineered food has gotten a bad rap in the last couple of decades, but at least one foodie has learned to stop worrying and love “Frankenfood.” Food journalist Josh Schonwald takes us on a tour of the work being done in bioengineering labs that will keep our future plates full and our palates pleased (“Engineering the Future of Food”).

Another implication of longer, healthier lives is more time on our hands, and futurist Emily Empel observes that the world’s sex industry is poised to offer an ever increasing variety of activities, products, and services (“The Future of the Commercial Sex Industry”). But this growth industry, particularly pornography, may have darker impacts on the human psyche and society, warns journalist Roger Howard (“Anticipating an ‘Anything Goes’ World of Online Porn”).

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Participants at the World Future Society’s 2011 conference in Vancouver last July had the opportunity to hear from two of this issue’s contributors, Aubrey de Grey and Emily Empel. And Josh Schonwald is among the thought-leaders you’ll meet at the 2012 conference in Toronto.

This is why we have described our conferences as a way to get the whole World Future Society experience live and in person. Other FUTURIST authors you’ll meet in Toronto include the principals of the Weiner, Edrich, Brown consultancy--Edie Weiner, Arnold Brown, Erica Orange, and Jared Weiner--as well as Jerome C. Glenn and Ted Gordon of The Millennium Project; John M. Smart of the Acceleration Studies Foundation; diplomat and futures scholar Joergen Moeller; and many more.

Learn more about WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver at http://www.wfs.org/worldfuture-2012. See you in Toronto!

Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST.