Year Million - First Season

Imagine a world

where your 300th birthday looks more like your 30th.

Sounds good, right?

Oscar, I'm done. Do you need the VR?

Surprise!

Well in the future

radical life extension technology

will make our current life span

seem like a mere blink of an eye.

Happy birthday.

We'll stay healthy and active for centuries,

putting plastic surgeons out of a job.

So, it's not every day your wife turns 300.

So, to Eva, who is as beautiful as the day I met her.

Adding centuries to your life

will radically redefine how we view relationships,

work, childbirth, and the fabric of society itself.

And those who choose immortality will have to rethink

the very idea of what it means to be alive at all.

It's the deep future.

Your body? Gone.

You're all computer, all the time.

Your brain is way more powerful

than even a billion supercomputers.

Jobs, food, language, water, even traditional thought,

all of humanity's building blocks?

All that's done.

And you are immortal.

Squirming in your chair yet?

You should be.

This isn't science fiction.

Today's visionary thinkers say it's a strong probability

that this is what your world is going to look like.

Tonight, they'll guide you toward that spectacular future,

and we'll see how one family navigates it,

one invention at a time.

This is the story of your future.

This is the road to Year Million.

Just so we're clear,

the Year Million is not literally the year one million.

It's another way of saying the far, far future.

The Year Million,

it's really not one million years.

It is a concept of an age.

The Earth is about, what?

4.5 billion years old.

So the Year Million is a literal...

That's right. A blink of an eye.

And human life has been around for less than that.

But it hasn't stopped us from obsessing

about how we can extend it,

since, well, since the beginning of time.

The nature of human mortality

is one of the most poignant parts of existence.

We're born, and we know we're going to die.

Great thinkers, from Einstein to Freud,

have long since come to the conclusion

that the fact that we are born with the knowledge

that we are going to die is what shapes how we live.

If that changes, then I think we'd fundamentally change

what it means to be human.

Thank you, Brian.

Folks, let's be clear,

it's no longer a question of if, but rather when,

we as a species will have the choice to become immortal.

So for those of you who've played your part

in the billion-dollar spend on anti-aging creams,

diets and gym memberships,

hoping you can turn back the clock and extend your lives,

get excited, because the real revolution

in radical life extension has already begun.

And it's way beyond just skin-deep solutions.

Let me show you what I'm talking about.

The first stage towards immortality

lies in the advancement of nanotechnology.

In the near future,

we'll send tiny microscopic robots

coursing through our bloodstreams,

fixing mutations in our cells,

so that they never get old or fall apart.

Next, we'll not only re-engineer our DNA

to resist all life-threatening diseases and viruses,

we'll be able to create super-intelligent children,

designed to our exact specifications.

Now it's time to get weird.

If creating the ultimate sustainable biological body

isn't enough,

there may be a time when our descendants will choose

to discard their physical bodies,

and upload themselves into a digital world.

And for those of you who might not live long enough

to see the beginnings of these breakthroughs,

you can make a long-shot bet on the future

in the form of cryonic preservation.

Freezing yourselves until the day we wake up to a world

where technology has caught up with our dream for eternal life.

Our journey to immortality will transform the way we live,

the relationships we have, and the very meaning of life itself.

But let's rewind to a more recent future.

Remember that birthday party?

It's just getting started.

But what's the perfect gift for the person you love,

when she turns 300?

Something more precious than diamonds or gold.

You know what I want for my birthday, don't you?

What's that?

The only thing that I want is more time with you.

Time, it's what everyone wants

but never has enough of.

So how do these two lovebirds get a marriage

that lasts 200 years, let alone survive it?

The answer might be found in the most unsuspecting of places.

Yes, whales.

The bowhead whale lives,

we think, on the order of 200 years.

In 2007, a giant bowhead whale

was caught off the coast of Alaska

with a harpoon point embedded in its neck.

That harpoon was dated back to approximately 1880,

making that whale around 130 years old.

The Greenland shark can live up to 400 years.

What are they doing that we're not?

Organisms age at different rates.

Some so long that we don't even know what their life span is.

Like crocodiles and alligators.

I've visited many crocodile farms,

and I've talked to the trainers there,

and they all say the same thing,

that, yeah, crocodiles that are older than them,

they're just as vigorous and as energetic as youngsters.

Aging is not necessarily a given

for all organisms on the planet Earth.

We don't know exactly why some animals

live longer than humans,

but one theory is that our biological clock is determined

by parts of our cells called telomeres.

As we get older, our telomeres fray,

they stop dividing and decay, and that's what causes aging.

So what if we could somehow stop the fraying,

or reverse the cycle?

In medical school,

I became enamored with the idea that there are species on Earth

that live for hundreds of years.

If they can, why can't we?

Enter nanotechnology.

Scientists are already hard at work

developing microscopic medical devices known as nanobots.

In the deep future, these tiny robots will be injected

directly into our bloodstreams.

And they'll be able to repair our cells from the inside.

They'll be able to reverse the telomere cycle from fraying.

Nanobots will eventually be so effective at curing disease,

and even genetic mutations,

that we'll never get sick, and we'll never get old.

Wow.

Imagine little robots

that are able to go into your cells,

look for problems, and actually correct them.

We really believe that nanotechnology

might be the future for treating a lot of our ailments

that we've been unable to treat using conventional therapies.

Those tools is something that is in our future.

It's just a matter of when, not if.

As it is right now,

you can get your Botox and your butt lift

and just look like Gisele

even though you started out,

you know, looking like a some sort of a frog.

Forget facelifts and knee replacements.

In the far future, nanobots will be able to heal a gunshot wound,

or treat the very first cell of a lethal infection.

And even as we speak, scientists are using nanotechnology

to help treat disease more effectively than ever before.

Now, I know what you're thinking, but let's be clear...

when we say nanobots, we're not talking about little C-3POs.

They'll be made of something organic,

so the body won't reject them.

And a precursor to these future bots

is already being developed.

It's a kind of messenger cell that delivers life-saving drugs

directly to the cells that need it.

The first step is just getting

particles of medicine that small.

What we can see here is a reaction

that we've created in the lab

that can make nanoparticles of selenium.

In larger amounts, the mineral selenium is toxic.

But at the nano scale, selenium can treat cancer.

Scientists inject these tiny amounts of selenium

into special synthetic immune cells,

that are capable of delivering it

to the precise place in the body that needs it.

So if there's a mutation in a cell

that might be cancerous,

we deliver selenium to that cell to kill it.

You can use this as a mechanism

to selectively kill unwanted cells in your body.

There's no fundamental law of physics

that says that our bodies have to decay

if we're constantly repairing them.