I wonder if Ray Kurzweil was inspired by this story, or if there was some other futurist who inspired them both. I had a sort of déjà vu reading this, having been at Kurzweil’s Siggraph keynote in 2000. He was predicting this very scenario - the singularity would bring nanobots that make humans immortal. His talk made an impression on my young mind. It wasn’t until later that I realized Kurzweil was just peddling the fountain of youth, and was somewhat unscrupulous about it…

He has been pitching the idea that human longevity is accelerating. For example, scroll to the very bottom of this essay and check out the plot: https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-acceleratin...

Looks plausible for a minute, but when you start to think about it, you realize he has conflated longevity with average lifespan, and that it cannot possibly be a mistake, he’s not that ignorant or careless. The plot is missing data points that were easily available when it was made, data points that would completely contradict the trend line he put in the graph. Turns out human longevity hasn’t really budged for ten thousand years, but average lifespan has changed a lot, due to infant mortality and sanitation and vaccines and lower infant mortality and less war and more science.

I think a lot of the graphics in that article are equally sketchy when you look a little closer, and a lot of his predictions from 2000 are already orders of magnitude off, so I have no trust in anything Kurzweil writes or predicts. But given the state of the earth today, maybe it’s a good thing that significant longevity or immortality isn’t just around the corner? It’s a fun thought experiment and a nice story though.