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every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations.
Every quarter century or so children take over from their parents—a
transition as fundamental to human existence as the rotation of the planet
about its axis. In tomorrow's world, if the optimists are correct,
grandparents will have living grandparents; children born decades from now
will ignore advice from people who watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan
Show. Intergenerational warfare—the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome—will be but
one consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober social scientists
find themselves discussing pregnant seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms,
protracted adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance companies.
Indeed, if the biologists are right, the coming army of centenarians will be
marching into a future so unutterably different that they may well feel
nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.

The oldest in vitro fertilization clinic in China is located on the sixth
floor of a no-star hotel in Changsha, a gritty fly-over city in the
south-central portion of the country. It is here that the clinic's founder
and director, Lu Guangxiu, pursues her research into embryonic stem cells.

Most cells don't divide, whatever elementary school students learn—they just
get old and die. The body subcontracts out the job of replacing them to a
special class of cells called stem cells. Embryonic stem cells—those in an
early-stage embryo—can grow into any kind of cell: spleen, nerve, bone,
whatever. Rather than having to wait for a heart transplant, medical
researchers believe, a patient could use stem cells to grow a new heart:
organ transplant without an organ donor.

The process of extracting stem cells destroys an early-stage embryo, which
has led the Bush administration to place so many strictures on stem-cell
research that scientists complain it has been effectively banned in this
country. A visit to Lu's clinic not long ago suggested that ultimately Bush's
rules won't stop anything. Capitalism won't let them.

During a conversation Lu accidentally brushed some papers to the floor. They
were faxes from venture capitalists in San Francisco, Hong Kong, and
Stuttgart. "I get those all the time," she said. Her operation was short of
money—a chronic problem for scientists in poor countries. But it had
something of value: thousands of frozen embryos, an inevitable by-product of
in vitro fertilizations. After obtaining permission from patients, Lu uses
the embryos in her work. It is possible that she has access to more embryonic
stem cells than all U.S. researchers combined.

Sooner or later, in one nation or another, someone like Lu will cut a deal:
frozen embryos for financial backing. Few are the stem-cell researchers who
believe that their work will not lead to tissue-and-organ farms, and that
these will not have a dramatic impact on the human lifespan. If Organs 'Я' Us
is banned in the United States, Americans will fly to longevity centers
elsewhere. As Steve Hall wrote in Merchants of Immortality, biotechnology
increasingly resembles the software industry. Dependence on venlly cost about
$15,000 a year. According to James Lubitz, the acting chief of the aging and
chronic-disease statistics branch of the CDC National Center for Health
Statistics, there is no a priori reason to suppose that lifespan extension
will be cheaper, that the treatments will have to be administered less
frequently, or that their inventors will agree to be less well compensated.
To be sure, as Ramez Naam points out in More Than Human, which surveys the
prospects for "biological enhancement," drugs inevitably fall in price as
their patents expire. But the same does not necessarily hold true for medical
procedures: heart bypass operations are still costly, decades after their
invention. And in any case there will invariably be newer, more effective,
and more costly drugs. Simple arithmetic shows that if 80 million U.S. senior
citizens were to receive $15,000 worth of treatment every year, the annual
cost to the nation would be $1.2 trillion—"the kind of number," Lubitz says,
"that gets people's attention."

The potential costs are enormous, but the United States is a rich nation. As
a share of gross domestic product the cost of U.S. health care roughly
doubled from 1980 to the present, explains David M. Cutler, a health-care
economist at Harvard. Yet unlike many cost increases, this one signifies that
people are better off. "Would you rather have a heart attack with 1980
medicine at the 1980 price?" Cutler asks. "We get more and better treatments
now, and we pay more for the additional services. I don't look at that and
see an obvious disaster."

The critical issue, in Goldman's view, will be not the costs per se but
determining who will pay them. "We're going to have a very public debate
about whether this will be covered by insurance," he says. "My sense is that
it won't. It'll be like cosmetic surgery—you pay out of pocket." Necessarily,
a pay-as-you-go policy would limit access to longevity treatments. If
high-level anti-aging therapy were expensive enough, it could become a perk
for movie stars, politicians, and CEOs. One can envision Michaele, the maids,
chauffeurs, and gofers of the rich will stare mortality in the face.

Short of overtly confiscating rich people's assets, it would be hard to avoid
this divide. Yet as Goldman says, there will be "furious" political pressure
to avert the worst inequities. For instance, government might mandate that
insurance cover longevity treatments. In fact, it is hard to imagine any
democratic government foolhardy enough not to guarantee access to those
treatments, especially when the old are increasing in number and political
clout. But forcing insurers to cover longevity treatments would only change
the shape of the social problem. "Most everyone will want to take [the
treatment]," Goldman says. "So that jacks up the price of insurance, which
leads to more people uninsured. Either way, we may be bifurcating society."

Ultimately, Goldman suggests, the government would probably end up paying
outright for longevity treatments: an enormous new entitlement program. How
could it be otherwise? Older voters would want it because it is in their
interest; younger ones would want it because they, too, will age. "At the
same time," he says, "nobody likes paying taxes, so there would be constant
pressure to contain costs."

To control spending, the program might give priority to people with healthy
habits; no point in retooling the genomes of smokers, risk takers, and
addicts of all kinds. A kind of reverse eugenics might occur, in which
governments would freely allow the birth of people with "bad" genes but would
let nature take its course on them as they aged. Having shed the baggage of
depression, addiction, mental retardation, and chemical-sensitivity syndrome,
tomorrow's legions of perduring old would be healthier than the young. In
this scenario moralists and reformers would have a field day.

Meanwhile, the gerontocratic elite will have a supreme weapon against the
young: compound interest. According to a 2004 study by three researchers at
the London Business School, historically the average rate of real return on
stock markets worldwide has been about five percent. Thus a twenty-year-old
who puts $10,000 in the market in 2010 should expect by 2030 to have aboun
themselves; a mass of the ordinary old, forced by insurance into supremely
healthy habits, kept alive by medical entitlement; and the diminishingly
influential young. In his novel Holy Fire (1996) the science-fiction writer
and futurist Bruce Sterling conjured up a version of this
dictatorship-by-actuary: a society in which the cautious, careful centenarian
rulers, supremely fit and disproportionately affluent if a little frail, look
down with ennui and mild contempt on their juniors. Marxist class warfare,
upgraded to the biotech era!

In the past, twenty- and thirty-year-olds had the chance of sudden windfalls
in the form of inheritances. Some economists believe that bequests from
previous generations have provided as much as a quarter of the start-up
capital for each new one—money for college tuitions, new houses, new
businesses. But the image of an ingénue's getting a leg up through a sudden
bequest from Aunt Tilly will soon be a relic of late-millennium romances.

Instead of helping their juniors begin careers and families, tomorrow's rich
oldsters will be expending their disposable income to enhance their memories,
senses, and immune systems. Refashioning their flesh to ever higher levels of
performance, they will adjust their metabolisms on computers, install
artificial organs that synthesize smart drugs, and swallow genetically
tailored bacteria and viruses that clean out arteries, fine-tune neurons, and
repair broken genes. Should one be reminded of H. G. Wells's The Time
Machine, in which humankind is divided into two species, the ethereal Eloi
and the brutish, underground-dwelling Morlocks? "As I recall," Goldman told
me recently, "in that book it didn't work out very well for the Eloi."

 When lifespans extend indefinitely, the effects are felt throughout the life
cycle, but the biggest social impact may be on the young. According to Joshua
Goldstein, a demographer at Princeton, adolescence will in the future evolve
into a period of experimentation and education that will last from the
teenage years into the mid-thirties. In a kind of wanderjahr prolonged for
decades, young people will try out jobs on a temporary basis, float in and
out of their parents' homes, hit the Europass-and-hostel circuit, pick up
extra courses and degrees, and live with different people in different
places. In the past the transition from youth to adulthood usually followed
an orderly sequence: education, entry into the labor force, marriage, and
parenthood. For tomorrow's thirtysomethings, suspended in what Goldstein
calls "quasi-adulthood," these steps may occur in any order.