Human civilization has been trying to defeat death forever. For the first time, we may be beginning to succeed.

In labs from California to Cambridge, the biology of aging is being treated as an engineering problem, and the pace of progress is no longer science fiction.

This episode traces the long human war against mortality, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to today's life extension science, and asks the deeper question: what happens to a civilization built on the assumption that we die… if we stop dying?

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My earlier podcast, How It Began: A History of the Modern World, is now available as a complete 20-episode collection at howitbegan.com.