Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

by Mark Miodownik

This is the technology that was envisaged in The Six Million Dollar Man, which allowed him to be “Better, Stronger, Faster.” In today’s money, those six million dollars would be thirty-five million dollars, and although this is a fictional figure, it does highlight an important truth about life-extending technologies: they are expensive. The technology that will allow us to lead fit and healthy lives up to the age of a hundred is likely to cost a great deal of money. Who will pay? Will it be a luxury? Will it be only the rich who can play tennis at the age of ninety-eight while the rest of us are in wheelchairs? Or will the technology simply allow us to work longer, making it normal to do so until eighty or ninety? I prefer the latter future, but if thirty-five million dollars is anywhere close to the right figure, then most of us will never be able to afford it, however many years we work.