Afterlife

Exploration of the open sea grew and flourished rapidly after Columbus’s discovery of America in the late fifteenth century. There were so many new regions of the world waiting to be explored and discovered. Innate curiosity along with the opportunity for adventure and economic gain were the principle driving forces behind these bold pioneers of the sea, However, their voyages were taken at great cost and with great risk. Many men died in these quests and explorations.

The adventurers and explorers who had set sail and discovered new routes, returning safely, possessed knowledge that was of great value. These men had learned the secrets of safe passages to new worlds. They kept detailed records in a small book called a “rutter,” which held all the secrets of a particular route to a specific destination and was of great importance to those who might make future voyages.

Obviously, a rutter held such great value because it recounted someone’s long journey, someone who had braved an unknown distance and returned as a witness to others. The rutter offered greater certainty for those who would travel in the future. With rutter in hand a sailor had confidence the same voyage could be retraced with a measure of safety.

The idea of a rutter is important when we consider the journey we will take at death. In one sense, when we depart this life, we too will be traveling to a distant, mysterious place. We too need a rutter, we need a guide who has experienced this journey and returned to share knowledge with us.

Jesus has revealed all that we need to know about death and the afterlife. It is so important to know that God became a man, and, most significantly, suffered a human life and death in its fulness, just as each of us will, and He came back to share with us what to expect and what awaits us.

In a remarkable 1988 article, the British atheist philosopher A. J. Ayer, architect of a philosophy known as logical positivism, recounted his own near-death experience (NDE)., Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon, causing his heart to stop beating for four minutes. But Ayer astonished his medical team by recovering and then telling them about an extraordinary experience. “I was confronted,” he recalled, “by a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it. I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe.”

One might expect that such an experience would prompt an atheist to reconsider views on God’s existence. But not Ayer—at least not publicly. “My recent experiences,” he wrote, “have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god.” He was ready, in other words, to admit the universe might be more complex than he originally thought, but not to the point of questioning its supposed godlessness.

Yet in a curious twist, another account suggests that Ayer did reconsider the question of God’s reality. Jeremy George, the attending physician, later reported that Ayer had told him privately, “I saw a divine being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”

Christianity is not [currently] declining in America. At the New York Times, journalist Lauren Jackson has been doing some searching, thorough reporting for a new series “Believing.” Apparently, 92 percent of Americans say “they hold a spiritual belief in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife, or something ‘beyond the natural world.’”

Jackson reasons that people haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion. She reports that for the last few decades, much of the world has tried to go without God, a departure from most of recorded history. More than a billion people globally and about a third of Americans have tried to live without religion. Studies in recent years have offered insights into how that is going. The data doesn’t look good.

Actively religious people tend to report they are happier than people who don’t practice religion. Religious Americans are healthier, too. They are significantly less likely to be depressed or to die by suicide, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular illness, or other causes. In a long-term study, doctors at Harvard found that women who attended religious services once a week were 33 percent less likely to die prematurely than women who never attended. One researcher on the study said, that because “they had higher levels of social support, better health behaviors, and greater optimism about the future.”

Religiously affiliated Americans are more likely to feel gratitude (by 23 percentage points), spiritual peace (by 27 points), and “a deep sense of connection with humanity” (by 15 points) regularly than people without a religious affiliation.

Religion can’t just become another way to optimize your life. Some have tried. Jackson describes secular community gatherings with pop music, morality talks, free food — but “None of us became regulars.” Going for any reason other than faith itself leaves you with little reason to stick around.

In the classic sports film, Heaven Can Wait, actor Warren Beatty plays a man named Joe Pendleton. He was the star quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams and on the verge of leading his team to the Super Bowl when he is struck by a truck while riding his bike. An overzealous angel prematurely removes him from his body, assuming that he was about to die.

When he arrives in heaven, Joe refuses to believe that his time is up. So, he pleads his case that he needs more time on earth. He successfully argues his point with the overzealous angel’s supervisor, but there’s a problem—he can’t go back into his original body because it’s been cremated. So, they have to find another dead body for him to enter. Lo and behold, there’s this multimillionaire who’s just died, murdered by an unfaithful wife.

Joe comes back to life in the multi-millionaire’s body. Then he buys the Rams so that he can become their starting quarterback and lead them to the Super Bowl. The problem is that his wife still wants him dead. Right before the Super Bowl, he’s shot. The Rams are forced to start the backup quarterback, but during the game the backup takes a brutal hit, and what happens? He dies. What happens after that? Right again. The angel’s supervisor sends Joe into the backup quarterback’s body, and he leads the Rams to Super Bowl victory.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what this story has to do with hope of heaven? The message of the movie is that heaven can wait because it can’t possibly be better than getting what we want right now. Attaining a lifelong dream—that’s heaven! But the truth is when I do get what I want, I find out that there’s something else I want that’s even better.

Constructed during the early 18th-century during the reign of Sultan Ismail bin Sharif, the Kara Prison is a vast subterranean prison in the city of Meknes, Morocco. Its most unusual feature is that it lacked doors and bars, but it’s believed that no one ever escaped.

Its inescapability despite lacking bars and doors was due to its complex labyrinth-like design. It was named after a Portuguese prisoner who was granted freedom on the condition that he constructed a prison that could house more than 40,000 inmates.

The entrance is located in Ismaili Qasba, but the labyrinth goes on for miles. Some believe it’s roughly the size of the city itself. According to legends, a team of French explorers attempted to discover the vastness of the prison and never returned. Each hall of the dungeon contained several corridors, which led to another hall, into another, then into another.

As time went on, the prison was discontinued and was utilized as a storage facility for food. Today, a portion of the former prison is open to the public, but its true extent is still unknown.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While this Moroccan prison may have claimed to be escape-proof, it is certain that there is no escape from hell. An inescapable horror of black darkness (Jude 1:4,13), eternal fire (Matt. 25:41), undying worms (Mark 9:44, 48), and everlasting destruction (2 Thess. 1:9) await those who reject Christ.

“Most of us will live an amazingly long life and should not worry so much about dying young.” Those are the words of Jonathan Clements, 61, who wrote more than 1,000 personal finance columns for The Wall Street Journal between 1994 and 2015. Plan on living past 90 and save accordingly, he advised, when he wasn’t running marathons or riding bicycles.

In May of 2024, he saw a doctor about some balance issues. Two days later, he received a devastating cancer diagnosis. Scans revealed a golf-ball-size tumor on his lung, and the disease has spread to his brain, his liver and elsewhere. Anything beyond 12 decent months would be a victory. “I’m definitely on the clock here,” he said as we sat at his kitchen table this week.

Clements said, “The No. 1 thing money can do for us is to give us a sense of financial security, and the way it does that is not to spend it and to hang onto it.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Clements did not know that there is only one source of true security, and it is not money. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psa. 46:1).

Multiple New York Times best-selling author and documentary director Sebastian Junger had a near-death experience in June 2020. This was due to an unexpected abdominal hemorrhage, which he survived thanks to his doctors. This led him to explore the topics of death, near-death, and the afterlife in his 2024 book In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of An Afterlife. After he had escaped death, Junger, a committed atheist, had several deep moments of reflection:

But I didn't die, and it made me wonder what this new part of my life was supposed to be called. The extra years that had been returned to me were too terrifying to be beautiful and too precious to be ordinary. A week after I came home, I found myself sitting at a window looking at a crab apple tree in the backyard. The branches were waving in the wind, and I had the thought that they'd be waving in exactly the same way if I'd died, only I wouldn't be here to see them. The moment would be utterly beyond my reach. Eventually [my wife] Barbara asked if I felt lucky or unlucky to have almost died and I didn't know how to answer. Was I blessed by special knowledge or cursed by it? Would I ever function normally again?

Junger flipflopped daily from wondrous thankfulness to existential dread:

Barbara said she couldn't take much more of me like this and made the excellent point that I had an opportunity to experience the insights of terminal illness without - almost certainly - having to pay the price. What was I learning? What could I come away from this with? My father had continued reading history books until the last weeks of his life. Would I keep practicing music if the news were bad? Reading? Running? What would be the point - but then, what's the point anyway?

Possible Preaching Angle:

Unbelievers are given an opportunity to come to faith by God, but sadly many hedge, delay, and then go back to their old ways, ultimately untouched by their experience.

In an interview with Danny Devito, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger despairs at the reality of death and wonders who’s to blame. When someone asked him what happens when we die, he said (curse words deleted):

Nothing. You’re 6 feet under. Anyone that tells you something else is a [...] liar. We don’t know what happens with the soul and all this spiritual stuff that I’m not an expert in, but I know that the body as we see each other now, we will never see each other again like that … When people talk about, 'I will see them again in heaven,' it sounds so good, but the reality is that we won’t see each other again after we’re gone. That’s the sad part. I know people feel comfortable with death, but I don’t. Because I will [...] miss [...] everything.

Schwarzenegger considers what that he’ll miss when he dies: “to have fun and to go to the gym and to pump up, to ride my bike on the beach, to travel around, to see interesting things all over the world.”

DEVITO: “Life! It’s the best!”

Schwarzenegger then wonders who’s to blame.

SCHWARZENEGGER: I tell you, there’s someone that mixed up this whole thing. Think about it. Who can we blame?

DEVITO: You mean that we don’t live forever?

SCHWARZENEGGER: Yeah. That we have to die.

DEVITO: That’s tough, man.

SCHWARZENEGGER: I don’t know what the deal is, but in any case, it’s a reality, and it truly [ticks] me off.

DEVITO: You don’t want to die.

SCHWARZENEGGER: No. What the […]? What kind of deal is that?

Admiral William H. McRaven writes about what he learned during Navy SEAL training that has helped him and could help anyone live a better life. Hope. He said:

Hope is the most powerful force in the universe. With hope you can inspire nations to greatness. With hope you can raise up the downtrodden. With hope you can ease the pain of unbearable loss. Sometimes all it takes is one person to make a difference.

We will all find ourselves neck dep in mud someday. That is the time to sing loudly, to smile broadly, to lift up those around you and give them hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Hope truly is a powerful force and yet “living hope” goes beyond what is satisfying in life because it is based on the resurrection of Jesus. Our hope is living because Jesus is alive.

Formerly the Religion Editor for the Atlantic, Sigal Samuel now writes about the future of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, and their "staggering ethical implications." She describes much of the hope for artificial intelligence as mimicking what Christianity and other major religions have been espousing for centuries. She writes:

Suppose I told you that in 10 years … you will live in a sort of paradise. You won’t get sick, or age, or die. Eternal life will be yours! Even better, your mind will be blissfully free of uncertainty — you’ll have access to perfect knowledge. Oh, and you’ll no longer be stuck on Earth. Instead, you can live up in the heavens.

The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists who are building AI just don’t recognize that.

These technologists propose cheating death by uploading our minds to the cloud, where we can live digitally for all eternity. They talk about AI as a decision-making agent that can judge with mathematical certainty what’s optimal and what’s not. (It is) an endeavor that guarantees human salvation if it goes well, even as it spells doom if it goes badly.

Jack Clark, co-founder of the AI safety company Anthropic, recently wrote: “Sometimes I think a lot of the breathless enthusiasm for AGI is misplaced religious impulses from people brought up in a secular culture.”

Sigal Samuel summarizes the beliefs in this nutshell: "When we put all these ideas together and boil them down, we get this basic proposition:

• We may not have much time until life as we know it is over.
• So, we need to place a bet on something that can save us.
• Since the stakes are so high, we should ante up and go all in on our bet.

Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged

In the summer of 2023, Heather Beville felt something she hadn’t in a long time: a hug from her sister Jessica, who died at age 30 from cancer. In a dream, “I hugged her and I could feel her, even though I knew in my logic that she was dead.”

Like fellow Christians, Beville is sure that death is not the end. But she’s also among a significant number who say they have continued to experience visits from deceased loved ones here on earth.

In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 42 percent of self-identified evangelicals said they had been visited by a loved one who had passed away. Rates were even higher among Catholics and Black Protestants, two-thirds of whom reported such experiences.

Interactions with the dead fall into a precarious supernatural space. Staunch secularists will say they’re impossible and must be made up. Bible-believing Christians may be wary of the spiritual implications of calling on ghosts from beyond. Yet more than half of Americans believe a dead family member has come to them in a dream or some other form.

Researchers say most people who report “after-death communications” find the interactions to be comforting, not haunting or scary. Professor Julie Exline says, “They’re often very valuable for people. They give them hope that their loved one is still there and still connected to them. These experiences help people, even if they don’t know what to make of them.”

There are several factors that come into play for a person to turn to supernatural explanations for what they’ve experienced. Prior belief in God, angels, spirits, or ghosts, combined with a belief that these beings actually do communicate with people in the world is one condition. Another factor is the relationship between a person and their loved one—“the need for relational closure” amid prolonged grief. And women are more likely to report the phenomena.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The spiritual realm described in Scripture comes with strong warnings. The text repeatedly advises against calling on spirits outside of God himself, with several Old Testament verses specifically addressing interactions with the dead (“necromancy” in some translations). Deuteronomy 18, for example, decries anyone who “is a medium or spiritist or who consults with the dead” as “detestable to the Lord” (vv. 11, 12).

Pastors can attest that grieving Christian spouses occasionally believe they have seen shadows or objects in the home moving after the death of a loved one. We can rest on the absolute truth of God’s Word that “absent from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). At death, believers are immediately in the presence of the Lord and not wandering the earth (Phil. 1:23).

Is there really an afterlife? While most people think humans will never be able to prove what happens after death, half of adults still believe their spirit lives on—somewhere.

The new survey of over 1,000 people in the United Kingdom, finds 50% of respondents believe in an afterlife. Of this group, 60% believe everyone experiences the same thing when they die—regardless of their individual beliefs. However, two in three believe scientists will never be able to tell us what really happens when someone passes.

Regardless of whether people think they’re going to heaven (55%) or worry their life choices could end up sending them to hell (58%), the poll finds 68% of all respondents have no fear of what comes next. Overall, one in four think people go to heaven or hell, 16% believe they’ll exist in a “spiritual realm,” and 16% believe in reincarnation.

No matter what happens after death, respondents are confident it’ll actually be an improvement over their current life. The poll finds adults think heaven provides people with a chance to recapture the things they’ve lost throughout their life.

The vast majority (86%) think the afterlife involves a sense of peace and 66% describe it as a place of happiness. Three in five adults believe there will be no more suffering when they die.

However, respondents think there are a few conditions people need to follow in order to reach this peaceful realm. Over four in five people (84%) say you have to live a good life and be a generally good person to reach heaven. One in three claim you have to place your faith in a higher power to reach the afterlife and one in five say it requires you to confess all your sins.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This survey was taken in mid-life when old age and illness are seen as far away. When one gets closer to the end, it is likely many of them will change their opinion, or fall deeper into denial with the help of Satan who wants to soothe them with lies.

A study explaining why mouse hairs turn gray made global headlines. Not because the little critters are in desperate need of a makeover; but knowing the “why” in mice could lead to a cure for graying locks in humans. Nowadays, everyone seems to be chasing after youth, either to keep it, find it, or just remember it.

People in the ancient world often turned to lotions and potions that promised to give at least the appearance of eternal youth. Roman recipes for banishing wrinkles included ingredients from donkey’s milk, swan’s fat, and bean paste to frankincense and myrrh.

Some ancient elixirs were highly toxic. China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang, who lived in the Third Century B.C., is believed to have died from mercury poisoning after drinking elixirs meant to make him immortal. In 16th-century France, Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of King Henry II, was famous for looking the same age as her lover despite being 20 years older. A study of Diane’s remains found that her hair contained extremely high levels of gold, likely due to daily sips of a youth-potion containing gold chloride, diethyl ether, and mercury. The toxic combination would have destroyed her internal organs.

Many people in our world today are still trying to find ways to look younger forever.

Just how bad are the polls for those in political office right now? It turns out more people are putting their faith in the dead than in living politicians. A new survey finds there are more people who believe in ghosts than trust their government.

The poll of nearly 1,000 people in the United Kingdom, found that 50% believe in the existence of ghosts. Meanwhile, just one in five say they have faith in the government. It also turns out that more than twice as many people believe in ghosts than trust in the media.

A belief in ghosts (50%) is more common than believing in astrology (23%) or magic (12%). In fact, 18% of respondents say they’ve had contact with an actual ghost. Luckily, many of these are not the horror movie kind of encounters—as only 23% say they’re afraid of these spirits.

When it comes to religion, Catholics are more likely to say they believe in ghosts (64%) than Protestants (53%), agnostics (42%), and atheists (37%). Although atheists are the least likely to fear a spooky ghost (17%), just one in three Catholics said the same—pointing to most people actually having a positive opinion of these supernatural visitors.

Interestingly, one in three young adults in Gen Z say they’re afraid of ghosts, making them the most fearful of any generation in the poll. Just 16 percent of baby boomers say ghosts creep them out.

In the book The Faith of Elvis, Billy Stanley, half-brother of Elvis, shares poignantly of the ups and downs of Elvis’ walk with the Jesus. On a more humorous side he shared this encounter between Elvis and Sammy Davis Jr.:

It was a kind of a funny thing, and also serious in a way, but one time in Las Vegas, he was talking to Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy noticed Elvis wearing both a Star of David and a cross necklace—two things that don’t normally go together because they represent two distinct religions: Judaism and Christianity.

Sammy said, “Elvis, isn’t that kind of a contradiction?”

Elvis looked at him and said, “I don’t want to miss heaven on a technicality.”

Why do people believe they have seen ghosts? Research suggests that the brain may summon spirits as a means of coping with trauma, especially the pain of losing a loved one. Just as most amputees report what’s known as “phantom limb,” the feeling that their detached appendage is still there, surviving spouses frequently report seeing or sensing their departed partner.

One 1971 survey in the British Medical Journal found that close to half the widows in Wales and England had seen their partners postmortem. These vivid encounters, which psychologists call “after-death communication,” have long been among the most common kinds of paranormal experience, affecting skeptics and believers alike.

Experts think that such specters help us deal with painful or confusing events. A 2011 analysis published in the journal Death Studies looked at hundreds of incidents of supposed interaction with the deceased. The paper concluded that some occurrences provided “instantaneous relief from painful grief symptoms,” while others strengthened preexisting religious views.

There’s also evidence that sightings have other mental benefits. In a 1995 survey, 91 percent of participants said their encounter had at least one upside, such as a sense of connection to others.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Afterlife; Heaven – Pastors can attest that grieving Christian spouses occasionally believe they have seen shadows or objects in the home moving after the death of a loved one. We can rest on the absolute truth of God’s Word that “absent from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). At death, believers are immediately in the presence of the Lord and not wandering the earth (Phil. 1:23).

More Americans believe their home is inhabited by someone or something that isn’t a living being. A study from the company Vivint found that nearly half of the thousand surveyed homeowners believed that their house was haunted. Another survey of 1,000 people found similar results, with 44 percent of respondents saying that they’ve lived in a haunted house.

One researcher offers the following explanations for this phenomenon. Haunted houses can be “a way to connect to the past or a sense of enchantment in the everyday world. [Younger generations in particular] might be searching for meaning in new places. If the modern world they live in isn’t providing food for the soul … it’s not hard to figure out that younger people will search elsewhere for that and find the idea of an alternate world — of ghosts, aliens, et cetera — to be enticing to explore.”

Another researcher claims that the pandemic also played a role in society’s relationship with houses and ghosts. The presence of death in our culture increased, igniting a desire for evidence of an afterlife for some people. “Think of all the sudden, and often not-sufficiently-ritually-mourned deaths during COVID. Many times, people lost loved ones with no last contact, no funeral.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

When people stop attending church or believing in Christianity they don’t stop seeking “spiritual experiences.” The spiritual hunger is still there.

In a recent Q&A with CT magazine, veteran AI engineer Tom Kehler, talked about the limits of the popular ChatGPT, and the wonders of the human brain.

Kehler has worked in artificial intelligence for more than 40 years, as a coder and a CEO. He grew up a preacher’s kid and got into mathematical linguistics in high school. After earning a PhD in physics, he wanted to do linguistics with Wycliffe Bible Translators, but “God kept closing that door,” he says. Instead, he found himself working with natural language processing in computing.

He was asked “Why is there an obsession with sentient AI?” Kehler replied, “If you are a person of nonbelief, you want to create something that gives you hope in the future. On the AI side, we want something that will cause us to have eternal life—my consciousness is going to go into eternity because it’s in a machine.”

Kehler was also asked about Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer, who said in 2022 that his chatbot had become sentient and had a soul.

The way these systems work, we’ll say, “This is the number seven.” We keep reinforcing until the neural network can recognize that seven. That correlation of events is the core way AI works now.

However, the way kids acquire language is truly mind-blowing. And not just language, but even if you go open the cupboard door. Kids see something once, and they figure out how to do it. The system that this Google engineer was talking about … was given trillions of examples in order to get some sense of intelligence out of it. It consumed ridiculous amounts of energy, whereas a little kid’s brain requires the power of a flashlight, and it’s able to learn language. We’re not anywhere close to that kind of general AI.

(AI) is taking inputs to build its knowledge. It doesn’t check the truth value, or as it’s called, the data lineage. Where did this data come from? Do we know it’s true? It’s translating input text to output text based on some objective.

If you think about how scientific knowledge or medical knowledge was developed, it’s by peer review. We as a human race have considered that trustworthy. It’s not perfect. But that’s how we normally build trust. If you have 12 of the world’s best cardiac surgeons say a certain procedure is good, you’re going to say, “Yeah, that’s probably good.” If ChatGPT told you to do that procedure, you’d better have it reviewed by somebody, because it could be wrong.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God-designed the human brain to be a marvelous, compact, and vastly intricate organ. It has a conscience, the ability to empathize, to feel joy and regret, and to ultimately seek a higher purpose in life in fellowship with the Creator. The human-designed AI is an attempt to potentially create eternal life for humans, but without ethics, and without submission to the Almighty God.

Singer songwriter Willie Nelson has a long history of tempting, and cheating, death. In 1969, when his home in Ridgetop, Tenn., caught fire, he raced into the burning house to save two prized possessions, his guitar and a pound of “Colombian grass.” He has emphysema, the consequence of a near-lifetime of chain smoking that began in childhood, when he puffed on cedar bark and grapevines, before turning to cigarettes and then—famously, prodigiously—to marijuana.

In 1981, he was taken to a hospital in Hawaii after his left lung collapsed while he was swimming. He underwent a voluntary stem-cell procedure in 2015, in an effort to repair his damaged lungs. Smoking has endangered his life, but it also, he thinks, saved it: He has often said that he would have died long ago had he not taken up weed and laid off drinking, which made him rowdy and self-destructive.

Now, in his late 80s, he has reached the age where getting out of bed each morning can be construed as a feat of survival. “Last night I had a dream that I died twice yesterday,” he sang in 2017, “But I woke up still not dead again today.”

Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it.

Now the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has about as much money as all of them put together, is going to try it. The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation. It plans to spend up to $1 billion per year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health.

The sum, if the Saudis spend it, could make the Gulf state the largest single sponsor of researchers attempting to understand the underlying causes of aging—and how it might be slowed down with drugs. Former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist Mehmood Khan says, “Our primary goal is to extend the period of healthy lifespan. There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one.”

Khan says the fund is authorized to spend up to $1 billion per year indefinitely. By comparison, the division of the US National Institute on Aging spends about $325 million a year on the biology of aging.

The Saudi government may be partially motivated by the belief that diseases of aging pose a specific threat to that country’s future. There is evidence that people living in the Gulf states “are aging faster biologically than they are chronologically.”

Basically, the country is being beset by diseases of affluence brought on by rich diets and too little exercise. Even though Saudi Arabia has a relatively young population, with a median age of around 31, it is experiencing increasing rates of obesity and diabetes.