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The Coming Crisis of Immortality?
Throughout recorded history, man has dreamt of eternal life. Christian theology promises immortality for the spirit, but not the flesh. Ponce de Leon searched in vain for the Fountain of Youth. Every recorded civilization has its myths of magical elixirs, charms and talismans, mystical islands, and fantastic secret gardens; all said to confer a remedy against age and death — and all, until now, just myths, no more.
Some of you may have noticed this article in the Washington Post over the weekend. Apparently, our Tech Titans have decided they’ve had enough of religion and myths. They want immortality, in this lifetime:
[The tech titans] who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research. Their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.
The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding, regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.
I should say from the outset that I doubt any of this will work.
But as a thought experiment: What if I’m wrong?
From time immemorial, human society been organized in the certain knowledge that every creature born must die. But what if we succeed in understanding the forces that control senescence and death? What we can understand we can control. And what we can control, we will control.
Religion, politics, love, family, desire, ambition, philosophy, justice, art, literature and the meaning we assign to life itself would be destined to change and change forever.
What if they merely succeed in a more modest goal–an increase in the maximum human life span of, say, 50 percent? This would surely be humanity’s greatest scientific achievement; advances such as the invention of the printing press and the discovery of the atom would seem trivial by comparison. The organizing principle of all human understanding, all striving – to every thing, there is a season – would be upended.
What would it cost? Clearly, the technology will be expensive. Would immortality–or a vastly longer life–be available only to a small minority of the population? Clearly, yes. If, as a society, we cannot pay for everyone–and we cannot–how would the immortals be chosen? Who will live and who will receive a death sentence? Would mortals and near-immortals exist alongside one another? What kinds of conflict would this engender?
What would become of the multitude of healthy, vigorous, but chronologically ancient people who have no established role in society?
Extended life spans would have revolutionary economic effects. Retirement, as we know it, would become meaningless. What would become of the idea of a career or a destiny in life?
What would the world be like when increasing numbers of people live indefinitely, and children must compete with previous generations—generations that refuse to die—for jobs, space, and every other resource?
Would religion be meaningful absent the prospect of death? If men and women can achieve extended or eternal life here on Earth, would the motivation for following the ethical teachings of religion be weakened? What do leading clergy say about the prospect of extended life on earth?
What would it mean to pledge love until death do you part, if death could never do you part? What is the future of marriage, of the ideal of romantic love, of the family, if human life span is unlimited?
How would functional immortality transform our attitudes toward justice—how, for example, will it change our attitude toward the death penalty? Or a sentence of life imprisonment?
What would become of poetry, literature, drama, and painting in a world of infinite youth?
It doesn’t seem to me we can confidently say, “They will never pull this off. It isn’t even worth considering.” Strange things have already happened in my own lifetime.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves these questions?
Published in Culture, General
That’s good news, John. Eternal lives for flies.
About the original question–judging from the generational resentment exhibited over social security and medicare, which, though understandable in a way, is also poisonous, I’m thinking this sort of engineering will engender some real social problems. But it is curious–right now I think we have a culture of death that is becoming more pronounced. Abortion, euthanasia, even infanticide is being touted in respectable journals and sanctioned by states. California, in its infinite enlightenment, is trying to legalize physician-assisted euthanasia. We have increasing acceptance of third party reproduction and fiddling with baby-making to include three parents and the like. People try to create designer babies and clone opera singers–yes, just read an article about this happening in Sweden. Humans pretending to be God fundamentally changes our thinking about the human person, brave new world style. Most of these attempts end the way the tower of Babel ended. That said, longer, healthier lives seem like generally a good thing, but I don’t have a lot of faith that there’s much human wisdom to deal with the consequences. Human wisdom is in very, very short supply right now.
Indeed I can!
This is such a ridiculously reductionistic view that I’m literally left sputtering and speechless. The fact that smart people, including Vint Cerf, might appreciate it reduces its naïvete not one iota.
Yes, it’s still communication. But throughput, bandwidth, reliability, and broadcast are all materially important to its effect on society and even individual human beings. To just choose a few obvious examples, let’s think about the differences between, e.g. the telegraph and SIGSALY. Let’s think about smoke signals vs. communication satellites. Whether you’re pro, con, or agnostic, let’s think about Bitcoin.
“Modern telecommunication is fundamentally no different than smoke signals or the telegraph” is as sensible as “the hydrogen bomb is fundamentally no different than a wood stove.”
But they’re still mortal, not biologically immortal.
Mortality is engineered into us. From the lack of replacement teeth to, as you note, telomeres, we’re designed to die.
Changing that would require some pretty fundamental reengineering. At least to the tooth genome, for people. Who knows if that would still leave us reproductively compatible?
(Btw, the notion that lobsters are biologically immortal appears to be untrue.)
There is a language barrier here that is enormous. Nobody was suggesting that the species is sure to die out anytime soon – the post was always about the lifespan of the individual, which is, as of now, finite.
How you answer this question is a reflection of how you view life.
I recall that William F. Buckley, toward the end of his life, told Charlie Rose that he was tired. He welcomed death. He rejected suicide on moral grounds, but he looked forward to death.
It strikes me as pointless to prolong one’s life, when you waste the time you have anyway. What would another thirty years give me? More items on a bucket list? Proving what, and to whom?
Lots of popular culture urges people to “make their mark,” or do something extraordinary, so that others will remember you. That strikes me as chasing fame. Don’t take this the wrong way, folks, but the fact that others may know me impersonally doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. It has as much value as knowing that a Chinese bureaucrat happened to see my name on the internet – who cares?
If you view life as a gift, and I do, then the logical attitude is simply to be grateful. I didn’t earn this life in the first place, and whatever life I have left is as much a gift as was the first few minutes. And whereas I respect and should take care of the gift I was given, I also have no obsession with prolonging it.
My Ignatian spirituality advises me that the purpose of my life is to praise, reverence, and serve God (and by this means to save my soul). Whether I do that for one day or a hundred years makes no difference.
KC, I think you are basically right.
The value of life is what we do with it (quality), not merely whether it is long (quantity). A good life is one that is packed with accomplishments.
I seek to extend my life only as a means through which I can achieve as much as possible before my time is up. Accomplishment is my service to G-d.
Sure. My point was precisely that physical immortality wouldn’t change how we should be viewing the future, or acting with respect to it. At most, it would accelerate the process.
Honestly, in the immediate term, my worry isn’t what physical immortality would imply, even if it happened to all of us tomorrow. My biggest immediate worry is that the entire world has bought into the lie of fiat currency, participated in a global race to the devaluation bottom, is stuck in toxic ZIRP policies, has failed to bite the bullet and amputate in a timely fashion, and is therefore only making the inevitable debt deflation orders of magnitude worse. That’s ignoring everything else from “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”
Apparently quoting is broken again…
A hydrogen bomb is fundamentally different from burning wood, though. One, as you well know, is nuclear fusion, the other is simple chemical oxidation.
The better comparison is a modern Mercedes-Benz engine to Karl Benz’ original. Both use the same principles, but the newer one is highly refined.
SIGSALY is a means of encryption. Using a technology (pulse-code modulation) that was originally developed for the telegraph:
I’m still looking for the fundamental difference here.
SIGSALY addressed a problem that first came to light in the telegraph:
Vint Cerf again:
And of course the fellow who patented the technique that SIGSALY used, a technique first used for the telegraph:
“…invented optical fibres as a means of communicating large quantities of information.”
It may make no difference to your soul. It makes a practical difference in terms of what you can get done in life, even if what you do brings you no fame. A difference that may matter to your loved ones, even if your own soul remains unperturbed.
You’ve noted more than once the cost of putting daughters through college. I’m sure family financed would have been upset if you’d died during their childhood, and quite possibly also if you died now. I’m also sure that, because your not a fool, you’ve taken precautions to mitigate their financial distress should the worst happen. I’m also fairly certain that, if you were struck with the kind of illness that makes your usefulness very hard to predict from one day to the next, it would trouble your serenity some.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I wonder whether the way in which you say you don’t take life for granted is in fact evidence of taking life for granted :-)
Ha–good point!
I don’t take it the wrong way, but I disagree. You’ve conjectured about what might happen if I were irresponsible with the lifespan I have. Okay, but why conjecture that at all? That doesn’t change the approach to life for a normal person.
My point really is that life I’ve been given is a gift. It isn’t mine. I don’t take life for granted, but neither do I take it as a personal, private possession.
I agree entirely with this.
I’m not sure I do. There are many things I wouldn’t undertake at my age because I don’t (rationally) think I have time left to do them well. If I reasonably expected to have another 40-50 years of highly energetic and healthy life, I would certainly consider beginning many different careers that I’m now too old to undertake.
Claire,
The Sublime
The Ridiculous
Regards,
Jim
Not necessarily irresponsible. If, though no fault of your own, you woke up each morning with a different number of limbs, or with variable eyesight, or variable hearing, you would not be irresponsible in the moral sense.
Perhaps you could be called irresponsible in a functional sense – incapable, through no fault of your own, of taking much responsibility for what happened to you in the future because the usual assumptions about predictability have gone out the window. But no one would consider you morally irresponsible with the lifespan you have, just “unlucky”, probably. And in light of that, let’s not overlook technology’s ability to improve our functional responsibility.
Exactly. For a normal person. You appear to be taking that normal functioning for granted. Which, I assert, is actually a good thing. All of us should strive for – and be so lucky as to receive from our striving – reliance on that kind of normality, that kind of day-to-day regularity, the stuff that makes even the most mundane planning in life physically possible.
And knowing that you have an additional 50 years, would you cram to study up on your new profession, or might you leisurely take an occasional class?
There is a near endless variety of personalities, so it is fair if you can say with confidence you would be highly motivated in pursuit of your new goals. Most of humanity would not be.
What’s wrong with doing things leisurely when the alternative is not doing them at all?
Our point was about whether having more time would reduce human drive. iWe compared it to gas that expands to fill a larger space without increasing in volume.
We can have a separate discussion about whether or not this is a problem after all have been cowed into submission and agree on the earlier point.
Has anyone actually disagreed with this yet? Technology has already done this. Most people use their extra time for leisure. If they aren’t comfortable with the quality of their leisure time, people tend to do more work until the quality of their leisure reaches their defined minimum. There are of course many exceptions.
I think it would reduce the drive to have children. And, without people dying off, that would be a good thing.
If you want to introduce an impetus to eliminate reproductive freedom, widespread, inexpensive immortality would do the trick.
Here comes the forced-abortion truck!
Claire was disagreeing.
Not really. Abundant room for more people on Earth. Mars, and eventually Venus available if we need more space.
She was talking about the special case of not enough time left to be confident in completing and enjoying that it was completed.
I’m reminded of that line from Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers: “You apes wanna live forever?!”
How much land does it take to support a person?
See above. Good luck raising cattle on Venus!
Less than you think. The entire worlds population could fit inside the state of Texas with a population density of NY City, leaving the entire rest of it available to farm. We are no where near running out of space.
And on the time scale where over population could become an issue, technology will allow us options for terra-forming. Colonization of the solar system is inevitable if the human race isn’t wiped out in the short term.
Have as many kids as you want and can afford to raise. There is no downside for humanity as a whole.
Less and less each year. We could easily support 10’s of billions one day.
Though we might be in the market for better soundproofing.
If the earth’s entire population of oboists and opera singers converged upon a single state, trust me, you’d want better soundproofing.
Woah boy. Full-on Progressive revival-meeting stuff!
If everyone lives in Texas in high-rises, who’s going to do the farming?
The biggest problem facing the world at the moment are diseases caused by malnutrition. And you’re telling me we could fit in some large number extra?
To the original topic, we certainly could not afford to double the population each generation, which is what immortality would mean with no reduction in even the lower, industrial birth rates.
Intensive farming has consequences, not least of which is this one:
“If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?“
I don’t agree with the underlying assumption that everyone would be happier if they could live longer. As a Christian, I believe that there will always be evil in this world until the Second Coming. Why would I want to prolong my stay in a world where bad people will always exist and bad things will always happen?
I would be perfectly happy to live long enough to see my children reach adulthood, begin a career and start a family of their own. I will do whatever I can to support them in reaching their goals. Beyond that, I only want to remain in this world long enough to fulfill whatever God’s purpose is for me. I have no desire to work a few extra decades. In fact, I envy those who are able to retire early and have enough savings to enjoy retirement.