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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
Well, one hermit said he hoped not to die yet because he hadn’t yet finished repenting.
Me, I have no interest in prolonging our years. I’m far more interested in prolonging our functional years, whatever our actual lifespan happens to be.
It’s obvious how many elderly have already their mere years extended by technology, long past the point where their function has deteriorated so badly that we question whether the elderly person is even “there” anymore. Less obvious, perhaps, but truly wondrous, is how much technology has done to give people functional years back. Now, it’s true that with restored function comes increased responsibility. Heck, even the possibility of restored function creates increased responsibility — a responsibility to try the options that might improve functionality rather than giving up and passively accepting your fate. This burden can weigh heavily on those who’ve tried and tried to overcome a dysfunction without noticeable success, but the burden only exists because so many people now can try with success to overcome dysfunction. That is a real human accomplishment.
Genetics? Bio? I thought the goal was to download everybody into computers. That way the government can easily reprogram behavior it did not like.
I am instating something called Tuckwin’s Law. For any conversation Tuck is involved in, it is only a matter of time before he implicates agriculture as the cause of the problem or Paleo as the solution.
There is a Heinlein story, Methuselah’s children, about attaining longevity. There are people in whom it occurs spontaneously & others who acquire it by breeding & others who get a different scientific solution. In the story, before universal longevity, there is a pretty ugly fight to take the long-lived few & use them to achieve benefits for everyone. Silly Heinlein–in our world, the market give more than enough good to each & everyone of us! It all works out in the end, but before it does, Heinlein shows two alien races that show something about mankind’s future.
First comes a slave empire where the slaves are slaves in mind, not just body. They have almost lost their individuality–they seem mere instruments of a mind so powerful it’s a god. (This is an ugly image of politics, slavery of body & mind, & one possibility for the long-lived few to control indirectly or remotely mankind.) Nobody is willing to live with that–the only man confronted with that kind of rule goes crazy–-the madness is somehow connected with insisting on being oneself, not allowing oneself to be taken over by another mind, wrong or right. (This recalls the Cyclopes in the Odyssey–-individual creatures who impose an incredibly strict & natural-like order, but deal with whatever troubles the order ruthlessly.)
Those gods seem benevolent: They send the humans to another planet, where there is no aggression or violence. There, minds enter & exit bodies without concern for individuality. This is a less terrible or intense rule of mind over body–it is utterly soft. Mind has completely removed anger from being & appetite is apparently easily ruled by power. Pleasure is the tyrant here, not pain. Some choose to stay, I think, because of democracy, which creates a kind of materialistic faith–-on this planet you see fulfilled all the dreams of Communists or these pseudo-Eastern charlatans who teach you to be at peace with yourself, the world, & everything. Not a life worth living, it would seem. (This recalls the island of Circe in the Odyssey, where the men actually prefer the life of talking pigs over the suffering & striving of humans trying to go back home. That may be reasonable, if you think about it… Mind & soul–-the human shape–-have not a lot in common…)
So you see two alien races, bodies without minds & minds without bodies. It makes sense that disembodied minds would have neither anger nor war nor no respect for a mother’s child or any body. Immortality presumes a kind of power of mind over body that removes soul.
It would have to be “Mike Hwin’s Law”, as you, not I, keep bringing it up.
The notion that we can keep doubling population forever with no consequences is Progressive fantasy, and pointing that out is the product of simple arithmetic, not Paleo.
1) Re: Christian eschatology – In the past few decades it seems that Christian theologians have come to say that after the new heavens and the new earth are established, we humans will live in communion with God as both spiritual and corporeal creatures. We will have material bodies, but we will be immortal, and more importantly we will be transformed, perfected, able to enjoy eternity. God’s gift of immortality is part of His plan for creation, and when He effects that it will be done right.
2) My pastor remarked recently that the next two or three decades or so will see the biggest challenges to theology in centuries. Genetic manipulation of humans and higher animals (apes, elephants, dogs, etc), and of course the pursuit of artificial intelligences, raises the possibility of redefining what it means to be ‘human’ and what it means to be a ‘person.’ And perhaps what means to have a soul.
3) In my opinion, the real danger comes from people who, consciously or not, are trying to reach some sort of utopia. I think it was in A Canticle for Leibowitz that one of the characters mused that humans were always trying to get back to the Garden of Eden. We can never get there. We live in a finite, moral creation, and no matter what we try we can’t get around that fact. We would be better off remembering that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…’
There are consequences for everything. But overpopulation is not a risk for humanity or the planet for the foreseeable future.
You’re presenting this as an article of faith, I presume? Since you merely assert, and provide neither evidence nor argument.
Sadly, I don’t have faith in that religion.
And you know that difference is not fundamental when viewed through the lens of physics: in both cases, matter is converted to energy. How much matter and how fast are the only relevant variables. What changes—dramatically—are the consequences.
It’s the same with the rest of your points about the technology examples. You want to claim there’s nothing “fundamentally” different about any of them from smoke signals or telegraphy. But that ignores any fundamental significance of what they can accomplish and have accomplished. That’s why I say the reductionistic definition of “fundamental” is not the appropriate one to use. This should frankly be obvious. After all, anything that can be computed at all can be computed by the universal Turing machine, the untyped lambda calculus, or the SK combinator calculus. Claude Shannon opened and closed the field of information theory in a single paper in 1948. By the reductionistic definition of “fundamental,” we can all go home now and hang up our shingles.
It doesn’t work that way. Any useful definition of “fundamental” must take emergent system properties into account as best it can. It is of fundamental significance that I can buy petabytes of storage using my credit card on Amazon, download the entirety of the human genome, and use open-source genetic sequencing software to manipulate it. (Be grateful I’m not the anti-hero of Frank Herbert’s “The White Plague”.) Cryptocurrencies, by routing around the world’s central banks via the internet, are of fundamental significance, and by the way have no telegraph or smoke signal analog.
Now, it’s true that the jury is still out on what the significance of cryptocurrencies, or genetic engineering, or plain ol’ geopolitics given the evolution of the internet are. But that supports, rather than refutes, the claim that they are fundamental, i.e. their implications are far from obvious. We’re faced with new axioms. Claire is, rightly, asking us to consider them and the theorems they might give rise to. I think it’s vital not to let “conservative” mean “can’t see the forest for the trees.” That’s why I’m being so insistent on this point—and having been, I must now hasten to add that my point is general rather than personal. :-)
There are many articles discussing the density of land use and resources. Most of the world is empty – and capable of hosting mankind and agriculture. We have, for all intents and purposes, endless energy, which means endless cheap water near all oceans.
If you want to get into the trenches, then we certainly can do so. When I looked carefully at this some years ago, it was clear that population density is laughably low, and humans are the most important resource on the planet, by far.
We need more people, not fewer.
I note you don’t address the example of Karl Benz’s engine. To compare the machine his wife drove and a modern Mercedes is to see, as iWc so elegantly put it:
“The difference is bandwidth and fidelity.”
Which is the same difference between a telegraph and typing to France through a web page, the point I was making to Claire when she wrote:
We could have done the same thing, without the peer-to-peer nature that is the real innovation of the ‘net, 150 years ago.
“Claire is, rightly, asking us to consider the them and the theorems they might give rise to. I think it’s vital not to let “conservative” mean “can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Indeed, but I think one of the main traps of the progressive mindset is to think that advances are inevitable. They’re not, and most of what appears to be “progress” is mere—not really mere!—engineering refinement a la Mercedes Benz. Not fundamental advancement of the sort that I think would be required to introduce immortality into life.
I guess I have a higher expectation of the word fundamental. ;)
“That’s why I’m being so insistent on this point—and having been, I must now hasten to add that my point is general rather than personal. :-)”
:)
BTW, how long would it take to transmit a bitcoin via telegraph?
Yes, I’ve done so. I used to believe as you do, but as I drilled deeper into what is required to achieve and maintain the state known as human, I began to realize that the amount of land required to maintain that state is much larger than the estimates I used to believe assumed.
If those assumptions are wrong, then the whole model of carrying capacity comes tumbling down.
For instance, one must base the carrying capacity of the Earth on its ability to produce sufficient quantities of the essential nutrients to human life. Yet we’re not even sure yet what those essential nutrients are, so how can we accurately estimate the required capacity?
The RDAs for human nutrients don’t even include things we’re now just starting to realize are essential.
If they are truly essential, then the earth has plenty of them, since we sustain human life on every continent save Antarctica. These mystery nutrients must, then, be found in Saharan Africa and Norwegian fjords and the Amazonian rain forest and remote islands, including for people with every kind of crazy diet. Which means that we needn’t worry about them for a planet with 20 or 30 billion people.
For me at least, immortality seems a bit much to ask for. It is the prospect of the opposite, that is everlasting pain and suffering, that is more instructive.
Because I could not stop for Death (479)
Emily Dickinson, 1830 – 1886
If we’re deficient in them now, and getting more so every day, what makes you think we’ll be sufficient with 30 billion people?
Even iodine was a population limiter at carrying capacities far lower than we have today. We managed to get through the first level of mass nutrient deficiency in the early 1900s, and yet there are today 2 billion people who are deficient in iodine.
Yes, perhaps we could sustain 30 billion subsistence farmers, but at that point we’d be closer to ants then to humans.
There is plenty of iodine in the world. Overpopulation is not the cause of deficiency, any more than overpopulation was the cause of scurvy.
There was an interesting article in Business Week a few weeks ago…first one I’ve read in a long time, about the effort to develop a drug that would stop or reverse the aging process. It went into some detail about how some particular molecule might be useful in this regard because it tells the cells to, in effect, clean themselves out. Then they sort of off handedly mention that this could either reverse the aging process or destroy the immune system…but all you have to do if you want to avoid the potentially rather deleterious side effect is fasting. Fasting apparently does the same things to the cells but you don’t die…presumably you don’t fast your self to death, and you don’t have any bad side effects…unless having to pee a lot counts. It amazes me that people don’t realize this or maybe they do but but they can’t help wanting a pill instead. I suppose the quest for discipline free..everything is eternal.
My assumption has always been that the ‘mark of the beast’ in Revelation is some sort of horrendous fallout from a botched longevity treatment. Longevity has always seemed to me like the ultimate attempt to defy God.
That’s too funny. You’re right! All we have to do is move those 2 billion people into the oceans, where there’s plenty of iodine. Why hasn’t anyone thought of that!
It’s simply the logical extension of typical medical treatment. Old age is pretty much indistinguishable from a degenerative disease. Mitigating its effect is equally as meritorious as curing a childhood genetic disease.
That’s not good logic. Death is a feature, not a bug, as it goes hand-in-hand with sexual reproduction.
Typical medical treatment mostly treats symptoms, and most attempts to change basic functions turn out to be problematic long-term.
It’s unlikely that taking a cocktail of poisons is going to extend your life.
High quality life extension would generally be a good thing whether or not it’s possible.
Yes, this was my only quibble with Claire’s original post:
“Christian theology promises immortality for the spirit, but not the flesh.”
I’m glad someone responded. The resurrection of the body is a belief stated in the earliest Christian creeds…
(3rd Article – Apostles’ Creed)
“At whose [Christ’s] coming all men will rise again with their bodies; And shall give account for their own works.”
(Athanasian Creed)
And I believe in one holy catholic and and apostolic Church
I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins,
and I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.
(Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed)
…and is derived from New Testament theology in a number of places, but beautifully summarized in 1 Corinthians 15 (which also includes the foundation (v.3-4) for parts of the above listed later creedal formulas):
“So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”
(1 Corinthians 15:42-44)
Yes, you’re right–of course. Poorly phrased on my part.
Indeed. Hard to argue with that!!!
I add this only to express my regrets at not catching this post two days ago when it was fresh – I doubt that I have anything new or meaningful to add to the discussion, but I have thoroughly enjoyed reading all that the ricochetti have posted.
If this has already been included above and I missed it, forgive my redundancy.
Claire’s original challenge – that the philosophical questions regarding the prospect of physical immortality deserve to be considered – has been an inescapable theme within my current academic studies regarding the nature of Transhumanism (the belief that the limits of Humanity can be transcended through the use of technology). The best answer I have found thus far can be found in the Book of Ecclesiastes (best summarized by Chapter 12, verse 13: Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind.)
For those less inclined to accept the veracity of such scripture, take an hour or two to re-watch Harold Ramis’ philosophical masterpiece, “Groundhog Day.”
(To Claire: Thank you! Your work is wonderful!)
I’m all for science and medicine making life better and more comfortable for all, but my first question to some of the things we’re doing is what is the motivation? We are obsessed with “appearance, and looking and being younger. I’m for less pain and illness – of course! I am not comfortable with “search engine” companies researching re-writing science, reprogramming DNA and brain waves, etc. The human race is obsessed with itself, and I wonder why people like the Google Founder has visited the White House once a week, has his paws in every arena it seems, has unidentified floating “research” barges on both U.S. coasts, has become so powerful that it has eliminated privacy from the Internet. Do we REALLY need one more distraction like Google Glass?? People are already losing the skills of actual communication and interaction. The virtual world is grey – no sunlight there.
There is something about Eric Schmidt that is not right. We seem to be going toward making the human being less human, and more robot-like. Somebody has to control the strings. I don’t need a microchip to unlock my car door or scan my groceries – I’m not that lazy. I don’t want someone fooling with alternating DNA and people choosing to make more blue-eyed children, or more boys than girls or anything else that disturbs the natural world, unless the science and technology eliminates horrible diseases, can restore sight, offers less invasive surgeries, helping those with lost limbs, etc.
God does not intend for man to be immortal unto himself. “It’s all been done before, there is nothing new under the sun,” said wise King Solomon. The serpent in the garden said ‘just take a bite and immortal life, all wisdom will be yours’ – sound familiar? Be careful – just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
Like Claire asks, does it benefit all or a select few? There is already too much control of our daily lives. How did we manage before the Internet? Claire questioned is it a good thing or maybe not so much (The Internet) we should question – – this is the same.
Suffering cannot be eliminated but can be eased – but focusing such tremendous importance on youth and living indefinitely lessens our humanity towards the weakest, the poorest, the suffering, the so-called imperfect in society (again – who decides this is) to the benefit of those with means, is evil. We actually have much humility to learn from the less fortunate in society. The Nazis sought the same thing – a “more perfect” race. Even alternating the DNA of crops is proving to be backfiring – more food allergies and new illnesses with GMO crops – which are banned in Europe. Now everyone is trying to put the genie back in the box and seek organic – don’t mess with Mother Nature and God’s plan.
Also, as a Christian, it is a reality that there IS eternal life – and you will be restored “both body and soul” , not just soul, says the Bible. Interesting that the kernel has to die first to sprout new life. Sorry for rambling – I did visit Ponce deLeon’s Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine and they give water samples from the actual location – Tasted and smelled like rotten eggs – didn’t improve my appearance one bit!
My point above exactly – only you said it using less words!
The technologies that Claire describes in the initial post (with the possible exception of brain digitization) all involve life extension, but have nothing to do with “immortality”. “Immortality” implies “can’t die”.
I don’t care how many nanobots you have circulating in your system restoring cellular damage or reprogramming your DNA, if I toss you off a 30-story building, when you hit the ground you’re going to die. Other techniques would presumably be equally valid in overcoming this immortality.
The early comments discussed the potential inequality of access to these “technologies” [for lack of a better word], or even a new separate race that could not interbreed with human-classic.
Sociologically, if these technologies exist and are not fully accessible to all, those who do have access will be spending most of their time cowering in fear of the mob.
Not if you kill off the mob. Or just outlive them.