Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  As our understanding of our bodies grows, the immortality engineers’ to-do list is therefore getting longer rather than shorter. The prescription for their elixir of life becomes ever more complex: cut back on fats, except omega-3; on alcohol, but not red wine; on bad cholesterol, but not good. One leading transhumanist, the respected inventor Ray Kurzweil, describes taking 250 supplements per day, a diet that would have made even the elixir-obsessed First Emperor balk. All of this might succeed in distracting us from the brute fact of our mortality, but it will not cure us of it.

  For centuries, many talented researchers have pursued the secret of aging—and believed they had found it. When Linus Pauling was a boy, sex hormones were considered the thing: one Paris-based medical professor had claimed to have turned back his biological clock by injecting himself with crushed dogs’ testicles; another became rich and famous by grafting slices of monkeys’ balls onto the private parts of aging millionaires with the claim it would make them twenty years younger. None of these methods have stood the test of time and rigorous trials. Although we might hope for the contrary, we should not be surprised if currently fashionable cure-alls prove to be just as disappointing.

  Science holds out the abstract promise that we are molecular machines that can be kept on the road indefinitely. But this is as unlikely to become reality as all other utopian dreams. The odds are stacked high against unlimited lifespans. This is not to say that we should not keep trying: life is precious—we should support the research that buys us a few more years. But life lived in good health is even more precious, so we should be wary of technology that promises to make a Tithonus of each of us—prolonging death but at the price of misery and decrepitude—and we should support the policies and research that make our last years more likely to be happy ones.

  There will surely be significant further advances in medicine, and perhaps one day we will all expect to live as long as the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, the longest-lived person whose dates have been verified. But even 122 years and 164 days is still a long way from infinity.

  ATOMIC HAVOC

  LINUS Pauling was a pioneer of the Engineering Approach to immortality, a bold thinker who saw the enormous potential of the new sciences to bring health and longevity to the human race. But Pauling’s vision did not only cover the benefits of science—he was also very much aware of the terrible risks posed by the headlong advance in mankind’s ability to reshape the world. Indeed, this is what motivated his first sortie out of the laboratory and into the world of politics—one that made him just as many enemies as his later conversion to vitamin C.

  Having labored diligently for the war effort, Pauling was horrified on the morning of August 7, 1945, when he picked up the daily paper to read “Tokyo Admits Atomic Havoc” and the details of a single bomb that had obliterated an entire city. He was deeply affected by the scale of the destruction—not least because he had been asked to lead the chemistry division of the project to develop the atomic bomb, turning it down only because of his many other commitments. When he was invited the following year by Albert Einstein to form the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an elite group who would alert the public to the dangers of nuclear technology, he immediately accepted and began speaking out against atomic weapons testing.

  But this was the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was convinced that Soviet sympathizers were working to undermine America; as a prominent scientist speaking out against nuclear weapons, Pauling could not hope to escape his attentions. Just ten days before Pauling was due to attend a symposium in his honor organized by London’s prestigious Royal Society in 1952, he was told by the U.S. State Department that he would not be granted a passport: the House Un-American Activities Committee had declared him a supporter of the “Communist peace effort.”

  It is a nice irony that if Pauling had been allowed to travel to England in 1952 he would most likely have visited the laboratory of a certain young researcher, Rosalind Franklin, at King’s College, London, who was producing detailed images of DNA crystals. Pauling was at the time attempting to deduce the structure of DNA—a fact that, when they heard it, almost made the Cambridge University team including Francis Crick and James Watson give up immediately. But, unlike Pauling, Crick and Watson had seen Franklin’s crucial images and so were able to work out the now-famous double helix structure—a huge leap forward and triumph of the Engineering Approach. It is likely that if Pauling had been allowed to travel, he would have beaten them to it: by denying him a passport, the U.S. government ironically prevented one of the great achievements of twentieth-century science from being claimed by America.

  In November 1954, it was announced that Linus Pauling was to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Previously, only Nazi Germany had ever prevented Nobel Prize winners from traveling to accept their prizes, and two weeks before the award ceremony the U.S. government finally relented and gave Pauling an unrestricted passport. He continued to campaign against the dark sides of our new technologies and was a crucial member of the campaign that resulted in the banning of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, a milestone in the efforts to defuse the Cold War. On the day the agreement went into force in 1963, the Nobel Prize Committee announced Pauling’s second award—the Peace Prize, making him the only person to have received awards in two entirely unrelated fields and the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes entirely alone.

  By this time the political climate had already changed. In April 1962, Pauling and his wife, Ava Helen, along with various other great minds, had been invited into that most glamorous center of power—the Kennedy White House—to discuss the pressing issues of the day over dinner with the president. But Pauling was by then a veteran campaigner: to the delight of journalists, he spent the day of the dinner picketing the presidential residence in the anti-atomic cause, before going to his hotel to change into evening attire and return as the president’s guest. His hosts, however, took Pauling’s protest in good grace: Jackie Kennedy, the First Lady, told him that their daughter, Caroline, had seen him outside protesting and asked, “Mommy, what’s Daddy done wrong now?”

  As Pauling continued to campaign he became increasingly disturbed by the conservatism of the scientific and political elite. Few of his fellows were willing to stand up as he had done to warn of the risks posed by the huge power of the new sciences and to advocate restrictions in the name of peace and justice. Pauling passionately believed both in the power of science and technology to solve the problems of the human condition and in their power to destroy us. In the two decades since his death, the rate of advance in scientific knowledge has accelerated even beyond Pauling’s prodigious imagination. He warned that our obsessive quest for greater power over ourselves and our environment could bring about the end of both; it is a warning more relevant now than ever.

  DOOMSDAY

  THE Engineering Approach is about breaking down problems into solvable chunks. But despite the results it has produced, this strategy is far from perfect. One risk is that the immortality engineers, in focusing on one narrow problem, fail to notice the new problems that their solution is causing. Or they might simply become blinkered in their obsessive quest and fail to notice the oncoming bus. In making a final assessment of whether this route to immortality has a chance of reaching its destination, we must join the futurists in peering into their crystal ball.

  THE tricky thing about staying alive forever is that it just takes one little fatal accident and it is all over. Surviving is not something you do once then take it easy; you have to do it every day, every hour, every minute. You might feel you are just hitting your stride after your first few million years, but still anything from a faulty brake cable to a herd of angry elephants could end it all in a second. When it comes to ways to die, your imagination is the limit—as the infamous tramway authority sign reminds us: “Touching wires causes instant death—$200 fine.”

  One longevity researcher, Professor Steven Austad of the University of Texas, calculated in 201
0 that the average lifespan of a medical immortal would be 5,775 years. In other words, if you were immune to aging and disease, this is roughly how long you could expect to live before you accidentally drove off a cliff or fell down a well. This figure is based on extrapolating the survival rates for nine-year-olds in the United States—chosen because they are least likely to die of illness, as they have survived the diseases of early childhood but not yet fallen prey to those that come with aging. The figure is very approximate—not least because nine-year-olds do not tend to drive or own guns, which are two of the major sources of accidental death. It is also only an average: you might live for over ten thousand years—equivalent to being around from the beginning of settled civilization, through the rise and fall of ancient Egypt, until now—or you might die in a plane crash at the age of twenty.

  In societies that are either less accident-prone or better at repairing people afterward, the average lifespan would be higher—for example, it would be almost twice as high in safety-conscious Japan as in the United States. But in most of the rest of the world—especially those countries that suffer from war and deprivation—it would be much lower. Even in the United States, living to such a ripe old age would require something like the normality of contemporary American life to continue for thousands of years—and that in itself is extremely unlikely. The greater part of human history has not been spent in peace and prosperity with a stable climate—and the future does not promise to be any different. On the contrary, there are many threats to our existence—individually and as a species—that are likely to ambush us on the long road to eternity.

  INDEED these threats are on the increase: as Linus Pauling was starkly aware, as our knowledge of the world has grown, so has our capacity to destroy it. Within living memory we have come terrifyingly close to the destruction of nuclear Armageddon. That we escaped is in part due to the tireless campaigning of men and women like Pauling who sought to ban irresponsible testing and stop the arms race. The Cold War is now long over, but it is more than likely that international alliances and enmities will shift again, one day returning us to a nuclear showdown. The weapons, after all, still exist—and even if they were disarmed, the technology would not be uninvented; for as long as civilization lasts, we must now live with the capacity for self-annihiliation.

  We also today live in the shadow of terrorism. Despite all the media and political attention, your chance of being killed by a terrorist—especially in the developed world—is currently minuscule. But we can be fairly sure that there are terrorist groups who would like to change that. The world’s security forces spend their time worrying that some hugely potent weapon—such as nuclear material or a lethal superbug—will fall into the hands of those described by former U.S. president George W. Bush as “evildoers,” whether they be politically motivated or intent only on hastening the apocalypse.

  The risks of war, terrorism and unrest are likely to be exacerbated by one potential consequence of the quest for immortality on earth: overpopulation. There are currently around seven billion human beings living on this planet—an entirely unprecedented number, more than four times as many as a century ago and thirty times as many as when the Roman Empire reached its height. Population levels are a function not only of how quickly people are being born but also of how quickly they are dying. This massive increase in global population in recent times stems from the first longevity revolution, which we encountered earlier: that is, the fact that we can now keep more people alive for longer.

  Current projections for global population—for example, that there is likely to be well over ten billion of us by the end of the century—are based on our continuing to die at roughly the same rate we do now. If we attained medical immortality yet continued to have children, the population would therefore explode once again—to potentially catastrophic levels. In many parts of the world, crucial resources such as fresh water and reliable food supplies are already scarce, and we are already destroying our environment through deforestation, desertification and pollution. On top of this, more people demanding energy means more burning of fossil fuels, and the resulting global warming threatens to bring further extreme weather, rising sea levels and many localized effects that will impact ecosystems and agriculture.

  There is a real risk that an ever-expanding population of medical immortals would push the biosphere over the edge, causing a collapse in its ability to sustain life as we know it. The pursuit of immortality on earth, in the face of these unsolved problems and at a time when millions do not even have clean drinking water, can seem like just another expression of the selfish ideology of exploitation that teaches that the whole world exists only to shore up the survival of a few privileged individuals.

  When looking at the Tithonus problem, we noted that some crucial systems of the human body appear to have both good and bad effects. One example is the natural limits of cell division: our cells can ordinarily only divide a certain number of times before they stop—a phenomenon believed to contribute to aging. So it might be thought that we should prevent this control on cell division. But this sometimes already happens of its own accord: it is called cancer. Tumors are cells dividing uncontrollably, effectively making their own bid for immortality at the expense of the organism as a whole. When we humans make our bid for immortality, the effect on the planet could be just like the effect of cancer on us: the whole is put out of balance, dominated and consumed until it can no longer sustain life at all.

  The transhumanists, of course, have answers to these arguments. They point to the fact that richer, longer-lived people tend to have significantly fewer children—perhaps medical immortals would choose not to reproduce at all. Or perhaps they could be made to face the choice: immortality or kids, but not both. They also like to point out that, despite global warming, it is by no means clear that we are near the limit of the human population that the earth can sustain: continually developing technology has so far allowed us to grow ever more food. Although there are billions more people alive now than ever before, most live in unprecedented comfort and security. These techno-optimists believe that we will similarly find solutions to any unavoidable problems of climate change. Plus, add some of the dreamers, we could always colonize space.

  Some of the more honest transhumanists offer a different rebuttal to the overpopulation question: it is unlikely to become a problem exactly because it is the project of the privileged few. The medicines required to conquer aging and disease will be too expensive for the vast majority of people, so the new immortals will be a small elite—too few to impact global population levels. But this of course raises another question: that of social justice. Death is the great leveler, to which even the rich must currently succumb—in the danse macabre of medieval allegory, the dancing skeleton took both king and pauper by the hand. But if immortality can be bought we would have the ultimate apartheid: between those fated to die and those blessed with everlasting life. On top of the intrinsic injustice of this situation, the undying elite might also be able to use their longevity to accumulate vast wealth and power, creating an eternal hierarchy of immortal rulers and their perishable subjects.

  The transhumanists have an answer for this too: that money can already buy you a longer life—wealth is today closely correlated with longevity—yet we all seem to accept this. Nor do we ordinarily think that the fact that only a few can afford a lifesaving treatment is a reason to ban that treatment altogether. Anyway, given that any future elixir of life is likely in fact to be a host of different interventions against the different diseases and symptoms of aging, the reality of who can access which treatments will be much less black and white than the skeptics suggest—most people will be able to afford some of the new medications, even if only a rich few can afford them all.

  Yet even if we see off the problems of overpopulation and a bloody war between the immortality haves and have-nots, there are countless catastrophes that could strike on our way to eternity. Specialists in “existential risks”—r
isks to the very existence of the human race—point to a terrifying Pandora’s box of fatal scenarios that ought to be keeping us awake at night. Many of these, as Linus Pauling foresaw, are by-products of the very technologies that are supposed to save us.

  We earlier saw that genetic engineering would be essential to attaining medical immortality. But our ability to manipulate life with such precision would not only allow for the creation of strong and healthy babies—it could also be used to create monsters. These are unlikely to be the man-eating beasts of film and legend: far more deadly would be viruses and bacteria engineered to be more virulent, more contagious and impervious to existing vaccines. Such pathogens could arise unintentionally—or equally be developed as weapons of terror or war.

  Nanotechnology looks to be even more dangerous. Much of its promise rests on the capacity for nanobots to reproduce—so for example repopulating your bloodstream with oxygen-carrying medi-bots. But exactly this ability could prove our undoing: a slight change in design—intentional or otherwise—could unleash a sea of minuscule replicators that could consume all organic matter, sweeping through cities and fields alike, replacing plants and animals with a gray goo of microscopic robots. Whatever precautions we take, human history to date suggests that any new technology will be exploited for military use—so rapidly reproducing, flesh-eating mini-bots are as likely to be part of the future as their lifesaving cousins.