* * *
To find out, I decided to meet with modern-day eternalists, to attend their gatherings, to spend time with them and discuss their worldview. Looking for an insider connection, I tried to interview the Japanese architect Arakawa. He lived in Manhattan and designed homes that could “counteract the usual human destiny of having to die.” Unfortunately, it turned out that he’d died a few months earlier. Then I set about tracking down the astrologer Linda Goodman, whose step-by-step guide to never dying includes visualizing your cells spiraling in reverse. She, too, had passed on. I phoned Dr. Daniel Rudman, who’d told the New England Journal of Medicine in 1990 that “growing old is not inevitable.” But the inevitable had taken him, too.
I considered paying a visit to People Unlimited, a group of “physical immortals” in Arizona focused on living now and forever. Their motto is “It’s time to end death and it takes a community of like-minded individuals to do it.” They are united in their belief that every human deserves deathlessness. “Why do we need to die? It makes no sense,” writes one recruit, Caleb Escobar, in the site’s comments section. He then adds, “I’m not living to die, I’m living for a major reason—TO LIVE!” Followers speak of how they experience “zero struggle” and feel totally freed of all limits. Dean Moriki’s testimonial explains that he joined PU after his wife suffered a stroke and became disabled: “It was a major change from a normal life to a daily living with a wheelchair involved. We divorced soon after.” Since then, he’d become convinced of his noncorruptibility and now lived without suffering or disease. Poof! Magic. The denial was so astounding—and also disconcerting—that I decided against infiltrating their sanctuary.
It didn’t take long to find a more appropriate group, one counting doctors, scientists, and philosophers among its members. The Immortality Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization whose mission “is to conquer the blight of involuntary death.” Members of the institute don’t see aging as a necessary reality: they see it as a disease. A curable disease. Or, to be more precise, “a sexually transmitted terminal disease that can be defined as a number of time-dependent changes in the body that lead to discomfort, pain, and eventually death.” To support the institute is to support research that will inevitably lead to eternal life. They all believe that science will ultimately orchestrate the defeat of death, and they’re trying to accelerate the process. Their forum boasts intricate debates about how exactly science will accomplish physical immortality. While surfing the site’s “events” section, I came across an open invitation from Dave Kekich, a registered imminst.org1 user.
If you want to celebrate the future, then come to my 125th birthday party on Saturday evening, May 23rd in Huntington Beach, CA. It’s a “Come as You Will Be Party.” Here’s the deal:
1. First, even though some people think I look it, I’m not nearly 125 . . . yet.
2. We are going to project ourselves to 2068 at the party.
3. You will act and speak as though it is 59 years from now. In fact, if you don’t agree to spend at least two hours “in character,” then stay home. There will be no 2009 discussions here unless you’re reminiscing. We will talk about what we’ve done and accomplished from 2009–2068, where we’ve been, what you’ve become, what changes the world saw in the past 59 years.
4. If you violate #3, you will be deposited into a worm hole in the basement which will immediately transport you back to where you came from.
The possibility of interviewing members of the institute in the flesh was tempting enough that I RSVP’d via e-mail: “Your 125th birthday party sounds like a wonderful idea! I’m a writer and I’d love to come. (I feel like it’s 2068 already).”
Soon, a response arrived from Kekich, with directions and elaborations about the theme:
Everything will be quite different 59 years from now. Since the power of our technology is doubling every year now with no end in sight (at least over the next 50 years or so), our tools will be over a thousand times more powerful in only ten years. If this doubling holds up over the next 59 years, that means our technologies, particularly our computational power, will be a billion billion times more powerful. Yes, that’s a quintillion, or 1 followed by 18 zeros. . . . Imagine what America will be like, the world, the solar system. Aging? In my humble opinion, that solution will be a slam dunk. I believe we will have solved aging well before then.
Guests were asked to arrive in 2068-appropriate attire. It sounded perfect. I couldn’t wait to see how they lived—and partied.
* * *
Looking for advice on how to blend in with a crowd of extreme life-extensionists, I forwarded the invitation to Jenna Wright, a good friend and talented costume designer in Hollywood. “Are you into coming to an immortality dress-up party?” I wrote. “It takes place in the year 2068.”
“Are we supposed to be ourselves in 59 years?” she asked. “Or just anybody?”
“The theme is ‘come as you will be,’ but we can come however you’d like,” I responded, CC-ing Clay Weiner, a director who often collaborates with Wright.
“Silver bodysuits seem like a YES,” he replied.
My two wingmen offered to stop by a costume house to choose outfits for the three of us. “I’m thinking octogenarian leisure wear,” e-mailed Wright. “Possibly some new biomechanically engineered organs on display?”
* * *
1. The website’s name was subsequently changed to longecity.org.
20
Biological Calculus
All or nothing! . . . Eternity, Eternity!—that is the supreme desire! The thirst for eternity is what is called love among human beings, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize himself in the other. Nothing is real that is not eternal.
—Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
WHERE TO?” asked the airport customs official, absentmindedly scanning my passport.
“Huntington Beach,” I answered.
“And what are you planning on doing down there?” He had a crew cut, piercing eyes, a testosterone jaw.
“I’m going to a party with people who consider themselves immortal.” It’s important to always be honest and succinct when crossing international borders.
The immigration agent sized me up. “Immortal religiously?”
“No, physically. They really think they are going to live forever.”
He’d never heard this one before. “They consider themselves immortal,” he said slowly, acknowledging my use of the term, then considering it himself. “Consider,” he repeated, thinking out loud.
“That’s right.” I smiled.
He seemed unsure how to proceed, taken aback by the idea that anyone would even desire eternal life. Deciding to interrogate me, he asked me what I do for a living.
“I’m a writer,” I told him.
“Are you going to write about this party?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. So it’s fiction?” Relief crept over his face.
“No: nonfiction,” I answered. “Science nonfiction.”
He considered it for another moment. On the verge of asking me something else, he caught himself, shook his head, and brusquely stamped my passport. “Good luck,” he grumbled, waving me through.
* * *
On board the plane, wanting to understand the mind-set of those wanting to live forever, I flipped through The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans, an anthology published by the Immortality Institute. It offers a solid introduction to contemporary immortalist beliefs. It is also one of the weirdest, most entertaining books I’ve ever read.
We’ll soon be delivered from the limitations of biology, one of the institute’s advocates of artificial intelligence tells us, through diamondoid nanobots assembled from billions of precisely arranged structural atoms. Computer
s will update our bodies’ Stone Age software so that we can eliminate and even reverse aging. Once we’ve figured out how to digitize memory by frying a mind’s salient details onto computational substrates, the Singularity will have been attained. There will be little distinction between RAM and brain. We will be able to live forever, but only if we diligently maintain our mind file by making regular backups and porting to updated data-storage formats. In the highly unlikely event that overpopulation ever becomes a problem, we’ll simply move off-planet. There’s an infinity of unspoiled stars out there just waiting to be colonized.
It all sounds so easy. Reading the book, it occurred to me that humanity’s willingness to believe in immortal life hasn’t changed much since the days of the T’ang emperors. The essays depict life as an intermediate-level puzzle to be solved through technological advance. But illusions don’t account for the interminable complexities of reality. Fleets of tiny medical nanorobots that communicate with one another through Wi-Fi signals is a catchy idea, but if the problems we have simply connecting to the Internet are an indication, its real-world application would be a disaster. Every technological appliance I’ve ever owned has glitches. They don’t always work properly. They break. Do we really want tiny robots malfunctioning in our bodies? Computers are fragile, not foolproof. Imagine having to fix an intracellular motherboard crash? What about computer viruses infiltrating our bloodstream? They can already be programmed to contaminate chips in pacemakers, defibrillators, and cochlear implants.
“Nothing made or engineered works perfectly or lasts forever,” explains Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University who specializes in man-made structures. It’s naïve to imagine that nanobots would suddenly become the exception. Yet members of the institute are already speaking seriously of mind uploading. We can’t cure AIDS, Alzheimer’s, or autism—and science still can’t explicate how consciousness works, why it evolved, or whether it even exists—but somehow we’re going to find a way of transferring the entire bundle of synaptic connections in the human brain onto computers? The brain isn’t just a computing device; it’s a thinking, feeling, remembering, fallible receptacle of consciousness. We rely on vast subpopulations of neurons—will those need to be backed up as well?
* * *
Reading the Immortality Institute’s collection of essays, I learned that many immortalists align themselves with a movement called extropianism (meaning those without entropy). Their guru, Max More, speaks of exploiting nanotechnologies in order to achieve complete control of matter at the molecular level. His wife, plastic-surgery poster child Natasha Vita-More, is a turbocharged optimist and aspiring posthuman who writes of her longing to transcend all limitations and live forever in an endlessly upgradable body. They and other extropians are disciples of the techno-prophet Ray Kurzweil, an immortality luminary who balances actual scientific legitimacy with arguable predictions about the promises of computing. He’s an undeniably brilliant computing expert with pioneering accomplishments in fields such as speech-recognition technology and electronic keyboard synthesizers. He is also convinced that informatics will get faster and faster until we attain immortality in the year 2029, or 2045 at the latest. If he dies before then, his corpse will be cryonically preserved in the hope that technology will catch up with his dreams.
The bedrock of the physical immortalist worldview is a supposition Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns. According to his calculations, an inviolable fact of reality is that “technology and evolutionary processes in general progress in an exponential fashion.” This is an article of faith. Even if technology has grown dramatically over the past few centuries, we can’t know whether it will forever proliferate at an exponential rate, let alone demonstrate that it has done so over the past five years. But Kurzweil has no doubts. Those who criticize him, he says, are merely Luddites who don’t understand the exponential nature of progress.
Darwinian theory doesn’t accept his assertion that “evolutionary processes in general progress” exponentially. The theory of evolution can be interpreted in various ways, but it does not offer proof that nature always improves. Instead, it suggests that nature constantly changes without direction at all, sometimes toward increasing complexity, sometimes not. There is no progress toward any goal in evolution—there is random drift, competition, chance extinctions, survival of the luckiest and often cruelest.
The truth is that there’s no consensus on progress, let alone on exponential progress. “We are not seeing exponential results from the exponential gains in computing power,” says William S. Bainbridge of the National Science Foundation, who disputes Kurzweil’s position. Bainbridge cautions against basing our “ideas of the world on simplistic extrapolations of what has happened in the past.”
Kurzweil has been making predictions for long enough now that anyone can verify how they’ve panned out. While he’s been right on some counts (people do read books and magazines on screens these days), others are worded in ways that make it hard to say whether they even transpired or not. Google’s driverless cars exist, as he predicted, but most people aren’t yet driving them from LA to SF while napping in the backseat. Some of his forecasts were undeniably mistaken. By 2010, he wrote, “computers will disappear as distinct physical objects.” They would instead be woven into our clothing and embedded in our furniture. Are our retinas synched to a computer feed? The average household is supposed to have over one hundred computers. It doesn’t. And most people today still don’t want to become cyborgs, whether or not the Singularity ever happens.
When his own followers question why many of his predictions have not come to pass, he lambastes their inquiries as “biased, incorrect, and misleading in many different ways.” Again, a peculiarity of belief is that believers don’t see their story as a mere belief, but rather as the Truth. There’s no contradicting a believer because evidence has no place in the realm of belief. No matter how many charts and graphs Kurzweil deploys, his opinions remain just that—beliefs cloaked in factual-sounding garb.
When he was a child, Ray Kurzweil’s hobby was magic. In his teen years, he replaced his parlor tricks with technology projects. He’s gone on to be phenomenally successful as an inventor, innovator, and entrepreneur. His command of computerized technology is vast, and his many books contain pithy observations such as “intelligence selectively destroys information to create knowledge.” His hope for the future is “to infuse our solar system with our intelligence through self-replicating non-biological intelligence. It will then spread out to the rest of the universe.”
Singularity activists speak of algorithms as “incantations,” as though they were magic spells. Reality for them is magical. They like to quote sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Who needs spiritual salvation, the death solace traditionally provided by religions, when you can have physical immortality? Kurzweil disputes the notion that his views are a substitute or alternative to customary belief systems: “Being a singularitarian is not a matter of faith but of understanding,” he declares.
But can one prove the existence of software-based humans?
“Everything I do actually has a lot of evidence,” he has said.
To prove this evidence, his book The Singularity Is Near drowns out doubts with a tellingly excessive hundred-plus pages of backup material. The footnote to a typically nonsubstantiable sentence—“we have the means right now to live long enough to live forever”—leads only to another of his books. He frequently cites other immortality “authorities” whose books also cite him in a feedback loop of back-patting “proof.”
Although Kurzweil is ostensibly discussing science, he seems to me more like a high priest of digital materialism. “Science wrought to its uttermost becomes myth,” wrote William Irwin Thompson in The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. That’s certainly true in Kurzweil’s case. He ingests hundreds of supplements daily, many of which are sold throug
h his company, Ray and Terry’s Longevity Products. “The vast majority of our baby boomer peers are unaware of the fact that they do not have to suffer and die in the ‘normal’ course of life, as previous generations have done—if they take aggressive action,” writes Kurzweil. What’s the most effective approach? Buying his pills, naturally.
Anyone entering the world of radical life extensionists quickly notices that many “scientific” immortalists also happen to be in the longevity business, so they stand to profit from gullible consumers looking for a stay-young fix. Many legitimate antiaging researchers are working on finding ways to extend healthy lives, but those who sell products and self-promote with talk of attaining infinite life spans are invariably out for personal gain. “Every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception,” writes neuroscientist David Eagleman. “Does it seem reasonable that we are the first ones lucky enough to be born in the perfect generation, the one in which the assumption of a comprehensive science is finally true?” Kurzweil’s books answer in the affirmative.
As all those Chinese emperors and European aristocrats learned, when we believe in nothing, we’ll believe anything. Closer to these times, the oft-overlooked “gland craze” of the post–World War I years illustrates our penchant for buying into stories that later eras can only marvel at.
* * *
In 1917, “Doc” John Romulus Brinkley opened a clinic in Milford, Kansas, population two hundred, where he grafted a goat testicle into the scrotum of a local farmer who hadn’t had an erection for sixteen years. The operation (apparently) rejuvenated the patient instantly. Brinkley said he’d managed to transfer the goat’s rugged, rug-chomping vitality into the Milford man. His infertility vanished. Nine months later, the patient’s wife gave birth to a baby boy named Billy.
Book of Immortality Page 33
