In Ovid’s recounting of the rejuvenation of Aeson, Medea admonishes Jason that his request to transfer years from his own life to his father was unreasonable and forbidden.16 But Jason’s request did have precedent. In the realm of myth, immortality could sometimes be shared, even traded away. For example, Heracles negotiated a bargain with Zeus to exchange the immortality of the centaur Chiron for the life of Prometheus, who was chained to a rock for stealing divine fire.17
And consider the confusing situation of the Dioscuri, the twins Castor and Pollux, who accompanied Jason on the Argo in the quest for the Golden Fleece. Mythographers could not decide whether the brothers were immortal or “half-mortal.” The uncertainty arose with good reason. Their mother, Leda, was human, but Pollux was fathered by Zeus, while Castor’s father was Tyndareus, a Spartan king. The novel idea of twins with different fathers posed a puzzle of mortal versus immortal bloodlines for people to ponder in antiquity. Oddly enough, the notion of twins with different paternity was not just a fantasy or plot contrivance. When two different males sire fraternal twins in the same ovulation cycle, the scientific term is heteropaternal superfecundation. It happens in dogs, cats, and other mammals, even including, albeit rarely, humans. Mammals can also be subject to superfetation, when a second ovum is fertilized while a female is already pregnant, although live human births of this kind are extremely rare because of the different rates of embryo development. The ancients were familiar with these processes, which were discussed by Herodotus (3.108) and Aristotle (History of Animals 585a3–9, 579b30–34), among others.18
In the myth of the Dioscuri, when Castor was killed, Pollux asked to share his immortality with his brother. His wish was granted by Zeus. The twins spent alternating intervals in heaven.
Behind many of the biotechno-wonders wrought by Medea, and other mythic and historical geniuses of artificial life in the coming chapters, lies a timeless theme, the search for perpetual life. Yearning to overcome death is as ancient as human consciousness. Every conscious being is born innocent of death: all human beings come into the world believing they’ll live forever and be forever young. The bitter truth dawns later, a universal disillusionment that finds expression and compensation in myths around the world. The fountain of youth, the elixir of life, reincarnation, resurrection, everlasting fame in cultural memory, perpetuation of bloodlines through progeny, quests for invulnerability, grandiose building monuments—even vampires, zombies, and the undead—all testify to mortals’ longing to find ways to defy death, the subject of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 3
THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY
AND ETERNAL YOUTH
THE ANCIENT GREEKS were obsessed with eternal youth and everlasting life. In their myths, poetry, and philosophy, they devoted considerable thought to the desire to stay young and live forever. To somehow possess ageless immortality like the gods would be the ultimate achievement in a quest for artificial life. But the Greeks were also quite aware of the sobering ramifications should such boons be granted.
For the ancient Greeks, men and women’s lives were measured by chronos, time divided into the past, present, and future. But if humans were to be set adrift in infinite time, aeon, what would happen to memories, or love? How might the human brain, which has evolved to accommodate seventy or eighty years’ worth of memories, cope when asked to store centuries or millennia of memories? The interrelationship of human memory, love, and awareness of a finite life span was central to the modern science-fiction film Blade Runner (1982). The android workers in the dystopia are genetically engineered to have life spans of only four years—too short to develop a real identity based on memories or to experience empathy. In the film, renegade replicants desperately seek to increase their allotted time.1
The links interconnecting memory, love, and mortality also come up in Homer’s Odyssey. In Odysseus’s epic ten-year endeavor to reach his home in Ithaca after the Trojan War, he is detained against his will by the nymph Calypso. She keeps Odysseus as her lover for seven years (Odyssey 5.115–40). Calypso offers him eternal youth and immortality if he will stay with her on her island forever. She is incredulous when Odysseus refuses such a generous gift. The other gods insist that Calypso must honor Odysseus’s desire to build a raft to try to return to his wife, family, and friends, and to live out the rest of his days in his native land. As Odysseus explains to Calypso: “I know my wife, Penelope, does not have your beauty, because she is mortal. Even so, I long to go home, despite the dangers.”
Lacking empathy, the immortal Calypso cannot understand Odysseus’s yearning for his wife and his nostalgia for home. As classicist Mary Lefkowitz points out, the ancient story expresses “one of the most important differences between gods and mortals. Humans have ties to each other” and to their homeland, and “the intensity of these ties is all the stronger because they cannot last.” Philosopher C.D.C. Reeve suggests that Odysseus knows he will lose his identity, precious not only to him but also to his family and friends, if he chooses to become marooned in immortality.2
Reaching for immortality raises other profound misgivings. Unlike human individuals, immortal gods do not change or learn. “For the immortals everything is easy,” notes classicist Deborah Steiner. With few exceptions, the gods act “without visible effort or strain.”3 Without the threat of danger and death, what would become of self-sacrifice, bravery, heroic striving, and glory? Like empathy, these are distinctively human ideals, and they were especially salient in a warrior culture like that of ancient Greece. The immortal gods and goddesses of Greek mythology are powerful, but no one calls the gods courageous. Undying gods, by their very nature, can never gamble on high stakes, or dare to risk obliteration, or choose to struggle heroically against insurmountable odds.4
If our lives be short—may they be glorious!
According to Herodotus (7.83), the elite infantry of ten thousand warriors in the Persian Empire of the sixth and fifth centuries BC called themselves “the Immortals,” not because they wished to live forever, but because they knew that their number would always stay the same. The assurance that an equally valiant warrior would immediately take the place of each dead or wounded fighter, thereby ensuring the “immortality” of the corps, fostered a sense of cohesion and pride. The lasting appeal of the concept is evident in the name “Immortals” taken up by the Sassanid and Byzantine cavalries, by Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, and by the Iranian army 1941–79.
In the great Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh, the companions Enkidu and Gilgamesh face death heroically, consoling themselves that at least their fame will be everlasting. This idea is embodied in the ancient Greek ideal of kleos aphthiton, “imperishable glory.” In Greek mythology, real heroes and heroines do not seek physical immortality. Indeed, no true hero desires to die old. Given a choice by the gods, heroic individuals like Achilles reject long lives of comfort and ease. To die young and beautiful in noble combat against an adversary who is one’s match—this is the very definition of myth-worthy heroism. Even the barbarian Amazons of Greek legend achieve this vaunted heroic status, dying bravely in battle. In fact, not one ancient Amazon succumbs to old age.5 In myth after myth, great heroes and heroines emphatically choose brief, memorable lives of honor and dignity with high-stakes risks.
That choice is the point of a legend about the Narts of the Caucasus, larger-than-life men and women who lived in the golden age of heroes. The Nart sagas combine ancient Indo-European myths and Eurasian folklore. In one saga, the Creator asks, Do you wish to be few and live short lives but win great fame and be examples to others forevermore? Or do you prefer that your numbers be great, that you have much to eat and drink, and live long lives without ever knowing battle or glory?
The Narts’ reply is “as quick as thought itself.” They choose to remain small in number and to perform bold deeds. We do not want to be like cattle. We want to live with human dignity. If our lives are to be short, then let our fame be great!6
Another antidote to wishing for
immortality was the classical Greek ideal of calm, even cheerful fatalism. The attitude was plainly expressed in 454 BC, in a poem by Pindar (Isthmian 7.40–49) celebrating the life of a great athlete.
Seeking whatever pleasure each day gives
I will arrive at peaceful old age and my allotted end.
Some six hundred years later, in his Meditations (2 and 47) the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius linked the acceptance of death with one’s responsibility to live one’s brief, fragile life well and with honor: “Dying, too, is one of our assignments in life,” he wrote. What is worthy is to “live this life out truthfully and rightfully.”
Many ancient travelers’ tales revel in descriptions of fabled utopias, where the people are happy, healthy, free, and long-lived. An early example of the idea that a fountain of youth or springs of longevity could be found in some exotic land of the East appears in the writings of Ctesias, a Greek physician who lived in Babylon and wrote about the wonders of India in the fifth century BC. Around the same time, Herodotus told of the long-lived Ethiopians, who owed their 120-year life span to a diet of milk and meat and their habit of bathing in violet-scented, naturally oily springs. Later, an anonymous Greek geographer living in Antioch or Alexandria (fourth century AD) wrote about the Camarini of an Eastern “Eden.” They eat wild honey and pepper and live to be 120 years old. All of them know the day of their death and prepare accordingly. Curiously enough, 120 years is the maximum human life span suggested by some modern scientists.7
A strange little myth about an eccentric fisherman named Glaukos was the subject of a lost play by Aeschylus and a lost poem by Pindar; further details also come from Ovid, Plato, and Pausanias. In the story Glaukos noticed that when he placed the fish he caught on a special sort of grass, they revived and slithered back into the sea. Expecting to become immortal, Glaukos ate the grass and dove into the sea, where he still resides as a seer or sea daimon covered in limpets and barnacles. Another odd myth about a different Glaukos, a boy who drowned but was saved, was the subject of plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus (all three plays are now lost). This Glaukos was the son of King Minos of Crete. One day the little boy was playing with a ball (or a mouse) and went missing. King Minos sent the sage Polyeidus to find him. Young Glaukos was discovered dead—he had fallen into a cask of honey and drowned. But Polyeidus had once observed a snake bringing a certain plant to resurrect its dead mate. Polyeidus resuscitated the little boy with the same life-giving herb.8
Pliny the Elder mentioned a group of people in India who lived for millennia. India also figures in the many legends that arose after the death of Alexander the Great, collected in the Arabic, Greek, Armenian, and other versions of the Alexander Romance (third century BC to sixth century AD). It was said that the young world conqueror longed for immortality. At one point, Alexander engages in philosophical dialogues with Indian sages. When he asks, “How long is it good for a man to live?” they reply, “As long as he does not regard death as better than life.” In his travels, Alexander is constantly thwarted in his search for the water of everlasting life, and he meets fantastic angels and sages who warn him against such a quest. The dream of finding magic waters of immortality persisted in medieval European folklore. The legendary traveler-storyteller Prester John, for example, claimed that bathing in the fountain of youth would return one to the ideal age of thirty-two—and that one could repeat the rejuvenation as often as one liked.9
On the other side of the world, in China, ancient folktales told of Neverdie Land (Pu-szu chih kuo) where people ate a miraculous fruit.10 Several historical emperors dreamed of discovering the elixir of immortality. The most famous seeker was Qin Shi Huang, born in 259 BC, about a century after Alexander the Great. The Taoist legends told of ti hsien, people who never aged or died because they cultivated a special herb on legendary mountains or islands. In 219 BC, Qin Shi Huang dispatched an alchemist and three thousand young people to try to discover the elixir. They were never seen again.
The emperor sought out magicians and other alchemists, who compounded various broths containing ingredients believed to artificially confer longevity, from hundred-year-old tortoise shells to heavy metals, especially tan sha, red sand or cinnabar (mercuric sulphide). In antiquity, mercury’s mysterious liquid state and astonishing mobility led people to consider quicksilver a “living metal” (see chapter 5 for mercury used to power automata). Qin Shi Huang died at the relatively advanced age of forty-nine in 210 BC. His immortality came in the form of his lasting legacy as the first emperor of unified China: he was the builder of the first Great Wall, the great Lingqu Canal, a magnificent mausoleum guarded by six thousand terra-cotta warriors, and a tomb with underground rivers of mercury.11
In contrast to Qin Shi Huang’s anxieties about dying, Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 47 and 74) crystallized the Stoic view, pointing out that “Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both. They were absorbed alike into the life force of the world or dissolved alike into atoms.” Think of every person and creature who has ever lived and died, “all underground for a long time now. What harm does it do them?” The historical Alexander’s own acceptance of his mortality was neatly distilled in a famous quip. It was recorded by several of his biographers near the end of the arduous campaigns in India. Alexander had already conquered the Persian Empire and had survived numerous serious battle wounds. Some men in his entourage had even begun to hail him as a god. In the midst of the heavy fighting in 326 BC, an arrow pierced Alexander’s ankle. As his companions rushed to his side, Alexander smiled ironically and quoted a well-known passage from Homer: “What you see here, my friends, is blood—not ichor which flows from the wounds of the blessed immortals.”12
Like Alexander—who would perish young and beautiful three years later (323 BC)—the great heroes of classical antiquity ultimately came to terms with their impending physical death, consoled by winning an everlasting “life” in human memory—even though it meant they must join Homer’s sad “twittering ghosts” in the Underworld.13 The ancient myths about immortality deliver an existential message: not only is death inescapable, but human dignity, freedom, and heroism are somehow intertwined with mortality.
The flaws inherent in seeking immortality come to light in myths about the most fearless mortal heroes. Take the case of Achilles. When he was born, his mother, the Nereid Thetis, sought to make him invulnerable by anointing his body with divine ambrosia and then “burned away his mortality” by holding him over a fire. According to the more famous version of the myth, she dipped baby Achilles in the River Styx to render him immortal. In both myths, Thetis had to hold Achilles by the heel, which remained his vulnerable spot (Apollonius Argonautica 4.869–79; Statius Achilleid). Years later, on the battlefield at Troy—despite his valor—the best Greek champion did not expire in the honorable face-to-face combat that he hoped for. Achilles died ignominiously because an arrow shot by an unseen archer homed in on his heel, the seemingly insignificant weak link in his body. Likewise, the god Hephaestus and King Minos of Crete did not anticipate that the bronze robot Talos could be toppled by Medea’s simple operation on his ankle that drained him of ichor (chapter 1). Unforeseen vulnerabilities are always the Achilles’s heels of cutting-edge biotechne.
Many ancient myths also ask whether immortality can guarantee freedom from suffering and grief. For example, in the Mesopotamian epic the hero Gilgamesh resents that only the gods live forever, and he fears his own death. He sets off on a quest for the Plant of Immortality.14 But if Gilgamesh were to achieve his desire for everlasting life, he would eternally mourn the loss of his dear mortal companion, Enkidu.
And consider the fate of the wise centaur Chiron, teacher and friend of the Greek hero Heracles. During a battle, it happened that Chiron was accidentally struck by one of Heracles’s poison arrows. The arrow, tipped with venom from the Hydra monster, inflicted a terrible wound that would never heal. Wracked with unbearable pain, the c
entaur begged the gods to trade his immortality for blessed death. Some myths claimed that Prometheus, the Titan who secretly taught humans the divine secret of fire, offered to exchange places with Chiron. Zeus’s notorious punishment of Prometheus was designed to cause interminable torture. Zeus chained Prometheus to a mountain and dispatched his Eagle to peck out his liver every day. The regenerative power of the liver was known in antiquity.15 Accordingly, in the myth the immortal Titan’s liver grew back overnight, for the Eagle devour again. And again. Forever.
A horror of monstrous regeneration also drives the myth of the many-headed Hydra monster. Struggling to kill the writhing serpent, Heracles lopped off each head, and watched aghast as two more grew back in its place. Finally he hit on the technique of cauterizing each neck with a flaming torch. But he could never destroy the immortal central head of the Hydra. Heracles buried the indestructible head in the ground and rolled a huge boulder over the spot to warn off humans. Even buried deep in the earth, however, the Hydra’s fangs continue to ooze deadly venom. The myth makes the Hydra a perfect symbol of the infinitely proliferating consequences of immortality. Indeed, Heracles himself was doomed by his own Hydra-poison biotechne. Because he treated his arrowheads with the monster’s venom, he possessed an unlimited supply of poison projectiles with their own chain of unintended disasters. The centaur Chiron was only one of the victims. The great Heracles himself perished ingloriously, in agony from secondhand Hydra venom.16
An interesting variation on the theme of nightmarish regeneration appears in the old story of an automaton in the form of a broom. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” tale was recounted by Goethe in 1797 and popularly retold in the episode starring Mickey Mouse in Disney’s 1940 animated film Fantasia. In fact, the original tale first appeared in written form in about AD 150, told by Lucian of Samosata, a novelist of satire and speculative fiction (now called science fiction).17 In his story Philopseudes (Lover of Lies), a young Greek student travels with an Egyptian sage, a sorcerer who has the power to make household implements, such as a broom or pestle, into android servants that automatically do his bidding. One night while the sage is away, the student attempts to control the wooden pestle by himself. He dresses it in clothes and commands it to bring water. But then he cannot make the automaton stop carrying buckets of water. The inn is flooding, because he lacks the knowledge to turn the automaton back into a pestle. In desperation, the student chops the unstoppable servant with an axe, but each piece becomes another water-carrying servant. Luckily, the sage returns in time to save the day.
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