Article on the current technological possibilities for eternal life, with contributions from leading scientists and academics in the field.
Published in the ‘Let The Right One In’ issue of Little White Lies
Who Wants to Live Forever?
Since the days that Gods and Monsters roamed the deserts and ruled the imagination of ancient Mesopotamia, man has sought in vain for the Tree of Life. Perhaps the earliest known work of fiction, the Epic of Gilgamesh, concerns the hero-king’s fruitless quest for immortality, while various accounts of the Alexander the Great myth recount the boy general journeying through terrible realms in search of the Fountain of Youth.
Every culture before and since has attempted to conquer death, be it through religious faiths such as the cycles of reincarnation espoused by Hinduism and Buddhism or the alchemical fervour of early China. England, for its part, can not only boast Isaac Newton’s long, strange mid-career pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone but is also pleased to consider itself the resting place of the Holy Grail – the cup of Christ that bestows eternal life.
Modern science has yet to agree on what makes us age. Our bodies are pre-programmed to grow and repair themselves, so why – to borrow a phrase from what is already the long-distant 20th century – do we come with an in-built obsolescence fitted as standard? The Nineteenth century theory was that once we had procreated we withered and died purely to make way for the next generation. This, however, is a goal-driven explanation of the matter at hand that implies evolution has some form of intelligent hand at the tiller, and that - though it may remain a comforting thought - is patently not the case.
Today there are a handful of competing theories as to why we age and die. None of them prove entirely satisfactory, but advances in gene manipulation, biotechnology and computational power could mean that in the future – which, in case you didn’t know, will be arriving much sooner than you think - we might not even need to understand our mortality in order to elude it.
The Next Ice Age
It’s nothing that’s going to happen overnight, of course, but there exists a quietly growing community of ardent believers prepared to go to extreme (though they might argue quite sensible) lengths in order to stick around long enough for technological advances to permit them to achieve something like immortality.
Cryonics (as opposed to cryogenics, which is the study of how matter behaves at extreme low temperatures) is a burgeoning industry that offers its clients unlimited time in the cooler while they wait for exponentially accelerating leading edge of science to catch up with their hopes and dreams of everlasting life. And running at around $100,000 for the full package, it’s abundantly clear that this treatment isn’t entirely the preserve of crackpots and high-minded hobbyists.
Far from serving merely as a dead-letter office for the soul, cryopreservation and the more common practise of neuropreservation - which freezes only the brain in the assumption that by the time the technology exists to revivify frozen grey matter the regeneration of a new body will be mere bagatelle – mean that many view the deep freeze as an entirely viable form of life extension.
The premise of cryonics is that the memories and personality of a being are stored within the cellular structure of its brain. Freezing the brain, utilising a combination of cryopretectants to combat the formation of damaging ice crystals, captures the subject in the precise state in which they entered stasis. The snag – and there’s always a snag – is that cryopreservation is not reversible by current scientific methods. How far off it remains is not clear. ‘Fifty to a hundred years for people currently being cryopreserved’ estimates Ben Best, CEO of the Cryonics Institute, ‘and perhaps as little as thirty years for those subjects of cryopreservation technologies that do not yet exist’
The Cryonics Institute was incorporated in 1976; not amid the freak-flag flyin’ flakes of Southern California or the log-cabin liberals of Aspen, but just outside the blue-collar Motown grime of Detroit, Michigan. It is just one of a handful of organisations currently offering a chilled slice of postponed foreverhood.
Controversial English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey explains further. ‘Cryonics is a very important area of biomedical research that will save enormous numbers of lives as soon as people start to realise that cryonics patients are only legally dead, not necessarily biologically dead. Once you realise that, cryopreservation is just a natural extension of the medically-induced comas that are done in hospitals every day to improve the chances of recovery from an operation.’ Cryonics may offer temporary sanctuary from the march of time, but elsewhere research into eliminating the causes of aging itself continues apace.
Splinter Cell
De Grey is author of the book Ending Aging and co-founder of the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit medical charity with no less a mission statement than caging the subtle thief of youth himself. They are working toward such an end by promoting an ongoing program of running repairs to take place within the body at the cellular level. When I ask him about his theories, he does not hesitate to correct my line of questioning; ‘My work doesn't involve creating theories - theories are explanations for how nature works. What I create are technological proposals for manipulating nature, specifically for manipulating aging. My work is no more ‘theory’ than the Wright brothers' design for a plane was a theory.’
That out of the way, he goes on to outline the aforementioned proposals. ‘Aging is essentially the same in the human body as it is in a simple, man-made machine: various types of damage accumulate as intrinsic side effects of normal operation. For a long time there is no consequence for the overall functioning of the machine, but eventually it declines and finally fails completely. In the case of the human body the maintenance will mainly involve replacing lost cells, eliminating unwanted cells, removing molecular garbage, and breaking unwanted chemical bonds.’
It has long been believed that there are only a finite amount of times that our cells can divide. This results in their decreased ability to replenish themselves and our bodies failing us in old age. It is a phenomenon known as the Hayflick limit. Does de Grey forsee any way to break through the glass ceiling that it imposes? ‘Certainly - insofar as it's an obstacle at all. We can overcome the Hayflick limit if and when we need to by introducing cells to replace the ones that have stopped working.’
The idea is that if our DNA can be reprogrammed to permanently stave off disease and degeneration then our bodies can go on working indefinitely, but as Dr. Steven Gane of the London Centre of Nanotechnology is quick to point out, this does not wholly ensure copper-bottomed immortality, rather, 'it is merely not dying from old age, not the complete inability to die at all: after all, car crashes will still be fatal.’
But like de Grey, Gane sees no practical obstacle to the deployment of his particular branch of science in the battle against the causes of cell degeneration and aging. ‘Nanotechnology is the science of the very small; the realm of weird quantum effects that underlie our ordinary world. We know that ‘blind watchmaker’ of evolution has made countless extremely intricate atomic-scale machines capable of building bone and jelly, brain and brawn and hope we may be able to do the same. Nanotechnology is closest we will come to replicating, and exceeding, the miracles of nature.’
The Ghosts and The Machine
If keeping our bodies in perfect working order in perpetuity can’t fully realise our quest for true immortality, then - in the future as envisaged by the likes of Dr. Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University - we might be well advised to slough off our fusty biological overcoats and simply go digital. ‘The idea’, he explains of the Institute’s research, ‘is to scan a brain in such detail as to get both its tissue structure and chemical properties and then compile the images into 3D volumes where software finds the connectivity and estimates cell properties. We would ultimately put these into a neural network simulator and run it.’
It might initially sound a little far-fetched and even faintly ludicrous, and there are many, such as noted neuroscientist Professor Susan Greenfield who not only doubt its likelihood but also question its validity. Proponents of such ‘mind uploading’ remind us, however, that mapping the human genome was very recently considered an impossible undertaking, only to be completed a mere twelve years after the inception of the Human Genome Project. Dr Sandberg even-handedly addresses both of these points when he informs me that ‘there is a difference between having a map and understanding it. If, for instance you gave me a circuit diagram of a computer processor I might be able to understand how each little part works, but have no clue what the whole system is intended to do.’
Such well-intentioned concerns have rarely derailed mankind’s innate desire to barrel on regardless when it comes to refining every technological innovation from fire to the firewall and, as Ray Kurzweil relates it, we are already well on a like-it-or-not course toward the birth of High Street neurotechnology; ‘IBM is already creating a simulation of about 10,000 cortical neurons, which includes tens of millions of connections. The first version of this process will simulate the electrical activity, and future versions will also simulate the relevant chemical activity.’
Kurzweil is perhaps the only man with a demonstrable claim to the awkward but increasingly relevant title of ‘futurist’. An inventor and hugely successful businessman who is also the recipient of dozens of awards and Honorary Doctorates as well as author of a remarkable series of books on futurism, technology and artificial intelligence, Kurzweil’s predictions have a staggering hit-rate.
‘Humans need about 10 quadrillion (1016) calculations per second (cps) to provide functions to all the regions of the brain’, he informs me; ‘some supercomputers are already at 100 trillion (1014) cps, and will hit 1016 cps around the end of this decade. Several with 1 quadrillion cps are already on the drawing board, and two Japanese efforts are targeting 10 quadrillion cps around the end of the decade. By 2020, 10 quadrillion cps will be available for around $1,000.’
That’s a computer with all the cumulative processes of a human brain for the price of a holiday: with the advances in neural mapping and the law of accelerating returns that Kurzweil believes to be driving on computational power at an ever-increasing rate, we already have access to the rudimentary tools with which to carve out true immortality.
‘We’ll have both the hardware and software to recreate human intelligence by the end of the 2020s’ predicts Kurzweil. ‘We’ll be able to improve these methods and harness the speed, memory capabilities, and knowledge-sharing ability of machines. We can then back up the information. Using nanotechnology-based manufacturing, we could recreate your brain, or better yet reinstantiate it in a more capable computing substrate.’
This process, believes Simon Gane, will ‘likely produce the same kind of behavior as the real brain. Whether it would be independently conscious or ‘the same person’ as the original brain depends much on your particular philosophical views; I think we have to do it to see how it turns out.’
But whether the gift of immortal life would, in fact, turn out to be a curse is a subject that has long been considered by the finest of minds. In his 1777 essay ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’ Scottish philosopher David Hume suggested that without the terror of death mankind would not have evolved at all, while in the Nineteenth century, the hero of Mary Shelley’s eerie short story ‘The Mortal Immortal’ finds that unyielding life leaves him ‘…alone, and weary of myself - desirous of death, yet never dying…’
Even as far back as the 5th Century BC, Greek lyric poet Pindar chastened himself to, ‘Strive not, my soul, for an immortal life, but make the most of what is possible.’ Tomorrow – or someday so like it as that it makes no odds – the eternal optimist in Kurzweil expects the everyday and the infinite to fold into each other. ‘In my view, death is a tragedy,’ he says, with the conviction of a staunch humanist. ‘It's a tremendous loss of personality, skills, knowledge, relationships. We've rationalized it as a good thing because that's really been the only alternative we've had. But disease, aging, and death are problems we are now in a position to overcome.’
