On Immortality

Recently I had a conversation with a friend about immortality based on the recent news about Jeff Bezo’s investment in a laboratory specializing in longevity and how it’s suggested that the first person to live to 1000 may already be alive.

“I don’t think anyone should be subjected to another 950 years of Bezos,” she said, shuddering at the thought. She went on to describe her vision of a dystopian future where everyone lives forever and machines have stolen everyone’s jobs and billionaires continue to leech off society.

But I have a different vision for immortality and it’s not pessimistic, but first I’d like to discuss what I see (and I am not a biologist) as the challenges and moral implications of living hundreds of years.

As a matter of focus for this post, I will mostly exclude external causes of mortality and instead focus on aging at the cellular, molecular and mental levels, but this is by no means exhaustive and I intend this to be a philosophical perspective instead of a prescriptive roadmap.

The Cell-ing Point

At the biological level, aging can be simplified as the accumulation of damage at the cellular and molecular levels. This damage can be caused through natural cellular reproduction whereby “errors” are produced every few billion cycles, leading to degeneration in healthy functions. This can also be caused by lifestyle and environmental factors, but the result is largely the same: more and more wrinkles and achy joints.

Studies such as this one on the “Immortal Hydra” suggest that there are ways to decrease the rate at which cellular errors occur and even shine a light on how organisms can recover from seemingly catastrophic or fatal damage. Reducing the rate of cellular errors alone would lead to a decrease in aging-related symptoms, meaningfully extending the average lifespan and health span of humans. And fewer wrinkles and achy joints, hurray!

But that is just longevity, not immortality.

To supplement this error reduction, technologies like CRISPR show some promise in bolstering our immune systems with the tools to seek out and destroy damaged cells and even target some genetic illnesses, effectively leaving us with a semblance of immortality. Fewer errors + deletion of errors = forever?

(NOTE: this is vastly oversimplified, and there are entire fields of study into the various causes of aging that I could not even begin to touch.)

So we’ve reached biological immortality. What about our minds? Can we store hundreds of years of information without some catastrophic issue? Would the weight of centuries drive us insane?

I can see a few possibilities. One is that of correction. Suppose a sizable percentage of the population begins to live hundreds of years, and the weight of those centuries does begin to take a toll on our mental functions. In that case, we’d have a meaningful focus on augmenting our existing capabilities through additive technology. An overly simplistic view of the human brain is to compare its functions to that of a complex computer. It has its own storage system, its own operating system, and even its own peripheral devices (your senses). Need more storage? I can see that as being possible. Faster processor? Sure, why not. Are senses failing you? We’re already introducing new senses quite easily.

However, I am more optimistic about our brain’s ability to adapt. There is a lot of evidence that suggests we’ve had to do it several times in the past (and I’m not just referring to evolution). Recent studies into neuroplasticity show that we can make near-immediate changes to its structure. As our minds store and then later recall information, we use symbols as shortcuts for representations of more complex information (there are theories that this is what dreams are. Converting information into a coding system for storage and later retrieval).

As an example of the power of symbols, if you ask anyone who has ever seen an airplane to draw an airplane, they will almost all give you the same basic drawing, despite thousands of different models of airplanes. And we’ve done this for as long as we’ve been humans. Symbols are shortcuts, and they are great for encoding information.

When language was introduced to humans, however, we were suddenly presented with a much more efficient coding system for our memories. Words individually are symbols, but words together convey fully formed and wildly complex ideas. In short, we invented a new encoding system for our brains, and with it, the structure of our brains rapidly changed to become more efficient.

It’s my belief, then, that our lengthened sense of time would present another opportunity for change in how our brains store information. It may take multiple generations of “immortals” for a consistent coding system to emerge, but we’d have all the time in the world to test… because of the whole immortality thing…

And none of this considers additional technologies like the “neural link” that would give us ready access to a repository of information external to our brains. With these, maybe no change would even be needed, but I have my doubts that it will affect this particular challenge and might instead affect communication or working memory.

So now we’re immortal, forever wrinkle-free, and we remember everything. What does society look like?

Well the dystopian view is that billionaires continue to leech off a society of immortal workers who have no choice but to work to live off continually meager earnings.

I disagree. Not that billionaires will try to leech or that they will even try to hoard or obscure these advancements for themselves (i feel pretty confident that even immortal people can be greedy), but that in a future where people can live 500+ years and advances in technology have already begun to replace many types of labor that they will have anyone to leech off in the first place.

There are already countries trialing things like universal basic income or incentivized societal income, because they see these foundational shifts in work and know that we will need to be more creative in the future where historically “menial” tasks are automated. More radical post-capitalist subscribers view an optimistic end to money as we know it. Others submit challenges to governments to present wealth caps in what is referred to as capped-italism, calling for an end to billionaires.

“Where there is money to be made, there is greed.” And I don’t disagree, but I see the mere possibility of a future where the ultra wealthy no longer have anything the populace needs, and that wealth (as we know it) is no longer relevant.

What about the environmental impact of immortality? This is the area I’m most concerned and least optimistic about. Our very living requires resources, and we have lived out of balance with our ecosystem for as long as we’ve existed, so how can we change this?

It’s overly simplistic to suggest we completely stop the extraction of raw materials, but is what it would take. There is a line in a recent episode of Star Trek that says, “first we cataloged the totality of the elements in our landfills and found all that we needed. Next, we produced technology to fabricate whatever we needed. Everything exists in abundance if you know how to use it.”

Big words, cool idea.

Another, and much more controversial angle would be strict population control or even reversal. I see how this is controversial because we’ve seen it in practice throughout history and the outcome has always been inequality (either monetary, racial or gendered), and also because what the actual fuck?! Still, I mention it because it will, no doubt, be mentioned in this conversation in the future and it would be unfortunate to ignore that possible conversation just because of how ew-y it is.

Still, something will need to change, or no one will live forever (unless Bezos takes off in his penis ship and flies around forever laughing like a Bond villain).

And finally, let’s talk about the concept of “forever”. Why would anyone want to live forever?

I believe the goal will never be to live forever and that the reason it’s romanticized today is because we each currently have an unknown “time limit” to our personal existence that presents us with a small but constant fear that any day might be the last day. And because the media paints such a delightful picture of it with a dozen shows and films about 500 year old vampires dating teenagers.

This presents us with another issue, though. Our impermanence, and this background fear, is a primal motivator for us to experience, learn, and, well, live. If we suddenly didn’t have our mortal worries would we be motivated to do anything, at all? Would we revert into lazy hedonists with no care or concept of time? Would our mental health decline without the structures and confines of life milestones (or even daily milestones)?

I am a firm believer in the power of applying positive constraints to your life and to your work, and that our limited lifespan is one of the most potent positive constraints there available. We have a limited amount of time within which we can do as much of the things that are possible to do within that limited amount of time.

The challenge will be finding a way to make immortality more constraining so that we don’t fall victim to Parkinson’s Law on a massive scale. Imagine living forever and wasting infinitely more time than you do now? Wouldn’t that suck?

As you can see, we have a lot to overcome, and I’m viewing immortality from the skeuomorphic lens of someone who is not (currently) immortal, but in my estimation, the reality of immortality is that it presents everyone with a choice for how long they want to go. Some will want to live longer than others, sure, and there will still likely be people satisfied with more traditional lifespans, but by effectively eliminating the unknown we gain a freedom from the ever-present reality of our mortality, along with the pitfalls that come with it.

Living forever becomes an option, like eating an entire kg bag of sugar. Sure, it’s possible, but most people would want to stop after a couple spoonfuls.