Immortality At The Pub
MY answer to the question of immortality, is "yes, please!". Amongst the questions, are - how would we live longer, should we live longer? And What do we mean by immortality?
Life is very short and its a dirty, dirty crime.
In the ancient Roman Empire, the average citizen could expect to live around twenty to twenty-five years, and he wasn't legally an adult until his father had died. By Shakespeare's day, thirty was terribly old. By nineteen-hundred, people lived to about forty or fifty. Today the average life expectancy is about seventy-five years, and we've only had scientific medicine for about a hundred years, and its only slowly being applied in general practice.
We now have a deep understanding of aging at the cellular level. Free radicals are the smoke from our cells burning food for energy, and they cause damage that accumulates over time. We can make worms live several times longer, by silencing certain genes. We can increase by forty per cent the healthy life span of mice by restricting the calories they eat. Researchers have identified the SIRT1 gene that is activated when you live on a restricted diet, and they are testing a drug called resveratrol that will achieve the same effects of making DNA easier to maintain. Resveratrol is available in red grape skins, red wine, dark chocolate, blueberries, mulberries, peanuts, the traditional medicine "Japanese knotweed", and seventy other plants. Resveratrol is also used medically to fight heart disease, cancer, influenza, HIV and other illnesses.
The life extension field is haunted by pessimists who are hung up on the Greek myth of Tiphonius who asked the Gods for eternal life, but was doomed to become decrepid because he forgot to specify eternal youth. I would argue that one of the main goals of medicine is to help people live as healthy as possible for as long as possible. Getting the impaired, repaired
Woody Allen said "Some people want to achieve immortality through their works or their descendants. I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying."
The longest human life on record is the 122 years achieved by the cigarette-smoking French woman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997.
The upper limit on flesh has long been thought to be the Hayflick Limit. Hayflick showed that cells in the lab only divide about fifty times before they get sick and die. A recent study in London has shown that by age eighteen, the fuse on the time bomb of cell death is about 7500 base pairs of chromosomes long, and shortened at an average of 27 pairs per year. By back-of-the-envelope calculations, this means that if the women in the study aren't killed by disease or misadventure, then they can live for another two hundred and seventy-seven years before the Hayflick limit stops their cells from replicating and tells them to start dying.
In glass, we can reverse this aging of cells by extending the telomere fuse that burns down as cells age, with an enzyme called telomerase. We don't know how to apply this to humans without causing cancer yet, but I think I can confidently say that nobody has died of the Hayflick Limit yet.
It seems that curing the diseases of old age is now more of an engineering problem than a scientific mystery. The Methuselah M-prize has been started by the people who got private industry into space with the Ansuri X-prize. The M-prize goes to the people who get mice to live significantly longer, in ways that may be applied to people.
If you can just survive to the next medical breakthrough technology, you might be able to survive a few years more, until the next little development, which might give you even more years. This way, if you're very lucky you may get climb a sort of "stairway to heaven" and leapfrog from one medical engineering discovery to the next. Imagine what the medical technology of 2150 might be able to do for us?
As the Jehovah's Witnesses said in 1918 "Millions now living may never die".
When talking about immortality its fascinating that some people get angry when you propose living forever. The audience for the panel were split between the "dyers" or "terminators" and the people who believed that life is worth living. One correspondent spoke to me about about living longer being a selfish use of Earth's limited resources. This ignores the fact that RIGHT NOW Paul and the many people who agree with him, are making selfish use of Earth's limited resources, and by the same argument that condemns old people to die in the future, they are condemning themselves to die right now. I asked himl if he was offering to suicide to give up his use of Earth's resources right now, but he declined. They've decided on a particular number that is "natural", and not only have they decided to die at that age, but they insist that EVERYBODY should be forced to go without whatever medical treatment might become available, and commit suicide at their favourite number. The dyers, with my correspondent as their spokesperson decided that most of them would like to die at age eight-five, which is about a ten year extension of the average life expectancy of seventy-five. This requires life extension technology not yet available. What right does anybody have to tell other people to commit suicide?
American writer Ronald Bailey wrote about the emotional battle between the pessimists and the optimists: "Future generations will look back at the beginning of the 21st century and marvel that intelligent people actually tried to stop biomedical progress just to protect their cramped and limited vision of human nature."
So maybe living a long time, even hundreds of years isn't impossible, and may be an inevitable working of the advance of medical engineering, but what about immortality? Living forever?
Its not really enough to just live a really long, happy, healthy life and then get assasinated or run over by a car. Eternal life means being able to recover from even these set-backs, maybe by having an off-site back-up of ourselves, to be resurrected in emergencies.
Lets look at what's happening at the bleeding edge of possible technology. The Cryonics people with their slogan of "freeze, wait, reanimate", have been dismissed for years because they haven't successfully reanimated anyone. However, earlier this year, researchers discovered that hydrogen sulphide can put rats into suspended animation, for short periods of time, and last week they revived dogs frozen after several hours of clinical death.. Freezing people might not work right now, but it looks like something a little like it might become available for surgery, the battlefield, and space travel.
Drexler proposed that tiny robots, a billionth of a metre across, could be sent into our cells to repair damage, and fight diseases.. We're now making the first tiny robots and nanomaterials, and nanotechnology is an undergraduate course at UTS. Environmental groups have been protesting about the use of nanomaterials in cosmetics. The Green party in Europe debated whether nano-robots were about to run amok and take over the world. When you can program matter down to the molecular level, you can achive wondrous things. Perhaps even survive a fatal accident or murder.
If your mind were able to be recorded from your brain, and perhaps some of your skins cells kept on ice, then a future life assurance company could clone you a new body, and then write your mind onto the brain. You might get your memories recorded once a month, just in case.
Or, if you're feeling more adventurous, you could have your mind run in a virtual reality inside a computer, where your every wish can be fulfilled. Or you could have a bet both ways and have your computer mind running a robot body.
Science fiction writers Vernor Vinge and Damien Broderick talk about the singularity, or the spike, where scientific breakthroughs start happening faster and faster until they are increasing exponentionally. At the spike, as soon as a human can think of doing something, the method and resources to do it become available. Should any of us survive this event, a very long and healthy life would seem a trivial thing to ask for.
Maybe only some people will want to live for centuries, and some will be content to live to 122. There may be social pressures to call it a day at 295 when you reach the Hayflick Limit, and let the kids have a go. Suicide could become an acceptable social choice, or perhaps it will still be seen as crazy. Imagine the world we could have if great geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci and Nikola Tesla were able to continue their work for centuries?