Supposing you wanted to live forever and found yourself in 2024, would you sign up for something like Alcor, a company that offers a cryogenic way to preserve your body until whatever ails it can be fixed, presumably in the far future? Something over 200 people have made this choice with Alcor, and another 200 at the Cryonics Institute, whose website says “life extension within reach.” A body frozen at −196 °C using ‘cryoprotectants’ can, so the thinking goes, survive lengthy periods without undergoing destructive ice damage, with life restored when science masters the revival process.
It’s not a choice I would make, although the idea of waking up refreshed and once again healthy in a few thousand years is a great plot device for science fiction. It has led to one farcical public event, in the form of Nederland, Colorado’s annual Frozen Dead Guys Days festival. The town found itself with a resident frozen man named Bredo Morstøl, brought there by his grandson Trygve Bauge in 1993 and kept in dry ice by Trygve’s mother when her son was deported for visa violations. Bredo Morstøl remains on ice in Nederland, where the festival includes “Frozen Dead Guy” lookalike contests, although Covid caused several recent cancellations. I am not making any of this up.
I have it on good authority that Robert Heinlein was once asked by a cryonics enthusiast why he shouldn’t sign up for cryopreservation, and Heinlein replied that he would not because he was too interested in what would happen to him after biological life ended. My source, a writer who knew Heinlein for decades, raised his eyebrows when telling me this. Does anything ‘happen’ after biological life ends? No one knows, of course, and even near-death experiences can’t tell us because we don’t know how to interpret them. Getting into a religious answer is something left to the preference of the reader.
Image: The Triumph of Death, Peter Bruegel the Elder, oil on panel, 1562, Prado, Madrid.
Given these musings, I was interested to see that science fiction author Ted Chiang has explored a related question: Should we even pursue the study of immortality as a desirable goal? The Chiang talk was titled “Do You Really Want to Live Forever?” held at Princeton as part of a lecture series that drew 200 attendees to Chiang’s talk. I want to look at what he said, but only after a few notes on my own preferences.
First, as to why I would never choose cryopreservation: If I wanted to live forever, I would balk at using what have to be considered rudimentary and questionable methods to do so. I’ve heard the argument that as time passes, techniques will improve, and any damage to the body can be mitigated along the way to reviving it, but even if this is so, I would fear some kind of weird consciousness emerging in my frozen brain, sort of akin to what Larry Niven’s astronauts on Pluto experienced in the story “Wait It Out.” Stuck on Pluto and with relief decades away, they expose themselves to the elements, only to find that their flash-frozen minds are still active through superconducting effects. Imagine that extended over centuries…
Well, it probably couldn’t happen, but it’s a grim thought, and it alone would keep me from dialing the Alcor number. But would I accept if given a credible way to stay alive forever, perhaps a new discovery in the form of a simple injection guaranteed to do the job? I’d like to hear from readers on the pros and cons of that choice. Because of course ‘forever’ only means as long as something doesn’t happen to take you out. ‘Eternity’ gets snuffed through simple accident somewhere along the line, and it’s inevitable that after a few tens of thousands of years, something is going to get me.
So it’s a bedeviling personal choice and we should be thinking about it. After all, research into life extension in forms other than cryopreservation continues. Advanced AI may even tell us how to do it within a decade or two. Chiang, whose fiction is monumentally good (I consider “Story of Your Life” one of the finest pieces of writing ever to appear in science fiction), notes the concerns society faces over such decisions. Writers Sena Chang and Christopher Bao, covering the Chiang lecture event for The Daily Princetonian, say that Chiang waived away any moral judgments on eternal life (what would these be?) but noted: “The universe, as we understand it, does not enforce justice in any way. If it turns out that medical immortality is impossible, that, by itself, will not mean that immortality is a bad thing to want.”
But as we follow this path, we have to ask what the individual would experience with a ticket to immortality. Chiang isn’t sure it would be a desirable life. For one thing, a person sated with life expectancy and no fear of death would probably not be motivated to accomplish anything interesting. Life might get, shall we say, dreary. Moreover, if immortality becomes a viable option, we face issues of overpopulation that are obvious, and the likelihood of seriously exacerbated wealth inequalities. Here Chiang settles on something I want to quote, as drawn from the article:
“…the relationship between what is sustainable and what is ethical is not simple. The desire to live forever is fundamentally in conflict with the desire to have children. Allowing people to pursue one of these goals will inevitably entail restrictions on people to pursue the other.”
To take this further, immortality disrupts the process that leads to the very advances in medicine and technology that make it possible in the first place. Chiang sees this process as a ‘social instinct’ and identifies this need for ‘collective scholarship’ through the social impulse as underlying our science. Immortality breaks the bond. Thus the billionaires who try to extend their lifetimes who seem to follow a cultural muse based on individuality and egotism as opposed to what benefits society at large.
What an intriguing thought. Yet it’s probable that if a key to immortality is achieved by science, it will start out by being fantastically expensive and in the hands of a tiny coterie of people whose wealth is beyond the imagination of almost all of us. As I see it, they would then have a choice. Do I share this information? Would they factor into the question the welfare of society at large, or make a personal choice based on their own fear of death? Would fantastically wealthy immortals become a cadre of rulers over a society that otherwise continues to face the everyday dilemma of the end of life?
Chiang pokes around in questions like this in much of his fiction. Remember, this is a guy for whom awards are routine, including four Nebulas, four Hugos and six Locus awards. Stories of Your Life and Others is the best way to get into his work, especially in times when the AI question is becoming acute and the very meaning of advanced intelligence is under scrutiny. Structures of language, Chiang understands, undergird all our perception, and they play against the philosophies by which we describe ourselves. It can be said that Chiang has few answers – who does? – but no one asks the questions and draws out the ineffability of human experience with more eloquence.
A wealth of personal and collaborative research: https://www.anti-agingfirewalls.com/
I think immortality is a perfectly fine thing to wish for. Not everyone does but I would jump at it if I had the chance.
As someone irreligious who is quite confident the life of my mind and soul will end when that of my body does there is really nothing to lose with trying. I am young and a student now but intend to sign up for cryopreservation some day in the future if I can reasonably afford to.
I think longer lifespans or medical immortality would motivate people to plan better for the long term, and overpopulation is really not much of a concern anymore given the steep downward demographic trends in the 21st century. A society of immortals would only discourage people from having children because there would be no rush, and after a little while population growth would slow even further.
The main appeal of extended life to me is the opportunity to still be around to learn what humanity will discover centuries in the future. We all know that many space exploration programs move at a glacial pace. Imagine being on your deathbed just a few years or months before the first data is expected back from a breakthrough starshot style probe of another star system. Wouldn’t that be a disappointment to never know what’s out there to be found?
It is exploration that drive me to wish for immortality, wanting the time to see and know more of what can be seen and known.
Good post by the way this one made me think!
I think the reality of “immortality” is a pipe dream, we have no idea how long that will be – we know that various types of star will die out, leaving a Universe mostly populated by dimminutive M & K dwarf stars, with the smallest of these M dwarves existing for trillions of years – it is impossible for a biological creature like a human, whose whole existance is based on time, can even truly visualise this let alone live it. The Sun’s total life is about 10 billion years – so we are talking hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of times the age of the Sun – we say we can imagine it, but can we really?
We are making significant progress on biology, recent papers that have been published discuss the understanding we are now making on how Tardigrades and certian specialised bacteria are able to avoid cell death by proteins that are capable of repairing even highly damaged DNA – our cells die if there are just two breaks in the DNA of the cell, these proteins seem to be able to repair several hundred breaks simultaneously. This is the research that points toward treatments that may allow humans to live longer, potentially overcome degenerative diseases and conditions that nature inflicts on humans. By stopping degenerative breakdown of cells, repairing DNA damage then a human could live, without accident or malicious act, for hundreds of years – that has serious social and moral implications.
Further, as our technology advances, there could be the possibility of places our brains into artificial bodies, true cyborgs, although these bodies would still need to supply Oxygen, vitamins, fatty acids, glucose et ete to the brain to maintain cell funtion, neuron function and prevent degneracy of these, without a biological body to age and deteriortate, that could give humans the potential to entend life into many thousands of years as long as the artificial body was supplied with a power source that could be replaced or maintained and replacement parts for the body were available – and as I live in the UK – made of materials that do not rust in the rain!
The reality is, humans will strive to entend our lifespans, there is no biological reason why it cannot be extended biologically into hundreds of years, but we are a long way off understand the full extent of how our bodies work, how DNS and our cells truly work, and more importantly, how all this impacts our brains – there is no point being a living body if the brain is mush.
Society needs to seriously change and improve to make this worthwhile.
For me the question turns on a personal concern. Since only very old or very sick people would choose to get frozen with an “ify” prospect of revival, I wonder whether such folks will still be old, or still sick, when they’re revived? Related, technology and culture changes so quickly, would a freshly revived person even be relevant or “seen” in a future culture. Somehow, I can’t imagine waking up later as the same old, not so healthy person that I am now, and particularly if my health status continues to decline, even in a generally normal way, up until the time a real option would be available. On balance, I’d say no thank you.
I disagree with most of the quoted from Chiang:
I think if someone knew they were going to live forever, their perspective on the flow of events would just fundamentally change. You can take stuff easy, plan carefully and gradually, and go with the flow in a way that isn’t possible if you’re operating on a very finite schedule of time.
I’m also not worried about overpopulation. Immortality is going to affect people’s time-scales for having children as well – I think after an initial surge in population growth that lasts for about a decade or so, you’d see the population growth rate slow to a crawl as it really sinks in that folks can take as much time as they want to have children.
The “wealth inequality” issue is a real one, though, but not really just one of wealth. In general, a lot about our society is built around “succession” dynamics, with the idea being that people will gradually age out and die to be replaced. If they don’t start being replaced, then odds are they’ll entrench themselves further and further – and that might be something people actually select for, because some stuff might be amenable to just getting better over time. A politician who has held office for a thousand years is going to have far deeper connections and skills in politicking than one who has held it for ten years, for example.
Although that might be good for space colonization. I think if we discover immortality, the powers that be on Earth will tacitly and sometimes openly encourage younger folks to migrate off-world to new colonies, to be the big fishes in their own ponds instead of challenging them.
I think Chiang has this ass-backwards, as does Elon Musk. I think radical life extension will motivate people to greater accomplishment, particularly things with long time horizons. For example, you might be a guy around 62 years old with a concept for fusion power. Do you do the start-up? Or do you not because you have to prepare for retirement and you cannot risk doing a start-up at age 62? If you were physiologically restored to age 25 and knew you had an open personal horizon, what’s 5-10 years spent on a start-up that may or may not succeed.
Guys like Chiang are misrepresenting the real issue of age-related risk management with some kind of nebulous concept of human behavior. The fact is that some people are naturally driven and others are not. The only effects of amortality will be greater opportunities for the driven to accomplish even more and for everyone just to hang out and party all the time. I don’t see any downside to this.
Thanks to you, Paul… directly or resultantly… my answer is no. Your 2009 article, “Advancing Action at NASA (and Beyond)” ended: “The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting,” said the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in a book (his Meditations) that I return to often. “The impediment to action advances action.”
I was quick to look up this hoary and sage work, and communicated my delight. You responded that you were happy to turn people onto Marcus Aurelius.
I read the text daily, here and there. A work without a beginning or end, really; it does refer to beginnings and endings, and the author’s own mortality. While the work was for his own understanding and development, many have since found wisdom and even solace in his expressed thoughts and considerations.
The good emperor returns to mortality with perspective he deems natural. What there is in death is not shameful or evil of itself. His thrust was to follow nature, and not defy it.
His words have fortified more reasonable views in my own mind. This letter can be filled with quotes, but I restrict this writing to these three pertinent thoughts of old Marcus:
“Look at the past—empire succeeding empire—and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand.”
“Though you should be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same. For the present is the same to all, though that which perishes is not the same; and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment. For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him? These two things then thou must bear in mind; the one, that all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle, and that it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years or two hundred, or an infinite time; and the second, that the longest liver and he who will die soonest lose just the same. For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not.”
“Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It, too, is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, and the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different. So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.”
Arthur Clarke said that we are all born immortal; we learn to die; we’ve got to unlearn that. Yet, other fiction writers have created the likes of Flint in Star Trek’s “Requiem for Methuselah”, and the film “The Age of Adaline”, and a short story “The Immortal” by Jorge Luis Borges, all of which would show that immortality ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Yes, I remember our conversations about Marcus Aurelius. Really pleased that you have introduced him into this discussion, Carl!
Dr. F. Mercury had some thoughts on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jtpf8N5IDE
Yes, I’d love to live forever, or at least, much longer than my usually expected allotment of years.
On the other hand, I would also like to retain the option of cashing out early if, for whatever reason, immortality wasn’t all I expected.
And the usual caveats apply–along with extended life should come extended health, keeping my good looks, the usual conditions. I don’t want to wind up like that dude in Greek mythology…
I am 77 now, and although I am perfectly happy with being alive, and would like to go for as long as possible, I have also come the realization lately that I have really done everything in my life I need to do, and most of what I want to do. So if the Reaper comes after me tonight, I will be ready. Just let me be asleep when it happens.
Wasn’t it Mickey Mantle who once said; “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”?
The religions always insist, however, that God is omniscient, all powerful and eternal. I suspect that this is because deep down inside we all know we are ignorant, helpless and mortal. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s not too high a price too pay for even one brief lifetime in this marvelous universe.
Cell processes replication, etc and all of our neurons in our brains, heart and muscles use minerals, calcium potassium. Vitamin supplement pills are a modern convenience, luxury, and privilege proven by biochemistry, molecular biology which is biochemistry and physics. We had to get everything from food and vegetables in the past, but we don’t today. This does not mean that these are a substitute for food and vegetables, but an diet enhancement which can save time. The body also needs raw foods like vegetables, fruit which have enzymes. The enzymes are destroyed in cooked food. It is clear the longevity is genetic including energy and stamina, but that does not mean one should not try to live that maximum one can live genetically. Consequently, diet, stress and lifestyle also influences the life span. Ultimately, no matter how good the diet and taking the right vitamins one will die because that is how the system of life is designed. I don’t think there can be any physical immortality.
Well I don’t know about immortality as such, but being 51 and sitting here receiving chemotherapy while I’m typing this, I can assure you that I am very much interested in making it to 52! Fortunately my chances are looking good.
Just a few centuries ago the average life expectancy was around 30. Just a couple of decades ago, my cancer diagnosis would’ve been a death sentence.
I am OK with it if I don’t make it to 52. What I have accomplished etc. will have to suffice, I have no regrets. If I do make it to 52, I am also quite happy to be here for the 20 or so years I am likely to have ahead of me if I look at the age most of my family members have managed to reach. I would get to see my last born grow up (she turns 2 next month) and with a bit of luck I’ll get to see what Europa Clipper discovers at Jupiter and if any Starships manage to land people on the Moon and even make the trip to Mars.
Beyond that, if medical advances can get me to 100 or beyond, preferably in an active non-vegetative state, I would also welcome it, as long as there is interesting stuff to learn and to do and to experience.
You can ask me how I feel about living another 100 years, 50 years from now.
It is already expensive to keep on living. Medical aid with gap cover costs us around R10000 monthly (roughly $500). And they won’t pay for anything they regard as cosmetic or whimsical or unnecessary. If you want to extend your life, you must be able to earn your keep, so to speak.
It may in future become possible to upload your mind to some sort of device in some form or another. I don’t know if that version of you will be the same person as you. That version of you might also be able to form a symbiotic relationship with some form of AGI. You may even be able to download that person or entity into another biological body, to some extent. Will that be ethical or desirable? Who knows.
As for overpopulation concerns, once we start mining asteroids and turning them into space habitats, there is unlimited real estate in the solar system to accommodate trillions of humans and other forms of consciousness. To my mind the expansion of consciousness can’t be a bad thing.
Not intending to turn this into a religious discussion but interestingly, the idea of seeking immortality in our present human form was actually addressed and warned against in the Bible in Genesis chapter 3;
22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.
So this question is ancient indeed.
That is a warning that should be heeded or there is hubris. Another biblical quote: John 10:28 “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.” John 17:3 “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
Jung wrote that it was important that one should have a concept of life after death as though this life was not the final end, the non material aspect of it. This only works if one has lived and Earthly life and fulfilled it’s Earthly obligations.
Its ironic how in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was Man’s Original Sin.
But Odysseus had his men tie him to the mast so he could know for himself “how his naked ears were tortured by the sirens sweetly singing’.
I think it’s important to note that in the story it is the tree of knowledge of good and evil not the tree of knowledge.
Interestingly enough, a few books later in Genesis the ages of the patriarchs are listed. The older ones averaged about 900 years, while the later ones had to be content with less than 200 years.
Maybe an extended life span of a few hundred years is the sweet spot for biological humans.
Seriously, are we going to base our ideas on a storybook? Today, with very benign conditions, just a few people live over a century. and none (provably) beyond 120. We already live longer for our size and metabolism than any other mammal. There is no reason to believe we can live much longer without extensive rejuvenation treatments, or even if that is desirable for society.
I was going to avoid saying anything on this. But then I remembered my comment about parabiosis, using blood of young people for life extension, and how I consider this ghoulish and vampire like. It offends my libertarian instincts. There are far better approaches to life extension that do not involve taking anything from young people that I am pursuing.
That’s when I realized that libertarianism, in general, actually does represent a higher and more logically coherent system of morality than that of the Abrahamic religions. The reason is because we actually do respect the autonomy and liberties of others. Religions such as Christianity do not. Rather they strike me as being totalitarian personality cults not too dissimilar to those of Stalinism and Hitlerism.
This discussion of Christian mythology and of The Fall in particular reminds me of what I consider to be the best explanation for the emergence of the Abrahamic religions and of The Fall in particular. That is Julien Jaynes theory of the origin of human consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Organized religion is a residual effect of the bicameral mind.
I suppose if the mind could be reset it would not be that bad, I mean if we built up too many bad memories making life miserable that path could be averted. Perhaps we have all our memories stored in a silicon state and then we can erase unpleasant memories making life more pleasurable.
I like the idea of cryogenic sleep and waking up in the future, but it will always be science fiction. Freezing a person kills them. I really like that episode of Twilight zone when some gold thieves go into a cryogenic sleep and wake up one hundred years in the future. There is the idea of slowing down the aging process genetically and making one live longer, but I agree immortality for the physical body is impossible. Mother nature has a semi immortality because through genes and genetics, she never dies. The only way to have immortality is with a good spiritual, intuitive viewpoint that includes the possibility of the soul being immortal. Reincarnation is one idea. We all could be the reincarnated souls of the individuals who came before us if we look at the level of consciousness being lower in the past and higher today in the present which will be even higher in the future, the collective consciousness. All of our science, technology and psychology was theorized and discovered by the brilliant minds scientists of the past. Our lifestyle Our knowledge and first principles have been build up over centuries. Einstein, Jung, Freud, etc might have immortality considering we still use their principles today and they will never be forgotten as being part of important history. We don’t exist without the past and people who came before us. The same will be true for the people of the future.
But imagine a scanning machine so powerful it can scan every protein in the brain and its orientation and then have a machine remake that configuration and we should have a functioning brain again. In the far future that may be possible, we will start with fruit flies first shall we.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y
The link to the nature article shows a connectome of the Drosophila brain. It was a very impressive achievement, but many orders of magnitude simpler than locating every protein and replicating it. [You need to add a lot other other types of compounds, notable lipids that make up most of the nerve fibers shown in that connectome. And don’t forget the water!]
But why stop at proteins? For full fidelity, atoms and their bonds would be better. But there is a problem. One doesn’t want a perfect copy, but rather a functional copy of the parts that involve the mind, and to discard the broken or diseased parts, such as the plaques that can accumulate, and a repair of damage such as lesions. Any autoimmune system should be reset. You probably need to reset. IOW, to make a useful, de-aged brain without damaging the mind, is going to be more difficult than replicating it. If the plan is to transfer the mind to another substrate, the new vessel will have to be more than a connectionist model, as brains and minds respond to other factors like hormones and feedback from interacting with the body (e.g. eating).
The slow model that I postulated would have to be far more than silicon circuits unless one was prepared to have very limited experience. That might be a living hell. Those Futurama cartoon “heads in jars” would likely quickly go insane unless coupled to virtual worlds to experience what would appear to be a normal, embodied life.
It seems to me that it is infinitely easier to create synthetic minds of great intelligence than to try to copy wetware brains and minds in a way that provides true longevity for the minds.
The brain is a finite resource, and a human’s remote past fades into the dim mists of perceived time. Even with a mortal life much of one’s past is lost to memory; with immortality aeons will be shed like leaves of a tree in autumn. The physical body-mind complex will have a continuity based on replacement of atoms and molecules, and likewise the person will also be replaced.
Five minutes of warm cerebral ischemia will kill a human brain: after the EMS folks called to a cardiac arrest restart the circulation; they have many-a-time brought to the Emergency Department a brain dead person whom I referred for admission and certification of brain death.
They were brainstem dead with absent calorics in the Emergency Department.
Hypothermia on the other hand can be associated with an agonal bradycardia or no heartbeat, and such patients have recovered upon warming and I referred them for admission for observation. “Not dead until warm and dead”.
Those folks who are frozen minutes or more after a warm death ain’t gonna make it.
Hey Paul,
That last post is a bit different from interstellar travel, although I can well imagine that you got on to it via the probability that eternally living machines will be the travelers. Anyway… for me there’s an easy answer to the question you pose.
No.
Reasons being:
1) I just want to do the same thing (regarding death) that all of my ancestors have done.
2) Humans are not meant to be immortal, if we can give any credence to the track record.
3) Humans should just be content being what they are.
4) Wanting to be something that we are not is just dumb… like my wife’s student who insists that she is a cat. Her parents actually allow her to continue in this belief and insist that her teachers encourage it, which is even dumber than what their daughter is trying for. Kids, I guess, should be given some room to be dumb, but parents… well…
Anyway, no immortality for meow, please. Nine lives, maybe, especially if I could choose when they would be (what a nifty idea for a SF story). Infinite lives, no thanks.
I use gotu kola, and my research mentions that this herb has been utilized in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. According to legend, an ancient Chinese herbalist lived for over 200 years after using gotu kola.
Recent studies suggest that a significantly higher percentage of 5-year-olds today may live to be 100. Genetic research indicates that the genes responsible for our aging process could be reversible. Overall, experts agree that the human body has the potential to reach 150 years without any genetic modifications. Additionally, organ cloning technology is advancing rapidly.
The potential for immortality could offer many benefits, especially if one can maintain good health. For instance, it might allow us to travel to distant planets, like Alpha Centauri b, on a interstellar soliton warp drive cruise ships to see all the strange creatures that exist there. This possibility could provide insight into the Fermi Paradox; perhaps immortal beings choose not to visit Earth, as direct contact could be detrimental to their lifespan.
Being a radical life extensionist myself (and doing my own DIY stuff) I would say that in term of morality, it is purely a matter of personal choice. Either you want it or you don’t. Either choice is acceptable. What is NOT acceptable is forcing others to make which ever choice YOU think the correct one. You cannot claim to believe in individual liberty in any meaningful sense while at the same time claim that it is wrong for people to choose unlimited healthy lifespans.
Cryonics is medical time travel, an ambulance ride into the future. It is really a form of migration. Instead of migrating across a distance, you are migrating into the future. Since I’ve already have made this kind of migration twice in my life (once from a relatively small town to Southern California and once from Phoenix Arizona to Tokyo Japan) I can claim to be psychologically equipped and capable of making a similar move 200 years into the future. I even know that it will be like upon reanimation. The first 6-8 months I will hate it. Then I will slowly come to like it. About a year after reanimation I will feel the strong sense of true openness and will come to feel true happiness and joy. Those of us into radical life extension are into it for one and only one reason. We really truly desire the infinite possibilities and true openness of an unlimited personal future.
You know what the best part of cryonics will be, if it actually works and we come out the other end? We will come out into a society where our world-view will be predominate. All the “deathist” world-views will be an artifact of history, just like a lot of beliefs of medieval Europeans are regarded today. This is what I really look forward to.
This seems like a very libertarian POV. No consideration of the consequences. Like tourism, it can be sustainable for the few, but when everybody travels to the location, the “pristine” nature of the location is destroyed. This is now epitomized by some tourist locations banning gigantic cruise ships and having to charge tourists entry to pay for the damage caused by the sheer volume of people, let alone the odd vandal.
For those insistent on living “forever”, maybe it is best if they take themselves off the planet and live elsewhere.
Look, I’m not talked about building a coal burning plant that will spew out soot all over the place. I’m talking about the right to life, which is the most fundamental right of all. That you would value health and vitality as less significant than some other social cause or value is utterly astonishing.
As Alex pointed out, if most people chose cryonics it would not take long before most of the world economy would be consumed with caring for the dead. Multiple billions of them. At some point the living might revolt and collectively pull the plugs saying the future shall not be held hostage to the past.
By “consequences” you must be referring to overpopulation. Since very few of us into life extension have kids or want to have them, there is no overpopulation problem. Hence no consequences.
Besides, you’re not keeping up on current events. Now it seems like a lot of people are talking about the depopulation problem. How countries like China and Japan are now loosing people. I don’t think much of this. But a lot of people, including Elon Musk, are making a big deal out of this on the ‘Net.
You know, if you want your death, you can keep your death.
I’m not sure you are thinking through even the first-order consequences.
Firstly, when everyone is an immortal (and why should it be otherwise since the claim is that it is so desirable?) then to maintain a stable population, there can be no offspring. No new people in the world.
Before that there will be immortals and everyone else. With the current longevity compared to just a century ago, organizations will be largely static, with immortals climbing the social ladder and staying there…indefinitely. No room for people to assume those positions. That is similar to the inherited position in society…aristocrats. And we know what happens when that becomes too stifling.
The social implications are likely to be far more extensive. How many are good vs bad?
That is why I say that immortals should take themselves off-planet. Limited lifespan people can continue on Earth and maintain that “circle of life” with the rest of the biosphere.
[q]”That is why I say that immortals should take themselves off-planet. Limited lifespan people can continue on Earth and maintain that “circle of life” with the rest of the biosphere.”[/q]
Well given that most of us are into space colonization as well, that’s not a bad idea. In fact, there is an SF novel where its like that. The only problem is that the Earth governments ended up forming a “deep state” in the form of a hivemind, attacked Mars with nanotech weaponry and then claimed jurisdiction over the rest of the solar system. Do you think the life extensionists in that scenario got the right of return as a result? The Martians? They developed some funky new physics that allowed them to move Mars to a new solar system, where Earth governments could never find them.
As far as stagnation is concerned, I think this is a bogosity. People loose aspirations because they age. Not the other way around. Young people do start-ups because they can. They can afford the risk. Older people cannot. This is a manifestation of the aging process itself, nothing else.
In any case, public debate about curing aging is superfluous anyways. I believe (as do many others) that the cost barrier has dropped to the point where it is within the resources of the DIY community to cure aging on our own. Since we no longer need public finance to accomplish our objectives, we have no need for the public debate either. Like that old Nike slogan. We just have to Do It, and make it a fait accompli to the rest of the world.
In order to decide about immortality of the self, you first need to know yourself, or what the self is. When you live fifty years, what you were as a child seems so remote – you’ve forgotten things, changed priorities, learned things, have different emotions and aspirations; it’s like being a different person. Most of the atoms are different, most of the synapses are different, even some of the biological regulatory pathways have changed with age. Even the memories you think have endured from that time have apparently been re-encoded many times since.
To be a “different person”, like two people walking past each other on the street, simply means that their neurons don’t at present have a route of communication, a way to share memories directly. Even inside the same brain, the neurons are different cells. The self is either some mode by which consciousness happens that is universal and shared between all the people of the cosmos, or else something so particular that it doesn’t extend beyond one time and place in life… at least, in this particular revision of the universe. Or both are true – notably, Kemetism distinguishes between a “ka” and a “ba” representing those separable aspects that can be reunited in another world. I would hypothesize some Judeo-Christian concepts of the soul relevant above need to be analyzed in that context (when the Israelites were civil engineers in Egypt) to be more fully understood.
Basically, people are much too worried about not being immortal. It is only the shallow, empty doctrine of materialism that pervades our society, with its perverse and unprovable claim that the universe is random and meaningless and unfeeling, which gives us this terror. We should be more fearful about the misery inflicted on others in the world, on future generations, because we are they.
Of course, preservation of primary knowledge in any form – including corpsicles – is a worthy task for the archivist, and I shouldn’t completely disparage efforts to accomplish that.
The idea that only the superrich can benefit from DIY life extension is hogwash.
This is my approach:
https://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/94224-manipulating-mitochondrial-dynamics/page-58#entry903440
https://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/100363-stem-cell-self-renewal-with-c60/page-66#entry917974
People who say that only the rich can do this tend to be leftists who are often hostile to individual action in many other areas of endeavor. Ignore such people and your life will improve.
@Abelard
The 2 posts by “Guest” on self-medication reminds me why we need to do real clinical trials rather than accept anecdotal reports of uncontrolled self-administration. Just as a single example, this link is to the latest study I could find on the use of Fullerene and neural stem cell effects. [Note the IC50 range that should give some pause.] Can one even replicate the processing of the C60 in the paper at home?
By all means knock yourself out following these recipes.
BTW, have you considered parabiosis with a youngster? Daily blood transfusions might be sufficient.
I have done and periodically do both of these protocols. The first, mitochondrial fission/fusion, has restored my body shape to the same tightness I had 35 years ago. The second, stem cell proliferation with senolytics, is a little more ambiguous. But it has restored head hair.
I refuse to consider parabiosis with young people. For one, I consider it ghoulish. As somewhat vampire-like in that you are consuming something from someone else. For another, I’m not convinced that it works.
You know, I don’t understand your attitude towards this. I was in L-5 Society back in the day. When in the “milieu” (late 80’s SoCal), it was generally understood that radical life extension, space colonization (L-5 style), and libertarianism fit together as a set. Most of the L-5 people (OASIS) had no interest in cryonics. But they recognized it as worth pursuing even though they had no interest in doing it themselves. I remember Keith Henson saying at a space development conference in 1986 that all true “spacers” were into life extension and cryonics because that was the only way they were actually going to get to space.
How someone who runs or comments in a space-related blog such as Centauri Dreams fails to relates to this is astonishing to me.
Parabiosis. The last I read was that researchers are homing in on the important molecules that may perhaps be taken as a periodic injection. We’ll see. Who knows, perhaps the ingredients will not be dissimilar to the Guest cocktails. Either way, there will be clinical trials to determine efficacy and side effects.
I can point out a SF series that depicts radical life extension in a very positive light and is one of the very few SF “universes” I would actually like to live in.
This is Peter Hamilton’s “Commonwealth” sage (Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained) as well as the “Void” trilogy. The commonwealth depicts a free society of 600 planets linked by wormholes where radical life extension is the norm and there is a incredible range of opportunities and life style choices. You cannot read these novels and not want to live in this kind of society. The Commonwealth sage is my absolute favorite SF I have read.
I’ve never read Asimov’s Caves of Steel. But I am somewhat familiar with the story. What I cannot fathom for the life of me is why anyone would want to live in his Earth society over that of the Spacer worlds.
It was not a case of Earthers wanting to live in terrestrial cities, but the Spacers blocking Earth from having starships and colonizing new worlds. Sound familiar?
Asimov retcons his novels to a common universe by eventually having Earth gain starships and the prolific population outcompeting Spacers. The lack of robots and an Earth left as an irradiated planet are also given explanations.
Yes, the Spacer worlds were very attractive, and Gladia on Solaris lives for centuries. Yet those 50 Spacer worlds were socially very static. Even the long lifetimes of the inhabitants resulted in research slowing down. OK, this is fiction, as are all Sci-Fi novels that can only offer stories around the human condition. Yet we can see the effects of longevity even today – witness the Murdoch media empire succession issues as 93-year-old patriarch Rupert marries his 5th wife while still notionally the head of the company. Can you spare a thought for King Charles III whose mother lived to 96 (her mother reached 101) leaving Charles to inherit the throne at the ripe age of 74. he spent a long time as a heir-in-waiting.
If life extension was granted to everyone, it would just mean endless more decades in toil, with no hope of retiring. IMO, this cannot happen until we have a post-scarcity civilization. But even this can go wrong as the satirical Fred Pohl story “The Midas Plague” outlines.
As I said, consequences.
I don’t know about the set of common beliefs/aspirations of the L5 Society members. I do recall the Co-Evolution Quarterly special on O’Neill’s space colony concept and the pushback from some in that community. No mention of longevity, AFAIK. Space colonies had a brief vogue, but are now coming back into style for various reasons. I still support their development, as long as they are democratized and do not become the escapes for the superrich as depicted in the movie Elysium.
Let say that space colonization (the cost of fabricating the habitat itself as well as getting to it) drops to the point it is self-financing by groups of people who choose to go there on their own, would you have any problem with a group of “Heinleinian” type people building their own habitat and going out on their own? I assume this is what you mean by “democratized” space colonization.
Of course not. Ideally, they don’t cause a lot of damage doing so, so good luck to them. Now if their project[s] caused considerable environmental damage to Earth, that would be a different matter. But if they source most of the mass for space resources, as O’Neill envisaged, and just took themselves and some hi-tech components to space, then of course that would be OK.
Now if they threatened to lob large rocks onto Earth [c.f. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress], then Earth authorities would have to retaliate.
“Now if they threatened to lob large rocks onto Earth [c.f. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress], then Earth authorities would have to retaliate.”
Well, yeah.
For those advocating cryogenics or similar to be reanimated in teh future, I don’t regard living an alloted lifetime but stretched over longer periods as anything like living “longer”. Living is a subjective experience, and finding ways to sleep for long periods to extend the period of absolute time to experience awakeness could be aq fraught experience, with no way to return.
We know that theortically time dilation can work so that a life can similarly stretch into the future, a form of one-way time travel.
The life extention research focuses in extending the life of a healthy, physical body. What seems missing is being able to ensure the brain can be similarly kept healthy. A senile mind in a young body makes little sense to me.
One way to ensure a mind can truly live for a long time is transfering it to a synthetic substrate. While I doubt the rather brutal ideas of direct mind uploading would work, I do wonder is a slow migration of the mind into prostheses might work. Eventually the mind would be fully contained in the synthetic brain and the biological body discarded.
Then there is the question of whether relocating to the future will be comfortable. As one gets older, one slowly loses connection with the ideas and behaviors of the yonger generations. As least this happens slowly. But what if one is reawakened in a future that is incomprehensible? Would a first meillennium person transported to the 2nd millennium be able to understand the world and how to function in it? It may prove impossible unless synthetic environments are provided that are not too dissimilar to teh world one left – a version of the “Truman Show” for each time period.
My last thought is whether immortality of any sort wther biological life extension or artificial is a good idea. Societies change and that is needed for progress. A world of ancients will slow that progress down. If such immortality was granted, perhaps it would be best if those immortals left Earth to live elsewhere, in habitats or in other star systems where they could live their lives in environments similar to the social and technological ones they were most comfortable with.
I would like to live as long as I would like to live.
Hi Paul,
FYI they’ve opened a Cryonics facility here in Australia:
https://southerncryonics.com/
Think it’s registered as a cemetery. It should be noted that once someone is pronounced dead (clinical death) they are not necessarily information theoretic dead until after 1/2 an hour or so when the brain starts to decay or the body is buried or cremated. Who knows what medical advances will be available in 200 years time (nanobots etc), still I agree the chance of someone being revived in the future from cryosuspension is very remote (0.001%?), assuming the cryonics facility with the regular nitrogen topup supply survives that long. The chances of being revived once buried or cremated is 0.
Cheers, Paul.
In the 2011 science fiction film In Time: “In 2169, people are genetically engineered to stop aging on their 25th birthdays and are given one free year to live. Everyone has a timer on their forearm that shows their remaining time; when it reaches zero, the person “times out” and instantly dies.”
Because humans remain greedy and cliquish even in the future, there are the rich who literally have lots of time on their hands (or forearms in this case) and the rest who have to keep working to earn enough time points just to stay alive, again in the literal sense.
As a result, the rich, who have centuries of time to live, do physically little so they are not injured or killed (they are not invulnerable at least, although I am amazed they didn’t try to find ways to fix that issue as well).
However, we meet one genetically wealthy character who has lived for 105 years and is bored with his existence, so he decides to off himself after giving all his time to our main character, who is of course poor and lives day-to-day. The rich guy’s final message to our hero is “Don’t waste my time.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time
Does not being immortal somehow almost paradoxically give our lives some kind of meaning? That it is finite has more value than living forever, where we might end up doing awful things because there would be fewer consequences or instead just sit around and eventually become bored to the point of catatonia.
This just reminded me of another science fiction film that focused on the subject of immortality and how the elite few who have serious longevity deal with it (the answer is, not well, of course):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz
Humans are limited biological creatures with more knowledge than smarts. Either we will need to change (genetic engineering, cybernetics) to match our intellects both morally and ethically, or we will have to pass the mantle of smartest terrestrials on to something else who can handle and use such powers appropriately.
All the talk of cryonics and resurrection reminded me of Simak’s Why Call Them Back from Heaven?
I used to be signed up with Alcor; I dropped my membership when I got married, and concluded that my finances weren’t enough to afford cryonics and fulfilling my duty to support my family properly. If I won the lottery? I’d likely sign up again. In the meanwhile I do what I can with a careful selection of supplements, periodically reevaluated, to slow the aging process. Who knows? Though I don’t expect it, maybe I’ll live long enough for rejuvenation to become an option, and in the meantime, my life is pleasant enough, I have friends, a loving wife, a great son. I’d like to see what he makes of his life. I’d like to see where mankind goes in the future, and be part of it.
I think people who don’t want life extension, and ideally immortality, tacitly assume that aging continues, and it will be an eternity of being old and wrinkled, with shrinking horizons and capacities. But that makes no sense; People die *because* they get “elderly”; Immortality would require making and keeping people young.
And part of being young is neural plasticity. To be biologically young is to be mentally, not just physically, flexible.
A world of immortals would not be a world of people who just happened not to die. It would be very different from what we see now.
I’m glad you raised this point. I think we would all like to maintain this if possible, even with our current lifespans.
But consider, we are very different people from when we were children and even when we were in our young adult lives. Friends from school are usually very different if you meet them after several decades. Now consider what this plasticity will mean over a millennium. While you may feel like the same person, you will be very different after a millennium. Either you have to maintain friendships over that time, or everyone you know will become strangers. Maybe you will have a constantly changing set of friends, both because of personality changes, and perhaps simply to maintain interest and stave off boredom. What seems certain is that a brain with finite capacity will be constantly discarding memories as they are replaced with new ones. This will cut you off from people you have known for a long time. [No doubt your life will be stored electronically to provide recall to mitigate that as experiments in that area are already being done.]
Bottom line is that neural plasticity will be important [at least for people who with to remain curious and eager to learn new things], but there will be social consequences that some people will accept whilst others will not.
“I think we would all like to maintain this if possible, even with our current lifespans.”
Actually, that’s possible. “Valproate”, a drug prescribed for a variety of conditions ranging from epilepsy to migraines, has a side effect of inducing neural plasticity. Adults given it have been able to learn perfect pitch, something you normally can’t do outside of childhood.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00102/full
I keep track of an post articles related to life extension in various facebook groups.
1. “Only for the rich.” Well, the rich want to sell it to you and get richer. The researchers involved are not just going to do all the work so and handful can keep it for themselves. And insurance companies would save all kinds of money as youthful bodies tend to not need as much care.
2. “Overpopulation.” Just taking the habitable land on Earth divided equally gives everyone an acre. But indoor vertical farming shows you can grow food anywhere and takes up over 90% less space and uses over 905 less water, and no soil or Sun is needed.
3. Near term there are a few things that seem promising. In research is the cloning of mitochondria which then get introduced in a youthful state into the body. This could at some point become as easy as giving you an injection based on your blood type. The only question right now is how much rejuvenation will one get.
Plasma filtering involves, right now, a tried and true method of having a blood transfusion with yourself, and while you blood is out of your body the aged factors are removed and replaced with saline and/or a protein. You can get this now outside of the U.S. but researches in the U.S. caution people as they want more research done for safety concerns.
Neither of these would be THE fountain of youth but they look to be a bridge to the next bridge, and the next after that. If you are still alive in a decade you will probably have death become an option rather than a rule aside from accidents.
As far as living forever goes, I don’t know, but I want the option.
Let’s not oversell this. Vertical farming is very expensive compared to field farming. An analogy might be the difference in cost of building a wattle hut compared to a high-rise apartment. There is a reason all the controlled environment farming is very niche e.g. ultra fresh leafy greens for local high-end restaurants.
. How will the cloned mitochondria be introduced into the majority of cells in the aging body? This isn’t like viral infections. Currently, mitochondria are best introduced into the germ cells by injection for what are called 3-parent babies.
Dialysis centers already do blood filtering. However, do we have the information to identify the “aging factors” let alone the technology to remove them?
Medical science to clinical practice is an extremely slow process. Maybe some or all of this will be available by the time we have mature fusion drives and experimental anti-matter rockets.
I’m going to side with Abelard and some of the other enthusiasts on the narrow political issue. There are few rights more fundamental than the right to health care (in theory at least, if not in current events). There is no particular point where we have any special reason to say “wups, you’ve lived too long”. The consequence of having a few immortals knocking around is minuscule compared to exponential population growth. And excessive population can be managed, as always, by the traditional Four Horsemen – either we war down the numbers, or lose them to crime and oppression, or plague breaks out, or there is a famine. Who here would rather volunteer their own great-grandparents to death, than drop a bomb on a random point on the map of the far side of the world?
That said, I don’t think we have so much to fear. The wealthy, especially, have their pathologies. If anyone can even consider volunteering the whole world for a timed mandatory suicide, surely we could instead choose to be uncaring about all those who volunteer to end their lives even in the most disorderly and spontaneous fashion. Given enough rolls of the dice, eventually everyone’s morale will hit a low spot, and this little exponential tail of the Malthusian Problem would simply go away. Besides, I also don’t believe that the current tactics to fight aging will really yield very much extra time before cancer and other more peculiar health issues close in. The friskier you make your cells, the easier it is for them to start a side hustle.
Cryogenics is a form of historical archiving, so it should not be actively discouraged. I don’t believe the corpsicles are going to wake up to be “real people”, though – they are more likely to be scanned to some level of precision, studied by neurological historians, used to make servant AIs, or at most, used to imbed the semblance of a human personality into a homunculus made of 3D printed tissue and designed from the neuron up to be a hapless slave to either man or machine. I think it takes a great amount of courage to volunteer for one of those cryogenic pods.
There was a play by Nigel Kneale (of Quatermass fame) called Wine of India where the choice was a young age until 70 and then quick euthanasia, or natural aging and death. The theme was the various arguments for an against the each choice.
Today, we would probably extend the euthanasia to mid-70s in the US. However, one could see that that age could be politically adjusted much as pension ages are today.
I don’t see any social stability for the wealthy few having life extension any more than the current unfairness in the US healthcare system. A few living to 200 or more would add further insult to the system. Death and Taxes are supposed to come for everyone, but if death is removed (and taxes are already much reduced for the superrich) that might just be too much to tolerate. So it must diffuse into the whole population, even to parts of the world that already have life expectancies far lower than the rich countries. And when that happens…
I’m not convinced by socialist or Malthusian objections to life extension. First, the problem with elite wealth is a social structure that preserves this wealth and inequality; we notice little actual change when the wealth is passed on, so their immortality would have minimal effect.
As for overpopulation … well, maybe mpox becomes the new smallpox and the population crashes to a few percent of what it was, or maybe the population grows exponentially until the next P-T boundary, but in any case, things will be different by the time a hundred years pass – which we need to much notice some people are immortal. Malthus has been beaten into the ground several times before, and it may happen again. There is no theoretical reason I know of why someone can’t invent an acoustic holographic soliton generator that can crack brick-shaped stones out of solid bedrock in an instant for very little energy. We could have all our roads, factories, farms, and preserves for endangered species deep underground, with perfectly conserved water and atmosphere and immunity from most nuclear attack. We’d need such tech to get people ready to colonize Mars, because I don’t think we’re really going to do that viably before we have successful human colonies under the Sahara and Antarctica, and on the ocean.
Immortality?… to wake up in a society like “idiocracy” ? ahh no thanks ! : )
…and what will become of you when our universe reaches thermodynamic balance, that even the protons will disintegrate and it will have only the night cold and immobility ?
Is immortality possible without the universe ?
To take things back to the overall theme of this blog – if one is worried about radical life extension leading to massive overpopulation pressures, then where else could the population ultimately expand to other than… Space and the stars.
Add to that the idea (which I’ve mentioned before) that travel between the stars becomes much more interesting if people can expect to reach the destination within their lifetime.
No kidding. Keith Henson, the founder of L-5 Society, said at a space conference in 1986 that all real “spacers” are into radical life extension for this reason.
I always said radical life extension and space colonization go hand in hand.
@David,
Life extension is taken as 2 things here.
1. Living longer while fully functional.
2. Stopping function by “cryosleep” (or similar) and just reaching the future but with the same functioning lifespan.
The 2nd is perfectly OK and is functionally similar to time-dilation and one-way time travel.
The 1st is very different, allowing for “Methusalahs”. These people could live on slow boat ships that we would now call generation ships, but which need only the original crew. I’m not sure how people living on even an O’Neill Island 3 could stand that for even a millennium. Maybe spend a lot of time in virtual worlds to eliminate boredom?
One could dispense with longevity to reach a destination by flight at very high velocities to benefit from time dilation. [Or cryosleep].
If we could “teleport” the passenger at c the trip would seem instantaneous.
The less ethical approach would be seed ships that only decant the passengers at or approaching the destination.
We cannot teleport humans or even their minds. That is not the case with artificial minds – robots and AIs. While the current bandwidth is low, it would be possible to transmit the details of the AI “mind” to the destination with instructions with the particular body form to reconstruct. Such AIs could travel the stars at c, spreading as fast as the slower ships were able to drop off the receiving technology. [Which is one reason I think artificial intelligence (artilects) will be the dominant “species” in the galaxy representing humanity.]
[And like Asimov’s Spacers and as well as their less intelligent robots, these artilects will have the ability to cross the stars and have extremely long functioning lives. However, they will not try to emulate human society which was the ideological flaw of the roboticist Spacer’s argument that they would send their humaniform robots to colonize the galaxy and make it receptive for the human Spacers. The Robots of Dawn.]
The scenario we cam up with in the late 80’s was based on the development of nanotechnology and the impossibility of FTL. The assumption that nanotechnology would lead to the development of a self-replicating “seed” that, when deployed, could generate a complete industrial infrastructure. Likewise, new bodies could be grown in vats. Thus, we “upload” our memories and identities into nanotech computer memory. Then send these, along with the self-replicating seed, on a starship to a destination star system. Once arrived, the seed would recreate an industrial infrastructure, including the vats. Then, new bodies based on either synthetic biology, would then be grown, and our memories and identities would then be downloaded into these freshly grown brains and we would be whole again.
This is still the scenario for interstellar migration I subscribe to assuming that FTL (warp drive) proves to be impossible. Naturally the new bodies, based on synthetic biology or nanotechnology, will not age. Aging and the fixed lifespan will be an artifact of history to us. Kind of like how we view medieval stuff today.
Now you understand why space colonization and radical life extension go hand in hand?
It goes without saying that transhumanists such as ourselves will not subscribe to archaic world-views that say that we cannot have life extension because some God or something or other does not permit it. I honestly do not understand the appeal this kinds of world-view.
In the 1985 novel Contact by Carl Sagan, the uberweathly fellow S. R. Hadden had himself frozen in deep space and flung out of the Sol system, with the hope that one day he would be found and revived by the right level and type of intelligent beings to continue living.
In the 1997 film version, Hadden died of cancer and was “buried” in Earth orbit, after living on the Mir space station in an attempt to stave off the disease.
In them more recent 3-Body Problem television series, one of the characters – who also happened to be otherwise dying of cancer – had his brain frozen and launched into space to meet the TriSolarians who were approaching Earth. Unfortunately, his spaceship went off course due to a technical error and we do not know if he will ever be found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc0N_7S3IWE
@LJK
IIRC, in the books he was found by the TriSolarians as he was revived and reconstructed and subsequently communicated with the main protagonists. [Book 3 – Death’s End ?]
A Hail Mary …. that worked.
The hope for some form of super medical technology to indefinitely extend physical life I think is a vain and foolish hope. This is the only hope of survival coming from the prevailing modern mindset of materialist scientism (making science into a sort of pseudo-religion). And as has been pointed out, sooner or later accident or other mishap will inevitably put an end to your physical existence.
However, there is a boatload of evidence from paranormal phenomena such as veridical near-death experiences, plus several very strong philosophical arguments, for a more spiritual nonmaterialistic viewpoint of existence, in which human consciousness is seen as it truly is, spirit or soul residing in the brain and body as an ultimately mobile center of consciousness that during an NDE for in stance separates from the body and brain to have experiences out of body and make observations that later investigators find it couldn’t possibly have done if not having left the physical body. Aside from veridical evidence there is the simple fact that NDErs have experienced an enhanced realer-than-real degree of consciousness while their physical brains were dysfunctional – clearly disproving materialism which says consciousness is nothing but the interactions of billions of neurons in the brain.
NDErs only get a glimpse of afterlife existence since they by definition are brought back into their bodies before irreversible physical death has occured, and other possible sources of information such as veridical mediumistic communications vary too much to make much of a consensus. So in my opinion all we can say for relative certainty is that there is a spiritual mobile center of consciousness that goes on into another existence after physical death.
The exact nature of this survival is another matter, that remains somewhat mysterious, but this information should at least assuage excessive fears of annihilation at physical death, the fears that engender so many hopes of technological eternal life in the physical.
Your definition of evidence appears to be quite different from the one that I’m familiar with.
I don’t want to discourage you from looking beyond our culture’s narrow sense of the material universe. However, I think your model asks for too much. To suppose a “spiritual mobile center” that hangs together outside of our Earthly life, capable of seeing and hearing with some extraphysical organ … well, it begs the question of why the split-brain patients and others with brain lesions can’t bring together all their thoughts internally, and of course why the blind can’t see and the deaf can’t hear with extracorporeal organs. The human experience of sensation, rods and cones, eardrums and cochleas … it’s all very, very specific to our particular planet (even our moonlight) and our biochemistry and ecology, and it is not the way that consciousness throughout the cosmos must perceive its existence.
The experiences you describe can sometimes be explained by the mundane functioning of the patient’s senses, but even if we venture a paranormal explanation, there are easier ways to do it. The patient might simply experience precognition, remembering what he will later find out happened while he was out. Or he might perceive other lives in the sense of parallel universes near our own in which he is more awake. In both these models, we suppose ordinary human neurons reconstruct some subtle information from outside the dimensions we suppose are accessible to us, but we don’t have to suggest that they move out and form a functional extracorporeal organism. Mind, this is not intended to argue there is no afterlife, no days of creation, no divine plan etc. – only that we don’t need ghosts to exist to make them conceivable.
Interesting article about being able to replace your brain (slowly), as well as brain body transplants.
This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little
The slow replacement makes sense, but will it work? Body transplants I find immoral. Essentially the argument is cloning a new pithed body (is that even possible?) and doing the “Spock’s Brain” transplant.
Eben if the brain rejuvenation doesn’t work, we should gain some new science about the brain. How we can tell the personality is truly the same without human experiments is a conundrum. Gross personality changes can be seen in animals, but subtle ones?
Thank you for sharing this one! We should study the idea, and keep an eye on what ARPA-H is up to. The MIT article has many useful links, but I didn’t see one to Hebert’s own editorial on the topic. I should note that unlike the MIT review, he suggests putting aborted fetal sources of brain cells aside “for now” (pending therapeutic cloning), focusing on induced pluripotent stem cells instead. Nonetheless, I find his quote peculiar that it is acceptable to use early fetal tissue where there “are no neurons, no sentience, and no person.”, if he then intends to differentiate those cells so that some or all of those things do exist. This is not his own peculiar problem, mind – the neuroscientists have been talking one another further and further out onto an ethical limb for the past twenty years.
Now I know well that some of the problems first and best addressed by transplant tactics – stroke, severe epilepsy, perhaps Alzheimer disease – well, it would be repulsive not to try to do something to help. If you can differentiate pluripotent stem cells from a stroke patient into new patches of brain tissue and perhaps help the rest of that brain find release from a mute and miserable existence, it would surely be wrong to mince at the cells’ potential pain. Still, we should understand that this falls within the province of war, where people accept doing some wrong in the hope of doing greater right. As we look to the proposals for “organoid intelligence” and observe the integration of private companies in this process, we should bear in mind that this all has the potential to go terribly wrong.
The priority and funding given to these projects ($110 million!) seems like cause for concern. It suggests an even more hierarchical approach to science funding, with one person having the power to direct large chunks of the budget to uncertain ends. Is there that much money to be had by developing long, slow, expensive therapeutics for stroke, or in developing a ‘brain rejuvenation’ treatment that is by no means an assurance of immortality? I’m struck that one party has aligned itself with the leading manufacturer of brain interface chips and the other now has started this project. The common thread may be the potential for control: if grafts can assimilate memories and talents, could they come with them preloaded? I fear many leaders around the world may be looking at their human livestock and dreaming of the day when they can print up or cybernetically program their workers with all the right skills and beliefs and loyalties to do their jobs, and nothing else.
@M.S.
Are you familiar with the Gerry Anderson puppet show Joe 90? Mind skills are uploaded temporarily to a child to do secret agent tasks.
My sense of injecting small amounts of neural stem cells is that they offer a patch of new cells and connections that the plasticity of the brain can train the connections to partially replace the functions that are lost, much as we see visual areas used for hearing when the subject is blind. I don’t see any way to replace skills as my skill at a task will not be wired up and connectable the same way in another brain.
To take the classic example – Phineas Gage – who went through major personality changes when his brain was severely damaged, I very much doubt he could be repaired in a way that would restore him to his pre-jury state. He might recover some important cognition, but while his personality would change it would not be restored.
I believe some organoids are being given some simple cognitive “skills”. What would that mean if these organoids were implanted into a brain? Would their wiring allow the brain to access the organoid’s “skill” or would the organoid be “reprogrammed” by the host brain? I am not sure we should even be thinking about doing these experiments in animals, let alone humans. Wasn’t there an experiment to implant brain cells modified with human genes into a mouse brain?
@Alex: I’m speaking beyond my competence, perhaps anyone’s competence at the moment. But implanting a graft of neuroblasts or other neuron precursors provides a huge range of options, and I can at least start to visualize some. Let’s imagine a very simple sort of neuron, a step up from a “brain pacemaker” mostly in that it is organic. Basically, it expresses BDNF, GDNF, and/or NGF, growth factors that promote the survival of neurons or long-term potentiation (which is related to memory), among other things. Implanting brain grafts into Alzheimer patients that are meant to stimulate and preserve brain tissue is probably a no-brainer, not a conspiracy. And it only makes sense to help them further by taking a basic action to preserve and restore language skill: use an optogenetic construct (such as Hebert was using) to activate these signals in a particular context. Basically, the brain processes data after hearing certain words in different places, which can be mapped with fMRI or weirder procedures. So you have the patient watch a series of videos, or better, hold conversations, about occupational topics, while using the light stimulus to reinforce and protect those cells by providing this modulator at the millisecond they are active. It is almost inadvertent that there are other topics that don’t seem worth protecting, other neurons which may eventually be crowded out.
More blatant interventions would be things like neurons that lead to positive or negative conditioning, whose connections could be trained the same way in order to improve motivation and fight depression. The siting of new grafts replacing old tissue would be chosen by AI, and the AI naturally would choose to obliterate the sites it predicts (based on what concepts trigger them) to cause the fewest behavioral side effects and the best occupational outcomes. It won’t even sound like you’re programming the patient like a microwave oven — the patient himself will be asking for this. And yet, even before it is corrupted, this system will already have the effect of taking over people’s minds.
As you indicate, it may require a lot of sophisticated control to get it right. I know that injection of neural stem cells that can deliver dopamine looks like a viable treatment for Parkinsons, so the correct controls seem to be working there.
For me, as I age and recall fails me, I would really like some treatment to help stabilize and even reverse this. Electro-therapy might help here. At least the internet is a decent prosthesis to help me in this regard – Wikipedia for facts, IMDb for movies and tv actors, a thesaurus for a word I can’t quite remember, a dictionary to make sure I am using a word correctly, and of course, rereading about subjects to refresh my memory.
But some things, like Alzheimers, cannot be fixed with neural implants. This disease needs another approach. Similarly with auto immune diseases that will not really be helped by just adding neural implants.
We certainly know a lot more about the brain than we did before, so I think we will be able to do something if only to reduce dementia and other degenerative brain diseases.
My last thought is that the neocortex is structurally a repeating pattern of columns (which in turn are composed of mini-columns). This suggests that if we know what each column/mini-column responds to, then it might be possible to insert a pretrained replacement that is induced to connect up correctly to its neighbors. This seems to be along the lines you suggest. It will take a lot of very advanced technology to implement, but if it can be done, then that should not alter personality of mind. However, I would also say why use neural material if an artificial prosthesis can be inserted instead? That is the idea of slow replacements that eventually leads to an entirely synthetic brains. [Markram’s Blue Brain simulation program in Europe is simulating parts of a mouse brain to respond as its wetware would. In principle this indicates that this approach should work.] These prosthesis would have to be very sophisticated, both responding correctly to naural signals, but also to chemical control.
So I think that you are correct, AFAIK, but the technology is going to need a lot of development to avoid building the neural equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. Brave new world!
I suppose generational starships might help your genes live forever.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/tech/design-an-interstellar-generation-ship-to-spend-decades-among-the-stars-with-project-hyperion-competition
Design an interstellar ‘generation ship’ to spend decades among the stars with Project Hyperion competition
By Conor Feehly published 18 hours ago
A new design competition, dubbed Project Hyperion, is calling for submissions for the design of a crewed interstellar generation ship.
To quote:
A new design competition, dubbed Project Hyperion, is calling for submissions for the design of a crewed interstellar generation ship. The project is part of study that is aiming to provide an assessment of the feasibility of crewed interstellar flight using current and near-future technologies, and hopes to inform future research and technology development as well as informing the public about logistics and potential of interstellar travel.
Project Hyperion link:
https://www.projecthyperion.org/
It is interesting that they are outsourcing, because they tried to design an upgrade to Daedalus with Icarus (not the best of names if you know your ancient Greek mythology) and they said they couldn’t get it to work, probably because of the whole nuclear fusion thing.
Gosh, if only there were another way to reach the stars using available technology…
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2016/09/16/project-orion-a-nuclear-bomb-and-rocket-all-in-one/
And here is this generation vessel plan from back in 2008…
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2008/06/18/the-ultimate-project-to-the-stars/
I will make my prediction yet again here: The first people to leave the Sol system for the stars will be a group of acolytes (read cult) for an uber rich individual who wants to immortalize themselves by expanding their genetics and their wealth into the wider Milky Way galaxy. They may also be leaving for legal reasons, making Alpha Centauri the new Seychelles.
They may do it with a hollowed-out planetoid or comet as an interstellar ark.
@LJK
Can we pack the ship with all the crazy uber-rich, put them in cryosleep with the promise to revive them, and then forget about it, leaving the ship orbiting somewhere in the Oort cloud?
Isn’t the ending of Don’t Look Up effectively your scenario? ;-)
Crewed ships with awake people will need to develop far better closed-loop recycling than we have today. Maybe fusion drives will be solved by then? I doubt any current design would work over the needed mission time. But do keep us informed of the winning entry.
My prediction does not come out of thin air. Biosphere 2 in Arizona was originally designed to allow several very wealthy fellows and their devoted followers a new home on Mars…
https://roamlab.com/biosphere-2/
https://www.salon.com/2021/03/27/the-inside-story-of-biosphere-2-a-forgotten-experiment-to-rethink-human-civilization/
Then there was the time drug advocate and guru Timothy Leary wrote to Carl Sagan while he was in prison (Leary, not Sagan) asking if the scientist could help him and his devoted followers leave the Sol system for another world…
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/carl_sagan_writes_to_timothy_leary_in_prison_1974
http://www.timothylearyarchives.org/carl-sagans-letters-to-timothy-leary-1974/
I am surprised you didn’t mention the B Ark…
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Ship_B
At least the B Ark reached Earth. :-)
Biosphere 2 clearly didn’t work as expected, as we know. One wouldn’t get far in an STL slowboat in even 1 year.
I think propulsion is a far easier problem to solve than an enclosed biosphere. Even if we simplify it using just recycling wastes to grow some sort of sustaining foods – like gene engineered algae.
If there is one reason why ETI doesn’t colonize other stars it would be because of the difficulty due to the complexity of biology. Even if planets were transformed in advance to match the homeworld, with fast ships it may be very hard to even rich the destination. Seed ships may be the best option if AI is good enough to ensure success.
I’m sure Sagan told O’Leary that it wasn’t possible at that time.
Even those super-rich who do not want to live in space or cannot quite afford it even on their wealth still want to stay alive and in luxurious comfort in the event society collapses or a big space rock hits Earth…
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/07/style/underground-bunkers-super-rich/index.html
Good luck with that. Did you watch the tv series Fallout based on the video game? I don’t believe they are closed cycle at all. I don’t know how they will get power for decades – mini-nukes? All the air has to be filtered for every noxious gas, radioactive elements, and, of course, bacteria and viruses.
Who wants to live inside even a large, luxurious house all the rest of your life? The same applies to slow space travel between the stars, except that you cannot even think about tasting unfiltered air and any live pictures of the outside to fake a view would have to be canned in a spacecraft.
At least it wouldn’t be grungy like the tv series Silo, or like the minimal interiors of the sci-fi tv episode Level 7[?].
You can help now to solve the lung organ shortage by investing in Frontier bio corp now at Republic crowdfunding:
https://republic.com/frontier-bio
This is the right time to invest because there may be big funding coming in now, Copy from my mail:
From: Eric Bennett
Sent: 03 November 2024 22:14
To: ciclo
Subject: Re: Funding
Thank you. I will reach out to him. If you know him personally, an intro email would be great :) If not, no worries and thanks for the tip!
Regards,
Eric Bennett
CEO | Frontier Bio
http://www.frontierbio.com
On Sun, Nov 03, 2024 at 7:09 AM, wrote:
An idea for you. Try reach out to Mellon for funding. Hes largest investor of Lygenesis and now this is his main focus. Hes one of UK richest.
https://www.lygenesis.com/about-us
The first part of Larry Niven’s World Out of Time (adapted from his story “Rammer”) tells of the memories of a frozen cancer victim being transferred to a brainwiped convict’s body. The cancer victim wakes up in a different body in 2190, finding himself in an incomprehensible society that forces puts him to work in deep space flying a Bussard ramjet.
What this tells me is that those who are frozen now and are eventually thawed out might be exposing themselves to exploitation. After all, you can’t expect anyone to thaw you out and give you a new life out of altruism.