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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.