The following essay is posted in its entirety.. and also as an attached word document. Full credit to Kevin Perrott for contacting Brin for this submission.
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FROM DAVID BRIN:
NOTE: there is a BOX below, designed to be set aside from the rest of the text. Can do?
Let me know if it works.
Db
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I Want More...
Immortality in Our Future.
By David Brin
(The following originally appeared in AOL's Online Magazine iPlanet in late 1999 as part three of a series commissioned specifically to discuss the new Millennium. Parts one and two are also available at http://www.davidbrin.com/ This version, expanded especially for the Immortality Institute, will be a chapter in Brin’s forthcoming nonfiction book, tentatively entitled 2020 Vision.)
Suppose you had a chance to question an ancient Greek or Roman -- or any of our distant ancestors, for that matter. Let’s say you asked them to list the qualities of a deity.
It's a pretty good bet that many of the “god-like” traits he or she described might seem trivial nowadays.
After all, we think little of flying through the air. We fill pitch-dark areas with sudden lavish light by exerting the mere twitch of a finger. Average folks routinely converse or observe events taking place far across the globe. Copious and detailed information about the universe is readily available through crystal tubes many of us keep on our desks and command like genies. Some modern citizens can even hurl lightning, if we choose to annoy our neighbors and the electric company.
Few of us in prosperous nations deem these powers to be miraculous, because they’ve been acquired by nearly everyone . After all, nobody respects a gift, if everybody has it. Instead, it is human nature to take such things for granted, like the air we breathe. And yet, aren’t these some of the very traits that earlier generations associated with divine beings?
Even so, there is one continuing exception. The most telling trait of all.
We remain mortal.
Our obsession with that fate is as intense as it was way back when the first angst-ridden epic was inscribed in clay -- the legend of mighty Gilgamesh and his search for extended life. Perhaps it feels more intense, since we overcame so many other obstacles that thwarted our ancestors.
Will our descendants conquer the last barriers standing between humanity and Olympian glory? As we’ll see, there are many bright people who feel we are on the verge of nothing less than deification.
Or may we encounter hurdles too daunting even for our brilliant, arrogant, ingenious and ever-persevering species?
So far in this book we have cast perspective on recent accomplishments carried over from the Twentieth Century and some near-term dilemmas we may face in the Twenty-First. Now let's take a long-view, exploring the possibility that our great grandchildren will be "great" in every sense of the word... and have problems to match.
Human Lifespan
Here’s the safest prediction for the next 100 years -- that mortality will be a major theme. Assuming we don’t blow up the world, or fall into some other catastrophic failure mode, human beings will inevitably focus on using advanced technology to cheat death.
Already the fruits of science and the Industrial Age give billions unprecedented hope of living out their full natural spans -- one of the chief reasons that our planetary population has expanded so. While it’s true that these benefits still aren’t fairly or evenly distributed, an unprecedentedly large fraction of Earth’s inhabitants have grown up without any first hand experience of plague or war or mass starvation. That rising percentage curve is more encouraging than the images you see on the 6 O’Clock News, though it offers cold comfort to those still languishing in poverty.
Suppose, through a mix of compassion, creativity and good luck, we complete the difficult transition and manage to spread this happy situation to everyone across the globe, solving countless near-term crises along the way. Will future generations take a full life span as much for granted as modern Americans do?
Of course they will.... and complain there’s nothing natural about an eighty or ninety-year time limit on the adventure and enjoyment of life.
Already, many proposed methods of life-extension have come up for discussion.
* Lifestyle adjustment
* Intervention and Repair
* Genetic Solutions
* Waiting for better times.
* Transcendence
The first of these, lifestyle adjustment, would seem to offer surefire immediate rewards. After all, most of the increase in average lifespan we've seen in recent centuries came from nothing more complicated than proper diet and hygiene.
But that statistical boost is deceptive! It was achieved by increasing the fraction of babies who make it all the way to the borderlands of vigorous old age. This had little to do with pushing back the boundary itself; the realm that we call "elderly" still hovers somewhere near the biblical three score and ten.
Do all animal species have built-in expiration timers? Some fish and reptiles may not, but most creatures -- and especially mammals -- do seem to have an inner clock that triggers every individual's decline to frailty after the middle years of fight-flight-and-reproduction run their course.
Still, there always does seem to be a glimmer in the eyes of those wanting more. For example, recent scientific results have stoked the fervor of those hoping for a dramatic increase in human life span.
For more than a decade, some studies have suggested an approach to slowing the senescence timer, a method that appeared to work in rodents, yeast, fruit flies and other organisms. Caloric restriction. By keeping experimental subjects hungry -- providing nutritious but carefully limited diets, or in some cases by delaying sexual reproduction -- researchers have as much as doubled longevity in a wide range of species.
As you might expect, quite a few human enthusiasts began eagerly applying these laboratory lessons -- limiting their caloric intake or else forbearing sex -- hoping to extend their own years through judicious abstinence. It may seem a difficult tradeoff, abjuring some of life’s most basic pleasures in exchange for more heartbeats. But some people clearly think it worthwhile.
Now comes news suggesting that difficult tradeoffs may not be necessary, after all, letting us literally have lots of cake and eat it too. According to a report in the November 23, 2002 edition of the journal Science, scientists may have found the core chemical process that is triggered in test animals by caloric restriction. Stewart Frankel of Yale University reported that an enzyme -- Rpd3 histone deacetylase -- may be key. In a recent study, flies with genetic mutations that resulted in lower levels of the enzyme lived 33% to 50% longer than normal, emulating the results of reduced caloric intake.
“If you decrease the level of the enzyme without eating less, you still get the life span extension”, Frankel said in a Reuters interview. Already eager companies are sketching out studies to find a drug that might eventually emulate these results in humans.
It all sounds quite terrific -- more high quality life span, while getting to eat whatever you like. What a deal
Alas, it may not be easy. In fact, I’ll put forward a wager, right now, that things won’t go according to plan.
First, a little perspective. Do all animal species have built-in expiration timers? Some fish and reptiles may not, but most creatures -- especially mammals -- do seem to have an inner clock that goes off whenever an individual passes his or her own species ‘middle age’, after the period of fight flight-and-reproduction has run its course, triggering a descent toward frailty and then death
Mice and elephants lead very different lifestyles -- one slow and ponderous, the other manic and fleeting -- yet rodents and pachyderms share the same pervasive pattern of aging. Individuals who survive the perils of daily life, from disease to predators, inevitably begin declining after they go through about half a billion heartbeats. (Elephants live much longer than mice, but their hearts also beat far slower, so their total allotment stays remarkably similar.)
The same holds true across nearly all mammalian species. Few live to celebrate their billionth pulse. No one knows quite what this coincidence signifies. Moreover, the program isn't rigid. As we’ve seen, researchers have as much as doubled the senescence timer in mice and flies, by keeping the test creatures hungry. Unfortunately, humans who have tried caloric restiction found no similar benefit. Beyond a slight increase in vigor and some reduction in heart disease, the results have been disappointingly slim.
This should come as no surprise, after a little reflection. Across history, many civilizations have fostered ascetic movements, sometimes in large colonies where dedicated individuals lived spartan, abstemious lives. After four millennia of these experiments, wouldn’t we have noticed by now if swarms of spry, 200-year old monks were capering across the countryside? There may be ample reasons why such simple measures work in animals, but not us.
Remember that billion heartbeat limit that seems to confine all mammals, from shrews to giraffes? It's a pretty neat correlation, till you ponder the chief exception.
Us. Most mammals our size and weight are already fading away by age twenty or so, when humans are just hitting their stride. By eighty, we've had about three billion heartbeats!
That’s quite a bonus. How did we get so lucky?
Biologists figure that our evolving ancestors needed drastically extended lifespans, once humans came to rely on learning rather than instinct to create sophisticated, adaptable, tool-using societies. The emphasis on learning meant children needed a long time to develop. Two decades weren't enough for a man or woman to amass expertise or pass complex culture on to new generations. Chimps and other apes share some of this lifespan bonus, getting about half as many extra heartbeats. So the adjustment must have begun millions of years ago.
So evolution has already slowed the human ageing process. In becoming the mammalian Methuselahs, we've already incorporated all the easy stuff . Including -- I am willing to bet -- the chemical effects that researchers recently stimulated in mice, through caloric restriction.
Believe me, I’d rather lose this bet! I am more hungry for years than for fatty foods.
But it sure does seem likely that little more overall longevity will be achieved by asceticism, or by pharmaceutically simulating drastic life-style adjustments.
Good diet and exercise may help more of us get our programmed eighty or ninety years -- and to spend more of them in decent shape. But to gain a lot more -- the same doubling that we see in ascetic mice -- we're going to have to work much harder. It may require deciphering every part of life’s blueprint, a project taking generations.
Disappointed? So much that you hardly even pause to be grateful for the triple bonus of heartbeats you already get?
Well, that’s how it always has been. We’re the beneficiaries of past breakthroughs that we take for granted. Likewise, if we leave our descendants a better world, they will simply assume the good parts and fume over consequences we never foresaw.
It is a pattern typical of adolescence, and one more clue that our adventure has barely begun.
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So what about intervention and repair?
Are your organs failing? Grow new ones, using a culture of your own cells!
Are your arteries clogged? Send tiny nano-robots coursing through your bloodstream, scouring away plaque! Use tuned masers to break the excess intercell linkages that make flesh less flexible over time.
Install little chemical factories to synthesize and secrete the chemicals that your own glands no longer adequately produce.
Brace brittle bones with ceramic coatings, stronger than the real thing!
In fact, we are already doing many of these things, in early-primitive versions. So there is no argument over whether such techniques will appear in coming decades, only how far they will take us.
Might enough breakthroughs coalesce at the same time to let us routinely offer everybody triple-digit spans of vigorous health? Or will these complicated interventions only add more digits to the cost of medical care, while struggling vainly against the same age-barrier in a frustrating war of diminishing returns?
I’m sure it will seem that way for the first few decades of the next century... until, perhaps, everything comes together in a rush. If that happens -- if we suddenly find ourselves able to fix old age -- there will surely be countless unforseen consequences... and one outcome that’s absolutely predictable.
We’ll start taking that miracle for granted, too.
-------------------------- More Life -- In Parallel? -------- (box)
How is the question of immortality dealt with in fiction? (More)
Though SF stories vary widely in discussing tvarious proposed methods of life extension achieving 'more years' , narly all portray tacking them onto the end... simply adding to the total length or increasing your life in 'series,' as it were.
In fact, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. What future era wants a bunch of a conservative old baby boomers hanging around, hoarding their money and getting in the grand-kids' way? In fact, modern biological science indicates that creatures grow old and die for very good evolutionary reasons.
No, what we could really use is more life... in parallel! Think about how frustrating it is to have so much that needs doing. The day is never long enough for us to handle all the chores, the jobs, the niggling details -- and simultaneously take advantage of this rich culture’s myriad opportunities for fun. How wonderful might it be to split into many selves each day, head in a dozen different dirrections at the same time, then reconverge into one all the memories into one continuing being by nightfall? Ah, to be in two -- or three or four -- places at once....
Sound weird? But that’s exactly the trend we have been following in computer design for the last decade. Multitasking -- arranging for your loyal PC to do several things at once -- has been a natural step. Operating in parallel seems right in the cyber world. What if something similar could be arranged for living human beings?
No, we aren’t talking about cloning. It is a popular misconception that cloning will produce a ‘duplicate” of any human being. We already make human clones -- called identical twins -- and even with nearly similar upbringings, no set of twins are ever homologous or indistinguishable people.
The “dittos” in my novel KILN PEOPLE aren’t clones. Rather, they are cheap artificial duplicates -- lasting only a single day -- that any person can make quickly on a 'personal copier' and dispatch to run errands, study, or handle business -- or engage in pleasures that are too dangerous for living flesh.
Or solve crimes! (And there would be many new types of crime.) Dittos dissolve after 24 hours, so they are highly motivated to make it home and download the day's memories. It's how they continue living, in the original organic brain.
Ah, but every neat solution creates new problems...
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On the other hand, it may not work as planned. Many scientists suggest that attempts at intervention and repair will ultimately prove futile, because senescence and death are integral parts of our genetic nature. After all, from a purely biological point of view, we individuals are merely the grist of evolution, here to strive, compete and reproduce, if we can.
If our australopithecine ancestors had been ageless immortals, wouldn’t that have bollixed the cruelly creative process of natural selection that produced us? Biologists who believe in the intrinsic genetic clock say we should be grateful for those three billion heartbeats. After that, the best service we can do for our grandchildren is to get out of their way.
Other experts disagree. They think the “clock” is a mere coincidence, having to do with steadily accumulating errors in our cells. In particular, they point to telemeres -- little chemical caps protecting the ends of our chromosomes -- which wear away with time until the sheltering layer vanishes and grave erosion starts affecting the vulnerable DNA strands, instead. This gradual chemical deterioration simulates a destiny clock, though some researchers hope it might be halted, if we learn the right medical and biochemical tricks.
Whichever side is right about the nature and evolutionary origins of the ageing clock, there are no obvious reasons why human beings can’t or won’t meddle with its programming, once we fully grasp how cell and genome work. Even if such tools come too late for today’s generation, intervention may help our descendants to live longer, healthier lives.
#
Long life may be just one of the benefits to spill from our rising pot of knowledge. Suppose we learn to emulate achievements of other Earthly species... say, hibernation. Might that bring us closer to another age-old dream, travel to the stars?
Hibernation, or suspended life, would also be a great way to travel forward through time. To see the future. Which brings up yet another way that some people think they can cheat death: by setting off on a one-way journey from our primitive era, hoping to emerge when civilization has solved many of the problems discussed here.
So far, our sole hope for such a voyage to the far-off future -- and a slim one, at that -- is something called cryonics, the practice of freezing a terminal patient’s body, after he or she has been declared legally dead. Some of those who sign up for this service take the cheap route of having only their heads prepared and stored in liquid nitrogen, under the assumption that folks in the Thirtieth Century will simply grow fresh bodies on demand. Their logic is expressed with chilling rationality. “The real essence of who I am is the software contained in my brain. My old body -- the hardware -- is just meat.”
Polls show that a majority of citizens today perceive cryonics enthusiasts as kooky, perhaps even a bit grotesque with their Frankensteinian interest in dead bodies. In fact, I share some of this skepticism, though perhaps for different reasons.
Suppose future generations can grow new bodies on demand, and are able to transfer something like your original consciousness out of a frozen, damaged brain. It remains to be seen why they would want to.
Anyway, today’s cryo-storage process is messy, complex, legally shaky, and terribly expensive. Wouldn’t any reasonable person -- one worthy of revival -- dedicate a lifetime’s accumulated resources to helping their children and posterity, instead of splurging it all on a chancy, self-important gamble for personal immortality?
And yet, cryonics devotees keep plugging away at their dream, refining their techniques, finding new ways to store brains with less damage and at lower cost -- in much the same way that past generations of putterers strove to develop machines that could fly. The funny thing is that we may never know when they cross a threshold and finally do manage to freeze somebody well enough to be revived at a future time. All that’s certain is that the techno-zealots will go on trying. They see Death as a palpable enemy that can ultimately be defeated, like so many others we’ve overcome during our long ascent.
Is there some point at which cryonic storage would become so simple -- so convenient and cheap -- that you would shrug and say “sign me up”? Suppose it took a thousand-dollar annex to your insurance policy? A hundred dollars? Five bucks?
What would you do differently then, in your daily life, to help ensure that future generations will feel kindly toward you? Perhaps even kindly enough to want your primitive company. Would you additionally sponsor cryo-storage for half a dozen poor people? Or donate part of your fortune to endeavors that help make a better, richer (and therefore more generous) future world? Would you work hard to raise descendants worth bragging about? Or were you already planning to do most of those things, anyway?
Some people who sign up for storage believe their bank accounts alone -- set up to earn dividends until some future era -- will suffice to make them worthy of being thawed, repaired, and given full corporeal citizenship in a coming age of wonders.
Somehow, I wouldn’t give that bet anything like sure odds, no matter how many technological barriers future people overcome.
Wise Enough to be Immortal?
All right, what if one of these proposed methods finally works? All too often, we find that solving one problem only leads to others, sometimes even more vexing.
A number of eminent writers like Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson and Gregory Benford have speculated on possible consequences, should Mister G. Reaper ever be forced to hang up his scythe and seek other employment. For example, if the Death Barrier comes crashing down, will we be able to keep shoehorning new humans into a world already crowded with earlier generations? Or else, as envisioned by author John Varley, might such a breakthrough demand draconian population-control measures, limiting each person to one direct heir per lifespan?
What if overcoming death proves expensive? Shall we return to the ancient belief, common in some cultures, that immortality is reserved for the rich and mighty? Nancy Kress has written books that vividly foresee a time when the teeming poor resent rich immortals. In contrast, author Joe Haldeman suggested simple rules of social engineering that may help keep such a prize within reach by all.
More people could wind up dying by violence and accidents than old age. Might we then start to hunker down in our homes, preserving our long but frail lives by avoiding all risk? Or would ennui drive the long-lived to seek new thrills, like extreme sports, bringing death back out of retirement in order to add spice to an otherwise-dull eternity?
Such changes may already be underway as we enter an era some call the “Empire of the Old.” Each year, retirement hobbies drive ever-larger portions of the economy, foretelling vigor by an active elderly population -- a wholesome trend portrayed in Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire and my own The Transparent Society . On the down side, the power of older voters can terrorize politicians and warp allocation of resources. Sensible proposals to raise the retirement age by some fraction of the lifespan increase, are quashed by waves of irate and uncompromising self-interest. It’s a worrisome trend for any society to rank generous retirement supplements higher than good schools for its young. No such civilization can long endure.
What will happen when the elderly outnumber all others? This may soon appear less than far-fetched in countries like Japan, where restrictive immigration policies help ensure and accelerate the ageing trend.
Even problems that seem far-off and speculative today may become critical when people live beyond a twelfth decade. For example, is there a limit to the number of memories that a human brain can store?
On a more fundamental level, are we about to insist, once again, that contemporary humanity is wise enough to overrule all of Nature's checks and balances?
(The answer to that one is simple... of course we’ll insist! We always do.)
Transcendence
There is a final category of ways that many people think/wish/hope/pray they can cheat death. They all fall under a single word -- transcendence.
…. But that topic- singularities and godlike computers - goes a little beyond what I’ve been asked to write about for the Immortality Institute. So let’s leave it for another time.
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David Brin is a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and Uplift War. (The Postman inspired a major film in 1998.) Brin is also known as a leading commentator on modern technological trends. His non fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? - deals with provocative issues of openness and liberty in the wired-age and won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.
Brin's newest novel - KILN PEOPLE - explores a fictional near future when people use cheap copies of themselves to be in two places at once.
THE LIFE EATERS - a new graphic novel - explores a chilling alternative outcome of World War II and has been called “the best thing since WATCHMEN or THE DARK KNIGHT.”
Comments and suggestions can be sent via http://www.davidbrin.com/
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