part0077

Having spent a good deal of time discussing breakthroughs that we might hope to see in the future, I would like to explore, if you will bear with me, the possible effects they can have on ourselves and our societies i.e. our lives ; and I will start by considering how it might affect our deaths .

Who wants to live forever? Well I do, for one. Our lives are so fleetingly short, and the questions we face are so immense, that it is a wonder that, as Schopenhauer observed, we don’t spend all of our time just musing on the meaning of life (rather than doing things like putting clean shirts on every day and making small-talk). It is not fashionable to reflect on death much nowadays, but the only thing that we can say with 100% certainty that all living things will experience, is death. Yes, as Ozzy Osbourne used to say, ‘ohhh, it’s a hard road’ - and then we’re gonna die; bum deal! But at least we are alive now and most of us experience much more pleasant and easy lives than nearly all of our forefathers did.

But who has not found themselves in their middle age, waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, thumping their pillow and repeating earnestly that they don’t want to die? Again, mercifully not myself, but many have – including Julian Barnes, who actually writes about the experience in his book Nothing to be Frightened Of .

It is undeniably true that, at least in the West, the average life expectancy is increasing all the time. This is one reason why nowadays a greater proportion of the population will experience cancer at some point in their lives – it is largely a disease of old age (other reasons might be increases in pollution such as the diesel fumes discussed earlier, as well as increasing presence of chemicals and plastic particles in our environments). It has to be said though, that life expectancies increasing by a year or two is quite different from the prospect of eternal life. The latter is not a new concept. For thousands of years, there have been tales of ‘The Fountain of Youth’, which is described as a spring that restores the youth of anyone who drinks or bathes in its waters. Notable examples appear in the writings of Herodotus (5th century BC), the Alexander Romance (3rd century AD), and the stories of Prester John (early Crusades, 11th/12th centuries AD). A more recent example appeared in the poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson: “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall…” In this poem, Tithonus asks for the gift of immortality, which is readily granted to him, but forgets to ask for eternal youth along with it. It’s a bit like when, at the supermarket, you buy your groceries but forget to bring the bags to put it in – you’ve got something but there’s not much you can do with it!

I guess we would all like to stay young and attractive - assuming that we are attractive to start with! Of course, Conan Doyle has his own take on the myth of the Fountain of Youth. In his Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’, the antagonist, Professor Presbury, wishes to marry a young woman and since he is 61, he feels that for the marriage some form of, shall we say, rejuvenation, is required. His plan for obtaining this involves taking a serum extracted from monkeys - Colobinae Asian monkeys, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, rather than the desired Viagra-esque effect, the serum apparently left Presbury with some ‘positively simian’ characteristics. Suffice it to say that he mistook Greater London for the jungle and found himself squawking while swinging through the trees of Hampstead Heath.

As you can imagine, it didn’t end well for the professor. An outré narrative indeed. But Holmes displays his usual prescience in making some observations that are still relevant today. For example, he says: “When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it…” I can’t help thinking that this phrase might well apply to attempts that could be made to greatly extend life using modern technology. For example, it can be imagined that genetic engineering could be used to modify human genes in favour of very long life. In my view, scientists would have to be extremely cautious here – it may well be not at all wise to try implementing this. It is clear that the aging process is something that is programmed into our genetic code and it is highly likely that evolution has done this for very good reasons. The main one that comes to mind is the chance of errors occurring over very large numbers of cell divisions. This is why cancer often occurs in old age – after many cell divisions have occurred. It seems that evolution over millions of years has introduced an aging process as part of the lifecycle as a means to limit the lifespan of the individual, and has coupled it with a strong desire to reproduce as the best means of maintaining health.

Simply short-circuiting the genetic results of all that evolution could be folly of the worst kind. A very similar argument can be applied to human cloning. When you consider all the significant risks that the human animal is exposed to through sexual intercourse – not least disease transmission – it seems clear that sex would not have evolved if it were not absolutely essential for human health.

So, if becoming a modern-day Methuselah is not realistic, what options are left for those seeking immortality? Well, if you are in the USA and have enough cash, one idea is to put yourself (after death) into the hands of cryonics technicians. This profession has existed since the 1970s, with the companies involved putting bodies of the deceased into deep freeze, with the aim of reviving them in the future, if and when suitable technology becomes available (the latter part being, I fancy, not 100% certain). The process is something like the following: Freezing starts as soon as possible after the patient dies to stop brain cells dying through lack of oxygen, with cooling beginning in an ice bath to slowly reduce the body temperature. The blood is removed from the body and replaced with ‘cryo-protectant’ fluid (anti-freeze to you and me), which prevents ice crystal formation that may damage cells. This seems to me like a stage that may have a detrimental effect on overall chances of success. I mean, if someone were to extract my blood and replace it with antifreeze then, even with the technologies of a few thousand years from now, it seems unlikely to me that I could be revived with any kind of quality of life. That would make your worst hangover seem like a walk in the park. Also, I can’t help wondering whether blood cell damage will occur, during or after the antifreeze transfusion.

Anyway, the next stage is for the person to be put into an arctic sleeping bag before lowering them into a giant tank, where their temperature continues to be reduced to that of liquid nitrogen in a bid to ensure preservation (-196 degrees Celsius). The US company, Alcor, for example, offers cryonic preservation for the whole body for around $200,000. For those who can’t afford the whole body, just the head can be frozen for $80,000, (but who wants to come back as a disembodied head?)

Although there is no scientific evidence cryonics will succeed, one can imagine that it might be possible to bring back life in a body that has been frozen in this way; but given the inevitable tissue damage involved, I have to ask whether the mind of the individual will be preserved and restored (or if you prefer more metaphysical terms, the soul or the spirit). If not, then we can’t really say the individual has been restored – although the DNA may be the same, the rejuvenated body would be more like your identical twin or a clone of yourself.

Perhaps the biggest risk, in practice, to taking the cryogenic route to immortality is that, if you need to be frozen for many years to give enough time for technologies to be developed to revive you, there is a relatively high chance that during that long period problems/issues will occur that will cause the freezing to be stopped, thereby ruining your plan. Probably the most likely cause for this would simply be that for some reason there is a business downturn for the cryonics company – they run out of money and call the receivers in and cease trading i.e. turn off the freezers. There are also a multitude of other potential causes for a premature thaw. Even if the process were to be successful, one has to ask who would provide the very high/expensive level of support the people from the past would be very likely to require.

Another approach to potential immortality, which is often described in science fiction, is to store one’s essence in a computer (this occurred in quite a few episodes of Star Trek ). This seems like quite a nice solution – certainly more straightforward and potentially less messy than the cryogenic option. The main problem here is that currently no one knows what one’s essence actually is. The soul and spirit are somewhat mystical terms – meaning different things to different people. There is no doubt that humans have a high level of consciousness – but what is consciousness? We usually think of materialism as the idea that goods and wealth are the most important things; for example, materialism is valuing a new car over friendships. However, it also has a meaning in philosophy - here materialism asserts that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions (materialism is closely related to physicalism—the view that all that exists is ultimately physical).

The problem is that materialism cannot explain consciousness. In fact, it’s such a problem that the philosopher David Chalmers described consciousness as the "hard problem" and contrasts it with the "easy problems" such as discriminating, collating information, reasoning, focusing attention, and so on. Therefore, the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how sentient organisms have subjective conscious experiences such as seeing red and green colours, emotions or feeling heat or cold; rather than objective observation. I submit that since scientists still have no real idea of what consciousness is, it would be a prodigious challenge to be able to load such consciousness into a computer. Otherwise, as mentioned, it’s a great idea.