Between now and the year 2123 a tragedy of Brobdingnagian proportions will befall humanity, causing the death of more than 6 billion people. I’m serious.
According to Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau of the US Census in Washington, DC, between 50,000 BC and 2002, 106,456,367,669 people were born. The Earth’s population is now 7,290,289,811 (in 2015). Of the 100 billion people who came before us, every one of them has died. To the extent that the past is the key to the present—and the future—that means that within the next 120 years (the maximum life potential) more than 6 billion humans will suffer the same fate. And there is not a damn thing we can do about it. Or is there?
Until the late twentieth century, when science took up the cause, the only recourses anyone had in the face of this reality were prayer and poetry. The seventeenth-century English poet John Donne, for example, knew all too well for whom the bell tolls (his wife died at age thirty-three, after giving birth to the twelfth of their children, five of whom died), decrying, “Death be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so.”
Today we are being offered scientistic alternatives, if not for immortality itself, then for longevity of biblical proportions. All have some basis in science, but none has achieved anything like scientific confirmation and thus fall into the realm of either borderlands science or pseudoscience.
Virtual immortality. According to Tulane University physicist Frank Tipler, in the far future we will all be resurrected in a virtual reality whose memory capacity is 10 to the power of 10123 (a 1 followed by 10123 zeros). If the virtual reality were real enough, it would be indistinguishable from our reality. Boot me up, Scotty.…
Genetic immortality. Oh, those pesky telomeres at the end of chromosomes that prevent cells from replicating indefinitely. If only we could genetically reprogram them to be like cancer cells. Alas, this is no solution because biological systems are so complex that fixing any one component does not address all the others that play a role in aging.
Cryonics immortality. Freeze—wait—reanimate. It sounds good in theory, but you’re still a corpsicle. Don’t forget to pay the electric bill in the meantime.
Replacement immortality. First we replace our organs, then our cells, then our molecules, nano-a-nano, eventually exchanging protein (flesh) for something more durable, such as silicon. You can’t tell the difference, can you?
Lifestyle longevity. Here is something we can implement today, which means the hucksters are out in force offering every elixir under and including the sun to extend human life. To cut to the chase, S. Jay Olshansky, Leonard Hayflick, and Bruce A. Carnes, three of the world’s leading scientists on aging, stated unequivocally in Scientific American (“No Truth to the Fountain of Youth,” June 2002), “no currently marketed intervention—none—has yet been proved to slow, stop or reverse human aging, and some can be downright dangerous.”
It has never been proven, for example, that antioxidants—taken as supplements to counter the deleterious effects of free radicals on cells—attenuate aging. In fact, free radicals are necessary for cellular physiology. Hormone replacement therapy, another popular antiaging nostrum, is effective for some short-term shortcomings such as loss of muscle mass and strength in older men and postmenopausal women. But the long-term negative side effects are still unknown and the slowing of the aging process unproven.
As a lifelong cyclist I am pleased to report that diet and exercise are tried and true methods to increase your life span. These, along with modern medical technologies and sanitation practices, have nearly doubled the average life expectancy over the past century. Unfortunately, this just means that more of us will get closer to the outer wall of 120 years before finally and inexorably succumbing to the way of all flesh, no matter how you may personally express Dylan Thomas’s sentiment now annealed into Western literature:
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Rage all you like, but remember the 6 billion—and the 100 billion before. Until science finds a solution to prolonging the duration of healthy life, we should instead rave about the time we have, however fleeting.