Functional Immortality

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Not dying young. Essay. 1100 words, 6-minute read.

Image: Sean Connery, Highlander (1986), imdb.com

Functional Immortality

By Ray Tabler

Who wants to live forever? I might be talked into giving it a whirl. I suspect many of us would.

A well-trod path of science fiction explores the benefits, costs, and consequences of long, long life. In fact, Gilgamesh, Adam, and Noah are reported to both enjoyed unusually long lives. So, the fascination has been around for a while.

Divine intervention aside, we, as modern enlightened humans, have settled on the consensus that there are 5 ways to live forever. We don’t really know how to pull off that trick. Not yet. But when has not knowing what we’re doing ever stopped us before?

Spontaneous Mutation – Immortality might just happen on its own. The most famous example of this in literature is Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long, in Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough for Love. A rich man dies young of a chronic disease. Annoyed that he will be denied a normal lifespan, he endows the Howard Foundation to promote longevity by financially encouraging people from long-lived families to marry and breed. The program enjoys unexpected, early success with the birth of Woodrow Wilson Smith (Lazarus Long) who goes on to live over 2,000 years.

These books touch on some likely pitfalls of immortality. The Howard families are viewed with suspicion and envy by normal-lived people. Lazarus must periodically relocate and reinvent himself to avoid detection. Personally, he must deal with the trauma of falling in love with, and marrying a succession of women, only to watch them grow old and die while he remains the same age. Similar themes run through as disparate works about spontaneous immortality as the Highlander movies, a Star Trek episode, and The Man from Earth (2007), and Mel Brooks’ The 2,000-year-Old Man.

Genetic Manipulation/Bioengineering – At this date, scientists are researching whether aging can be cured, as if were merely a disease. Which, it may very well be. In a real sense, we are nothing but biochemistry. In 1997 researchers managed to grow a human ear upon the back of a mouse (the Vacanti Bioengineering Project). So, editing out aging from our biological makeup isn’t that far a stretch after all.

Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow imagines a widely available anti-aging drug, which is basically a sip from the fountain of youth. To be fair, everybody’s understandably addicted to this drug, and there’s a resulting overpopulation crisis.

Cloning – This might be thought of as aftermarket parts. Your liver or heart gets worn out?  Just swap it out for a new one. We can do that already with donor organs. Larry Niven followed that to its logical conclusion in his Known Space universe, writing about organ donation getting less and less voluntary. Allegedly, the CCP has taken the message to heart.

It may soon be possible to clone and individual organs for transplant. Once that is reduced to practice, the concept naturally arises of cloning an entire body and parting it out. I suspect that technical challenges will be overcome long before the moral quandaries. Is that cloned “thing” a person or not?

The Island, a 2005 movie, is about an isolated community of clones who serve as a ready reserve of replacement organs, and entire replacement bodies, for wealthy clients. There’s a bit of handwavium about how the clients’ memories are transferred to the clone, allowing functional immortality. But sci-fi gonna sci-fi.

Man Becomes Machine – Transfer of human consciousness to a computer appears to have moved a step closer to reality with the advent of “AI”-capable software recently. Still no real understanding of how this would be accomplished, but the driving forces seem undiminished. An unspoken assumption behind the concept is that a computer, not being alive to begin with would never die. That may be true, but we seem to be a long way from building a long-lasting computer at the moment.

Your average cellphone or laptop is doing good to last 5 years. Admittedly, that’s partly due to the unrelenting pace of technical progress, rendering the hardware and software obsolete and needing replacement. And there’s likely some intentional planned obsolescence mixed in. But the focus has not been on building computers to last. Which could be a problem a few decades down the road.

When you think about it, the human body, even with our limitations, is a marvel of evolutionary engineering. We are more-or-less self-repairing for up to 120 years. Human technology is currently on the steepest part of that learning curve when it comes to constructing a computer to house a human consciousness.

A good example of human minds in machines story is Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse series. In Bobiverse, a techbro, Bob Johansson, has his mind recorded, then is promptly run over by a bus. Eventually, the government downloads him into the computer controlling a slow-than-light interstellar probe, because he has no rights as a person anymore. It’s a long, entertaining tale, feeling out how this type of life might unfold over 5 books.

Time Dilation – Finally, a ride on Einstein’s express. The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time passes for you. So, a ride to Alpha Centauri and back would yield an exceptionally long life, from the point of view of someone who stayed behind. You, moving at relativistic velocity, experience a normal lifetime, but extended over several homebody’s lives.

Heinlein wove this into his novel Time for the Stars, Leaving one twin behind on Earth, while the other crowded lightspeed. At the end, one was still young, and the other was an old man. Poul Anderson’s Starfarers is about the rift which grows between most of humanity and the subset that travel between the stars, skipping across centuries. In Charles Sheffield’s Between the Strokes of Night, an interstellar elite recruit from planet-dwelling hopefuls to man starships and attain extreme longevity by perceiving time flow thousands of times slower than normal.

If sci-fi stories so far are any indication, functional immortality would cleave the immortal away from the bulk of humanity. Viewing we poor unfortunate normals as mayflies, doomed to a short insignificant existence, might be an easy trap for a person who lives for thousands of years to fall into. From there it’s only a short step to assuming a god-like superiority, justified or not. Likewise, those not blessed with immortality would naturally be envious of the immortals. Envy breeds a particularly nasty type of contempt. Should we eventually achieve the capability for immortality, limited, conditional, or otherwise, the best remedy would be to make it as widely available as possible. Regardless of Vonnegut’s warning about overpopulation. Which would likely change what it means to be human. But that would be preferable to dividing us in two over who dies and who doesn’t. Then the question of who wants to live forever will no longer be rhetorical.

END.

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