[extropy-chat] more great reasons to be dead

[Damien Broderick]

A regular columnist in the Australian newspaper `explains' why life 
extension would be a terrible prospect:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,15863203,00.html

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Christopher Pearson: No future in eternity

09jul05

I SUPPOSE most people have sometime or other toyed with the fantasy of 
eternal youth and health. Damien Broderick, a science contributor with The 
Australian, has turned it into a magnificent obsession.

In his futurological books The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable 
Future and The Last Mortal Generation: How Science Will Alter Our Lives in 
the 21st Century, he has seriously canvassed the chances that immortality 
is at hand. In last week's The Weekend Australian Review he was at it 
again, reviewing a new work by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman entitled 
Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.

Surveying the latest evidence, Broderick is up-beat. "It seems likely that 
powerful research programs will let us first slow, then halt, the leading 
causes of death - heart disease, cancer, stroke, infections - then, 
perhaps, reverse ageing, that slow terrible corrosion of our youthful flesh 
and lively minds."

How can this be? "Knowledge is doubling and deepening at a prodigious rate, 
and even that rate is accelerating ... some of those alive now may thrive 
indefinitely, kept youthful by the same recuperative processes that build 
brand-new babies from ageing sperm and ova."

Fine and dandy for the fortunate young, you may be thinking, but what about 
the rest of us? Are we the last to feed the worms or crematorial fires? 
"Perhaps not, if a kind of maintenance engineering can be applied to our 
ailing bodies. The remedy may be complicated: genomic profiling, pills, 
supplements, stringent diet, more exercise than we care for ... In the 
slightly longer term, our bodies may be infused with swarms of machines not 
much larger than viruses, nanobots designed to scavenge wastes and repair 
tissue damage at the scale of cells."

Broderick envisages a future in which "every human will have the choice of 
staying healthily young indefinitely or of stepping aside, if they choose, 
to make room for a new life, assuming, of course that we linger on this 
planet and that we remain strictly human".

 From a futurologist's perspective, inter-planetary emigration is probably 
neither here nor there. However, an attenuated relationship with the 
strictly human does raise philosophical problems. Broderick is a 
techno-triumphalist; tomorrow belongs to him. "No doubt the arguments will 
continue for generations until all those opposed to endless life have died."

If his confidence is warranted, it's surprising that there hasn't been more 
of a fuss made about such startling developments. Admittedly you can go to 
the Immortality Institute's website or log on to the World Transhumanist 
Association, but so far not a peep out of the federal Government. Are they 
just trying, yet again, "to underpromise and deliver in spades" as John 
Howard is wont to say? Usually voluble sources were tight-lipped, so I 
decided to try thinking like a futurologist.

Supposing immortality were technically feasible, how would people avail 
themselves of the opportunity? First World economics suggests that they'd 
have to pay for it and that, like any scarce resource, it would be rationed 
by price. Initially the capital cost would be astronomical and keep eternal 
youth as the preserve of the very rich and, no doubt, their pets.

If electoral pressure -- and occasional riots -- obliged the G8 governments 
to pour endless public funding into nanobot research, cryogenics and 
cloning, the unit cost would fall. But even if immortality became a 
national health service item, there would still be tricky distributional 
issues. For example, someone would have to make decisions about who was 
least likely to benefit from treatment and explain why they'd, as it were, 
missed the bus.

Then again, think of the recriminations from the Third World, unless the 
elixir of life were made freely available and as UN cant puts it: "Within a 
socially acceptable time frame."

Or forget about the recriminations and think instead about a rogue state or 
a terrorist organisation getting a nuclear weapon. How easy to hold the 
life-enhanced (but by no means indestructible) populations of the developed 
world to ransom: the slogan would be immortality for all or for none.

Even if enlightened self-interest triumphed, in an orderly transition to a 
post-mortal world, there would still be pesky economic issues to sort out. 
What, for example, happens to countries where huge amounts of capital are 
diverted from other kinds of productive investment into a bottomless pit of 
human resource development? In a society where those entering into 
immortality spend most of their time at the gym or taking (on Broderick's 
reckoning) 250 pills a day, who does the work and prepares the food?

After time and tide have borne away the last mortal cohort, there'd be an 
end to the transfers of inherited capital that previously helped keep the 
wheels of industry and speculative enterprise turning. For fear of running 
short, business and investors would become highly risk-averse. While some 
optimists might reckon that there's always time to make more money, most of 
us would be playing it safe and hoarding or saving up for planetary 
migration and to fund the next generation of life-enhancers.

Talking of the next generation, reproduction as we have known it would lose 
any sense of urgency. The notion of immortality through progeny and the 
survival of one's genes would fade away. Indeed, given the amount of time 
that would have to be devoted to personal regeneration, it would be 
surprising if people had any left over to devote to parenting. Besides, the 
zero population growth lobby and the greens would doubtless be arguing that 
there's no more room, at least on this over-crowded continent.

Presumably, in the transition period, adopting Third World babies would be 
permitted. It might also be possible - borrowing the model of carbon 
emissions trading - to buy the reproductive entitlements of adults who'd 
been talked into renouncing their access to immortality. Forward-thinking 
regimes such as China's might well set up a market in the reproductive 
rights of long-term prisoners and those condemned to death, to cover 
administrative costs and so forth and to complement the existing trade in 
body parts.

Futurologists seldom take much notice of scarcity economics and they're apt 
to assume technological progress means abundance for all. It hasn't so far, 
of course, and -- if scarce resources meant rationing the right to 
reproduce -- we would all be in terrible trouble. For it is the experience 
of parenthood that most effectively teaches us, men especially, the lessons 
of selflessness. That hard-wired capacity for unconditional love of 
helpless offspring turns self-preoccupied adolescents into adults almost 
overnight. Without parenthood, the race would become spoiled and go to rack 
and ruin.

It is, I suppose, just conceivable that Broderick may be right about the 
theoretical possibility of indefinitely prolonged life. However, human 
nature is less malleable than human physiology and ill-adapted to 
immortality's challenges. I also have my doubts about whether, if offered 
the everlasting option, all that many of us would take it.

After all, well-adjusted people tend to develop a serene acceptance of 
finitude. Then again, the sense of an ending is all that makes some lives, 
especially very long ones, bearable in the meantime. Robert Louis 
Stevenson's popular Requiem captures the sense of a welcome end:

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be,

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

© The Australian