Over at the main page, Jason has a fascinating post about his religious beliefs and hopes for the future of humanity. My own beliefs don’t congrue with his, but I admire the intellectual rigor and depth of his belief system. Given that my beliefs are amorphous and subject to change without notice, quibbling with his isn’t my goal.
However, he wrote one thing that caught my eye, and with which I must disagree. Regarding the changes in human lifespan, he says:
The convergence between medicine and information technology is the key. Every day we get closer to the ultimate goal — indefinite life extension. You and I may live to see it, although probably not. My daughter stands a better chance. And her daughter? An immortal, almost certainly. It fills me with awe and wonder to think of these things.
I have to say, with some regret, that I think this is almost certainly wrong. Perhaps one day humanity will hold the key to immortality, but I strongly doubt it will be within the next few generations.
Medicine has made incredible strides over the past century or so. Humans are living longer, healthier, more fulfilling and productive lives than ever before. Much of this is related to the effective prevention (through vaccination) and treatment (through antibiotics) of infectious diseases that used to exact a heavy toll. Related advances in antisepsis, along with improvements in anesthesia and related technologies (ventilators, heart-lung bypass machines, etc), have made surgery much safer and more effective. Insulin, chemotherapy, inhaled steroids for asthma — these have all been secular miracles (not, in many cases, without drawbacks) that have rendered treatable many of the maladies that ended or shortened innumerable lives.
Of course, what this has done is allowed us to live long enough to be killed by other, more indolent illnesses. And medicine is far less successful at doing much about them. Antihypertensives, lipid-lowering medications and the like have reduced the incidence of heart disease, but it remains the number one killer in the United States. We (and by “we,” I mean scientists much smarter than myself) have gotten pretty good at curing many cancers, but there are plenty that resist effective treatment and cancer remains a close second on the list of fatal diseases. And while hope springs eternal about a cure for the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, a safe and effective drug is a long way off. Progress in the management and detection of these illnesses comes in fits and starts, with major reversals announced every few years to great fanfare and controversy.
Even assuming we keep these illnesses at bay with greater effectiveness over the coming decades (which I think we will), the longer a person lives the more time she has for an errant white blood cell to undergo malignant transformation or for the accumulated effects of chronic wear to steadily damage the liver or lungs or kidneys beyond the hope of repair. Jason acknowledges that longer life may uncover new illnesses, but is more optimistic than I that there will be a ready answer. Heck, we have no idea what sorts of side effects might accrue after a century of use from medications that are well-tolerated for a decade or three. The Lipitor that safely controls your cholesterol today may wreak unknowable havoc if you were to take it for another hundred years or more. Dealing with whatever new illnesses surface will require a new generation’s worth of research and development, and so on.
I applaud Jason’s defiance in the face of the endless abyss that is our collective mortality. I am cautiously hopeful that we as a species will become more enlightened and just and wise with successive generations. But I think those generations will still have to face their own imminent demises, for a long, long time to come.
As medicine and biology advance, we’ll drain the lake of the old scourges of mankind as Gorgas drained the swamps of Panama before we could build the Panama Canal. But as you point out, though we drain that lake of preventable and curable diseases, we will only die of other causes, until at last we’re reduced to heads in jars, like Nixon and Al Gore in Futurama.
The world would get pretty cluttered up with all those heads. What would they do, what meaning would their lives have? Timor mortis conturbat me: someone might unplug me.
“But as you point out, though we drain that lake of preventable and curable diseases, we will only die of other causes, until at last we’re reduced to heads in jars, like Nixon and Al Gore in Futurama.”
Even at that, I’m more inclined to the problem that Heinlein noted with his long-lived characters: the human brain appears to have a relatively limited memory capacity. At the very least, even if the bulk storage capacity is large enough for multiples of current lifetimes, the indexing function seems to be limited. Speaking just for myself, the ability to learn and retain new things has declined as I aged (ah, for the ability to soak up math at the pace I could when I was 18-24). If you could keep me going long enough, I suspect that I would be unable to continue to learn new things at all, or at least, only learn them at the expense of giving up something old.
“What would they do, what meaning would their lives have?”
What mean do their lives have now?
Well, for the moment at least, people are capable of drawing quite a lot of purpose from trying to stay alive as long as possible. It is distracting, if nothing else.
If you are in line to live for billions of years, I imagine the question of purpose becomes more pointed.
Won’t know ’til we try!