Member-only story
Who Wants To Live Forever?
Why the dream of life extension is really a nightmare
According to boosters like Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Gray, David Sinclair, Ben Bova, and a great many others who’ve spotted a lucrative niche to exploit, we’re on the verge of being able to live forever.
Sometimes this vision is presented as a function of manipulating biology; sometimes it’s presented as an inevitable outcome of the computer age. Occasionally these two visions are merged, so that we proceed for the first part of our lives replacing parts that wear out (this is the human-as-automobile idea) and then when the right moment arrives we just upload our consciousness (which is never actually defined) into a computer program and voila: we become immortal.
We can think of this idea as “stuffing granny into your smartphone.”
In reality, biology isn’t so easily manipulated. We may get to the point where we can grow organs and other tissues, but we’re precisely nowhere in terms of making progress towards any ability to maintain the human brain. So even the best-case “replace stuff when it’s worn out” dream simply brings Swift’s Struldbruggs closer to reality: a world in which no one dies, but everyone’s brain has turned to mush.
As a great many people don’t seem to have much in the way of brain function to begin with, the deterioration of…
