Extending life

A seriously ill fourteen-year-old girl made a plea to have her body cryogenically frozen. She hoped that she can return one day to do all the things that she wanted to do in her life. She felt cheated. She felt life is unfair. I think we believe that a life is not complete unless we manage to do a set number of things. Maybe explore intimacy, get married, have children, travel and so on. Wanting her body frozen meant that her mother had to make a quick scramble in the last couple of weeks of her daughter's life to get it arranged. This meant that the mother didn't get to spend much time with her daughter in her dying days. However, this teenager feels that there are many things she wants to experience in life. Knowing that death is imminent, these things will never be possible. She hopes that in years to come her body will be cured, the disease banished, and she will be able to do all the things she dreams of.

When she is finally thawed out, she might well wake up next to someone who is having age reversal therapy. The prospect of having treatment is not entirely well received by all. For some have only served 30 years of a 100-year prison sentence. The state wants to make sure they serve it all. Arguments could brew in the rooms upstairs when they try to justify using the same therapy on someone that has been in and out of prison many times. There are many dictators that have been in power for forty years. Their grip and control on the country has been very tight and their popularity is close to zero. The opportunity to extend their reign for another 300 years does not light the population up with a great deal of excitement.

The technology to bring people back from the dead is a long way off. It may never materialise. The probability of being able to restore the memories and experiences that make up a big part of who we are, is very slim indeed. Nevertheless, it provides hope and even if the chance is one in a billion, that might seem a good deal greater than zero. Some wonder whether it will be worth it. In a hundred years time the world will have changed considerably. It might be better, or it might not be what we had imagined it to be. Either way we would find ourselves being more than just a fish out of water. Those that are brought back to life won't have the comfort of friends and family around to ease them back into a new life. Can you imagine trying to adjust to a whole new way of life. New laws, new processes, new technologies, new ways of doing things.

The story invites us to consider the idea of living forever, or at the very least extending our life. Some also think about living inside a machine. We can overlook a good few things, however, the minute people suggest this potential to live in a machine form, I like to remind them that reward is felt by the bio-chemical machine; our body. A simulation does not get any thrill or excitement, it only emulates the logical processes. If it is just your head that is stored you won't have the rest of your body that makes you, you. It is not just your mind that contains neurons either.

In life, we set a goal and once that has been achieved, we can feel deflated. We have nothing to work on anymore. Whilst some aim to produce a great work of art, write a song or build something, there are some people that focus all on seeing life extension schemes come to fruition. Take that goal away and they do not have much. Once their project is complete, they have little direction. They may be forever involved with widening the scope and efficacy of the drugs and operations, but their main objective will be dead.

Tiring of it all

Our memory capacity seems to be fine for 100 years but will eventually fill up. Nevertheless, will you forget key parts of your life? Will you need to re-learn a lot of things as time goes by? The more films and TV series' I watch, the less and less I find to be truly original. More and more variations on a theme, with just a little twist. Boredom rears its head. Seen it, done it. What next? Some will manage many more years before being overcome by boredom. Some will tire of life after 60 years, some after 120 and only a few will honestly be full of zest at 240. There are only a certain number of possible combinations when it comes to human relationships to write about. An affair, a marriage, create a child, polygamy, or incest. There are not infinite different possibilities in certain domains. You will find it ever harder to get a thrill from seeing a film or programme as very little breaks new boundaries.

When we are young there we get excited about going out and doing things we haven't yet tried. This enthusiasm diminishes a bit as each year passes. We do do lots of things over and over but eventually most things become stale. Once we have explored every avenue the drive goes a bit. Sometimes a lot. Our curiosity cannot be realigned onto different things entirely. Throughout life, there is plenty to do. Different sports, ventures, and activities, but only a few inspire us enough to pursue them more. Only a limited range of things appeal. We tend to find enough to stay occupied for about 80 years but how many of us could stretch what we enjoy to 400?

What about if life extending treatments are only available to the wealthy? Costs would come down for sure no doubt. Maybe the only thing to contend with will be the years in and out of hospital having parts replaced. It is delusional or overly optimistic to think that we simply have to take a pill to turn back the clock. I do hope you don't dread the dentist visits. Quite few teeth will need fixing over the centuries of your 'never ending' life. It would not be so bad if we could analyse the genes of a person, select the switches to deactivate and encourage some winding back. However, our genes have built in compromises. If we mess with them too much, it will most likely bring about unwanted side-effects.

How far off is it anyway?

I recall reading about people who studied the make-up of the nematode worm. It all began with hope and expectation. They thought that they would work out all the processes going on in this tiny worm. How hard can it be? Even though the nematode worm is far far simpler than a human being it proved to be so much more involved than they first expected. After some twenty years, disillusionment set in. The professor and clinicians realised that what they had taken on was far more complex than expected. That was then, now we have better tools available and new technologies coming on stream. The biggest problem is that it takes a long time to prove that something is effective. I mean, you need to wait years and years watching what happens to the person who has the drug/procedure carried out. Maybe a full DNA/RNA gene system could be emulated and run on a large computer. If weather predictions are anything to go by, that might be equally awkward to pull off. Pessimism prevails with the knowledge that life expectancy will nevertheless be gradually lengthened albeit with a diminishing rate of improvement.

I suspect that a few key issues will prove to be stumbling blocks. At the moment, we have a body clock that slows down. Time seems to go by faster as we age. Our perception of it really is different. This has been tested. Count to 60 and compare with a clock. A youngster gets there at 50 seconds, an older person 70 seconds. At the age of 200 we would be so slow that we would be unable to do much bar sit in a chair bewildered by everything. The advocates of eternal living will say that that is something that can be fixed, but that is another example of what makes it biologically unappealing.

If you think of a classic car that can be kept on the road forever it merely suggests we would have an old inefficient car in a world of electric hover vehicles. Maybe we can move our thoughts in the direction of upgrades and enhancements. People might go a lot further than simple cosmetic surgeries and push for higher performing bodies. People have tried all kinds of things to get ahead, and this is tempting. The race to the top with the ground beneath you slipping faster than you can run. Wealth, fame, and success are all relative so there won't be more people benefitting.

Refresh

With more people acquiring ever greater wealth, any new-borns would face an even larger mountain to climb. Even with the best will in the world there would be problems in relation to over population. Death provides the fodder for new shoots. You can't be anything but envious of those that have the will and confidence to say they would be happy to live for hundreds of years.

Is it a 'crime' that people are dying so early, early in the sense of getting to 80 rather than 400? It might pan out to be ten times cheaper and easier to have a new worker in place by having unprotected sex rather than refreshing a person that is already alive. The cost of raising and educating someone might be less than all the restoration work.

Risk

Would you go sky diving or to war if you knew you had 380 more years left to live? Would you be even more reckless if you thought "no problem, If I get hit by a bullet or smash into the ground, they can restore me".

The priorities of living would change in a world where there is the potential to live hundreds of years. New issues surrounding probability arise. At present the chance of reaching 80 without being shot, run over, hit by lightning etc. are far lower than we realise. We will have to change the way we live if we want to reach 400 untouched by so many dangers that lurk everywhere. There will be limits to what we can bring back to life in a presentable comparable form.

Adjust to make us conform

Our DNA can be adjusted to suit society. We can meddle with it to homogenise, make no one stand out and ensure evil is banished. Repeat offenders go to prison, get released, commit another crime and go back to prison in an endless cycle. They are guided in part by their fixed preferences. Adjusting the DNA will alter what we prefer. Many people get alarmed by eugenics and the nightmare scenario of it being forced on people. It makes us shudder. However, the aim towards perfection is the most undesirable. All the contributions made by imperfect people is lost along with the joy of differences.

Life can seem pointless. Ultimately it is. The world will disintegrate eventually. I doubt that we will manage to populate another planet beforehand. Life is a game, with a start, middle and end, exemplified by a football match. A football match is 90 minutes long, give or take a few minutes of extra time - and a football match that went on for 8 hours would have an empty stadium.