For as long as our species has buried one another, we have told tales about how the dead are not really dead. One of the oldest religious impulses is to insist that those who have physically died are, in fact, alive in some other form, in some other realm. Oblivion, it seems, runs counter to our biological and psychological programming.
Virtually every major civilization throughout history has had a conception of the afterlife. The Egyptians mummified their kings and crammed tombs with gold in a convoluted effort to subvert soul death. The Hindus hold that the soul cycles through different lives, ever reaching toward liberation, while the Buddhists, rejecting the notion of a fixed self, believe in a current of karma that seeks release from the cycle itself. Islam promises Jannah to the faithful, and, of course, Christianity teaches a resurrection, whose consummation is an eternity with God. Through different cultures and idiosyncratic vocabulary, the foundation has stayed the same: Humans never truly die or cease to exist.
It is no small miracle that we exist at all. That matter could weave itself from the chaos of starstuff, attain self-awareness, and develop a desire to persist is, itself, almost a divine act. Some may say, since we have punched through the black glass of non-existence, it would be absurd to conclude that our lives ended when our bodies expired.
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. -Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
Consequently, every era has drummed up clever campaigns against the prospect of death. But it was not always clear what kind of campaign would appear in the twenty-first century. Until now.
Mr. Immortal
Bryan Johnson is a 48-year-old tech entrepreneur who, in 2013, sold his payment processing company to PayPal for $800 million. After selling his company and going through a divorce, he shifted his attention and a considerable amount of his wealth toward a single goal: staying alive…forever.
According to his website, Blueprint, “[n]ow is the first time in 2,000 years for a new, globally adopted ideology to emerge,” adding that “AI is progressing faster than any of us can comprehend, causing us to reexamine everything we think about ourselves, each other and society.”
Johnson’s conception of a “new, globally adopted ideology” points toward a future where humans do not die. Not only on a personal level, but in every conceivable way. And the path to achieve this is by leveraging AI. His manifesto is short and sweet:
Don’t die individually.
Don’t kill each other.
Don’t destroy the planet.
Align AI with Don’t Die.
Johnson has hired more than thirty physicians who monitor the biological age of his organs and track hundreds of biomarkers. He is ostensibly the most measured human being in history. He adheres to a strict daily regimen, which includes ingesting 91 supplements, eating a calorie-controlled vegan diet (with his last meal before noon), and always sleeping alone. He has been vocal about his intention to achieve immortality by 2039.
What motivates Johnson is nothing new, but his method is certainly among the most literal. He has taken the wish that Gilgamesh carried to the bottom of the sea and the same hope that inspired the Egyptians to pack their tombs, and hollowed out all the layers of metaphor. No gods, ceremony, or afterlife. Just hard data, supplements, and the belief that the human body can be transmuted into something beyond its nature.
Despite his high aspirations, Johnson was reminded that his body is, well, mortal. In May, his team found something unexpected in his blood panel: anti-parietal cell antibodies, approximately five times the normal ceiling. And his immune system started eating away at his stomach.
The diagnosis? Autoimmune gastritis. Currently, this disease is incurable and chronic, in which the body indefinitely goes to war with itself. Johnson had apparently spent 11 years with consistently low ferritin that no amount of iron supplementation could resolve, a mystery that his bench of medical specialists couldn’t seem to crack.
Doctors eventually tied it to an autoimmune thyroid condition Johnson has had since he was 21. These two diseases co-occur, which is known as thyrogastric syndrome. However, Johnson has refused to slow down, extending open invitations to researchers working on regulatory T-cells and antigen-specific tolerance, conceiving of his incurable disease as a solvable problem that just has not been resolved yet.
Until recently, I did not pay much attention to the so-called longevity gurus out there. To borrow a line from Sam Harris, who used it in a different context, “it somehow felt unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel.” Even though Johnson is the most rigorously monitored human on this planet, having a body with more sensors and datapoints attached to it than most commercial aircraft, he was still utterly powerless to keep his body from launching an incurable assault against itself. Optimization, it appears, was gravely mistaken for prevention, in his case.
But Johnson is not really the subject here. He is merely the latest and most literal expression of humanity’s desire to live beyond its expiration date.
An old, old argument
The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is considered by many to be among the oldest and greatest works of literature, points to our overwhelming desire to evade death. In the myth, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, watches his best friend, Enkidu, die, and afterward sets out on a quest to ensure the same thing will not happen to him. During his journey, he learns of a plant at the bottom of the sea that restores youth. After tying stones to his feet and sinking to the bottom of the sea, he retrieves the much-desired plant. But on the way home, while Gilgamesh is bathing, a serpent steals the plant. Consequently, the king returns home to Uruk empty-handed. That is, he returns home no more immortal than when he left.
How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet?
My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved has turned to clay.
Shall I not be like him, and also lie down,
never to rise again, through all eternity?
-Epic of Gilgamesh
Or consider the idea of life-giving waters. The earliest account of a Fountain of Youth comes from the 5th century BCE by the Greek historian Herodotus. In Book III of his famous work, The Histories, Herodotus describes a peculiar spring located in the land of the Macrobians, a mythical, exceptionally tall, and good-looking people residing in the Horn of Africa. Many of these people were believed to live past 120 years.
The spring had peculiar qualities. It was said that nothing could float in the water, including wood or lighter substances. Everything would sink to the bottom, and it carried the scent of violets. When the Macrobians bathed in it, their skin turned sleek, smooth, and glossy, almost as if they had washed themselves in fine oil.
Even throughout many Christian denominations today, baptism is a symbolic gesture of rebirth, or renewal (John 3:4-5). And in the book of Job, it is asked, “Can the dead live again? If so, this would give me hope through all my years of struggle, and I would eagerly await the release of death” (Job 14:14).
For millennia, mankind has demanded a justification for the struggles and misfortunes that life daily inflicts upon him. He tells himself, This cannot be all life is. There has to be more to existence than what I have experienced. Life must go on somewhere else, whether among the stars or in the cradle of the gods. And despite his yearning, despite his mad insistence, the vaults of ambrosia appear to be locked from the inside.
The new arguments
Today, rebirth, renewal, and the effort to reverse engineer aging have stumbled out of the phantasmagoric caves of religion and myth, and have leaped into the metropolis of experimental science.
If you have the cash or credit line to foot the ~$232,000 ticket (if you’re a paying member), Tomorrow.bio will happily cool your deceased body to around two hundred degrees below zero, and store you in liquid nitrogen on the bet that future medicine will be such that, at some point, you will be thawed out and live again.
But the more future-minded transhumanists out there can opt to have only their brain cryopreserved, which lowers the price to ~$87,000. The thought, here, is that at some point in the future, scientists will be able to upload your consciousness. This is called mind uploading.
Tomorrow.bio is not the only cryopreservation company betting on future science. Alcor, the oldest Cryonics organization still in operation, offers the same services at a competitive rate. And if you feel so inclined, they can also freeze your pets.
The interesting part is how Alcor defines death, noting on its site that death “is only permanent when the structures encoding memory and personality (necessary for consciousness) have become so disrupted that it becomes theoretically impossible to recover the person. This is called ‘information-theoretic death’.” They go on to say that “Cryonics is currently the best-known method for pausing the dying process in a way that allows for potentially restoring good health with medical technology in the future. Cryonics is an ambulance to the future.” Does this have the sour, lip-puckering taste of religious magisteria dressed up as academic science to anyone else?
And finally, perhaps the most compelling, considering current debates around Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its place in our future, there is “the singularity.” The scientist-turned-futurist, Ray Kurzweil, has long been convinced that “the singularity”—where man and machine merge—is not only inevitable, but it is much closer than we think. Kurzweil, in an interview with The Guardian, said, “We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence and it’s all going to be rolled into one. Making it possible will be brain-computer interfaces which ultimately will be nanobots—robots the size of molecules—that will go non-invasively into our brains through the capillaries. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.”
Consciousness, it appears, is the cornerstone life-extension efforts. If there really is a way to elude death, the solution will have to take place at the level of consciousness.
“I think that we are headed toward a hybrid future,” Oxford University’s Marcus du Sautoy said, during an interview with Popular Mechanics. “We still believe that we are the only beings with a high level of consciousness. This is part of the whole Copernican journey that we are not unique. We’re not at the center.”
Our assumption that we are the only species with a high level of consciousness, while perhaps true for the moment, has been challenged since ancient times. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod, at the turn of the 8th century BCE, wrote a bizarre story about what seemed to be a robot named Talos. According to the tale, it was forged by the godly blacksmith Haephestus and imbued with ichor, the very same life force that pumped through the veins of the Grecian gods themselves. Talos, it could be said, is the first description of an artificial lifeform. And Pandora, the first human woman in Greek mythology, was also artificially made, with each god contributing something of their own to complete her. The similarities to these stories and AI are, in some ways, uncanny.
If there is one thing that binds the age-defying, or age-terminating, ambition of religion and science, it is the insistence that the ancient hardware with which we are bound is nothing more than a starting point, a beginning meant to be shucked for something that transcends it.
Contempt for what we are
In Albert Camus’s 1951 book-length essay, The Rebel, he writes that “man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” While he was writing about the human refusal to accept any given condition, from politics to metaphysics, without protest, it fits our current subject with unusual precision.
Beneath the youth-giving fountains, cryo-preserved bodies, and hundreds of daily supplements, it seems there is more contempt than optimism for the human condition. In other words, there is a refusal to accept the fact that we are not perfect creatures, who can somehow cheat death with the right exercise routine or correctly calibrated freezer.
That is not to suggest that we should stop providing life-saving treatment, cancer research, or dissemination of vaccines. No sane person would advocate for such a thing. We need a science that aims to provide each person a certain quality of life, for as long as possible. This does not seem to be the goal of the longevity crowd. It is easy to imagine Johnson, while striving to remain youthful for as long as possible, could fall into the business of extending life for nothing more than merely extending life.
Consider a human who, discovering a very rare substance that can extend their life for five years each time they consume it, spends every waking moment trying to get their hands on the next batch of supply. They have no time for friends, family, travel, holidays, or entertainment. Every single moment they are awake is devoted to resupplying the substance that sustains the condition that has them desperately searching for it. This would amount to a Sisyphean imprisonment riddled with despair and paranoia.
Compare Johnson and the longevity community’s perception of life to Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and bioethicist who wrote a 2014 essay for The Atlantic, entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” Emanuel does not argue in favor of suicide. And he has said, on more than one occasion, that he opposes euthanasia and physician-assisted death. But beyond the age of 75, Emanuel wrote that he would decline preventative screenings entirely, refuse flu shots and antibiotics administered for their own sake, and turn down cardiac stress tests, pacemakers, defibrillators, and bypass surgery, accepting only palliative treatment if he happens to be in pain.
Again, Emanuel is not pushing for a self-induced end to his life at 75. He has made a deal with himself that he will stop attempting to stave off the reaper, if it naturally comes knocking on his door.
For Emanuel, life is measured in its quality, not its quantity. At the end of the piece, he writes:
Seventy-five years is all I want to live. I want to celebrate my life while I am still in my prime. My daughters and dear friends will continue to try to convince me that I am wrong and can live a valuable life much longer. And I retain the right to change my mind and offer a vigorous and reasoned defense of living as long as possible. That, after all, would mean still being creative after 75.
Conversely, Johnson has pushed all his chips in on the hand of longevity: no small talk, no meals after noon, no nights spent beside another person, all wagered against a payout that has no secured arrival date.
And despite the sensors, the specialists, and the discipline, his own body still delivered him a disease that cannot be cured. Even if the researchers he has recruited to solve his illness succeed, there is no way for Johnson to get a refund on all the years he declined to live life simply to get more of it.