Death is at once the most terrible and most natural thing in the world. Although we can take measures to avoid mortal trauma or lethal violence, we cannot escape biological mortality, and we will one day succumb to frailty, decay and death. We dread it, loath it, resent it, but we also accept it as a reality in a way that we don’t accept a violent death, an accident or a fatal illness. It is seen as a part of the natural order, but I have never understood how death can be reconciled with our treatment of life.
We live in society that values and encourages personal growth and betterment. We are conditioned to live for our future, to plan, to prepare, to act in a way that will best help our future selves. When we are young, we are readied in schools for the lives we will live, we are apprenticed and interned and our careers begin, where we encounter phrases like ‘the career ladder’ and ‘opportunities for growth’ and ‘long term goals.’ But all the while, we quietly accept that this future will inevitably come to an end and no amount of development or goal-fulfilment will prevent this. This seems like an impossible contradiction to me; how can we possibly invest in something we know will fail? Or how can we still accept death once we have become so invested in life?
It seems to me that biological mortality is an aspect of our animal heritage. Biology guarantees us just enough time to procreate, raise and protect our successors and then reclaims its gift of life. But modern man wants more than this. As intelligent, self-aware and creative animals, we now have pursuits and labours to occupy multiple lifetimes, maybe hundreds, but we are forced to specialise, to learn a certain skill, develop a particular hobby as we have no chance to do it all. But the concern of biology is only the survival of the species, which does not require immortal individuals. If we produce sufficient offspring to replace us, and they do likewise and through all generations, the species endures and so in a way, we are already immortality, at the species-level.
This is, however, little consolation to those who form the many tiny hands that perpetuate the species along its grand journey, and yet see only a slim fraction of it. Think of all the great minds and far-thinkers that never saw the results of their work and or the futures they predicted. Yet still think of the things that we will not see. Whether the first lunar colonies, or Martian? Or the discovery of the twin to our own planet to which we dispatch the noble pioneers on long cryogenic voyages never to return. Or artificial life? Thinking machines or the recreation of lost species in real-life Jurassic Park’s within vast designer ecosystems
Aubrey de Grey is an author and theoretician in the field of gerontology and a leading proponent of extended human life. As chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation (Strategies for Negligible Senescence) his work seeks to develop a range of regenerative medical therapies to periodically repair age-related damage to postpone the correlated diseases in humans. [i] He describes aging simply as a disease rather than cosmic law or “the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us.” [ii]
De Grey believes that the first people who could live to be 1000 are already alive today, and could even be as old as 40 or 50 already. [iii] It is important to clarify that the SENS strategies do not refer to a single ‘immortality’ treatment, but rather the on-going bodily rejuvenation provided by constantly improving medical treatments. The 1000 year figure is cumulative, so as long as you live to see the first generation of these treatments, predicted to be as little as 20-25 years away, you will gain enough time to see the next medical breakthrough, further postponing senescence. In a TED talk in 2005 de Grey describes this as ‘Longevity Escape Velocity,’ as although individuals aged 80+ today may have too much age-related damage already to be helped by the first generation of treatments, those aged 40-50 may be pulled out of “the dive” and regain lost youth. [iv] It is important to point out that SENS is describing the postponement of aging, not the prolonging of aging as is often assumed, or the ‘Tithonus error’ de Grey calls it, recalling Eos’ torturous gift of immortality that neglected to prevent the Trojan’s aging. Indeed de Grey believes that the science far ahead of the funding as the work struggles against a general social “pro-aging trance;” described as a psychological strategy people employ to deal with the inevitability of death which explains society’s general ambivalence with death. [v]
Biological immortality, however, isn’t inherently impossible, in fact the term ‘negligible senescence’ was in use in the 1990’s, long before the SENS Foundation, to describe living organisms like lobsters and Hydras who were found to show no signs of aging. This is a subject that is seemingly still debated, but the work of Daniel Martinez in 1998 on the ‘Biological Immortality of Hydra’ is generally considered to be evidence of non-senescing organisms generally. [vi]
If the living world permits immortality in other organisms, why should humans be so accepting of death? How could the pursuit of deathlessness possibly be ‘unnatural,’ when modern medicine is already doing this by preventing disease, injury and organ-failure? It seems we need to change our perception of aging altogether. If we treat aging as Aubrey de Grey does, as just a disease, why should we not seek to cure it?
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[i] SENS Research Foundation, “A Reimagined Research Strategy for Aging | SENS Research Foundation,” accessed May 4, 2013, http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research.
[ii] Aubrey de Grey, “Hang in There: The 25-Year Wait for Immortality | LiveScience,” accessed May 4, 2013, http://www.livescience.com/6967-hang-25-year-wait-immortality.html.
[iii] Aubrey de Grey, “Aubrey De Grey: A Roadmap to End Aging | Video on TED.com,” July 2005, http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Aubrey de Grey, “Combating the Tithonus Error: What Works?,” Rejuvenation Research 11 (August 2008): 713–715.
[vi] D. E. Martinez, “Mortality Patterns Suggest Lack of Senescence in Hydra,” Experimental Gerontology 33 (May 1998): 217–225.
