If you are encountering the idea of radical life extension for the first time, you probably assume that a long life would bring many problems. Before you read this entire article and realize that, at least in many ways, you were mistaken, I want to note one thing: no one is going to force you to live forever.
When rejuvenating or life-extending therapy appears in this world, it is hardly likely to be mandatory for every person on Earth. If you truly, sincerely do not want to extend your life and youth, you will always be free to choose otherwise and die, for example, when your body gives out from accumulated damage.
It is also important to understand that this is not about physical immortality, that is, the impossibility of dying under any circumstances. If you are biologically immortal, that only means your risk of death does not increase with age and you show no signs of aging. Potentially you may live forever, but if an anvil falls on your head, you will still die.
(Unless, of course, we develop astonishing regenerative abilities like Deadpool in the Marvel comics, though I am not sure how possible that is in principle.)
It is precisely this risk of accidental death through injury that limits the hypothetical average lifespan of a non-aging human being to about 1,000 years, if we use the modern probability of death for a thirty-year-old.
The idea of human biological immortality is that death would no longer be obligatory.
Eternal old age?
By "life extension" I mean the extension of healthy life and/or the elimination of old age.
If someone speaks of extending life, they are automatically speaking of eternal youth, not eternal old age. If you imagined a person who goes on aging forever but cannot die, you have committed what is called the Tithonus Error.
In the ancient Greek myth, Tithonus asked for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth, and so he aged forever and became a cicada. But life does not work like ancient Greek myths.
In real life, the idea is that you could feel twenty at eighty, or twenty at one thousand, and that affects many of the questions that follow.
Will progress stop?
In connection with point 2, we can immediately refute the claim that death is necessary so that there will not arise a population of people unable to change their minds, thereby halting human progress.
The rigidity of thought that comes with age is most often tied to brain aging, and that problem would be solved.
And think about it: if people become capable of fully defeating aging and death, would they not also become capable of managing the brain's neurochemistry so as to tune the level of plasticity and, accordingly, openness to new experience? Of course we will be able to do that.
Some substances, for example psilocybin or LSD, according to research, can already now positively shift openness to experience on the Big Five scale. [1]
It is also worth noting that in the past, progress did not stop because human lives became longer. Historically, greater longevity made the human world richer and accelerated its development, opening doors to new possibilities rather than closing them. The replacement of ideas does not require the replacement of corpses. That is not a humane approach. A new paradigm usually wins not because the old people die, but because it offers better explanations, better tools, and a better quality of life.
Imagine a composer with 180 years of practice, a philosopher with 220 years of dialogue across the ages, a film director who has witnessed five technological revolutions, a scientist who personally sees to the end longitudinal studies begun a century earlier.
That does not sound like stagnation. It sounds like the possibility of depths of understanding and mastery never before seen.
Living forever would be boring
Ask yourself: what reasons are there to suppose that, with life extension, boredom would arise in you more often than during any random period of your present life?
There are not many such reasons, in my view. One might say that over a long life you would have time to try everything in the world. That is highly doubtful, because history and science keep moving forward, ever more possibilities open before us, and the amount of human-made content has already grown to unimaginable proportions.
But even if we imagine the world freezing in place and nothing new ever being created again, it would still take you thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years to study everything and try every kind of activity and sensation.
For example, off the top of my head, to read all of Dumas would require several months of nonstop reading, yes, even without pauses to blink, yawn, or go to the toilet.
What is more, as already mentioned above, in the future we may gain the ability to manage our brains and our mental states, perhaps even switching on heightened curiosity at will, as well as immersing ourselves in virtual worlds with an absolutely limitless quantity of experience.
Does death give meaning?
To my mind, this is one of the silliest misconceptions about immortality.
Do you really think to yourself from time to time, "Oh, soon I will begin to fall apart, suffer chronic fatigue and pain, and then vanish forever. How inspiring"?
Would life really lose meaning if you knew that a thousand years, or many thousands of years, of life and possibility lay ahead of you? It seems to me the opposite is true.
The only thing death motivates me to do is fight it, so that I can go on living, creating, enjoying life, so that all this does not disappear. I do not believe I would stop striving toward other goals if I became immortal. Those goals are not tied to death, so why should death affect them?
If I want to play the guitar, then I want to play the guitar. If I want to write a book, I want to write a book. A rose is a rose is a rose, that is all. I do not do these things because I will die, not because I must "manage to try them in time," but simply because I want to.
"Death makes life valuable" is absurd.
If someone told us that our phone would always work well and never grow obsolete, would we stop valuing it?
If the risk of dying gives life meaning, then the older or sicker a person is, the more valuable their life must be. So if you had to choose between saving a 110-year-old man and a small boy, would you choose the 110-year-old? Is an infant's life valuable only because he can die easily? I think it is valuable because he has many years of potentially happy life ahead of him. Death has nothing to do with value.
In childhood we do not think about death, often we do not even know about it, and yet we still rejoice in life. Often we rejoice far more strongly than we do as adults.
In truth, we value life not because it can be taken away, but because it contains love, beauty, knowledge, the possibility of joy and creativity. Death does not create these things; it simply cuts them off.
If death itself gave meaning, then why do we regard murder or fatal illness as bad?
Death may intensify a feeling of scarcity, the feeling that you do not have much time left and must hurry to do a great deal.
But that is not meaning. That is anxiety.
Deadlines, as we know, do not protect us from procrastination. If they mobilize our resources at all, it usually happens closer to the deadline itself; they do not make us productive throughout the whole time allotted to the task.
And finally, allow me to quote a random commenter on the internet:
Seriously, death as a motivator? Death does not even motivate people to quit smoking! Do people really believe everyone would just sit and watch TV if not for death? Oh wait, most people already do. What a motivator! [2]
First part: https://antimortality.com/posts/7Nzxn5jowaPQo89PN/what-is-immortality
If you are encountering the idea of radical life extension for the first time, you probably assume that a long life would bring many problems. Before you read this entire article and realize that, at least in many ways, you were mistaken, I want to note one thing: no one is going to force you to live forever.
When rejuvenating or life-extending therapy appears in this world, it is hardly likely to be mandatory for every person on Earth. If you truly, sincerely do not want to extend your life and youth, you will always be free to choose otherwise and die, for example, when your body gives out from accumulated damage.
It is also important to understand that this is not about physical immortality, that is, the impossibility of dying under any circumstances. If you are biologically immortal, that only means your risk of death does not increase with age and you show no signs of aging. Potentially you may live forever, but if an anvil falls on your head, you will still die.
(Unless, of course, we develop astonishing regenerative abilities like Deadpool in the Marvel comics, though I am not sure how possible that is in principle.)
It is precisely this risk of accidental death through injury that limits the hypothetical average lifespan of a non-aging human being to about 1,000 years, if we use the modern probability of death for a thirty-year-old.
The idea of human biological immortality is that death would no longer be obligatory.
Eternal old age?
By "life extension" I mean the extension of healthy life and/or the elimination of old age.
If someone speaks of extending life, they are automatically speaking of eternal youth, not eternal old age. If you imagined a person who goes on aging forever but cannot die, you have committed what is called the Tithonus Error.
In the ancient Greek myth, Tithonus asked for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth, and so he aged forever and became a cicada. But life does not work like ancient Greek myths.
In real life, the idea is that you could feel twenty at eighty, or twenty at one thousand, and that affects many of the questions that follow.
Will progress stop?
In connection with point 2, we can immediately refute the claim that death is necessary so that there will not arise a population of people unable to change their minds, thereby halting human progress.
The rigidity of thought that comes with age is most often tied to brain aging, and that problem would be solved.
And think about it: if people become capable of fully defeating aging and death, would they not also become capable of managing the brain's neurochemistry so as to tune the level of plasticity and, accordingly, openness to new experience? Of course we will be able to do that.
Some substances, for example psilocybin or LSD, according to research, can already now positively shift openness to experience on the Big Five scale. [1]
It is also worth noting that in the past, progress did not stop because human lives became longer. Historically, greater longevity made the human world richer and accelerated its development, opening doors to new possibilities rather than closing them. The replacement of ideas does not require the replacement of corpses. That is not a humane approach. A new paradigm usually wins not because the old people die, but because it offers better explanations, better tools, and a better quality of life.
Imagine a composer with 180 years of practice, a philosopher with 220 years of dialogue across the ages, a film director who has witnessed five technological revolutions, a scientist who personally sees to the end longitudinal studies begun a century earlier.
That does not sound like stagnation. It sounds like the possibility of depths of understanding and mastery never before seen.
Living forever would be boring
Ask yourself: what reasons are there to suppose that, with life extension, boredom would arise in you more often than during any random period of your present life?
There are not many such reasons, in my view. One might say that over a long life you would have time to try everything in the world. That is highly doubtful, because history and science keep moving forward, ever more possibilities open before us, and the amount of human-made content has already grown to unimaginable proportions.
But even if we imagine the world freezing in place and nothing new ever being created again, it would still take you thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years to study everything and try every kind of activity and sensation.
For example, off the top of my head, to read all of Dumas would require several months of nonstop reading, yes, even without pauses to blink, yawn, or go to the toilet.
What is more, as already mentioned above, in the future we may gain the ability to manage our brains and our mental states, perhaps even switching on heightened curiosity at will, as well as immersing ourselves in virtual worlds with an absolutely limitless quantity of experience.
Does death give meaning?
To my mind, this is one of the silliest misconceptions about immortality.
Do you really think to yourself from time to time, "Oh, soon I will begin to fall apart, suffer chronic fatigue and pain, and then vanish forever. How inspiring"?
Would life really lose meaning if you knew that a thousand years, or many thousands of years, of life and possibility lay ahead of you? It seems to me the opposite is true.
The only thing death motivates me to do is fight it, so that I can go on living, creating, enjoying life, so that all this does not disappear. I do not believe I would stop striving toward other goals if I became immortal. Those goals are not tied to death, so why should death affect them?
If I want to play the guitar, then I want to play the guitar. If I want to write a book, I want to write a book. A rose is a rose is a rose, that is all. I do not do these things because I will die, not because I must "manage to try them in time," but simply because I want to.
"Death makes life valuable" is absurd.
If someone told us that our phone would always work well and never grow obsolete, would we stop valuing it?
If the risk of dying gives life meaning, then the older or sicker a person is, the more valuable their life must be. So if you had to choose between saving a 110-year-old man and a small boy, would you choose the 110-year-old? Is an infant's life valuable only because he can die easily? I think it is valuable because he has many years of potentially happy life ahead of him. Death has nothing to do with value.
In childhood we do not think about death, often we do not even know about it, and yet we still rejoice in life. Often we rejoice far more strongly than we do as adults.
In truth, we value life not because it can be taken away, but because it contains love, beauty, knowledge, the possibility of joy and creativity. Death does not create these things; it simply cuts them off.
If death itself gave meaning, then why do we regard murder or fatal illness as bad?
Death may intensify a feeling of scarcity, the feeling that you do not have much time left and must hurry to do a great deal.
But that is not meaning. That is anxiety.
Deadlines, as we know, do not protect us from procrastination. If they mobilize our resources at all, it usually happens closer to the deadline itself; they do not make us productive throughout the whole time allotted to the task.
And finally, allow me to quote a random commenter on the internet:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21956378/
https://qr.ae/pCLZia