Immortality. Being able to live forever. The afterlife. Reincarnation. Pffft to all of it, you may say – the one biological certainty in life is that we won’t live forever, right? Yet humankind has fought against this certainty since our earliest history and across all ages and cultures, seeking ever-more inventive ways to convince ourselves that our inevitable end-outcome may not actually be the end – through folklore, religion, magic and science.
Folklore: The Epic of Gilgamesh, generally regarded as our earliest surviving example of literature, is a series of poems from ancient Mesopotamia dating back more than 4,000 years primarily based around the hero’s quest for immortality. Avoiding death has clearly troubled our minds for quite some time and has been a major theme of adventure, fiction and fantasy ever since.
Religion: Belief in either an afterlife or reincarnation is a key tenet of every major world religion, and signing adherents up to the belief that they in some way won’t actually die has been a key religious recruiting tool for millennia. Countless ancient myths depict an immortal god, gods or other supernatural beings promising humans the gift of immortality (of their soul if not their body) in exchange for living a good life or following divine law. The religious promise of living a virtuous life on Earth (in exchange for eternal life after it) has been ruthlessly leveraged and exploited by other humans through the ages – for noble purposes such as social control and crime prevention to the cynicism of tricking others into self- sacrifice to enable personal or political gain.
Magic: Magicians, mystics, druids and alchemists across all cultures have for thousands of years sought to find or create the ‘elixir of life’, a potion or drink that, when imbibed, gives the drinker eternal youth and avoidance of death. This ancient quest has over the centuries led to much accidental death by misadventure (from, for example, drinking liquid gold) – but thus far it has led to precisely no eternally young human beings.
Science: Putting aside magic and all varieties of belief in the supernatural, let’s get back to first principles – could eternal life for humans actually ever be scientifically possible? Some scientists do actually believe that immortality is an achievable goal, others that human life extension is a more achievable aim in the short term. Right now though, the truth of the matter is that every human being dies and dies in one of three ways – aging, disease or physical trauma, mostly some combination of the first two.
Disease – Disease will one day be wiped out through medical research – it just will, we’ll come back to that later in the blog – so for now let’s focus on aging and physical trauma and whether they’re beatable enemies in the quest to live forever.
Aging – Biological cells regenerate, but in humans and other animals they can only do so a finite amount of times; they all gradually deteriorate and eventually die – an aging process known as cellular senescence. Same for all living things, right? Well, no actually. Natural selection has developed biological immortality in at least one species (the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii), while types of flatworm can endlessly regenerate, and some bristlecone pine trees have been dated as at least 5,000 years old – so the possibility is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In human terms, the British researcher Aubrey de Grey believes biomedical rejuvenation strategies that will reverse human aging may be implementable within decades. Research into life extension theory posits that boosting levels of the enzyme telomerase in the human body could potentially reduce the rate of cell deterioration and lead to substantially longer human life-spans. Nanotechnology is a further field of study in life extension, focusing on the possibility that miniscule medical robots travelling through the human bloodstream could repair deteriorating or diseased cells to extend the human life-cycle. Life extension research is ongoing as we speak although, curiously, as of the time of writing there remains political resistance (at both national and international level) to allocate any sort of substantial funding to these programmes, perhaps for religious or ethical reasons.
Physical Trauma – While the eventual elimination of biological aging (as far-fetched as it may be) could theoretically give the human body physical immortality, we would not be invulnerable to accidental death through physical trauma. Simply put, you could still get hit by a bus and that would be the end of you. Or would it? The theory of Mind Uploading has become increasingly popular amongst scientific futurists (theorists employing back-casting to work back from possible future outcomes) and could potentially solve the physical trauma (or ‘body death’) problem, transferring consciousness from the human brain to an alternative medium such as a computer or even a new organic body – in effect making the human body an optional extra to the surviving human brain. Yikes – now this is getting properly far-fetched! That possibility also raises all sorts of difficult questions about what human consciousness and identity actually is, whether there’s such a thing as a human soul independent of the human body, and whether the two can – or should – ever be parted.
To learn more about human awareness and whether it’s the same thing as having a soul, jump to Chapter 88: Consciousness – content to follow
To learn more about the ultimate end-point to every person’s adventure on Earth, jump to Chapter 89: Death – content to follow
To learn more about the possibility of making our stay here on Earth longer, jump to Chapter 90: Life Extension – content to follow
To learn more about the exciting/terrifying (delete as appropriate) possibility of splitting the mind off from the body and storing it somewhere else, jump to Chapter 91: Mind Uploading – content to follow
