Who Wants To Live Forever?

 

First off, two nuggets of weirdness I’d like to share with my beloved readers, whoever you might be.

I went to buy beer at the Safeway, a regional supermarket.  Beer is an “age-restricted item”, which requires a Safeway Authority Figure to verify my State-Issued Vehicle Operation ID to make sure a child is not purchasing low-potency alcoholic beverages.  In her casual haste to fulfil her duties, the SAF entered my year of birth as 1169, prompting the Cashier Computer to go into “WTF” mode, meaning I would have to bring my purchase from the self-checkout register to the Actual Flesh & Blood Store Cashier register.  Once the Cashier verified I was 52 years old, instead of 852 years old, my beer purchase was finally consummated.  And there was much rejoicing.

Then, the weather report.  As my hearing is well below milspec (which is why I’m an attorney and not an Army-trained killing machine) I have the TV thing set with captions.  And in the wintery time, in a place such as Northern former Confederate State Virginia which sometimes sees that snow stuff, obviously that possibility was germane to weather reporting.  However, the captioning indicated that because the temperature would be rising above freezing, the snow would transition to “eyes”.  Raining eyes?  Really?  Now that’s a form of precipitation I’ve never seen.   Imagine that.  We’re all Mortys living in Rick’s world. 

I’ve been plowing through Westworld, Season 3.  Whereas season 1 & 2 took place in the “park” area, somewhere in Utah, season 3 takes us out to the real world, as the Hosts (Androids) manage to determine how to survive on their own.  Aaron Paul, aka Jesse Pinkman from “Breaking Bad”, is here as veteran with PTSD who ends up working with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood).  Of course, the #1 issue is always, who is a guest (human) and who is a host (android)?

Biological Functions.  This came up during “Blade Runner”, the early 80s sci-fi film based on PKD’s book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with Harrison Ford as Deckard, an assassin who takes out rogue replicants (androids), the main one being Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).  Replicants are hardwired with a two year lifespan, which Batty is trying to fix, only to find that it can’t be fixed.  Then the faux-clever question is, “is Deckard himself a replicant”?  First off, if he was doing it for more than 2 years, then no.  But here’s another big issue.

Humans have these things called biological functions.  We eat, drink, poop, pee, sleep, get sick, age, and die.  Androids need at least some power source, but beyond that there’s no reason to program them with all those biological functions.  Why do so??? That would be like retro-engineering a modern car with the same features as a Model T.  Best to keep androids the way they are and not worry about making them replicate humans.

The really stupid thing is that aside from plot reasons, there’s no reason to show people in movies or TVs shows peeing or pooing, or getting sick.  So those occur off-camera, presumably, for any character who is human.  If you’re uncertain if you’re a human or a robot, the simple deal is:  do you get hungry and have to eat?  If you eat, do you poo?  Do you get older and sick?  The narrative of “Westworld” occurs over 20-30 years, and we see at least one human character age so much he’s played by two completely different actors at those different times.  But all the hosts – the most notable being Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Meave (Thandie Newton) look exactly the same.  Well, of course:  an advantage of androids is that they don’t age and are theoretically immortal.

The catch is, how does a HUMAN get to enjoy that immortality?  How do you transfer your consciousness from your meatbag, aging, peeing and pooing shell, into that sleek, non-aging host body?  So far as I can tell, none of the guests from Westworld made that transition.  They can make host copies of guests, but while the copies might have memories of the guest, there is no continuity of consciousness; the host is just a copy, the original person eventually dies.  The best they can do is reduce all the hosts’ personalities and memories to a small globe which can be removed and inserted into any other host body.  They can also make copies of these globes and inhabit multiple host bodies simultaneously.  Think of how the narrative might change with that possibility.  Anyhow, none of us are androids and unlikely to be one anytime soon, or ever.

Robocop.  One scenario where it did happen, albeit under somewhat suboptimal circumstances.  In the first movie, Detroit, facing an unruly police union, decides to avoid the issue by making robot cops: a robo-cop made from somewhat deceased cop, Murphy (Peter Weller).  Robocop starts off as a robot, but Murphy’s prior memories leach back in.  In Robocop 2, they pull the brain, eyes and spinal cord of the subject (truly evil bad guy) into a second generation robot.  They had to use the bad guy, Cain; the good guys they tried it with first immediately killed themselves.  Is this a truly practical solution?  Probably not.

In any case, the insanely rich and well funded Delos Corp never seemed to manage to figure out how to transplant an original guest consciousness into a host body:  the best they could do was somehow copy the humans into a very convincing android who supposedly had the original’s personality and memories.  But if the original human simply died at some point, what’s the point of all these android copies?  It doesn’t do the original human any good, and doesn’t solve the ultimate problem.

The other issue is that our brains have limited memory capacity.  Once we reach that limit, new memories are only acquired at the expense of old ones.  So if you could live to be 1000, but your brain can only reliably store 100 years worth of memories, which of those do you retain? That would be 10%.  Then if you live to be 2,000, we’re talking 5%, and so on.  This sounds like a problem which will never be fixed no matter how brilliant the scientists are.  Let’s talk to Dr. Strange…

Immortality Revisited

Back in high school, I had my first sleepless night contemplating mortality:  what happens when we die – Heaven? Hell? oblivion? - and the fact that (apparently) there is nothing we can do to stop it.  I managed to put that monster to sleep, for some time, but recently he woke up again.  My father’s sudden death in December 2004 probably did more than anything else to resurrect this monster.

 The mortality monster presented me with two additional blows, thought-wise.  1. I’m 39.  We usually think of age 50 as “middle age”, but that assumes a life expectancy of 100, well above the 75 year standard life expectancy for males in industrial nations such as the US.  By that token, I’m already middle-aged.  John Rutsey, the original drummer for Rush, recently died at age 55, meaning he was middle aged at 27, and was probably unaware of the milestone on his 27^th birthday.  2.  If we die eventually, what is the point of all our efforts?  Even our own children (if we have them) will eventually die, our grandchildren, etc. – our entire “line”.  All our possessions, our accomplishments, everything we worked so hard for all our lives, down to NOTHING, absolutely nothing, with the laziest slacker, the most productive saint, the prince and pauper, and the vilest of criminals and murderers all equalized in the oblivion of death.  It seems the happier our all-too-brief lives are, the more we have to fear the inevitable loss thereof that death will bring.  So the only solution to a fear of death is to have a life so dull, miserable, or even painful, that death is actually welcome and not feared.  Brilliant, we have two choices:  happy life with fear of death, or shitty life with no fear of death.  Is that it?

So it should come to no surprise that mankind has sought, for ages, immortality, whether in reality or fiction. 

Vampires.  One of the more glamorous, or horrifying, “solutions” to this topic, are vampires.  First Bram Stoker, then Bela Lugosi (Hungarian, not Romanian, though Transylvania qualifies as both), and most recently the “gay” vampires of Anne Rice (yes, I know that as “vampires” they’re not gay, but funny that Lestat seemed to prefer drinking the blood of male vampires almost exclusively...and the company of David Talbot).  Of course, vampires suffer the drawbacks of having to suck blood constantly and only go about at night, which cuts back on the usefulness of immortality.

Highlander.  “There can be only one.”  Personally, I was never a big fan of these movies, or the TV show.  Christopher Lambert, a French actor, portraying Connor McLeod, a Scotsman, whereas the true Scotsman, Sean Connery, portrays an Egyptian pretending to be a Spaniard (Ramirez).  No one ever seems to explain how these “Immortals” came to be so, or why there can be only one.  We just have to enjoy the Queen soundtrack and go along for the ride.   However, they were not vampires and could exist in daylight, with the only drawback being apparently sterile.  Is that it?? Hey, I’ll take that.

Futurama.  Matt Groening “solves” the mortality issue by time travel (Fry) and also keeping heads (not only brains) inside jars.  However, this sort of immortality would appear to be disturbing: the heads are sentient and conscious in real time, but cannot move under their own power.  The sole exception was when Nixon managed to buy Bender’s body from him.  This is all more of a ludicrous plot device to get contemporary celebrities into a time frame of the 31^st century.

I Will Fear No Evil.  Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite science fiction authors, took a stab in this direction in this book.  A Montgomery Burns type old man, filthy rich and obnoxiously misanthropic, manages to get his brain transplanted into the body of his young (female) secretary and experiences a second youth, albeit as a woman.  The fix turns out to be quite an adventure, though ultimately short-lived.

Time Enough For Love.  Heinlein clearly hits the mortality issue head on, and here he takes another stab, this time considerably more serious and actually (as discussed below) remarkably more plausible.  The Howard Families selectively breed for longevity, but also use certain periodic rejuvenation treatments which detoxify the body and reverse aging.  They therefore appear considerably younger than their chronological ages.  As noted in Methuselah’s Children, these treatments, though, are exclusively for the Howard Family group and not available to the population at large, which in that book forces the group to escape Earth to avoid uncertain – but certainly unpleasant – consequences at the hands of a jealous and angry population at large.  Lazarus Long is the most important, and longest-lived, member of the family.  Among other things he goes back in time to 1916, engages in a romantic and sexual relationship with his own mother, Maureen (the mother’s side of the story is told in To Sail Beyond The Sunset, Heinlein’s last book) and even volunteers (against his better judgment) for the AEF and goes off to France in 1917.  Time Enough For Love is one of the best of these series of books, as it has longevity/rejuvenation, time travel, Lazarus Long, and LOTS of sex.  The Cat Who Walks Through Walls also has many of the same characters, including a husband who discovers that his “younger” wife turns out to be a Howard old enough to be his grandmother.

Ending Aging, by Aubrey de Grey.  In my earlier blog, “Mein Kampf vs. O Alquimista”, I discussed immortality and decided, after some thought, that it must be theoretically impossible.  And the prior examples I gave are all fiction, so they had no hope of convincing me otherwise.  But it turns out that Heinlein was on to something.

            In this book, de Grey discusses various technologies to treat aging, and makes an astonishing series of arguments:
            A.  No one dies of “old age”, per se; we simply die of some disease or other brought about by either the overaccumulation of waste products in our cells or some disease which our weakened immune system could not defeat.  Therefore, defeating aging is twofold: attack and cure diseases (including cancer) and “throw out the trash”.
            B. He mentioned the Howard Family breeding, but clearly that was only half the story.  We’re not talking about merely slowing the aging process, but actually reversing it, by periodically eliminating waste inside cells which the body’s own system (lysosomes) cannot handle, and by replenishing dead cells, which the body cannot replenish itself, through stem cells.  Anyone who reads this book (myself included) will realize how important stem cell research is and how idiotic the opposition to it is.  Maybe Bush doesn’t want to live forever, but I certainly do.
            C. The fight against cancer is a major part of this.  Cancer, in various forms, is one of the most serious killers.  It basically involves mutant cells which overreproduce and crowd out normal cells.  De Grey’s proposed cure involves gene therapy to permanently switch off cells’ ability to reproduce (cancer cells as well as all others), which would have to be introduced after a person reaches some level of physical maturity, and combine this with stem cells to compensate for this.
            D.  At first the treatments will simply extend life; aging will still take its toll, though not as rapidly.  But eventually, possibly within the lifetime of people alive today, treatment of harder-to-fix damage will become practical, giving us what he calls “longevity escape velocity” (LEV), the ability to reverse aging indefinitely.  While he doesn’t want to scare people off by indulging in wild fantasies, let’s face it: LEV could more clearly be described as nothing less than IMMORTALITY, eternal youth.
            De Grey is a biologist, not a science fiction writer.  He certainly knows far more about this than I do, and far more than Heinlein, though from what I can recall, Heinlein had the basic ideas and principles but was light years away from the details.  My own experience in biology ended in high school, so I’m in a poor position to second-guess de Grey, let alone to pick apart the extensive research he cites.  For all I know it may be complete nonsense, each and every study cited taken out of context and deliberately misquoted – or completely fabricated.  Or perhaps he’s right, but simply overoptimistic about various details or the overall timing – they may discover immortality the day after I die (just so long as they discover resurrection!).  But de Grey has made an argument, at last, for real, true, eternal youth, in our lifetimes.  I’ll take false hope over no hope any time.