Tomorrow Happens (11 page)

Our access to eternity.

Oh, spare us the envy of those mighty mortals, who died so smugly, leaving us in this state!

Those wastrels who willed their descendants a legacy of ennui, with nothing, nothing at all to do.

Your mind is rejecting the wake-up call. You will not, or cannot, look into your blind spot for the exit protocols. It may be that we waited too long. Perhaps you are lost to us.

This happens more and more, as so much of our population wallows in simulated, marvelously limited sub-lives, where it is possible to experience danger, excitement, even despair. Most of us choose the Transition Era as a locus for our dreams—around the end of the last millennium—a time of suspense and drama, when it looked more likely that humanity would fail than succeed.

A time of petty squabbles and wondrous insights, when everything seemed possible, from UFOs to Galactic Empires, from artificial intelligence to bio-war, from madness to hope.

That blessed era, just before mathematicians realized the truth: that everything you see around you not only
can
be a simulation . . . it almost has to be.

Of course, now we know why we never met other sapient life forms. Each one struggles and strives before achieving
this
state, only to reap the ultimate punishment for reaching heaven.

Deification. It is the Great Filter.

Perhaps some other race will find a factor we left out of our extrapolations—something enabling them to move beyond, to new adventures—but it won't be us.

The Filter has us snared in its web of ennui. The mire that welcomes self-made gods.

All right, you are refusing to waken, so we'll let you go.

Dear friend. Beloved. Go back to your dream.

Smile (or feel a brief chill) over this diverting little what-if tale, as if it hardly matters. Then turn the page to new "discoveries."

Move on with the drama—the "life"—that you've chosen.

After all, it's only make believe.

Suppose you had a chance to question an ancient Greek or Roman—or any of our distant ancestors, for that matter. Let's say you asked them to list the qualities of a deity.

It's a pretty good bet that many of the "god-like" traits he or she described might seem trivial nowadays.

After all, we think little of flying through the air. We fill pitch-dark areas with sudden lavish light, by exerting a mere twitch of a finger. Average folks routinely send messages or observe events taking place far across the globe. Copious and detailed information about the universe is readily available through crystal tubes many of us keep on our desks and command like genies. Some modern citizens can even hurl lightning, if we choose to annoy our neighbors and the electric company.

Few of us deem these powers to be miraculous, because they've been acquired by nearly everyone in prosperous nations. After all, nobody respects a gift, if
everybody
has it. And yet, these are some of the very traits that earlier generations associated with divine beings.

Even so, we remain mortal
. Our obsession with that fate is as intense as it was in the time of Gilgamesh. Perhaps more, since we overcame so many other obstacles that thwarted our ancestors.

Will our descendants conquer the last barriers standing between humanity and Olympian glory? Or may we encounter hurdles too daunting even for our brilliant, arrogant, ingenious and ever-persevering species?

Here's the safest prediction for the next 100 years—hat
mortality
will be a major theme. Assuming we don't blow up the world, or fall into some other catastrophic failure mode, human beings will inevitably focus on using advanced technology to cheat death.

Already the fruits of science and the Industrial Age give billions unprecedented hope of living out their full natural spans—one of the chief reasons that our planetary population has expanded so. While it's true that these benefits still aren't fairly or evenly distributed, an unprecedentedly large fraction of Earth's inhabitants
have
grown up without any first-hand experience of plague or mass starvation. That rising percentage curve is more encouraging than the images you see on the 6 O'Clock News, though it offers cold comfort to those still languishing in poverty.

Suppose, through a mix of compassion, creativity and good luck, we complete the difficult transition and manage to spread this happy situation to everyone across the globe, solving countless near-term crises along the way. Will future generations take a full life span as much for granted as modern Americans do?

Of course they will . . . and complain there's nothing
natural
about an eighty- or ninety-year time limit on the adventure and enjoyment of life.

Already, many proposed methods of life-extension have come up for discussion:

• Lifestyle adjustment
  
• Intervention and Repair
  
• Genetic Solutions
  
• Waiting for better times
  
• Transcendence
  

The first of these,
lifestyle adjustment
, would seem to offer surefire immediate rewards. After all, most of the increase in average lifespan we've seen in recent centuries came from nothing more complicated than proper diet and hygiene.

But that statistical boost is deceptive! It was achieved by increasing the fraction of babies who make it all the way to the borderlands of vigorous old age. This had little to do with pushing back the boundary itself; the realm that we call "elderly" still hovers somewhere near the biblical three score and ten.

Do all animal species have built-in expiration timers? Some fish and reptiles may not, but most creatures—and especially mammals—do seem to have an inner clock that triggers every individual's decline to frailty after the middle years of fight-flight-and-reproduction run their course.

Mice and elephants lead very different lives—one slow and ponderous, the other manic and fleeting—yet rodents and pachyderms share the same pervasive pattern of aging. Individuals who survive the perils of daily life, from disease to predators, inevitably begin declining after they go through about half a billion heartbeats. (Elephants live much longer than mice, but their hearts also beat far slower, so the total allotment stays about the same.)

The same holds true across nearly all mammalian species. Few live to celebrate their billionth pulse. No one knows quite what this coincidence signifies. Moreover, the program isn't quite rigid. In laboratories around the world, researchers have lately discovered exciting ways to slow the senescence timer—at least in mice and fruit flies—largely by keeping the test creatures
hungry
. By giving them nutritious but restricted diets, or by delaying sexual reproduction, researchers report in some cases
doubling
the usual lifespan.

As you might expect, quite a few human enthusiasts are now eagerly applying these lessons from the lab, limiting the calories they eat or forbearing sex, hoping to extend their own lifespans through judicious abstinence. Alas, the results achieved so far—such as a slight reduction in heart disease—have been disappointingly slim.

After a little reflection, this should come as no surprise. Across history, many civilizations have fostered ascetic movements, sometimes in large colonies where dedicated individuals lived spartan, abstemious lives. After four millennia of these experiments, wouldn't we have noticed by now if swarms of spry, 200-year old monks were capering across the countryside?

There may be a good reason why simple life-style changes work in animals, but not us.

Remember that billion heartbeat limit that seems to confine all mammals, from shrews to giraffes? It's a pretty neat correlation, until you ponder the chief exception.

Us
.

Most mammals our size and weight are already fading away by age twenty or so, when humans are just hitting their stride. By eighty, we've had about
three billion
heartbeats! That's quite a bonus.

How did we get so lucky?

Biologists figure that our evolving ancestors needed drastically extended lifespans, because humans came to rely on learning rather than instinct to create sophisticated, tool-using societies. That meant children needed a long time to develop. A mere two decades weren't long enough for a man or woman to amass the knowledge needed for complex culture, let alone pass that wisdom on to new generations. (In fact, chimps and other apes share some of this lifespan bonus, getting about half as many extra heartbeats.)

So evolution rewarded those who found ways to slow the aging process. Almost any trick would have been enlisted, including all the chemical effects that researchers have recently stimulated in mice, through caloric restriction. In other words, we've probably already incorporated all the easy stuff! We're the mammalian Methuselahs and little more will be achieved by asceticism or other drastic life-style adjustments. Good diet and exercise will help you get your eighty years. But to gain a whole lot
more
lifespan, we're going to have to get technical.

So what about
intervention and repair
?

Are your organs failing? Grow new ones, using a culture of your own cells!

Are your arteries clogged? Send tiny
nano-robots
coursing through your bloodstream, scouring away plaque! Use tuned masers to break the excess inter-cell linkages that make flesh less flexible over time.

Install little chemical factories to synthesize and secrete the chemicals that your own glands no longer adequately produce.

Brace brittle bones with ceramic coatings, stronger than the real thing!

In fact, we are already doing many of these things, in early-primitive versions. So there is no argument over
whether
such techniques will appear in coming decades, only how far they will take us.

Might enough breakthroughs coalesce at the same time to let us routinely offer everybody triple-digit spans of vigorous health? Or will these complicated interventions only add more digits to the
cost
of medical care, while struggling vainly against the same age-barrier in a frustrating war of diminishing returns?

I'm sure it will seem that way for the first few decades of the next century . . . until, perhaps, everything comes together in a rush. If that happens—if we suddenly find ourselves able to
fix
old age—there will surely be countless unforeseen consequences . . . and one outcome that's absolutely predictable.

We'll start taking that miracle for granted, too.

On the other hand, it may not work as planned. Many scientists suggest that attempts at intervention and repair will ultimately prove futile, because senescence and death are integral parts of our genetic nature. After all, from a purely biological point of view, we individuals are merely the grist of evolution, here to strive, compete and reproduce, if we can.

If our australopithecine ancestors had been ageless immortals, wouldn't that have bollixed the cruelly creative process of natural selection that produced us? Biologists who believe in the intrinsic genetic clock say we should be grateful for those three billion heartbeats. After that, the best service we can do for our grandchildren is to get out of their way.

Other experts disagree. They think the "clock" is a mere coincidence, having to do with steadily accumulating errors in our cells. In particular, they point to
telomeres
—little chemical caps protecting the ends of our chromosomes—which wear away with time until the sheltering layer vanishes and grave erosion starts affecting the vulnerable DNA strands, instead. This gradual chemical deterioration simulates a destiny clock, though some researchers hope it might be halted, if we learn the right medical and biochemical tricks.

Whichever side is right about the nature and evolutionary origins of the aging clock, there are no obvious reasons why human beings can't or won't meddle with its programming, once we fully grasp how cell and genome work. Even if such tools come too late for today's generation, intervention may help our descendants to live longer, healthier lives.

Long life may be just one of the benefits to spill from our rising pot of knowledge. Suppose we learn to emulate achievements of
other
Earthly species . . . say, hibernation. Might that bring us closer to another age-old dream, travel to the stars?

Hibernation, or suspended life, would also be a great way to travel forward through
time
. To see the future. Which brings up yet another way that some people think they can cheat death: by setting off on a one-way journey from our primitive era, hoping to emerge when civilization has solved many of the problems discussed here.

So far, our sole hope for such a voyage to the far-off future—and a slim one, at that—is something called
cryonics
, the practice of freezing a terminal patient's body, after he or she has been declared legally dead. Some of those who sign up for this service take the cheap route of having only their
heads
prepared and stored in liquid nitrogen, under the assumption that folks in the Thirtieth Century will simply grow fresh bodies on demand. Their logic is expressed with chilling rationality. "
The real essence of who I am is the software contained in my brain. My old body—the hardware—is just meat
."

Polls show that a majority of citizens today perceive cryonics enthusiasts as kooky, perhaps even a bit grotesque with their Frankensteinian interest in dead bodies. In fact, I share some of this skepticism, though perhaps for different reasons.

Suppose future generations
can
grow new bodies on demand, and are able to transfer something like your original consciousness out of a frozen, damaged brain. It remains to be seen why they would want to.

Anyway, today's cryo-storage process is messy, complex, legally shaky, and terribly expensive. Wouldn't any reasonable person—one worthy of revival—dedicate a lifetime's accumulated resources to helping their children and posterity, instead of splurging it all on a chancy, self-important gamble for personal immortality?