“Who wants to live forever?” asked Freddie Mercury in 1986. Well, as it turns out, most of us don’t. Ever since the dawn of humankind, death has been accepted as the only inexorable fact of existence, a final act which gives our life meaning.
Neuroscientist Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, a research fellow at Melbourne’s Monash University, does not agree. Death is not inevitable and it should be resisted, he argues. Instead, life should be prolonged for as long as possible, and technology will eventually enable us to live for centuries.
A quick disclaimer: this is an incredibly challenging book. It is not something you can bring on holiday or read half-heartedly on a train. Those who do persist will find a book that changes their entire idea of mortality and what science is capable of — even though I found myself disagreeing with much of its fundamental argument.
Zeleznikow-Johnston begins by attacking the idea that death is inevitable. People should “have the power to make decisions about life on their own terms”, he writes, accusing philosophers of “palliative philosophy” by normalising the acceptance of death. In the past, philosophy provided “comfort when there was no cure that could be offered”.
The book argues that philosophers have not meaningfully explored the possibility of immortal life
Despite significant breakthroughs in medical science, the book argues that philosophers have not meaningfully explored the possibility of immortal life. Zeleznikow-Johnston cites the example of anaesthetics: doctors used to believe that pain during surgery had a “purifying effect” as no remedy existed at the time. Contemporary philosophical thought is limited in its vision and ambition, he claims, because it can only deal with the world as it is — not what it could eventually be.
Less convincing is Zeleznikow-Johnston’s argument that the future will necessarily be a better place. “Straightforward extrapolation from historical trends of the past 200 years implies that people of 2154 may well be vastly healthier and wealthier than us today. In the 1850s, global mean life expectancy was 30 years, compared to about 70 in 2011,” he notes.
There is no doubt that this is factually accurate, but we cannot index collective human happiness to technological progress. To this day, we continue to invest more in weapons to kill each other than medicines to heal one another. Will we be happier in 200 years’ time and will life be worth living? It is simply impossible to know.
Zeleznikow-Johnston goes on to outline several ways in which humans may be able to live into the future, with the caveat that this technology is decades — if not centuries — away from being available. One of the ways that he suggests that life could be extended is through brain preservation. This would allow anyone willing to donate their brain to science at the end of their life to be revived in the future, in a synthetically reconstructed body or another form. This could be made possible by a process called vitrifixation, an impossibly complex technique performed just before death to preserve the brain for awakening.
Scientists could also experiment with “whole-brain emulation” by replicating the functionality of the human brain in synthetic form. This would be done by creating a detailed digital snapshot of the connectome, a term that refers to the map of neural connections in the brain. The end goal would be a “digitised brain” that is so sophisticated that it flawlessly replicates human behaviour, personality and thought. After the brain is “woken up”, it could be attached to a robot, virtual body or even a new biological body.
The obvious rebuttal to any argument about the merits of life extension is climate change
This part of the book is fascinating, but a tad heavy on the science for anyone without a neuroscience or medical degree. At times I was crying out for a joke, a witty analogy or even a word with less than eight syllables. Trying to dumb down or simplify cold hard science is a notoriously difficult task for academics who write books for the public, but I fear many readers will be tempted to skip these sections.
The obvious rebuttal to any argument about the merits of life extension is climate change, which will transform life on Earth as we know it. This problem is dealt with towards the end of the book, when Zeleznikow-Johnston urges humanity to push “the probability of global catastrophic risks as close to zero as we can”. Here he strays close to utopianism, suggesting that we stand “at the cusp of a new age of economic productivity enabled by artificial intelligence”. This may be true, but it assumes that the automation of millions of jobs will be delivered painlessly. It sounds a tad like Silicon Valley’s promise that Facebook and Twitter would usher in a new era of pluralism and social harmony. Whichever side of the political fence you lie on, it has certainly not done that.
In order to imagine a life beyond physical death, Zeleznikow-Johnston asks us to suspend disbelief and place our faith in the hands of science. “Life on Earth is four billion years old, while human science has had barely more than four centuries to develop,” he writes. “Imagine what we might be capable of once we’ve had even a fraction as much time.” The central claim of this book, that humanity should never bet against its capacity to innovate, is inarguable.
In the poem Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats writes of the human soul as being “fastened to a dying animal”. His solution to this existential dilemma is to seek immortality through art, to be gathered into “the artifice of eternity”. The artists and writers of the distant future may face no such predicament in the world imagined by Zeleznikow-Johnston: their physical death will be merely a footnote in a much longer story. The elimination of death may certainly be possible, but whether it is desirable could form the basis of the most important philosophical debate of the 21st century.
The Future Loves You is published on November 28 (Allen Lane, £23.50)
