If NASA announced they had detected a comet on a collision course with the earth 30 to 50 years in the future, the best minds on the planet would embark on a frantic search for methods to deflect the heavenly intruder and save the day. It would at least make the front page! I'd hazard a guess that such an event would be either the salvation, or the downfall, of civilization. Hopefully we won't have to find out any time soon. And yet individually, we each face just such a rendezvous with death.
Aside from the obvious advantage of saving our own skins from the Grim Reaper, it is a pity our lives are so brief. Compared to the universe in which we are embedded, our arc of consciousness across the fabric of space-time is about as enduring as a bolt of lightning. And because it is so brief, we miss splendors untold; some inspiring, some terrifying, all beautiful.
I'll explore some of those wonders later this week. Wonders we miss because of our flashbulb existence. But for now I just have to ask: Why do we accept these pitiful few decades of life as inevitable? Why put up with this bullshit?
Oddly, little progress has been made in extending human life dramatically. Ask someone about it and they don't seem to think it's that big a deal. Yet I can think of nothing bigger. I asked several chatters in a Christian chat room, mostly right wingers imo, and the answers were predictable and boring. "We can't play God" some said. We'll excuse me, but if extending our lives and not accepting natural disease and death is playing God, we've been playing God since before recorded history. Frankly my only gripe is that we're not good enough at it yet.
Others claimed not being able to die would be a form of hell. That may be true, although I think I'd like to find out myself. But I'm not suggesting we put ourselves in that position and I doubt it's possible anyway. I'm talking about simply living substantially longer than we do now.
Others of course opined that humans can have immortality for the asking, simply by subscribing to whatever flavor of supernatural mysticism the speaker of the moment professes, be it Islam or Christianity or Scientology. Call me skeptical, but I'm a bit suspicious of any 'product', in which part of the directions for proper use mandate that questioning the effectiveness of the product is akin to heresy and will nullify any results, and where the benefit of owning the product happens to occur solely in a realm which is invisible and unverifiable, but payment is requested in the all too real here and now.
I'm not saying they're wrong or that your faith is bogus .. But I am saying that sounds an awful lot like a con job to me, especially if the price of the product is exorbitant. I suspect what is going on is the devoutly religious suspect, correctly, that if the time and place of death is purely a personal choice or if our lives are greatly extended, their respective viral memes will be deprived of a robust infection vector; namely, fear of death.
Let's face it, most of the standard answers you'll get seeking to trivialize mortality are cop outs. And they're by no means limited to religion. It's a fate we all have to face, and we'd rather do about damn near anything than think about it carefully. These knee jerk responses are defense mechanisms to help us cope with the prospect of personal death which we find both highly undesirable and utterly beyond our control. But does it have to remain forever out of our hands? Why?
It seems to me a good place to start would be to find the genes that control human development. Humans are born pretty helpless as animals go. But like every other critter we evolved to hit the ground running in our own way. We grow fast. Childhood is over in the blink of an eye. Adolescence and teen years whip by in a cloud of pot smoke and hangovers punctuated with heartbreaking relationships almost all of which end badly. The whole way we are edcuated at a vicious pace, to cram as much learning into our skulls as we can in the shortest time possible, while our brains are still plastic enough to accept the download.
We race through our twenties in a blur, often starting our own family which only accelerates the passage of relative time. In a heartbeat we're over thirty, worried about career, employment, health insurance, and what's this weird lump ... the years start falling like months and before we know it forty is in the rear view mirror. Our kids are growing up, time for a second mortgage to pay for college, and we stuff that 401 K with what scraps we can. Fifty drifts by in a flurry of management decisions and mid life crises, in an instant we're looking fearfully at retirement and anxiously working out future values on whatever nest egg we've managed to accumulate.
By the time we can finally sit back and maybe relax just a tiny little bit, our bones are aching, our eyesight is failing, our minds are fading. And the years are now racing by like days. It's a pretty harsh journey, and many of us don't even make it this far. For we lucky few who manage to hang on into the eighties and nineties, it's a slow descent into mush. Most will be first infirmed, then senile, eventually near comatose and warehoused, and ultimately vegetables. Wrecked human shells housing a decrepit brain running mostly on inertia: And then we die.
And yet we've accept this in the past, because we had no choice. But do we have to keep accepting it?
Wouldn't it be nice if we could stretch out childhood for decades? Can you imagine having that toddler genius brain that picks up language without even trying for twenty years? Can you imagine how much easier puberty and high school would be if you had forty years of experience under your belt before that time? The mistakes you would avoid? What if you could undertake plans as a young adult that wouldn't mature for a half a century? What if you could wait one-hundred years to find the right partner in life and start a family?
Slow down the rate of development and I think our progeny could have exactly that. And it might be a matter of just tweaking around a few genes. We could live maybe five-hundred years or more. Wouldn't that be nice? To have time? Time enough for ten careers, a dozen degrees, time enough to walk around the world and see the sights?
Well first we'd need to get a handle on all kinds of terminal illness. But that sounds doable in the long run, we've made a pretty impressive start already and the future only looks brighter. Vascular and pulmonary disease and cancer are the biggest killers. With the cloning of organs for transplant, stem cell therapy, new genetically designed drugs, and a host of other technologies that are already on the table, I think that's something we can probably lick in the next fifty years. Maybe less if the freakin fundie morons would get off our backs (Have I mentioned lately how much I hate those fuckers?).
After that, well, we'd need to get a handle on what the hell aging really is, because biologists disagree. And once we have a handle on that then maybe we can stop it. Now we're looking at living maybe a thousand years or more on average before an accident gets us. And all of it in the prime of health.
But to last even longer ... our brains can probably only store so much information. We don't know where that limit is, but our noggins evolved for a life span of a few decades, a century tops, so there probably is some kind of max capacity. If we start living a thousand years or more we'd need better storage systems sooner or later. Perhaps some kind of AI/Organic hybrid brains could be developed. And in the off chance that we get crushed by a falling rock or whatnot, we'd need some kind of back up storage. Maybe a real time feed into some kind of recording media just in case.
How would we go about extending our lives, and I mean by millions of years? We'd need to be virtually indestructible. What would life be like then?
Living just hundreds or thousands of years would teach us things we need to know to make it to the billion year mark. With that kind of life span, we'd see things like global warming, pollution, big ass comets zipping past or supernova flaring in the depths of interstellar space. And the first nation of culture that starts doing any of this will rise over their peers like a modern human over an ape-man. There would be no competition.
But alas, that nation is unlikely to be the US. We spend more on one single aircraft carrier than on research into aging or extending our life time significantly. To think our priorities will change, even when each of us has an appointment with metaphorical comet on an unstoppable collision path, is fantasy.
And this is just a Sunday morning daydream, on a bleak winter morning after an all-nighter writing session, about the cruelly short number of the days of our lives.