Do We Really Want EVERYONE to Live Forever?

“To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed

The bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die

And the power they took from the people will return to the people

And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.”

~Lyrics from ‘Iron Sky’ by Paolo Nutini

Immortality. The end of death. Calico. Radical life extension. These are the topics near and dear to many of our greatest minds. At its heart, this is the dream of a future time where man no longer succumbs to biological death.

Our desire to beat death is not new. Long have we tried to avoid it, even though death is the only guarantee in life. Not all will drive a Tesla, study at university or even get to eat today, but everyone will die. It is our constant companion. Some learn to live with this inevitability, focusing on the now. Others make all sorts of deals with various spiritual practices in order to ensure the after-life is pleasant. Still others wake each morning in fear of their deaths, unable to live fully because they’re analyzing every activity from the stand point of whether or not it will keep the Grim Reaper at bay.

In the end , we all die. Yet our efforts to avoid life’s final moments have not been in vain. Through science we have changed the game of life significantly. Thanks to vaccines and antibiotics, we’ve added decades to human living. While this has consequences on human evolution and biological reproduction, one thing is clear—we are already living longer. Death still comes for all, but we’ve radically extended human life by conquering the virus and bacterial worlds on a fairly significant level. Have we eradicated disease? No. But we have made progress. The average life expectancy in 2018 is 79 years. In 1920 it was 54.

Yet as long as death still makes her final call, many see time as against us. There are radical life extension programs popping up everywhere. Some focus on genetic cures, others on eradicating disease, others on hormones or organ replacement therapies. Many look to the Singularity, or a merging of our consciousness with machines, to bring the solution. Whatever it is, humanity has long chased this dream and there aren’t any signs of it stopping.

Yet as we march towards an immortal utopia, I can’t help wondering if it’s a good idea. Individually, I’m not sure I’d want to live forever, so as long as there were laws that ensured I could opt out of immortality, I’m fine with progress continuing down this path. But before we get too far, I think we need to ask ourselves, “Do we really want EVERYONE to live forever?”

Now before ya’ll start screaming eugenics, I’m not talking about whether or not some group or race is worthy of immortality. Technology is to be shared, and anytime a single group hoards it, we all suffer. What I’ve been thinking about is the effects of immortality on governance. Because if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that those in power like to stay in power. Death is one of the only ways we can get rid of them. And if a bad leader can’t die, because we’re no longer capable of dying, then how in the world do we recover from devastating leadership?

We don’t have to think like a sci-fi writer to work this out. Right now we can see the effects of improved longevity and poor leadership within the American political and business sectors. Men, and a few women, who refuse to leave their posts as they grow older. Who remain in power, even though there are able bodied folks much younger than them ready to lead. Who refuse to even groom the next generation because they have no intention of stepping down until—you guessed it—death herself forces their hands.

Take the US Congress. A recent study done by Quorum, a public affairs platform, states the following:

“Today the average American is 20 years younger than their representative in Congress. This should come as no surprise, considering that over the past 30 years the average age of a Member of Congress has increased with almost every new Congress. In 1981, the average age of a Representative was 49 and the average of a Senator was 53. Today, the average age of a Representative is 57 and the average of a Senator is 61.”

Further breakdown shows that within the Democratic Party, the average age is actually 72 years, whereas the Republicans hold an average age of 48. Why is that? I think the emergence of the Tea Party within the Republican Party, which can be seen as a reformation on that party’s politics, did a fairly good job of sweeping out the old, for better or worse. The Democrats haven’t had that type of insurgence take over—yet.

It appears that by and large, congressional Baby Boomers aren’t letting go, unless forced to do so as the Tea Party candidates can attest. Unless someone kills them, or their careers, they’re not going anywhere. Only cancer, party rebellion, or a homosexual affair, will get them to leave.

Not only does this create a power vacuum where no new ideas can come to life, it also prevents the younger generations from taking their rightful place at the table. We’ve had one  sort-of Gen X president, Barack Obama (technically he might be a Boomer, as he was born in '61 and most consider '63 as the Gen X cutoff), who is now 56 years old, yet the election of 2016 gave us Trump (69 at that time), Hillary (68) and Bernie, who was a whopping 74 years old.

Where are the younger Democrats? Are they not involved, or is all the gold going to the elders? Is anyone mentoring them and preparing them to take the reins, or will Generation X be skipped completely, with Millennials taking office at age 60 when the Baby Boomers finally die?

This is an issue, especially in a world where the most powerful have access to the latest life extension technologies. A dictator used to need sons to continue his tyranny, and even then a son could end up being too weak to continue the path. The same thing went with our kings. Good ideas die with people, tis true, but bad ideas need death as a reset, do they not?

I’m not saying we should stop seeking the philosopher’s stone. By all means, keep at it you alchemists of medicine, physics and engineering. But as a society, we need to prepare ourselves for the eventuality that those in power will stay in power, forever, unless we set up restrictions now.

In a society where the life expectancy is already 79, term limits are needed more than ever. Not forced retirement, but forced rotation of work. People will need to keep themselves busy during their golden years (which are now at least 40 years long) and there’s only so much golf that can be played, unless you’re the President of the United States, of course. But we need to encourage people to step down after a certain amount of time. We limit the presidency, we need to limit congress as well as the judiciary branches. A retirement age based on years of service, not an arbitrary age, seems appropriate.

It’s easy to imagine how horrible it would have been if Hitler, Pol Pot or Stalin had lived forever. How about a world where the same people are elected over and over, never stepping down, allowing in the random whipper snapper when a seat becomes vacant? How can one person understand a lifetime of technological and medical advancements at every turn? How can someone stay up-to-date, in order to serve the people and understand the cultural phenomena as they emerge?

Oh wait, no need to imagine such a dismal state of affairs.

I think the Zuckerberg trials made it abundantly clear that we’re already letting our leaders lead for too long—and it will only get worse when death’s kiss is no longer felt on this earth.

Time For An Aging Upgrade

It seems everyone I meet is afraid of growing old. It’s so bad that even thirty-six year old women bemoan that they’re reaching the age of no return, unless they can get married and have a child soon. There’s a race in our society to accomplish as much as we can, as soon as we can, because once we hit forty, we’re doomed.

Doomed from promotion, if you’re a salesperson. Doomed from motherhood, if you haven’t conceived yet. Doomed from starring in a Hollywood movie, if you’re an actress. Even in Silicon Valley, the race continues, and if you haven’t created some new great app and sold your company by the age of thirty, you might as well hang it up old man.

Personally, I think this behavior is incredibly silly. Most would say that our society encourages this insane idea that life is over by forty through advertising, media and entertainment. That advertising never worked on me. Even when I was younger, I wondered why people seemed to give it their all until middle age and then either turn to treatment after treatment to stay “young”, or let it all go and grow unhealthy quickly, as if waiting for Death to knock on their door at any minute.

The truth is, Death isn’t going to knock on our door at forty. Or even fifty. Nor is life even close to being over at middle age. What if our obsession with youth has nothing to do with what’s sold to us? What if instead, it’s an old, biologically based fear that lives within us so deeply, we don’t notice it? 

What if our consciousness hasn't caught up to the fact that humans in the Information Age live much longer than we’re programmed to think?

In the 1900’s, the average life expectancy for a male in America was 46.3. Women got a few extra years, 48.3. As the nation grew, so did the life expectancy, little by little. By 1920, the average male lived to be 53. Slowly the age went up to the 60’s by the late 1940’s and when our fathers were born, the average was at an all time high of 66!

This meant that during the advent of our entertainment, business and advertising sectors, people really did die between 40 – 50 years of age, quite regularly. So it was true back then that if one didn’t achieve their dreams by forty, they only had a few years before Death arrived and it was all over. With time, this sort of thing became the expectation—and our dreams, hopes and visions as a people went with it. But along with the growth of our nation came improvements in health care, vaccinations and medical innovation. Science has changed the game.

Fast-forward to today and you’ll find that life expectancy has gone up, even in the past few years. In 2009 it was 78.6, in 2010 it was 79! This means that we’ve gained an extra 30 + years in a little over a century! And it certainly means that life isn’t over at forty and if you buy into that lie, you have almost forty years of waiting around for a death that just isn’t going to happen as soon as you think.

It gets even better. In my own circle, many of the grandparents are nearing 100 when they die. In our family alone we had a grandmother live to be 92, another almost 97, an uncle who was 96 and a third matriarch who passed at 101!

When I look at these numbers I don’t feel the least bit old at forty-two. Not even close. Hell, I’m not even halfway there. I look back at all I’ve done in four decades with the satisfaction of knowing that I get to do all that, and more, in the four decades to come. Imagine it! All the people I’ve met and all the people I’ve yet to know. All the things I’ve seen, and the big wide world still waiting. All the love I’ve shared, and the intense amount of love I have yet to experience. It’s like I have a second life that's just begun. In many ways, my questions are those of the high school senior. What shall I study? Where shall I live? What's my next step as I venture out once again?

Of course, Death can take anyone at any time. Accidents happen. Cancer, heart attacks and other modern plagues are concerns. But if we’re aging naturally, which is how most of us are going to experience life, then why in the world do we race to get it all done by forty?

Personally, I can’t sit around for the next sixty years assuming I missed my chance. Every precious minute of my life is my chance.

It’s time for us to re-boot our life expectations, embrace our humanity and expect to live much longer than we ever have on this good, green Earth. Life isn’t over at forty, or fifty or even sixty. Life is long and we’re all better for it.

Besides, I haven’t even begun to take into account the Singularity, which we all know is just around the corner…

Book Review: The Transhumanist Wager by Zoltan Istvan

Finally, after two months of summer parenting duties, I’ve found time to review another independent author’s work. This time around I’ve chosen, “The Transhumanist Wager” by Zoltan Istvan. I had the pleasure of meeting Zoltan at a Transhumanism conference near Berkeley, CA. In general, he’s a staunch advocate of the Transhuman movement and his blogs on the Huffington Post often get a rise out of people. To put it simply, Zoltan is passionate about his work and he doesn’t mind stepping on a few toes to get his message out there. As a matter of fact, the more toes stepped upon, the more people discuss his blog, which in the end is a good thing when you’re trying to get people to think about the future.

The parallels between Zoltan and his main character, Jethro Knights, are not lost on anyone who’s followed him. Yet Jethro is indeed his own man in many, many ways. A young college co-ed at the beginning of the novel, Jethro Knights prides himself on his perfect ability to reason. His love and devotion to logic are obvious, to the point that any conclusion that considers human emotions is silly and meaningless to him. He views humanity through a lense that makes him an outcast at best. No one could possibly ever understand such a detached human being. Many have compared Istvan’s work to “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand but I would disagree. Jethro Knights is not John Gault at all. “The Fountainhead” would be the more appropriate Rand analogy to "The Transhumanist Wager"-- Jethro Knights is Howard Roark, purely devoted to his craft, without the sado-masochistic love relationship.

Disgusted by the religiously biased current in his curriculum, and the government as a whole, Jethro leaves the university, after pissing off some very important people, and makes his way around the world on a sailboat he’s rebuilt by hand. During his sojourn, the United States government invests in a War on Transhumanism, fighting against science and any gains it might make to improve human life.

While overseas, in a surprising moment of weakness for this otherwise emotionless man, Jethro meets Zoe Bach, and falls in love with her, despite his own war on irrationality that he’s been waging his entire life. Some have said this love story is unreasonable, for nothing is more irrational than falling in love, but I find Zoe, and her relationship with Jethro, to be one of the most delightful, and insightful story lines in the book. While her presence in the story is too short, her impact was lasting for me. It was Zoe’s take on life, which she accurately calls “Quantum Zen,” that showed the most obvious path to immortality. Much more than Jethro’s avid atheism, which is just as narrow-minded as the Christian doctrines his antagonists carry with them, Zoe’s outlook on life, aging and death were engaging, interesting and full of potential.

Which brings me to the narrow-minded Christian antagonists-- they’re developed slowly within the storyline, and we don’t actually get to see them in full action until Jethro returns to the US and takes up his mantle as the new face for the Transhuman Movement. At that point Jethro becomes Enemy Number 1 of the state, and enter Reverend Belinas, your typical sleazy televangelist. The kind of Christian that makes you go, “Yuck.” On many fronts, Istvan is accurate in describing the zealous nature that drives Belinas to commit crime in the name of the Lord. Belinas is exactly the reason we need the separation of Church and State—people like him often throw out Christ’s entire message of peace and love for the one line in the Bible where the prophet declared, “Only through me shall man enter the kingdom of heaven,” thus giving Christians the right to manipulate politics to their dogma, since that’s the only way to get to heaven.

“The Transhumanist Wager” tackles this aspect of our society in a scathingly honest way. I have no doubt that the reason our governments spends .65 of every tax dollar on the war machine rather than on infrastructure, technology and education, is to further zealous idealisms like the ones Reverend Belinas supports. This sort of intrusive thinking is also what limits technological research and fuels the anti-science movement we’re witnessing. From the tone in this novel, I can see that Istvan is very concerned about this religious-political environment and how it will affect his dreams of living forever. Jethro Knights likens it to genocide of sorts-- that denying people the right to radical life extensions due to religious fears is a form of murder on the part of those in power.

Overall, the technology in “The Transhumanist Wager” is fun to think about. Transhumania, the sea city Utopia Jethro is forced to build in order to invest in Transhuman technologies without government intrusion, is every libertarian's dream.

But there’s a glaring hypocrisy I simply cannot ignore-- Jethro Knight’s relentless belief that his way of life is the only way of life feels very similar to Reverend Belinas’ worldview. One places his belief in an unseen God while the other places his in an unproven science. It's ironic when atheists, or those who believe only in science, use the same language as a religious zealot to justify their choices. To be against any way of life other than yours is simply intolerance, whether religious, racial or technical. There’s a scene in the novel where the Reverend is torturing Jethro, ready to kill him, in order to protect the evolution he thinks humanity should take. In that moment I of course sided with Jethro; I don’t believe that killing others to support my way of life is justified. Yet only a few chapters later, when Jethro is released and back on his heavily armed floating city, he issues an ultimatum to the world that is so eerily similar in language as Belinas, I had to laugh at the hypocrisy.

True, Jethro wasn’t calling all Christians to evangelize the world. Instead, he was calling all of those who were willing to produce and work hard for an immortal future to evangelize the world. If you didn’t agree with him, or perhaps were just lazy, then you weren’t needed. You were expendable. Yes, perhaps even murderable. For in the future according to Jethro Knights, only the capable are needed. The rest are nothing to him and taking up resources. Best to simply kill them off.

To me, this is the polarization that has kept humanity back for centuries. As long as we look at one another as either with us or against us, we’ll be limited in our growth. As long as we see our technology as either evil or good, we’ll never make the next great leap. True, we’ll keep inventing interesting stuff to control or kill one another, but to great destruction and unnecessary expense.

In my opinion, “The Transhumanist Wager” let me down at the very end not because it’s written poorly, nor because I don’t agree with the fantastic vision that Istvan has for our future when it comes to technology, but because Jethro Knights is just another bully forcing his philosophy upon the inhabitants of the world. There’s nothing novel about a tyrant. We’ve been there, done that, over and over again.

Life shouldn’t have to be either/or anymore. We can rise up and be both/and. Philosophers call it, “neutralizing the binaries.” I like that idea. When we can move from a binary way of thinking, to a more quantum view of life, then anything becomes possible.

Alas, perhaps Istvan has hidden the key to our future in this book after all, in the form of Zoe Bach’s “Quantum Zen.” Follow her, rather than Jethro Knights, and the singularity, as well as world peace and tolerance, might just be around the corner.

I'm a Believer

I haven’t blogged in a while, mostly because I’ve been busy writing the sequel to eHuman Dawn. It seems I can’t write two things at once, or at least, I don’t believe I can. The sequel has been exciting to create and while I’m pleased to announce the first draft is finished, the final product is far from complete. Now comes the time for editing and rewriting, for pulling out scenes, adding new ones and reshaping worlds, as well as words.
   
While writing the second eHuman novel, a new thought began to circulate through my head:

“How do our beliefs shape the world as we know it?” 

At the end of eHuman Dawn, the female lead, Dawn, announces that she’s about to take on a quest to search the world for humans--those who remained in the flesh after the rest of the population Jumped into eHuman bodies. (Sorry readers, if you haven’t read the book, this might not make sense. You can remedy that unfortunate situation by purchasing it at Amazon, using regular currency, or from me using Bitcoin! Just click the appropriate button above.)

Dawn believes that someone must have avoided the Great Shift, and she’s willing to give up the role of World Leader to pursue her goal of finding what’s left of carbon based humanity. Like the whisper of a grand conspiracy theory, Dawn’s belief sets the course for the rest of her life, taking her from the victorious, immortal eHuman world into the unknown, and because he believes in her, her beloved Adam follows.

Belief is defined as, “Trust, faith or confidence in someone or something” and in my opinion, is the driving force of human life as we know it. Once, we believed that the world was flat, until someone began to believe it might be round, and set out to prove the rest of us wrong.

Once we believed that illness was literally a curse, or the devil inside of us, and healthcare was practiced accordingly. With time, curious minds began to wonder, thus believe, that perhaps something else was causing the illness. Eventually a new way of curing disease was created, but it would take decades for enough people to believe in them before antibiotics were accepted as normal.

Belief guides the scientist to invest his time into finding a new solution. Belief guides the investor to give his money to a new technology. Belief guides the population to purchase and use the innovations at hand. Any marketer knows that the adoption of a product requires teaching the consumers why the product is important before they’ll buy into it.

Belief has driven men to war against others, and encouraged humans to destroy or continue practices that are harmful. Belief is the driver of all evolution and devolution. We believe in the “survival of the fittest” and therefore have created entire economic systems based on such a belief--money that rewards the “strong” and destroys the “weak.”

My eHuman novels deal with the intersection between belief, immortality, and technology. When people ask me, “Will AI destroy us?” I answer, “Only if we believe it necessary to destroy one another.” As long as we believe some of us are good, and others aren’t even human, then there’s a good chance our AI will behave the same way.

Other readers ask me, “Could we really live forever?” I answer, “Do you believe we can?” My dear Transhumanists, here is the crux of the issue--as long as we accept that an average lifespan of seventy-six is an achievement, we’ll never live forever. Hell, we won’t make it past one hundred. Before the government will invest in life extension technologies, we the people must believe it possible. We must believe the human being has only just begun it’s ascent, and that we’re at the point where we can indeed inherit our true potential as peoples of the Earth.

Of course, immortality isn’t appealing to everyone. That’s fine. I’d reckon though that most of you reading this would like to live as long as possible, and in health and wellness. If this is true, then the place to start is your belief. Seventy-six really isn’t that long. Why not expect to live to be one hundred? Why not believe that fifty is just the half way point, instead of the end of your life? Why not live as though you’ll be on this planet forever, even if no one you know personally has done it? How many decisions would be different if you believed you’d be here for a lot longer? What would you do now to live a more meaningful life? Would we, as a race, continue to destroy the environment if we believed we’d be around for a long, long time?

Whatever we believe in, we become. Whatever we believe in, we invest in. Whether it’s a government or an individual, the choices we make are based on our beliefs about ourselves, our world, and one another. 

If we begin to believe that every human being is worthy, then our AI will do the same. Perhaps then our technology will serve us and help create a cleaner, greener, more prosperous world.

If we begin to believe that one hundred is the new seventy, perhaps it would be so. What if we age merely because we expect to age, whether consciously or not?

Well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?