Immortality? You just missed it (sorry)

Who wants to live forever? I certainly do, but I am constantly amazed by meeting people who don't. Like Ruth Gordon in the film Harold and Maude, who commits suicide at age 80, because "that is enough time to live." Perhaps these individuals dread the infirmities of old age, or the spectre of the increasingly overwhelming complexity of life.

It doesn't have to be that way any more. Once a science-fiction staple, immortality is another fantastic notion about to become a reality. The era of life extension has already begun. For centuries, the life span of homo sapiens has been on the rise. Technologies of food production, lifestyle enhancement and medicine have allowed us to say "60 is the new 50." Living to 50 has been a big deal through recorded history, between poor nutrition, dire working and living conditions and diseases that were treated without much knowledge about how the body really works.
Today, it still seems that just about the time you start to get the hang of what life is about, it's time to check out. Wisdom takes a long time to accumulate, and is impossible to teach (just think about your kids). What a shame then, that our greatest potential thinkers and leaders have such a brief shelf life.

Aggravate that with a youth-worshipping society which discounts elders, rather than venerating them, like China did for millennia. Wise persons might well see the short-sighted folly of our policies toward issues that plague the world today; war, poverty, intolerance and greed come to mind.

Unlocking our genetic code is changing everything. This discovery is up there with fire. Diseases gone, artificial organs, cloning, gene therapies, and yes, even eugenics are all picking up speed. We won't have to cheat the Reaper. We'll be able to beat him fair and square.

As our knowledge grows, even small gains will have a big impact. Let's take an eighty-year life span, for example. If 20 years can be added, to make 100 years, that is seemingly a gain of 25 percent. If we factor in a figure of 20 years at the beginning of life for development, and another 20 at the end for decline, that leaves a productive period of 40 years. Assuming that these parameters don't change much, that extra 20 years now looms as a huge 50 percent increase!

Too much population, you say? That problem has more to do with the birthrate, an issue that wiser, more philosophical leaders might address more effectively than those today.

Life extension gets us part of the way, but the techniques of perpetual life are still a ways off. Don't give up all hope. Maybe you'd like to put yourself in cold storage and wait it out. Cryonic preservation has been around since the 1960s, but typically as the vehicle of Walt Disney jokes (smart man). We've actually been freezing cattle semen since the 40s, human sperm since the 50s.

I want to have my head frozen at the moment of death, and put into L7 orbit aboard a capsule full of other like-minded heads. This is more efficient than saving the whole body, which is just an apparatus to carry the brain on its errands. using less space and requiring less rocket fuel.

The natural cold of space supplants the need for refrigeration here on earth, whose interruption might be caused by natural disaster, war, civil unrest or bad publicity. The L7 label denotes an area in space where gravitation forces are in such an equilibrium that no additional fuel is needed to maintain orbit.

The rest of my body would be cremated, with the ashes encased in lucite molds, like so many little trophies, to be handed out to whomever wanted them. Why not preserve a few cells for cloning at a later date? Unfortunately, that would only create a physical replica of me (nothing special there). Identity rests with the intellect, and that dwells inside the original brain.

Cloning might be part of the eventual solution, though. New sciences, collectively called GNR, for Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics, will show dramatic results in the next few decades. Their powerful synergy is comes from creating tiny machines that can interact directly with the body at the cellular level. Strengthening and disease-proofing bodies before they are born, augmenting them with enhanced sensory and motor functions, as well as repair systems, will catapult our life span into the hundreds. That's not even counting the unknowable advances that will come in the field of what we call today computers.

That's still not forever, but don't you think that in a world of wise people, where basic problems such as poverty, war and sickness have been fixed, and everyone has the time to be a doctor, an architect and a poet, that the final threshold will be crossed? That is, how to extract the essence; the intelligence, emotions and psyche of the mind from its delicate shell, so that it might be transplanted into whatever vessel we choose.

If this all seems too fantastic, that's because we all have deep-seated opinions about life and death. You probably won't partake in the process. Your children might, if they get their act together. It is probably the following generation-your grandchildren, that will begin to take the concept seriously enough to plan for it.

Want to have a perfect physique? Fine. Want to have the superhuman capacity of a robot? OK. Want to be free of all physical constraints and exist as a discorporeal, ethereal entity? Let me get back to you on that - tomorrow.

(Martin Miron [e-mail: marty@naplessuntimes.com] is a Naples-based writer who feels we are living in an intoxicating, vibrant age of technology. Discoveries and decisions are being made that will significantly alter the course of human history. It's a lot to keep up with, so he's here to keep you informed and up-to-date. The future, after all, is only as close as tomorrow.)

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