Death as a Flaw in Biological Code

More apologism for aging and death

Image by kues on Freepik

A few days ago, The Free Press published an article by Suzy Weiss titled “The Tech Messiahs Who Want to Deliver Us from Death.” The subtitle: “They see death as a software error—and they have a plan for fixing it. But should they?” I see some value in commenting on it because it provides an opportunity to shed light on several foolish beliefs about life extension.

Weiss begins by telling us about the plans of Kai Micah Mills, who founded Cryopets to cryopreserve pets even if the pet’s humans reject cryonics for themselves. Jumping from one slightly related thing to another, the article then talks about de-extinction of animals, the pro-natalists’ opposition to life extension, and the practices of biohackers.

The article never gets to grips with the core ideas behind cryonics or biostasis. Near the start, it seems promising enough:

The practice of cryonics has been around since the 1950s, when sperm was first frozen, then thawed and used to inseminate a woman. Now, up to 2 percent of births in the U.S. are the result of a similar vitrification process… In the history of medicine, only a few life forms have been frozen and then reanimated, including the Bdelloid rotifer and the tardigrade, or water bear, a sturdy eight-legged micro-animal that was brought back in 2015 after 30 years on ice, and then later, had babies.

Weiss also cites Mills explaining of cryonics that “It’s the only technology that directly targets death. We obviously need a way to put biology on pause, and put people in stasis until we can solve every single cause of death, which is going to take time.” See adds: “He is not just referring to killers like cancer and heart diseases, but accidents and homicides, too.”

But then the article goes wrong. Referring to cryonics organizations, it says “another popular facility—a sort of techno-optimist’s cemetery—is outside of Scottsdale, Arizona.” The storage areas of cryonics organizations are not at all like cemeteries. Cemeteries provide a way of disposing of people. Cryonics organizations provide a way of preserving people with the hope of eventually restarting their lives. Would Weiss describe a ward providing long-term care for comatose people a “high tech cemetery”? Cryonics patients are like comatose people with no metabolism.

Weiss may not know enough about cryonics to think that it has any chance of succeeding. But that doesn’t change the intended purpose. Cryonics is an extension of emergency medicine. It puts the dying process on pause – as quickly as possible – with the expectation that more advanced medical technology in the future might be able to repair the person and revive them. Today, we routinely revive people who would have been considered permanently and irreversibly dead prior to the 1960s. In a similar way, cryonics sees people declared legally dead today as actually needing decisive care and preservation. Even if it never works, conceptually it is continents away from the practice of burying people.

The “rich immortals” double mistake

Weiss falls into another common error: “Being really rich is no longer about owning a helipad or an impressive art collection; it’s about creating a facility in which scientists fashion a future where you can meet your great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.” I am not “really rich”. I’m not even just rich. And yet, I have arrangements to be cryopreserved and have maintained them for most of the past 37 years. Some people signed up for cryonics are rich, just as some people who own homes are rich. But many are regular people willing to pony up around $1000 per year. (The real figure varies depending on the organization chosen, the kind of cryopreservation, and on age at sign up.) This rules out the poorest people on the planet. These people also cannot afford to indulge in a daily coffee shop habit. Yet most coffee shop visitors are not “really rich”.

In addition, there have been many successful cases where the cryonics community stepped in to provide funding for the cryopreservation of people with limited means (or who had fallen on harder times).

It's disappointing to see the author play the “only for the rich” card so selectively. It’s fine to spend $75,000 on a nice car but not on an attempt to save your life – or the life of a loved one? Or to spend $100,000 on futile end-of-life care than only slightly postpones the inevitable at the cost of extended suffering?

Weiss cites a recent article in which Peter Thiel again unapologetically affirms his cryonics arrangements. Thiel apparently is not especially hopeful that it will work, but he strikes a strong note in saying that “I think we need to be trying these things.” Weiss elaborates on Thiel’s point in saying that “What Mills and his cohort are suggesting is that we look up from Candy Crush and aim higher. Like the highest.” Technological progress often feels like the latest smartphone update. More stirring and challenging are goals like extending the human species into space, lifting billions out of poverty, and putting an end to aging.

The forever error

Following a perfectly sensible quote from Ben Lamm, co-founder of de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, Weiss takes another misstep. Weiss introduces Lamm’s words as being “on living forever”: “I would like to be here as long as possible, because I think there’s a lot of hard things to do and interesting things to learn. If you want to live to 1,000 and beyond, and it doesn’t hurt other people, you should be able to.” Weiss then bridges to her next topic by writing “Mills and Lamm think it would be cool to live forever.”

This tedious error eternally recurs. Even many friends of life extension make this mistake. Life extension, including cryonics, is not about living “forever”. Given what we know of the universe, it is probably not physically possible to live forever. The difference between, say, a billion years and forever is literally infinite. If we assume – implausibly – that accident rates stay unchanged, the elimination of aging would enable an average life expectancy of perhaps a few thousand years. Life extension – and the continuation of life after revival from cryopreservation – is about changing definitions of death and not having to die of old age, and preferably not from accidents and homicide.

The difference between the end of aging with the possibility of much longer lives, on the one hand, and literal immortality or eternity on the other hand matters and not just numerically. Focusing on forever, on immortality, on infinity, takes us from the realm of the physical world and science to the world of fantasy and mere wish fulfilment. Elon Musk sadly makes the same basic error in his November 21, 2022 Tweet: “I can’t think of a worse curse than living forever.” He seems to be mixing up a curse of unwanted and compulsory immortality with the prospect of choosing to continue living while enjoying life. This is unfortunate because he did make encouraging comments on cryonics in the past.

More excuses for aging and death

Undaunted, Weiss manages to cram in three more errors in a single sentence: “The real-world pitfalls of a society of forever-aging humans—overcrowding, pollution, or Xi Jingping ruling China for 2,000 more years—don’t seem to trouble Lamm.” With the Western world already peaking in population and heading for a decline, I’m not sure why Weiss is worried about overcrowding. Without life extension, many countries are going to have to contend with the shock of rapidly shrinking populations. Pollution in developing countries tends to improve over time, not worsen. Only the concern with gerontocracy is remotely reasonable but that’s primarily an issue for closed societies. On the other side of the ledger, it would have been amazing and wonderful if many historical persons would have lived a much longer life.

Apply the reversal test. If longer lives means worse crowding and pollution, wouldn’t shorter lives mean less crowding and pollution? So, why not encourage shorter lives? No one wants to do that. (Except for a few drastically anti-human deep environmentalists.) Is our current lifespan the optimal one? How about that of 25 years ago, or a century ago, or a longer lifespan yet to be achieved? The 2023 lifespan is exactly right? How incredibly coincidental and fortunate for us!

False choice

Weiss goes on to quote Malcolm Collins who, with his wife Simone, is a leader of the American branch of the pro-natalist movement: “There is a growing divide in the Silicon Valley diaspora between the life extensionist faction and the pro-natalists.” Pro-natalists believe it is our moral duty to have as many children as possible to counteract crashing birth rates. Talk of a divide is peculiar. Suppose you were discussing ways to improve your health. Would you talk of a divide between those who favor exercise and those who favor diet? You might point to relative differences in emphasis, but these are two complementary approaches to the same goal. Some people don’t especially want many children. Others want children (not necessarily as a moral obligation) and want to live longer. There is no conflict!

Apparently, the Collinses believe that the drive to live forever is a “disgusting philosophy.” They complain about a “gerontocracy that’s causing toxic discrepancies in power” and assert that “People who want to live forever believe they are the epitome of centuries of human cultural and biological evolution. They don’t think they can make kids that are better than them.” I find this baffling. You can want children and hope they will be better than you and want to keep living.

I could just as easily respond by asserting that the idea that you should die for your children is disgusting. If your life has no value, why would your children’s lives have value? But why not leave it up to differing preferences? Longer life with no or few children. Longer life with many children. No contradiction.

Weiss talks to Jay Kim, the pastor at WestGate Church in San Jose, California. Kim conveys his deep wisdom with the unprecedented claim that death is “a natural part of the human process” and that trying to use science to achieve immortality feels like “arrogance.” Again, the misdirection about immortality. Do the Collinses and Kim also believe that undergoing heart surgery is also disgusting and arrogant? My view is that arrogance is deciding for other people that they should die when there may be an option to live longer.

More apologism for the status quo of aging and suffering

Peter Attia, author of Outlive, has spent only a single decade studying aging but believes that “from a technical perspective there’s just nothing that comes close to exercising when it comes to living ten years longer.” Attia says “There’s something sad and beautiful about how relatively short our lives are.” He wonders how we would spend our time if we lived much longer.

So, is ten more years just right? Not 15? Not 30? Not 200? Why? If he is concerned that we won’t know what to do and that longer life “takes away some urgency”, why does he want to live ten years longer? Why not shorten life by ten years? That should make it easier to fill our time and to feel more urgency.

We can apply the reversal test again here. Would life be more urgent and beautiful if we lived to 50 or 40? Why is the current lifespan the optimal one? We live much longer than we did in the 19^th century but don’t have any trouble finding ways to spend our time. The kinds of objections and worries Attias repeats from others shows a lack of serious thinking. As Aschwin de Wolf points out, a lot of things in live are not experienced with lifespan as a framework but have intrinsic value to us.

Weiss wonders “if you come back at a different time, shaped by a different culture, and without any of the relationships of the people you were born around, is it even worth it?” For me, the answer is: Yes, definitely. Other people may have a different answer and it may be correct for them. It is an individual matter. On average, this is less of an issue for men than women but preferences are all over the place. If cryonics were known to work for certain, I strongly suspect that many more people would suddenly decide that, despite the challenges of adapting, it’s worth returning to your life.

Weiss then wonders: “And, for now, does having the lung capacity of an 18-year-old actually make someone 18 years old, or 43 and with too much time on his hands?” As to the first part of this: Obviously not. It means someone has the lung capacity of someone younger. We want to reverse all signs of aging.

As for the second part, “too much” according to whom? Is she seriously claiming that putting effort into being healthier and higher functioning means you have too much time on your hands? Shouldn’t we be glad that we have the time and resources to live longer and healthier? Or would you rather return to the conditions of the past when life was nasty and short?

The religious rationalization

Pastor Jay Kim says, “I do think I will live forever. I just don’t think the path to that is paved with ones and zeros, and technology and medical advancement.” Kim and others like him, do not actually reject much longer lives – immortality, even. They think that trying to achieve longer lives through science is foolish and problematic. But believing that they will live forever in a supernatural realm that has never been observed is somehow wise.

What if God tells you, on reaching the afterlife: “I gave you my Creation and pointed to the means to live and flourish in it, yet you spurned it to rush to an easy afterlife. Such lazy and ignoble behavior will not be rewarded. Off you go – downstairs.” Believers tell us that an indefinitely long life will be boring and meaningless. Somehow, that no longer applies to infinite after-life. But what will people do in the afterlife? Will they have jobs? Hobbies? Will they have bodies? Will they do anything productive or creative? Oddly, these questions are never considered and yet are one-sidedly aimed at advocates of longer lifespans.

Like the immortality trope, critics often think cryonics and religion are at odds. This is not the case. Cryonics deals with our evolving definitions of death and seeking a longer lifespan (or to be more precise, a longer health span). Religion deals with the afterlife and immortality.

The comments section provides more anti-wisdom and anti-insight. One commentator reminds us that the goals of living indefinitely and curing ills “are reminiscent of so many science fiction stories that turn out - guess what - poorly!” “The only thing that makes life worth living is the fact that it's temporary. Many stories and movies (Tuck Everlasting, Highlander, Interview with a Vampire come to mind) have pointed this out.” Translation: Fiction, in need of conflict and drama, portrays extended lives negatively. Fiction is a valid guide to reality.

The absurdity of this argument – if we can even dignify it with that term – is so extreme that it is not worth addressing. Not just not worth it, but pointless. Clearly, the argument is not serious. This and related arguments are rationalizations. They are terrified of death and feel helpless before it. Flimsy reasons are thrown out for claiming that death is a blessing. These reasons are aimed not at truth but at consolation. The unfortunate consequence of that comfort is a failure to effectively tackle the problems of suffering, deterioration, and death.

Let us embrace discomfort. Let us keep our eyes open. Let us double down in our efforts to understand aging and to find solutions.