FUTURE
HUMANS’ HELL-BENT QUEST TO CHEAT DEATH
Besides being a global technological hub, Silicon Valley has also carved out an identity for itself as home to death-defying research.
Humans have long harbored animosity towards death. Whatsoever the reason, this has set them on an indefinite quest to wrestle the nature for the control of death, so much so that today’s big-name billionaires are raining millions of dollars onto the anti-aging industry, with various initiatives springing up over time in Silicon Valley. However, though humankind’s steps do not seem to falter in its bid to assume eternity, taking a look back at the past points out that it is just being led up a blind alley!
History is littered with failed endeavors to achieve immortality. In the 22nd century B.C, the Sumerian King Gilgamesh grew infatuated with the desire of living forever. In pursuit, he came to hear of a flower on the ocean floor that was believed to cure death. He plucked it but eventually lost it to the appetite of a snake, which thereby left him to encounter death. Around 200 B.C, China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang also embarked on an expedition to search for the holy grail. Accordingly, he commanded his subjects to forage him the “Elixir of Life”, but after some time with no success in sight, despair began to take hold. He then began gulping down potions containing the substantially noxious compound called mercury sulfide, which instead of blessing him with everlasting life, ushered him to a premature grave. Fast forward to relatively modern times, and the quest continues to take its toll. In 1492, Pope Innocent VII did away with himself by undergoing blood transfusions from young healthy people, thinking that it would restore his youth. Furthermore, in 1868, Leonard Jones, a Kentucky politician, ran for the US presidency under the pretext that he would relay to the public his secrets to terminating death — which he had attained through prayer and fasting. Later that year, he succumbed to pneumonia.
Still, for all these warnings issued by time, humans anticipate that the purge from mortality is well on the cards— especially by relying on the ever-expanding pool of knowledge. Recently, they have triumphed in introducing an assortment of ways (or more appropriately called trade-offs on account of the reasons we may see) that, they hope, could near them to their goal.
One of them is biohacking; a man enters a coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles to extend his longevity — no joke! But unlike any other coffee shop, this is unique: equipped with electromagnetic chairs designed to mount the sitter’s blood flow, lighting that switches colors, grounded floor panels and raised yoga spots, this coffee shop serves its customers with coffee infused with oil and coupled with butter (gak!). This is one of the Bulletproof coffee houses of the entrepreneur Dave Asprey, who plans to be alive to observe his 180th birthday. He believes that embracing these practices (called biohacks) alters one’s natural physiology and slows down the aging process. However, the scientific evidence supporting this claim is deemed speculative at best, and it emerges that biohacking is actually a double-edged sword: that is, such practices may yield a boom in the health of young practitioners, but in the case of elderly people, the balance is more likely to incline towards loss.
Another critical approach, as it is called, is calorie restriction. Unsurprisingly, this is achieved by cutting down on diet, and experiments on simple species, from threadworms to mice, have demonstrated that starving these animals near to, but not quite at, the starvation point actually draws out their lives drastically. However, so far no such examination has been carried out on people, and even if the future witnesses any, odds are that driving people famished for such a prolonged period is likely to curb their reproductive ability, much less bearing healthy offspring.
Next comes, what I would call, flank stitching. In 1956, Cornell-affiliated gerontologist M.MacCay performed a somewhat bizarre experiment in which he sewed together flanks of two mice to merge their bloodstreams and made several such pairings. In one particular pairing, in which a young had been tied with an old fellow, he discerned that the old one seemed to reverse-age and restore its youth, meanwhile the young one appeared to be getting up in years ahead of its time. At that time, the rationale behind this remarkable phenomenon did not unfold owing to the then gaps in the understanding of the makeup of blood, but soon afterwards in 2004, the Harvard scientist Amy Wagers came forth with an explanation. She determined that a protein called GDF11 was scant in an old mouse’s blood, while profuse in a young one’s blood. This blood constituent is responsible for keeping stem cells active (requisite for tissue renewal), and as its level declines with age, injuries heal at a slower pace and aging sets in motion. So, when the bloodstreams of a young and old mice were linked together, the blood rich in GDF11 was transmitted from the young to the old (hence reviving the latter), while the blood sparse in GDF11 was transferred from the old to the young (thus shrinking the former). In humans, though blood transfusions may involve several silent risks, such as the suppressive effect on immune system and even fatality, researchers still hold the idea that this gateway is “incredibly promising” — too big a trade-off.
Last (and the most eccentric one) is to create ourselves — or rather our avatars (robots). As part of the Russian billionaire Itskov’s 2045 Initiative, an initiative founded in early 2011 and which has already enticed great minds with specialties ranging from robotics and neural interfaces to synthetic organ creation, the concept is to replace our delicate bodily form, teeming with (so-called) faults, with more durable and robust holographic or robotic form. The challenge is: how can we map our consciousness that is so severely tied to our meaty messy brains onto an artificial mind? Advancement is being made in this regard by the tech giant Intel, aiming towards building an “exascale computer” — a computer that can run at the same speed as a human brain. They expect that a robot storing such a computer and synthetic organs inside will hopefully serve as a more efficient substitute to our natural bodily form. However, it comes over as quite injudicious of them to step into this venture. This is because while they concede that today, despite of all the scientific advancements made so far, they are still in the dark about the true nature of human biology (body and functions of its innumerable parts), how can they be successful in replicating themselves, let alone perceiving its consequence on the surrounding world? Moreover, this approach blatantly flies in the face of common rationale and is self-contradictory: it nears them to the very thing they are seeking escape from — abolishment of humanity!
Clearly, mankind has been overwhelmed with the futile obsession to ward off death. Ready to proceed to unreasonable lengths, they do not seem to realize the reality that we are already facing death and have faced it countless times to reach ‘now’, as pointed out by a wise man.
“Every breath is the dead body of the life that passed by. Life is the name of living by facing successive deaths.” (Nahj ul Balagha)
Credits:
- Fig.1 provided by Flickr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode
