ETERNAL LIFE? (PART I)

A definitive way to settle the debate over Death With Dignity and end of life care would be for humans to just not die—an idea that has beguiled our species throughout history. And it seems so straightforward, too.

In one form or another, it’s what most religions promise the righteous, while for sinners and secular types, any number of contemporary medical and genetic researchers seek to light the path. People who opt to have their bodies preserved after death via cryogenics are banking on it, in fact. But feasible or infeasible, how desirable would eternal life be?

The casual thought is that we personally—our own selves—would live forever in something like our peak state, however that might be defined. Yet we’d still be faced with everyone and everything around us—our neighborhoods, our parents, our friends, spouses, children, grandchildren, our favored political leaders and our favorite entertainment figures—degrading and passing away. Oops, too grim. And certainly if eternal life meant that humans would merely live out their normal span and at the end, elderly and infirm, just go on and on, I doubt there’d be many takers.

A desirable mode of eternal life would need to go more like this: all humans, say through genetic reprogramming triggered by an elixir administered during infancy, would cease to age after 35 to 45 years and then live unchanged forever. To ensure fairness and civil peace, the elixir would be universally available regardless of income, nationality or infant health status. The age range 35 to 45 presumes people younger than that would lack the maturity re- quired for an optimal society, while people older would be past their prime and too likely to create a drag on the vigorous and productive multitudes.

Of course, during the phase-in period, the entire human popula- tion would have to receive the elixir, with those over 45 offered a modified version that would immediately halt further aging. A certain quotient of "senior citizens" would thus continue to exist, and beyond their novelty value, some could perhaps serve as wise elders for the human enterprise. Meanwhile, the vast ma- jority would live permanently in their peak years, so economic activity could be expected to boom. Compared to other utopias that are bandied about, doesn’t sound half-bad, does it?

But let’s dig a little deeper. In a matter of relatively few gener- ations, the absolute carrying capacity of our planet would be reached and exceeded, with dire consequences for everyone. This is why heaven has always been conceived as an otherworldly dimension with limitless space for all found worthy. Hell is never seen as unsustainably crowded either. In the earthly realm, though, to rigidly limit death would require an equally rigid limit on birth. Among those for whom aging has ceased, the elixir would have to render them infertile as well. Among the younger, still aging population, childbearing could be permitted only if some other human, willingly or accidentally, died as an offset. Now things don’t sound quite so utopian.

Such a rationing scheme makes China’s controversial one-child policy seem moderate, and life overall would begin to resemble that portrayed in Alfonso Cuarón’s powerful 2006 distopian film Children of Men. Cuarón’s vision, set in 2027, posits a human race that has become sterile, with no live births since 2009 and wide- spread despair among people of all ages.

The result is an extremely repressive government that openly markets and advertises a product called Qietus, which provides users an immediate and painless death. Marketing is focussed particularly toward the elderly, because a society with no young workers and a shrinking population of vigorous adults can’t possibly cope with masses of unproductive citizens requiring expensive medical care. In other words, a society that has in- advertently vanquished birth without also vanquishing death.

These ideas do hark, however, to traditions among Native Americans and other nomadic peoples regarding those too infirm to survive without impairing the group’s safety. Such persons, typically aged, had a sacred duty to disappear quietly into the wilderness on a freezing night or to allow a stream or the ocean to carry them away. This behavior was expected and honored, and probably, in my utopia of eternal life, people who voluntarily ingest some variant of Quietus and die to make way for a birth would reap equivalent honor. Thus death would still be with us, for the simple reason that it would have to be, and it wouldn't differ much from current Death With Dignity practices.

But my immortality elixir has so far dealt only with death from natural causes. Constructing a plausible world in which death by trauma, due to war, accident, murder, etc., likewise doesn’t exist, is beyond my powers. I’ll just go with the concept and ignore the mechanisms by which it might be achieved. Here, then, is my premise: in the most benign model of eternal human life I can come up with, there is no death other than death self-chosen by persons who are enabling a child to be born.

A bit creepy, but that’s only where the problems start. Can any- one imagine the scale of corruption and coercion that would arise surrounding the issuance of birth permits? In addition to the in- evitable outlaw bands off in the hills making babies, there would be innumerable attempts to game the system and intense anger at anyone who was able to do so. Or perhaps a huge adult popula- tion, increasingly jaded by a life of endless stasis (see Jose Sara- mago's Death with Interruptions or Carel Capec's The Makropulos Case), would produce over time enough candidates willingly seeking death to keep things in balance. Who knows? What we do know is that even this hypothetical world wouldn’t be eternal, because in cosmic terms, impermanence is baked in the cake.

Our solar system would eventually die, and any artificially im- mortal human enterprise along with it. On their own schedules, so would all stars now visible, and every other type of complex matter, in whatever alternation of Big Bangs and Big Sucks con- stitutes the ultimate nature of reality. So, really, the only path open to us is to accept death for what it is, an integral part of life, and incorporate into our thinking a commitment to have it occur, when it does, in the most favorable way possible. I deeply fear, though, certain trends hinted at above which point in the oppo- site direction. For why, see my next post.