Who Wants to Live Forever

10^th March 2006

The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

This is not about Queen or Sarah Brightman. It is about a question which, in the 1994 Miss America competition, was asked to the Miss Alabama contestant who gave a convoluted answer that has become a quotable quote:

“I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.”

There are some who firmly believe that one day, science will be able to advance enough to extend human life to infinity and people regularly sign up for the services of an Arizona-based company for their body to be cryonically frozen upon death, so as to preserve it for when the life extension technology becomes available.

Aubrey de Grey, a bio-gerontologist at Cambridge University maintains that the first person who will live forever is probably already alive. Such predictions are dismissed by many scientists as mere fantasy. Yet, our longevity is a reality and that it is accelerating is widely accepted. So much so that retirement age is being extended in most countries and a famous British economist, Samuel Britain, argues that the retirement age should be indexed to longevity to keep our pension system sustainable.

Isn’t it funny? While longevity is putting pension systems, especially those with defined benefits, under severe financial stress, if living forever were to become possible we would solve the pension issue in the simplest of manners. Everlasting life would mean that pensions would become irrelevant as we will never retire. Nobody would need to save for retirement.

Can you imagine the social consequences of substantial life extension, perhaps into infinity? Would humans continue to reproduce if they can live forever? What about marriage? Even the “anti-divorcists” may feel uncomfortable to share an interminable life with the same partner. They had promised till death do us part when they calculated 50 at most 60 years of marriage. Can they be held up to their promise for 500 or 600 years?

And how would eternal life on earth square up with religious beliefs that promise eternal life after death? What would happen to moral and social values if people know that they will only be judged by the Creator if they are involved in a bad traffic accident?

How will our attitude to risk change when human life is extended well beyond present expectations, perhaps to infinity? The cost of loss of life through accident would increase exponentially, as such cost is often calculated on the basis of expected lifetime at the time of the accident. If human lifespan increases exponentially, the cost of human life would rise to the point at which people will become very wary of taking any sort of risks. Driving, flying and even merely stepping outside could be considered too risky. Would we be condemned to eternal life watching TV and communicating electronically?

I am pretty sure that if one were to make a survey today and ask people if they really want to live forever, the great majority would unhesitatingly answer no. But if medicine advances enough for people to have a real choice, not just a hypothetical one, hesitations would creep in.

Maybe living forever is unappetising, but a couple of decades more would be interesting or may be a little bit more to see how the grandchildren develop and see them get married. And once at it, one could take a couple of centuries more to see if the democracy will ever take root in the Middle East and to see of the Israel and Palestine will ever learn to co-exist peacefully. Or may be once at it, one could stay a bit longer to see the millennium out. But forever, surely not.

Can you count how many silent Fridays I would have to deal with writing about matters that do not even remotely touch upon the local political scene?