Immortality (17 page)

The belief that we can conquer death through scientific mastery of nature is often set up as being in opposition to the religious tradition but in fact closely follows the Resurrection Narrative of apocalyptic Christianity. The prophets of scientific progress—including both Mary’s husband, Percy Shelley, and her father, the radical philosopher and writer William Godwin—promised the imminent arrival of a utopia in which the frailties of the human condition would be transcended. This is of course just what was preached by Jesus and St. Paul, who prophesied the Day of Judgment and subsequent arrival of heaven on earth. The only difference was that instead of a miraculous act of God bringing about the resurrection, we would achieve it ourselves through science.

M
UCH
of the energy of those inspired by this narrative is spent on research that offers to extend our days—that is, the pursuit of staying alive. But, as Victor Frankenstein recognized, the real prize for those who could learn to subjugate nature is not simply postponing death; it is the power of resurrection—bringing the dead
back to life. After all, although some might hope to achieve the “longevity escape velocity” we met in
chapter 3
, many will recognize that there is a good chance that nature will get them before science has completed its conquering. Luckily, the narrative of endless progress reaches even beyond the grave.

We saw in
chapter 4
that resurrecting the dead requires something extraordinary; it is not as easy as a certain energy company inadvertently suggested when they wrote to one recently deceased customer, “We are very sorry to lose your valued custom. Should you like to return at any point, please just let us know.” But the astonishing advances in technology in the past decades have given many hope that it will indeed be just this straightforward, that there will soon be companies offering that if you would like to return, then “please just let us know.” There are three theories in particular that are inspiring cutting-edge research in the promise of transcending our final limit: cryonics, mind-uploading and, once again, superintelligence.

Francis Bacon was onto the right idea on that fateful winter night when he decided to stuff a dead chicken with snow: freezing can indeed halt the decay that otherwise quickly turns a fresh corpse into a heap of stinking goo. Mary Shelley was well aware of this when, two hundred years after Bacon’s chilly death, she wrote her short story “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman,” about a man frozen by an avalanche while returning across the Alps to England from Italy in 1654, only to be dug out and revived in 1826. Again presaging modern science fiction by generations, she explains that the ice and snow put him in a state of “suspended animation.” Rumors of such cases were rife in the 1800s—such as folktales from New England of how poor families struggling to feed the household through the harsh winter months would give the grandparents large quantities of homemade liquor, lay them in a coffin and bury them in a snowbank. When spring finally came they would be hauled out, defrosted
and (allegedly) revived—perhaps with the help of a little more moonshine.

Whether modern techno-utopians believe these legends or not, they are convinced there is something in the idea of freezing bodies in order to ward off decay. At temperatures below –276°F, they argue, biological structures could be preserved for hundreds or even thousands of years without decomposing. Cryopreservation (that is, preserving things at extremely low temperatures) is already used for storing small samples of human tissue such as eggs and sperm. So it should be an ideal way of ensuring you are still around when scientists have worked out the finer points of resurrection. The leading prophets of the future scientific utopia are therefore signing up to have themselves supercooled. This is the practice known as
cryonics
, and already there are metal vats in numerous sites around the world containing the bodies of techno-optimists bobbing gently in liquid nitrogen.

Cryonics is of course not itself a recipe for resurrection; it is only a way of preserving corpses until the day when resurrection is supposed to become possible. It is, if you like, the modern equivalent of mummification, but the doctors and scientists have yet to work out the modern equivalent of the various spells that are supposed to return these modern mummies to life. Given the enormous damage caused to our cells when they are supercooled, on top of the damage of whatever it was that killed the person in the first place, they have their work cut out for them. Skeptics therefore see cryonics as just an eccentric form of burial. But it has nonetheless captured the popular imagination, featuring in countless science fiction stories and shaping our vision of the future.

It is, however, currently rather pricey: cryonics institutes charge around $150,000 to look after your body in perpetuity. Some aspiring resurrectionists find this a little much, and they also reason that by the time they are ready for the icy thermos they might anyway
be disillusioned with their old and creaky bodies. Perhaps, therefore, it is not worth preserving the
whole
body. After all, many believe that what matters is just the brain: that is what supports a person’s mind—memories, plans, hopes. Therefore, instead of signing up for the whole hog, they choose to have only their dead, severed head put in the freezer—for a mere $80,000. Such techno-optimists conclude that by the time technology is sufficiently advanced to defrost and repair a person, it will surely also be possible to grow or build a new body.

B
UT
the belief that it is only a person’s mind that really matters has led some futurologists to more extreme conclusions. Many people see the mind as essentially a set of information—memories, desires, dreams et cetera—encoded in the brain. They argue that it is only this information that matters, not how or where it is encoded. Brains are useful because our minds run on them like software on a computer, but if we found some other way of running that software, then the squishy gray matter would be dispensable. Given the amount of damage caused to the brain by lying around dead for a few hours, then being filled with antifreeze, then supercooled and, one day, thawed, some cryonicists believe it would be best if they left their old heads behind. The route to resurrection, they argue, is for their brains to be scanned, all their psychological data recorded, then a new brain built to encode it—like running the same software but on a spanking-new computer.

The process of scanning and recording all the psychological information in a brain is known as
mind-uploading
. Even advocates admit that it is currently impossible—the data-storage capacity of the human brain vastly exceeds that of the most powerful existing computers, and scanners do not yet exist that are accurate enough to map the brain neuron by neuron. This is why those who consider mind-uploading to be the route to immortality still have to sign up to have their heads frozen—at the moment, the human brain is the
only structure capable of encoding a human mind. But many modern utopians confidently expect that to change—one leading futurologist, Ian Pearson, predicted that “realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it’s not a major career problem.”

If it does become possible to digitize all the information contained in a human brain, then indeed a whole new world of sci-fi routes to immortality would open up. Your mind could be assigned to an avatar—a virtual person in a virtual world who would have all of your recollections, opinions and quirks. Or, if your mind can be turned into software, then it could be installed onto a robot—who might even be made to look just like the old you. Or, as many immortalists dream, it could be downloaded onto a new brain in a new biological body—but a superbody, immune to aging and disease.

Philosophers call this “computational resurrection,” the rerunning of the software that is your mind on a new piece of hardware so that you might live again. The resulting being—whether avatar, robot or human—would be psychologically identical to you: it would remember your first day at school, support your favorite football team and think it was married to your spouse. According to the techno-utopians, it would therefore
be
you; after years lying dead in a freezing thermos, you would live again in a new and improved form.

Mind-uploading has some important advantages over merely finding a modern elixir of life, which, as we saw earlier, would still leave you vulnerable to catastrophic accidents—your airplane crashing, for example, or being at the center of a nuclear explosion. You could make daily backups of yourself on your home computer, which would be linked to a central immortality factory. Within minutes of your plane falling from the sky, a new you, based on your latest scan, would be rolling out of the factory conveyor belt.

If this all sounds rather far-fetched, it is worth considering that companies already exist that offer primitive forms of personality
uploading, even attempting to animate these personalities with avatars. Currently the amount and quality of information these avatars use is so small in comparison to the amount preserved in a human brain that few people would be willing to say that the avatar really has the same mind as the original. The goal of bridging this gap is driving forward research in many fields. And with the continued rate of increase in processing power and the involvement already of major corporations such as Microsoft, it might be rash to dismiss the idea that we will soon(ish) be creating digitally based entities with human-like psychologies.

The idea of digital immortality with its various resurrection options fits neatly into the ideology of mastering nature. Digital worlds are ones of our making—we are therefore necessarily their masters, setting the limits and determining what is possible. In such worlds resurrection is a commonplace idea: in video games, you always have more than one life, and you can always start the game again. (As the old joke has it, “My heart had stopped beating; I felt like I was flying down a tunnel toward a circle of light when I heard a voice: ‘Insert coin to continue. Ten … nine … eight …’ ”) There is no limit that cannot be transcended with the right programming. At the cutting edge of these technologies, research is motivated by the belief that this need not only be true of our electronic alter-egos, like Pac-Man or your avatar, but can also be true of you.

The digital age, however, promises even more radical reinterpretations of the Resurrection Narrative. We encountered earlier the idea of superintelligence—computers, robots or cyborgs whose intellectual capacities vastly exceed our own. Once we have built one such thing—an eventuality many consider to be inevitable—it would then take over from us the business of further technological innovation. Because it would be so much cleverer than us, the rate of further development would increase exponentially. Soon enough, it, or some even more super superintelligence that it has
built, would become all-powerful and all-knowing. Effectively, it would be like God.

The futurists optimistically speculate that such a superintelligence (let us call him “DigiGod”) would also be benevolent—that is, well-disposed to the humans that created his primitive digital ancestors. In that case DigiGod would want to make all the humans who have ever lived as happy as possible. Being all-knowing, DigiGod would also have the information required to create beings with psychologies identical to those of all the humans who have ever lived, and being all-powerful, he would also have the capacity to do so. DigiGod, according to these optimists, would therefore resurrect all of us—and create a fine paradise in which we can all live happily ever after.

This is the most extreme version of techno-utopianism, and its debt to the Judeo-Christian tradition is obvious. It is a wonderful demonstration of human ingenuity in weaving an immortality narrative from scraps of science, myth and speculation. This vision has reached its clearest expression in the work of the theoretical physicist Frank Tipler, who has gone as far as arguing that something like DigiGod is inevitable according to the laws of physics,
and
that he will be able to take advantage of certain specific features of the final stages of the universe to create the perception of living for eternity for the universe’s inhabitants (Tipler calls this “the Omega Point”). In other words, if you do not believe in the traditional God of religion, don’t worry: scientists are going to build him anyway, and he will resurrect us to immortality at the end of time, just like Jesus promised.

B
UT
as speculations about the prospects of scientific immortality go, we might doubt whether Tipler’s vision is any more
convincing than Mary Shelley’s. When we left Victor Frankenstein, he was inspired by the science of his day to “explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” He throws himself into examining these mysteries until eventually he realizes that “what had been the study and cause of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within [his] grasp.”

Frankenstein toils day and night in his attic laboratory, leaving only to collect human parts—as large as possible to make his work easier—from “vaults and charnel-houses.” In a passage of muted horror, we read how finally, “on a dreary night of November,” he manages to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at [his] feet.” With language that parallels the reports of Aldini’s “galvanic” experiments, Frankenstein tells us, “By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

Just as in her dream, Mary Shelley has her scientist hero rush from the room, overwhelmed with “breathless horror and disgust” at what he has done. Expecting the spark of life to fade from his creation, he collapses exhausted onto his bed, but the “demoniacal corpse” follows him, its arms outstretched. In the belief that he has created a hideous, evil monster, Frankenstein flees into the nighttime street.