This article was taken from the May 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
There is a dangerous idea gaining ground in our culture. It spreads with every headline that promises a cure for cancer or celebrates the discovery of a "gene for longevity". The idea is that science and technology can make us live forever.
Wired readers will be familiar with the prophets of this movement: men such as this issue's cover star Ray Kurzweil, who promises immortality by mid-century, or Aubrey de Grey, who says we will soon be living for 1,000 years. They claim that the progress we have seen in life expectancy in past centuries can be extended, even accelerated, until ageing, disease and death are defeated for good. One problem: it's not going to happen.
The ancient Egyptians thought they had cracked it 4,000 years ago. Two millennia later, China's First Emperor was convinced an elixir was within his grasp. Since then, sages and scientists have believed they could develop a potion that would turn back the clock. You may have heard about Harvard medical professor Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard's theory that injecting extract of dog testicles would grant eternal youth; or the double Nobel Prize-winning Linus Pauling's campaign for vitamin C as the panacea for all our ills. All these believers have had one thing in common: they are now pushing up daisies.
Believers argue that the precedent of the past is not a good guide to the future -- progress, after all, has never been more rapid. But the reality is that as our population ages, we are beginning to see the full extent of the toll time takes on us. One demographer has estimated that curing all cancers, heart disease and stroke -- currently the three biggest killers in developed countries -- would only push up life expectancy by 15 years as our body is crumbling anyway. There are many other Malthusian monsters waiting to finish us, from our own tendency to over-indulge in sugar and salt to our microbial enemies, who evolve as rapidly as we do. Surviving is not something that can be done by drinking a magic elixir: it must be done every minute of every day. And in the end probability will always be against us.
But even if it is nonsense, some might think that this talk is harmless. It's not: we pay a high price for indulging in these fantasies. Here are three reasons why:
First, such claims are bad for the science and technology community. Promising what you cannot deliver is the surest way to undermine your credibility -- witness the fate of Pauling, who was transformed from one of the most celebrated scientists of his time into "a lonely crank" (in the words of
Nature) because of his claim that vitamin C was an elixir of life.
Second, it's an expensive folly.
I've no reason to think that men such as Kurzweil and de Grey are anything but believers, but just as the prophets of another immortality strategy -- Christianity -- were followed by peddlers of relics and pardons, so these prophets of medical immortality are followed by those who peddle vitamins, antioxidants and would-be wonder-drugs to the old and the anxious. Victims of these myths are already parting with more than $80 billion (£52 billion) per year in the US alone.
Third, believing that science and technology will deliver us from death is a way of denying the inevitable. The message is: there are people in lab coats sorting out the little problem of mortality for you; so relax, you've got all the time in the world. But you haven't. Your days are numbered, which is why each one matters. In his 2005 Stanford speech, Steve Jobs said: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." If we permit ourselves to believe the fantasy of unlimited lifespans, <span class="s3">then we risk wasting the limited -- and so very precious -- time that we have.