While Chip Walter’s Immortality, Inc. lays out an optimistic vision of what Silicon Valley’s titans may have in store for us as it relates to perfecting our imperfect shells, speculative fiction, encompassing science fiction and fantasy, is generally a lot less confident about everlasting life and what it might actually look like in practice.
In Drew Magary’s 2011 novel The Postmortal, a gene-therapy technology is developed that arrests the natural process of aging, giving anyone who can afford the procedure an indefinite lifespan. “The Cure,” as it is called in the book, does not assure immortality per se. It only eliminates death by old age, as well as the hundreds of physical indignities associated with getting old, from creaky knees to failing eyesight to gray hair.
The Postmortal games out, over several decades, exactly what might happen in a world where some humans live as if they are eternally 29, the ideal age to take The Cure. “Cycle marriages”marriages with an expiration datereplace traditional unions, wreaking havoc on the security and trust of long-term relationships. Birth rates plummet as the population continues to grow, creating a punishing social stigma for any woman who decides to have a baby.
A booming black market for The Cure allows people to sidestep government regulation and use the technology for perverse ends (one woman is arrested for administering the cure to her 8-month-old daughter, dooming the child to eternal babyhood). The death penalty is expanded beyond the crime of first-degree murder, largely because life in prison is suddenly a prohibitive cost to the state.
Heirs to large fortunes plot to murder their parents. Street violence spikes. Class warfare becomes literal. The government begins to encourage and sponsor assisted suicide. Walls are built around small towns. Military desertion jumps. And China, beset by crippling overpopulation, decides to nuke its own people.
In his 1996 book Why Things Bite Back, historian Edward Tenner outlined his theory of the “Revenge Effect” of technology. Humanity’s ability to build wondrous machines always, according to Tenner’s idea, outpaces our ability to anticipate their consequences. “It is the tendency of the world around us,” he writes, “to get even, to twist our cleverness against us.”
When Henry Ford built the first Model T, did he foresee freeway congestion, suburban sprawl or greenhouse gases? Was that even his job? But if not Ford, then who?
To take a more recent example, the 1990s were awash with hype about the new interconnected world, the “information superhighway” to use a term that former vice president Al Gore was especially fond of. But back in the Clinton years, did anyone anticipate a behemoth like Facebook crippling journalism, distorting Americans’ sense of shared truth, exploiting consumer data and contributing to the rise of a president like Donald Trump?
However fundamental and profound the social and cultural changes brought on by social media, the Revenge Effect of an indefinite lifespan will likely be exponentially more fundamental and profound. It has the potential to change the character of human life itself.
Christine Amsden is a science fiction writer who grappled with the question of eliminating old age in her novel The Immortality Virus. She said that the technology could turn the gap between the haves and have-nots into a kind of genetic destiny. The Immortality Virus is set hundreds of years in the future, but the world she describes is recognizable to us today, without the super technology that sci-fi has always assumed would be part of the future. There’s a reason for that.
“What I saw happen immediately [after the introduction of an ‘immortality virus’] was the cessation of scientific and cultural advancement,” Amsden says. “Without the generational turnover, we start to see the death of innovation. We tend to look at things as individuals, but if you look at it from the perspective of the human race, as an entire society, we change and progress through death and rebirth.
“Do you think if people born in the 1800s were still around today that we would have LGBT rights, for example? At some point, we refresh our ideas with our children. I see that every day as a mother, too. I try not to be set in my ways, to be open-minded. But when I hear my children talk, I go, yep, this is humanity advancing. At some point, I have to get out of the way.”
From food (how are we going to feed everybody?) to sports (Tom Brady could play forever) to entertainment (ditto the Rolling Stones) to family life (what would Thanksgiving look like with nine generations around the table?), indefinite longevity would transform life in ways that no one can fully anticipate. But in science fiction, the scenarios are almost uniformly dystopian.
“I have trouble imagining a future where extremely long life works out well for mankind,” Amsden says.
“Everything in society,” Walter says, “and in every society, is based on the fact that we’re all going to die. If you change that, all aspects of life would change.”
The ultimate Revenge Effect of indefinite longevity is that it could make fear of death even more intense and anxiety-producing than it already is. Eliminating death by old age does nothing to stop death from infection or disease or violence. A billionaire who expects to live forever has to contemplate the possibility that a kitchen knife could bring all those expectations to a sudden and jarring halt.
In The Postmortal, the black-market doctor administering the cure to the novel’s protagonist tells him, “What this cure guarantees is that you will never die a natural, peaceful death. And you have to ask yourself if it’s worth all those extra years of knowing that your demise will inevitably come at the hands of disease, starvation or a bullet.”
If inevitable death makes life precious, is the opposite also true? If “natural” death is defeated, is life cheaper for it?
“I don’t think it really matters what any of us personally thinks,” Walter says. “Even people who say, ‘I don’t want to live forever,’ if you could have 10 or 50 more good years, would you really say no? If we actually solved this problem, unless they’re in horrible pain or something, I don’t see anybody saying, ‘Nah, I think I’d like to die today.'”
Wallace Baine
