Immortality: You Can Have It, But Would You Want It?
If a genie jumped out of a bottle right now and offered you eternal life, you’d probably jump at the chance. Or would you? You are part of the first generation of human beings who could realistically prolong their life indefinitely, or at least for a very long time. You know how this goes, though, there’s always a price. From the philosophical fear of death that distorts our approach to human life, to the possibility of foetus-farms designed to provide stem cells, there are plenty of objections to immortality. Nonetheless, the Fountain of Youth has been an obsession since the dawn of time, and it isn’t going away in a hurry.
From the moment you are born, you begin to die. Breathing is the cause of natural death, as your cells literally oxidise, and their copies contain tiny flaws in the genetic code that are amplified over time. The main point of anti-aging research is to stop these flaws from occurring, and being passed on to the new copy of the cell.
You can do this by eating foods rich in anti-oxidants while reducing your calorie intake. But the advancing field of anti-aging research has plenty of new tricks. The two main fields are nano-tech and stem cells.
Nano-tech for immortality is about creating armies of invisible road-worker crews in robot form that march around your body repairing cells. Stem cells are ‘blank’ cells (present in foetuses that are only a few days old) that have not yet been designated as a skin cell, a heart cell, a blood cell and so on. These are used to grow new organs – even a whole new you, in the event of cloning.
The ethics of immortality are complicated. No matter what method is devised to keep you alive forever, it will be expensive at first, affordable by the top ten or twenty wealthiest people in the world.
Alternatively, if the only way to grow new lungs when yours fail after years of smoking, was to harvest a foetus, would you choose immortality? Although there are hundreds of thousands of legal abortions (and ten times that number of illegal abortions) performed each year, demand could quickly out-strip supply. Could it be a new industry – pregnancy for the purposes of early abortion – to supply the better-advantaged folk with the cells they need to live longer? If you think it could never happen, think of the documented cases of poorer folk selling kidneys on the black market for as little as a thousand dollars.
Let’s say that we all had the money for immortality, and could do it easily. Where are we going to put all these people? The planet is over-populated to the point of exhaustion, and population control strategies like the Chinese one-child rule causes all kinds of problems. What if the only way to live forever was to be sterilised? Would you give up your natural immortality (passing on your genes to your children) for the chance to live forever? Immortality sounds like a great idea, but some of us would rather rent apartments in Rome for a week.
