We May Already Know How We Will Cure Death—But Should We?
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| Aubrey de Grey is head of a Silicon Valley-based research team bent on reversing aging just in time for de Grey to live forever.
David Alvarado & Jason Sussberg
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"And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" -Hebrews 9:27
Quartz
A
pair of advocates—they do legitimate research too, but their ardor is
so intense, it’s hard to call them scientists—believe that they will,
within their lifetimes, make ours the first generation of humans to live
forever.
Their quest is elegantly laid out in The Immortalists, a new documentary making its way around the film festival circuit. The Immortalists follows the triumphs and tragedies of three years in the lives of William H. Andrews and Aubrey de Grey, two men who prove just as interesting as the work they’re doing. The Immortalists is really a film about death, not life, which is what makes it so fascinating.
The
goal of Andrews and de Grey is not merely to extend life, but to
actually reverse the aging process. “Once we are really truly repairing
things as fast as they go wrong, game over,” de Grey says in the film.
“We will have the ability to live indefinitely.”
The
mechanisms by which each man proposes to end death are radically
different. Andrews suggests that in order to lengthen our lives, we may
have only to extend the length of our telomeres,
which are caps on the end of our DNA that shorten as we age, leading to
the breakdown and demise of cells. This mechanism for extending life
has the advantage of a potentially straightforward solution: If we can
find a pill that lengthens telomeres, we’ve won. Andrews spends the
duration of the film searching for one.
De
Grey, a theorist who comes across as the better scientist despite his
lack of experience “at the bench”—scientist parlance for doing research
in a lab—disagrees with Andrews. While his solution to mortality isn’t
as clearly articulated in the film, it seems to line up with the
strategy articulated by the dean of transhumanism (a movement that aims
to remove the limitations on human existence), Ray Kurzweil:
Stay alive until microscopic robots that swim through our bloodstream
and physically repair our cells are invented, in 20 or so years.
All
this may sound crazy, but de Grey has convinced Silicon Valley
luminaries such as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to give him millions of
dollars to fund a full-fledged research foundation devoted to testing his ideas.
What will we do when some portion of humanity refuses to die?
The science behind this sort of thing is extremely controversial—and
so are its philosophical implications. It might seem premature to start
talking about what we’ll do when the day of the undead finally arrives,
but after spending two hours with Andrews and de Gray, I came out
convinced that this is a conversation at least worth starting.
David Alvarado, who made The Immortalists
with Jason Sussberg, described a similar pivot to me after the film’s
premier at South by Southwest. He said he went into this project feeling
skeptical of the science behind life extension. Three years and
countless hours of filming later, however, it struck him that,
eventually, we will radically extend human lifespans—it’s just a question of when.
If
humans could live forever, it would transform our civilization in ways
more profound than just about any other technological breakthrough.
Lifelong marriage—already on the ropes
in the age of ever-lengthening lifespans—would cease to make sense.
Overpopulation could become an even more significant issue than it is
now. The cost of war might have to be re-evaluated. We could live long
enough for humans to reach other stars. Young people might find
themselves unable to compete in an ossified job market, full of people
with centuries of experience.
