Immortality: what a terrible idea

Discovery Channel Magazine, 2011

Interview with Stephen Cave – author of Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization

You argue that mankind would cope better physically than psychologically with immortality. If we were unprepared, would productivity drop, you think? Would we fall into a “longevity funk”?

Yes, we would fall into a longevity funk. The deep problem is this: the value of a thing is related to its scarcity — someone conscious of their mortality values their time and aims to spend it wisely because they know their days are numbered. But if our days were not numbered, this incentive disappears: given infinity, time would lose its worth. And once time is worthless, it becomes impossible to make rational decisions about how to spend it (eg, when to stop studying and start work; or just when to get out of bed. Life as we know it may be too short to watch daytime TV, but eternity wouldn’t be). The consequences of this for an individual would be bad enough; for a civilisation of such ditherers it would be disastrous.

If this speculation of infinite time sounds a little abstract, we can look at the experience of those who suddenly realise their time is very finite. People who narrowly escape death frequently experience a realisation of the shortness of life and at the same time a new found joy in its preciousness. The psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom who works with the terminally ill has noted that even those diagnosed with diseases such as cancer experience an “enhanced sense of living… a vivid appreciation of the elemental facts of life… and deeper communication with loved ones.” So evidence suggests that life is already so long that we fail to appreciate it — more time, or indeed infinite time, could only exacerbate this.

You suggest death plays an important part in our motivation levels to act, and reinvent ourselves. Is death like the ultimate deadline that provokes us to act now?

Yes, death is the source of all our deadlines. It enables us to shape a life and make decisions about how to spend it. Given indefinite time, such decisions become meaningless or even impossible.

Yet surely eventually, without the immediate focus on death, people might spend more time on making this planet a more liveable place? Wouldn’t we see more long-term thinking and planning from people and companies, knowing that we’re not going anywhere else, any time soon?

This seems to me unlikely. People today are short-termist, even though they can reasonably expect to live for eighty years, and even though the world they create will be inherited by their children. People will always prefer jam today. And given finite resources and infinite time, this could get the human race into a lot of trouble.

If immortality is not the good news we expect, might science better focus on improving the lives we have, rather than prolonging them?

Prolonging lives is a worthy cause — but not at any price. Longevity is increasing at the impressive rate of two years per decade (meaning those born in 1970, say, can expect to leave two years longer than those born in 1960). But only one quarter of this additional time is spent healthy. In other words, of those additional two years, 18 months are spent in ill health or disability. We can all expect to spend many of those extra years unable to wash or dress ourselves, unable to recognise loved ones, our senses fading and our strength gone. We are not so much living longer as dying slower.

There are two revolutions we need before a new longevity revolution: the first is the one that brings long life to the disadvantaged of the world — we should worry about whether children in poorer countries are living to see their first birthday before we worry about whether we will see our hundredth. Second, we need a revolution in care for the very elderly, including both better facilities and more research into diseases such as dementia that will soon be affecting a huge proportion of the population.

Your recent article said that you weren’t worried about the ability to cope from a resources perspective. Why not?

The point is perhaps not that we would definitely be able to cope materially if everyone became immortal, but more that if a resource-crisis is coming, then it is coming regardless. This is the maths: If people stopped dying, the world would start to fill up a little faster. Currently, some 135 million people are born each year. At the same time, every year around 57 million people die. So 78 million more people per year are coming than going — hence population growth, at a rate of about 1.1%. Now imagine nobody dies: instead of a mere 78 million extra people each year, the world is burdened with all those 135 million babies with no one shifting over to make space for them. The growth rate is therefore instantly pushed up to 1.9%.

But this is lower than the population growth rate seen for most of the 1960s and 1970s, when it was over 2% — and we coped then (albeit with ups and downs). Immortality for all would mean that instead of reaching the 10 billion mark in 2083, as currently predicted by the UN, we might hit it at the slightly earlier date of 2050.

So if we are going to hit a resources crunch, immortality would mean we would hit it a bit sooner. But people who live longer tend to have fewer children (this is the real world trend) — and indeed a fifth of women in many developed countries are already choosing to have no children. So it is possible that we would adjust to immortality by foregoing offspring. (Not that I’m advocating such a world, having two small daughters who I would not want to forego!)