And they lived happily forever after?

There are many debates going on about whether it will one day be possible for humans to live ‘forever’. Sure, this wouldn’t mean being immortal, and probably in the end all of us would still die. But it would mean that we would simply no longer die of natural causes, the only way to die would be by accident. So while this debate seems interesting and is getting more and more attention nowadays, the real debate should be about whether we actually would want to live forever. For, if we as society feel that this is something to be desired, I’m sure that with billions of dollars as investment we would come pretty close to living forever within centuries, if not decades. So the real question is: do we want to live forever? In his book ‘Humanity’s End’ Nicholas Agar focuses a lot on this question, as he also acknowledges that his problem with transhumanism lies not so much with the science we would have to develop, but more with the ethics behind it. There are several arguments he makes in order to show us why it is undesirable for humans to live forever:

Boredom

The first argument being made is one that has first been brought up by Bernard Williams: Boredom. He argues that once we live long enough our lives will stagnate. Since there will be only a limited amount of new experiences, soon enough we will be completely bored with the things we find entertaining and challenging right now. This seems indeed a reasonable argument; can we really expect ourselves to find enough stuff to do for thousands of years? However there are several things that Williams overlooks when makings this argument; first of all people change. While Williams assumes that we will still be the same person over a thousand years as we are right now, reality shows that people change already a lot in a mere forty or fifty years, I think we can’t even imagine how people will develop and change over centuries of time! This means that there will be new things we will find entertaining and we will seek new goals in our lives. Along with that we must realize that even if we will be able to live for centuries, our lives will still be framed by birth and death; there is no way people will ever become immortal. So humans will always remain ‘obsessed’ with surviving, and so although the timeframe might change our perspectives on life will remain the same. For only if we were to become immortal and the fear of dying would be completely gone there would be a drastic change on our attitude on life. Even more important is to remember that if we really were to become bored with our lives, there is still a way out. People can always choose to commit suicide if they figure out that their life has become meaningless to them. And the good thing to this is the time it has taken these people to become so bored with the activities they used to love. For quite some people nowadays say that they wished they could have done more in their lives; but these people choosing to commit suicide after centuries of life will actually have done everything they could have ever dreamed of: they will have had the full human experience. And so only once they are completely done with all of it, they will die. So it seems that boredom actually shouldn’t be seen as an argument against living forever at all.

Fear
Another argument Agar makes that is linked in with this argument of boredom is Fear. As we will then have the possibility of living thousands of years, an accident would apparently seem much more horrible to these humans than it will nowadays to us: since we will only lose a few decades of life, while they will lose centuries of life! Thus Agar argues that risks that seem reasonable to us will become far too dangerous for those humans: they will no longer dare to drive cars, they will not go with airplanes anymore and so on. And so Agar thinks that these humans will retreat from the world: they will stay within the safety of their homes and make sure that there is no chance that they will die. However I think this is very unlikely to happen in reality: for it is exactly this risk of dying that makes life so exciting. It makes us want to achieve things right now. And together with that it must be said that most of society isn’t too obsessed about dying; perhaps a small group of people contemplate dying and actually make rational choices in order to make the chance of having an accident as small as possible, but most people don’t make these rational choices: for example many young people are pretty damn good in destroying their bodies with alcohol and drugs, they only think about the short term (having an amazing time with friends) and not about the long term (all sorts of deceases and the change of having an accident because of being drunk/stoned). It seems that it isn’t really our human nature to make sure that we live as long as possible. So it is very unlikely that this would change once we get to live a thousand years on average.

Tokyo trainpassengers

Social Inequality
There is however one ethical problem that will probably cause serious problems anyway: social inequality. Since once the science for the Longevity Escape Velocity (the moment science develops more quickly than a human will grow old and die) has been created, it seems reasonable that at first only the richest and most successful people in the world will get access to the available treatment. This will mean that suddenly there will be a huge gap between the rich who might live a thousand years and the poor who will still only live for around eighty years. So where social inequality now can cause at most a twenty to forty years difference in life expectancy, then this change will increase to over nine hundred years! This will have monumental consequences for society, since it will give all power to the people with access to the treatment. For example it seems reasonable to say that people who get the treatment are no longer willing to fight in armies and thus others are needed to fight in wars for states, perhaps in exchange for the treatment many poor people who won’t have access to the treatment normally, will thus be eager to go into the armies; since this is their only chance of living a longer life. The same counts for other jobs which are way too dangerous for the people that have undergone the treatment.

Conclusion
So it seems that although there are no direct objections against living forever, if boredom and fear are the only real objections I sure as hell wouldn’t mind having the treatment, it might actually have too much of an impact on society as a whole. Thus it might be undesirable to invest in a treatment that will increase the inequality between people on such a gigantic scale that we might perhaps even start speaking of two different sorts of humans. It seems that only if all human beings were to be given the treatment at the same time it would be desirable to have the treatment at all. But as we can see with the treatment for illnesses like AIDS this is easier said than done, and so it is highly unlikely that people will ever make sure that all people, as equals, will get the same treatment at the same time.

Written by Laura Pierik
2nd year student LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.