Humans have always longed for immortality. Tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals were burying their dead in fetal poses, suggesting hope for posthumous rebirth. In Neolithic times, we entombed food alongside corpses so they’d have something to snack on in the spirit realm. Cuneiform tablets from Nineveh, among the oldest written documents, shimmer with accounts of quests for eternal life. Early humans all tried to make sense of the senselessness of death. They did so through stories about outliving the end, about attaining a never-ending existence in the beyond. Those mythologies became codified into institutional religions that remain with us millennia later.
To this day, immortality is usually conceptualized as a kind of secondary life that occurs after death. The idea emerged from our fear of dying, from the knowledge that our days our numbered, from the sense that life must go on in some way. The basic premise of spiritual immortality is simple: We die, but our soul or consciousness doesn’t. An energy or force within us outlives its mortal container, ending up in an afterlife or hurled back into rebirth. Three quarters of Americans believe in some form of life after death.
But there’s another, more materialist side to the equation: Trying to live forever physically. In imperial China, numerous emperors died after consuming toxic elixirs of everlasting life. One of the main goals of alchemy was the attainment of physical immortality. Such approaches may not have succeeded in the past, but driven by recent advances in science and technology, a tricked-out version of humanity’s oldest and fondest dream is gaining followers.
Physical immortality is a seductive conceit and its allure gains in luster with each new technological breakthrough. Despite the fact that there are no documented examples of anything immortal in nature, there’s an increasing sense that science will soon figure out how to end mortality altogether.
All we need is to do, experts tell us, is lengthen telomeres, target sirtuins or activate CREB1, the brain’s latest “longevity molecule.” Nonprofit organizations like the Immortality Institute and the Methuselah Foundation have been established “to conquer the blight of involuntary death.” And every year, more conferences — with names like Humanity+ or the Global Future 2045 International Congress — pop up purporting to reveal the latest breakthroughs in attaining technologically enabled eternity.
The reality is that we have seen breakthroughs in the field of organ regeneration and molecular biologists have uncovered ways to extend the life spans of worms, fruit flies and mice. So far, however, these findings haven’t yielded any human applications. In 2009, aiming to staunch the hype, the National Institute on Aging announced that “no treatments have been proven to slow or reverse the aging process.”
That’s not stopping people from trying.
Longer Life Spans, But Still an Expiration Date
Beyond stoking the embers of our primal need to believe, how did the concept of physical immortality become so popular in recent times? Part of the answer lies in increases to life expectancy. From the dawn of the Homo genus up to the 19th century, an average life lasted approximately 25 to 40 years. Largely due to basic realizations about hygiene, life spans have increased significantly over the past century and a half. Today, anyone above the poverty threshold can anticipate living 70 to 90 years unless an accident, disease or disaster strikes — or immortality becomes real.
Will life expectancy continue climbing? Some demographers argue that we’ve reached a peak, while others suggest that 125 is a reasonable target for baby boomers. Radical life-extensionists speak of “Plastic Omega” (omega being the end of life, and plastic being malleable). No one knows for sure.
For the most part, we don’t question the idea that every problem is solvable by the rational mind, that humanity’s biggest challenge — death itself — will one day be met. But is progress an inviolable fact of history or just a story we tell ourselves? Not everything progresses. Have our emotions evolved since Shakespeare’s time?
Our ability to program computers has accelerated our faith in the possibility of overcoming death. Early software developers spoke of coding personality into electronic circuits and reanimating it at will. They hypothesized that, in combining cybernetics with DNA, they’d find the formula for immortality.