From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jul 06 1998 - 12:11:19 MDT
Rather than simply raising questions, I guess I should add some more to the
discussion:
[NOTE: *please* do not quote this rough-draft passage off-list without
explicit permission]
===============================
The HU-GOO catastrophe?
Here's the worst and most ironic question of all: would a true immortality
treatment, emerging as a spin-off of the HUGO Project, telomerase
investigations, or some other deep life sciences research effort, unleash
the world's worst plague - an unstoppable tidal wave of endlessly
reproducing human beings? It is all very well to mouth wishful platitudes
about human intelligence and foresight, but those great gifts have let us
down in the past, at least some of the time (although we're still here,
despite owning nuclear and bacteriological weapons of mass destruction for
over half a century). At other times, coupled to devotion, courage, honour
and love, intelligence and foresight have been our salvation and our glory.
Tangled through every fibre of human choice, however, is our deep-grained
inheritance as the children of four billion years of driven replicators.
Any one of us can overcome, at least for a time, those inarticulate urgings
and imperatives coded into our bodies by survivor genes. Any of us is able
to delay parenthood for years or decades past the dizzying adolescence when
Homo sapiens reproductive programs kick in with their wild hormonal songs,
their heartbreaking melodies of loneliness and yearning. Any of us, given
sufficient motivation, can choose a life path without any kind of
parenting, or indeed any sexual expression at all - there are many
voluntarily childless heterosexual people, gays, celibates, paraphiliacs
with interesting tastes that preclude reproduction. But not all of us can
deny those urging all the time - and it will be impossibly harder, perhaps,
when we literally have all of time.
China has managed for two decades to restrict most couples to bearing only
one child, within marriage, using an authoritarian and quite brutally
invasive policing mechanism. Still, many Chinese citizens break the rules
and have more than the one authorised `little emperor'. (Many of the
little empresses die young, notoriously, which does show in a gruesome way
that people can deny one of the most powerful instinctual drive even as
they pursue the satisfactions of a related cultural pressure.) So what
will happen if people learn to live for centuries or millennia, retaining
all the fertility and juice of healthy young adulthood?
Here's the worst and most ironic answer of all.
The world would be swollen with hungry human mouths very quickly, by
evolutionary measures, even if women only had a new baby or two every 20 or
even 50 years. The most prodigious and Promethean technologies might find
it impossible to meet our collective appetite for energy, raw materials,
living space. Nanotechnology will make the driest deserts bloom, honeycomb
the mountains, fill the oceans with self-sufficient artificial cities and
the skies with geodesic homelands kilometres in diameter - but sooner or
later, even with cheap transport off the planet and into the asteroids, a
planet's worth of always-fertile immortals will choke Gaia's life-support
systems, or go haywire into lethal carnage.
So, at least, it might seem. Malthus, who long ago forecast overpopulation
doom, would prove to be the bleak prophet of utopia.
The new population bomb
Dr George D. Moffett's authoritative Critical Masses notes that in the
mid-1990s world population was some 5.6 thousand million, and expected to
double by 2035. (By July 1998, according to the US Bureau of Census, the
global figure was estimated at 5,927,383,121.) In fecund Africa, doubling
times are half the global average, and numbers would swell from 670 million
to 1.4 billion by 2015. At some point, it was hoped, the most struggling
nations would attain sufficient economic prosperity that women would move
into `replacement fertility', stopping at no more than the two surviving
children needed to replace her and their father(s). Yet population
momentum would slow the impact of that transition. Two out of five humans
in the poorest countries are under 15, readying themselves to add to that
huge bulge. Strikingly, while Japan reached replacement fertility as long
ago as 1957, its population would take half a century to become stationary
(zero population growth) in the early 2000s.
And the world as a whole is nowhere near replacement fertility: the current
level is four surviving children for every couple. Not even the appalling
epidemic of AIDs will scythe that swelling human harvest. `Even with the
projected losses,' Moffett notes of the plague, `population growth rates
will remain high and population doubling times will be increased by only a
few years.' On the other hand, if heterosexual people most at risk of AIDs
in the Third World adopt condoms as a protective measure, that might in
turn reduce runaway overpopulation.
So what happens if science extends life span significantly? Even
`replacement fertility' would be excessive for a groaning planet, since
those ageing adults whom the new babies were meant to replace will still be
alive and kicking, consuming, polluting with their energy demands, and
perhaps making even more babies. Prophets of population doom like Paul and
Anne Ehrlich might be proved right after all.
The population prosperity engine
Is it true, though, that the new demographic transition into extended or
rejuvenated life would have such terrible consequences? Optimists such as
the late Julian Simon, a professor of business administration, argued
vehemently that economic growth in human societies booms alongside
population increase, without leading inevitably to resource depletion and
environmental degradation. How so? Because we are cumulatively
intelligent creatures, whose cultures learn new and more efficient ways to
shape the materials of the world to our needs. Once, we were obliged to
accept only what came our way from Nature's bounty; then we learned to draw
abundance from the land; now we build altogether new materials. Every year
we work smarter and cheaper, with wealth increasing for all (for some much
more than for others, it's true) as market signals enable us to maximise
our productive powers.
The tragedy of ageing and death is that so much human effort and resource
is expended in education and training that's inevitably lost within a
couple of decades. Only genetic memory is transmitted more or less
unblemished down the centuries, the millennia. Yes, cultural memory is
compressed, shared, committed to writing and other external storage media -
but its fine-grain detail perishes, in large measure, with every human who
falls. We pour increasingly greater quantities of treasure into teaching
first the fundamentals and then the sophisticated expertise of a thousand
trades and professions and, in each case, within fifty years that treasure
is wasted in death.
Suppose it need not be that way? Suppose the accumulated knowledge and,
better still, the hard-won wisdom of the years were retained - not in
written summary, not in tales passed down from parent or tutor to child,
but in the canny brain and sinews of a vastly long-lived adult?
The dead hand of the past
Or is this, in turn, a recipe for crushing stagnation? As things are
today, technical knowledge doubles even faster than human numbers. The
fresh young minds of children are specially structured to take in
tremendous amounts of raw and processed information, to learn new words for
new ways of looking at the world. An entire generation of researchers
struggles for decades to create an impossibly difficult innovative way of
perceiving physics or chemistry or economics, and a pristine intake at
college effortlessly gulps down that shocking paradigm shift and moves
forward creatively, within what seems to them the most natural perspective.
Science advances as the old bulls weaken and retire. So what happens when
the old no longer weaken, when nobody is obliged to give up tenure due to
physical exhaustion and slow mental decline? Is this not a return to the
grim days of repressive priesthoods and principalities, when opinions are
set in concrete and no disruptive new angle on the world is permitted to
ruffle the timeless surface of The Way Things Are Meant To Be?
Certainly that is a risk. It is not, though, a very persuasive picture, I
think. Julian Simon's market forces would surely step in to topple a rigid
gerontocracy, as they are doing now in China. If the old refuse to learn,
they surrender possession of the finest novelties to their rivals.
Knowledge is indeed power, and new knowledge brings surprising access to
new power.
Besides, must an ageless gerontocracy be rigid in this way? It is too
early to know, but we might be taking a false logical step in assuming that
the old in a deathless world must automatically resemble today's crusty
elderly. One reason older people today tend to cling to views acquired in
their own youth and early maturity is that the brain literally gives up its
plasticity. The neural wiring is trimmed from the earliest months and
years like a manicured topiary bush, shaped by each child's environment to
create an adult well adapted to a certain historically contingent time and
place. Eventually that specialisation - with its concomitant loss of
flexibility - hardens into place as the ageing brain suffers damage.
Neurons tangle in plaque, dying and not replaced. Yet this physical
deterioration is precisely what an immortal generation will need to halt in
order to forestall death. Telomerase therapy, even nanotechnological
machines like hordes of clever benign viruses, will maintain the repair and
health of neurons and their vast network of knowledge - indeed, of
self-awareness. If mental rigidity is a risk for the deathless, it will be
a psychological rather than physiological hazard, the kind that already
afflicts `young fogies' who choose to squeeze their eyes shut in the face
of novelty.
Hope I die before I grow old
For all that, the political consequences of massively extended youth might
not be comfortable. On the one hand, a world in which everyone retained
the piss-and-vinegar zeal of adolescence, in which male `testosterone
poisoning' was never quenched in the hormonal ebbing of late adulthood,
might be an alarming place to live. I suspect this risk can be overstated.
Even diehard criminals in their late 40s or 50s are physically strong
enough and brutal enough to maim and kill their foes, but it seems that
they often mellow with experience. Times simply teaches us lessons of
prudence that the innocence and ignorance of youth cannot know. Happily,
we also learn `people skills', learn to ignore the foolish herd-mentality
of the young, learn courage in taking chances that once might have frozen
us solid in terror of imaginary consequences. To retain those skills in a
body unhurt by the years - ah, `Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,' as
Wordsworth did not quite say, `but to be old was very heaven!'
===========================
Comments welcome
Damien Broderick
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