Humanity’s undying quest for immortality

James Bedford was a psychology professor at the University of California. He died aged 73 in 1967. Well, perhaps he didn’t. He left $100,000 in his will to cover the costs of having his body ‘cryopreserved’ – frozen down to 196 degrees and stored in a liquid nitrogen tank –  in the hope that he would, one day, be thawed and returned to life. It has not yet happened. In fact, in the 59 years since, nobody who has been subjected to cryopreservation has been raised from the dead.

Maybe it’s a matter of time: ‘We’re saying instead of just disposing of the patient, give them to us,’  says cryonicist Max More, who changed his name to suit his optimism. ‘We’re going to stabilize them, stop them getting worse and hold them for as long as it takes for technology to catch up and allow them to come back to life and continue living.’

The human desire for immortality remains unquenchable. Many, perhaps most, find consolation in religion. But, as faith declines in many countries, medical research has come to the rescue. Undoubtedly, we have learned ways of extending life. Surviving childhood in the 15th century, you would have a life expectancy of about 50. Today, people in developed countries can expect to live into their late seventies or eighties. Part of this is thanks to environmental improvements, and the rest is medical research.

There are intriguing outliers. In France, Jeanne Calment died at the record age of 122 in 1997. The journal Nature Communications suggested we could live up to 120 or 150 years. Meanwhile, inevitably, the tech gods are working on fixing our bodies. Sam Altman of OpenAI has invested $180m, hoping to extend our life span by 10 years. Also on board for extending our – probably meaning their – lives are Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Elon Musk.

One of the most distinguished and well-known thinkers in this field is Aubrey de Grey, a British gerontologist. He is not taken as seriously as he should be, perhaps because of his extraordinarily lavish beard. But for 30 years, he has pursued research into biomedical gerontology, a study of ageing that became a study of preventing the illnesses of old age before they happened – more or less what the techies are pursuing now. He is currently frustrated in his work because he has a clear sense of how this might be achieved, and the chemicals needed to make it happen are available, but, so far, the companies don’t seem very interested. That may all change now that the trillionaires are on the case. But their combination of great wealth and supreme self-belief would, perhaps, make them more interested in making humans immortal rather than simply making them live longer.

The truth is, however, that they have already created a form of immortality, but it is not human. The most advanced computers can now think independently. Anthropic, an offshoot of OpenAI, has created a programme – Mythos – that can think so independently that it is, for the moment, closed down. The fear is, for example, that it may think of a way of breaking into all the world’s banks, rendering everybody and every entity penniless. Last year, Roman Yampolskiy at the University of Louisville warned that there was nearly 100 per cent certainty that AI would destroy all jobs within five years and, in effect, replace humanity. The machines, obviously, would be immortal.

Curiously, though perhaps predictably, the pursuit of life-extension or even immortality draws in the despots. An accidental audio recording captured Vladimir Putin telling Xi Jinping that humans could, in this century, live to 150. He also said that organ transplants could offer immortality. Others would have to die in order to keep the despots alive.

Perhaps, more seriously, living humans can attain immortality by downloading – or rather – uploading the content of their brains into a computer. This would seem to be a form of immortality. But not really. If you survived the process, you would have created two individuals, each of which would have different experiences. Within seconds you in the computer would become an entirely different person. Susan Schneider, a philosopher at Florida Atlantic University, has made the point: ‘I don’t think that will achieve immortality for you, and that’s because I think you’d be creating a digital double.’

Sadly, none of that solves the problem of the frozen Professor Bedford. He was not after life-extension; he was seeking rebirth. Now it is true that most people – suicides excluded – do not have a favourable view of death. It is terrifying to think of the extinction of memories, passions and experiences, of the entire human mind, or, as Keats put it: ‘Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.’

Some fuss has been made about the humble hydra, a freshwater creature that never seems to grow old or die, it keeps reassembling itself and it doesn’t need sex to reproduce, it simply creates a new version of itself. The hydra can even regenerate damaged tissues, suggesting the possibility of human tissue renewal. It is certainly true that mere life-extension would create its own problems. The human population of eight billion is already straining our resources, and there is little hope that war, that ancient killer, will put a dent in that figure – nuclear weapons may help. Life-extension would clearly make matters worse; it would also produce strange outcomes. Assuming they stopped having children at 60, they could, at the age of 160, have a dizzying number of direct descendants.

There is no doubt, however, that immortality – producing an even more catastrophic excess of humans – is the goal that haunts people. Some religions are successful precisely because they offer life after death, and, failing that, I don’t doubt that billions live in hope that they will never have to die. But, even here, there is a catch.

‘I don’t think when people are even asking about immortality they really mean true immortality, unless they believe in something like a soul,’ says Schneider. ‘If someone was, say, to upgrade their brain and body to live a really long time, they would still not be able to live beyond the end of the universe.’

The cultural reality now is that the desire to avoid death has grown into a huge industry. It is seen as morally correct to pursue life-extension wherever it can, however dubiously, be found. ‘Wellness’ is a new, fashionable word that, according to ChatGPT, means: ‘It’s not about perfection – it’s about consistent habits that help you function well and feel good over time.’ Going to the gym, pursuing mental, spiritual and emotional balance, eating well, resting, caring for your mental health, ‘mindfulness’ may not be explicitly life-extending, but that is what they are. They are also about vanity.

‘The perfectionism and the narcissism around some of it is really a waste of time,’ said the journalist Kara Swisher. ‘How much benefit do you get from the time you spent measuring your ketones or whatever you want to do?’

Implicitly, illness and death have become failures. We could do better. This becomes absurd. The American actor and comedian Dick Van Dyke has reached 100 because, as he says in his book Rules for Living to 100, he has maintained a positive outlook and never gets angry, neither of which causes or cures cancer.

We are human, death defines us.