the-BA : SPATalk

The last of life for which the first was made?

Aubrey de Grey and Jon Turney differ

Dear Jon,
Ageing kills 100,000 people worldwide every single day. There is no difference between saving lives and extending lives - for what is saving a life if it is not giving someone the chance to live longer than they otherwise could? This is the first reason for curing ageing.
The second is choice: when these therapies are developed, individuals and societies will have the choice whether to use them. Some may reject them, just as the Amish reject much modern technology today; others may prefer to use them and cope with the consequent changes in way of life (such as the need to have far fewer children in order to stop overpopulation).
We have a duty to provide that choice, rather than impose our values on a cohort of future humanity. Indefinite lifespan will be an option for them if we develop these therapies without delay, but not if we hesitate today.
Cheers,
Aubrey

Dear Aubrey,
Extending lifespan through ‘curing’ ageing is an intriguing possibility. But I do not see a duty (a moral duty?) to do it right away.
Let’s assume that there is virtue in maximizing a quantity – call it total current human life years – reckoned as the number of living humans multiplied by the time they have lived. If the planet’s carrying capacity is finite, this is ultimately a zero sum game. We can have lots of people, or people who live indefinitely. But not both.
And as far as the planet goes, we have a few other things to sort out this century, as you'll have noticed. Pessimistically, we will be stretching our ingenuity coping with human induced environmental and climatic crises.
Optimistically, we will apply that ingenuity to fashioning a world system in which a stable population of, say, 10-12 billion can lead humane lives.
Sure, forging ahead with life extension would enhance choice for some. But the first beneficiaries would undoubtedly be the affluent city dwellers of the developed world who are already constraining the choices of billions who live elsewhere. A priority project? Not for me. Next century would be plenty soon enough.
Cheers,
Jon

Dear Jon,
Your claim (‘We can have lots of people, or people who live indefinitely, but not both’) is true only if one counts all the people who are not yet born, as well as those currently alive. There's no problem with carrying capacity unless we also carry on having a lot of children. Thus, only if we say that hypothetical, yet-to-be-conceived people have the same right to life as currently living people is there any challenge to the moral imperative to cure aging.
As to priorities, I ask: why are we currently doing so little to address these other problems? My answer is that aging makes us fatalistic. It is a constant and horrible reminder of our failure to control nature, which limits our ambition to improve our world.
You're wrong about universal access too. Three points: first, the first therapies will be experimental and risky. The masses will be grateful to the desperate rich for being the guinea pigs. Second, it’ll be in the enlightened self-interest of the wealthy to make such
profoundly life-changing therapies universally available, because the
poor will get angry otherwise. We know the dangers of making lots of people really angry for a really long time. Third, the therapies will be repair technologies, not useful for the young. That means it’ll cost less to provide these therapies to poorer parts of the world, where fewer people reach old age at present.
Cheers,
Aubrey

Dear Aubrey,
I’m still curious about where your moral imperative is coming from. I note your last points, without actually agreeing. But I’m not going to respond to them directly, apart from suggesting that the rich tend to find ways of testing ‘experimental and risky therapies’ on the poor.
In the end, though, I think this a question where arguments matter less than wishes. What I mean is that we all tend to take death personally. So when you advocate that radical life extension should be a choice for everyone, I assume you mean for you.
I am not so sure. I accept an authentic answer to whether I want to live to, say, 200, would come on my 199th birthday. But as far as I can tell, the prospect does not appeal enough to take on the urgency it clearly has for you.
This is a large difference in temperament, so it is interesting to ask where it might come from. I am a comfortable, educated, secular Westerner, in good health. You too, I fancy. I enjoy life, on the whole. Yet at 50, my existing life expectancy feels pretty OK to me. Am I in denial, do you think, or a hapless fatalist?
Cheers,
Jon

Dear Jon,
Absolutely, you are a hapless fatalist in denial.
As things stand, you have a remaining life expectancy of a little over 30 years, which indeed sounds like all the time in the world. But consider your likely condition after, say, 20 of those years. You'll be ever more aware that you're becoming more debilitated, decrepit, dependent on others for basics of daily life. You'll make the best of it, but is it an attractive prospect? Hardly.
You might avoid it by hastening your death before that decline proceeds too far - but that seems unpopular too. The only other option is to develop therapies that permanently prevent the decline. And unfortunately for those who think they don't want to live a long time, the decline is what kills old people. There is no magic time bomb that will see us off at some appointed hour, irrespective of our vitality.
If it's easier for you to consider life extension as an acceptable side-effect of curing the disabilities and diseases of aging, that's fine, and I won't even say ‘I told you so’ when your 199th birthday comes around and you seem keener on benefiting from my forward planning than you are today.
Cheers,
Aubrey

Dear Aubrey,
Thanks for confirming that this discussion is really about attitudes, not arguments. Actually, I don’t think thirty years, or even fifty, is all that long. But then you are the one who seems to want all the time in the world. I can think of plenty of things I’m never going to get round to doing, but I am continually amazed our culture offers so many things to choose from. One can make choices without regret.
You are right, of course, that no-one relishes becoming decrepit. The process of dying is surely more frightening than the result. There are many things we might do, medical and social, to achieve a more graceful ending. But denial lies in believing that the end, or even the decline, can now be avoided by the appliance of science. We are all going to end up the same way, sooner or later. You are just going to be more disappointed about it than I am.
Perhaps one of the choices we can make is to recognise that death is no big deal. It is astonishing that any of us is here in the first place. But however wonderful our brief interval between bouts of oblivion, I take comfort in finitude.
Unambitiously,
Jon

Dr Aubrey de Grey leads the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence project at Cambridge University
ag24@gen.cam.ac.uk

Dr Jon Turney is course leader for the MSc in Creative Non-Fiction Writing at Imperial College
jonturney@dsl.pipex.com