Physical Immortality in Seven Years?

According to Google Director Ray Kurzweil, we will stop aging in 2030. What does that mean?

This elderly mouse “de-aged” and got its eyesight back during a Harvard experiment. Geneticist David Sinclair said: "The experiments show aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven 'forwards and backwards at will'."

I must admit: I am personally fascinated by the prospect that we are on the cusp of attaining “biological immortality,” or, at the very least, lifespans with no definite time limit. I find it almost equally fascinating that there seems to be something shameful or guilt-inducing about discussing this. It is also extraordinary that we are, generally, not discussing it, despite its staggering implications. I feel it is worth unpacking why all of this is the case — why it may be happening, why we don’t explore it much, and why it induces shame, guilt, and a peculiar psychic paralysis to attempt to focus on it.

One of the people who boldly predicts that we rapidly approach biological immortality is Google Director Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near and its recent sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer. Kurzweil believes we are seven years away from this threshold. In other words, by 2030, we will no longer face inevitable old age and death as a fact of life. This is an incredible, shocking prospect — but to be honest, I don’t find it surprising. 

I learned that Kurzweil still believes we are on this timeline in David Shapiro’s YouTube video, ‘Biological Immortality by 2030: Social & Economic Implications,’ which looks at the prospects of near-term human immortality. There is something about Shapiro’s straightforward, slightly naive, engineer-minded approach to subjects like the Singularity and immortality that I find helpful. His thought experiment inspired this one.

While natural evolution designed human beings so that we would quickly reproduce, wear out, and be replaced, there is no innate or intrinsic necessity that this should continue to be the case. One main reason that we age and die are the telomeres: Repeating sequences of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that influence how cells age. 

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Each time a cell divides, our telomeres get shorter. When they become too short, the cell can no longer divide and may die or become senescent. Telomere shortening is believed to contribute to the aging process and the development of age-related diseases. But if the telomeres are a kind of code programmed into our cells. I don’t see any logical reason that this code can’t be hacked and rewritten. David Sinclair, a geneticist at Harvard, has already successfully “de-aged” mice, and we are not so different from rodents. 

Clearly, human evolution no longer requires natural selection over many centuries to produce physical mutations. Instead, we are gaining the ability to direct the evolutionary process via technology – to rewrite our own code. We know there are certain species of jellyfish and lobster that are technically immortal or at least have no obvious cap on their lifespans. It seems sensible that we can use biotechnology and nanotechnology to address the human aging process, to halt and even reverse it. With the acceleration of Artificial Intelligence and the looming Singularity (the fusing of AI with biotech and nanotech), it is not that surprising that this is coming quite soon.

Of course, reprogramming the telomeres is not the only thing we have to do to stop and reverse aging. The fact is, if we only stop cellular aging, we will still inevitably die from cancers and other diseases. There are, obviously, other developments we need to make to attain undefined lifespans or “immortality”. We will need to scrub our aging cells of whatever gook or “rust” eventually causes diseases and cancers to occur. But I can’t see any reason this would be impossible. Kurzweil is convinced that “nanobots” will soon be able to take care of this—and pretty much every other problem humanity faces.

As I have written elsewhere, I found something almost comical about Kurzweil’s nanobots in The Singularity Is Near. They seem quasi-mystical or a bit like our ancient ideas of the elves or fairy folk who can accomplish many impossible feats. Or perhaps a bit like the angels of redemption. In Kurzweil’s post-biological utopia, not only are we directly hooked up to AI by some implant similar to Neuralink (which he thinks will be the case within ten years), we will also have an army of nanobots to handle our every whim. 

If we find it too boring to breathe, then nanobots in our lungs can do it for us. Swarms of nanobots will be able to create perfectly simulated virtual environments — anything we desire. Eventually we will upload our brains to the digital matrix, so we have our entire archive of memories and feelings available to us, at all times. 

Why does the idea of physical immortality feel so wrong?