The War on Death
Technology will give us the Fountain of Youth. In this essay I explore the history of longevity in mythology, how we can categorise death by its two eras, “The Spinning Vinyl” of aging, “hypercentinarians”, and how we hope to eliminate non-communicable disease.
This is part of my “cyborging” series where I look at the relationship humans have with technology and the inevitable transhuman lifestyle of future generations. Pursuing human-computer symbiosis will enable us to live forever, enhance our senses and quality of life, and give us existential relevance as carbon-based organisms in the age of silicon superintelligence.
Contents:
I. The Case Against Aging
In all western cultures, we build pensions for our retirement, aiming for enough savings to see us through to the end. When we eventually retire from work, we try to enjoy life without digging too far into our savings, for it is only a matter of time before our family puts us into ‘care’, where we pay to be treated like patients until our eventual passing (preferably painless and in our sleep).
Aging kills 125,000 people per day. It is responsible for 9 out of 10 deaths in the western world, and 80% of medical expenditure on in the US. Death by ‘old age’ is so commonly accepted, it is seen as the universal rite of passage, and any death before old age and by no age-related disease is considered ‘premature’.
While most choose to come to terms with mortality when there are no viable options for extending our lives, it isn’t unreasonable to believe that humans, given the option, would rather live unbounded by their own biology. If you were given the option to reverse aging and live youthfully with your loved ones, for as long as you liked, how could you ever choose not to?
II. Mythological Immortality
One of the oldest stories known to modern man is The Epic of Gilgamesh (written around 2,000BC). The story follows Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, who is fearful of his own death and seeking to find the secret of eternal life. His quest takes him over cosmic mountains and through a tunnel guarded by scorpions to a vineyard at the end of the world. He finds an old man who can live forever and gets two chances at achieving immortality: Either he must conquer sleep by staying awake for seven days, or he must eat the plant of life that grows at the bottom of the ocean. Gilgamesh fails to stay awake, and upon retrieving the plant, a snake steals and eats it (leading to the Akkadian parable of why snakes can regenerate their skin). Gilgamesh ultimately accepts mortality and vows to spend his lifetime going great deeds. [1]
Figure 1. Gilgamesh and Methuselah.
In the Old Testament, each successive generation dies younger than the last. According to canon, Adam died unfathomably old at 930 years. His son, Seth, died at 912. Seth’s son, Enosh, died at 905. This continued, 895, 962, 365 (Enoch was mysteriously ‘taken by God’). Enoch’s son, Methuselah, lived the longest of all at 969 years old, dying at the time of Noah’s Flood. Later in Genesis, we find the Bible’s seemingly prophetic scripture “Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’” (Genesis 6:3; King James). [2]
Tales of a life-restoring spring appear in early works by Herodotus (5th century BC) when he mentions a special kind of water in the land of the legendary Macrobian people that gave them exceptional longevity. In the Bible’s New Testament, the ‘troubling of the waters’ happened when an angel went down into the pool (of Bethesda) and stirred up the water; whoever stepped in first was made well of whatever disease they had. During the Age of Exploration, this myth became a river or spring said to reverse the aging process and to cure sickness when swallowed or bathed in.
Figure 2. Cranach the Elder’s Fountain of Youth (painted 1546).
Early stories of a chemical Elixir of Life (of which there has been over 1,000 names) can be attributed to Gilgamesh’s plant, and later to the Qin Dynasty in 3rd century China. The first emperor of unified China sent an alchemist named Xu Fu to the eastern seas to find the elixir in the mythical Penglai Mountain. Other Chinese people of antiquity would ingest long-lasting precious substances such as gold, cinnabar and jade to confer some of their ever-lasting properties.
In some form or another, the desire to live forever has been held by humans since prehistory. Finally, given the nature of exponential technological progress and impending access to quantum technology, machine learning, and new forms of therapy, humanity in the 21st century could render many of the challenges associated with aging irrelevant. As with all technology, once this is available, it will be widely used.
III. Death: Type 1.0
While age-related diseases are the near-universal killer now, this hasn’t always been the case. Since 10,000BC the world has seen between 80 and 100 billion human deaths. 5-10% of deaths of history are attributable to malaria alone; greater than 1-in-3 deaths happened before the age of five; and war, famine, and other infectious diseases can be attributed to the vast majority of the remaining deaths (for example, the Spanish Flu alone killed between 1 and 5.4% of the world’s population in 1918). [3]
Figure 3. Compounded population growth since 10,000BC on a logarithmic scale.
In 2022, humans have nearly conquered behavioural causes of death. To die by these now highly preventable causes, we shall call it Death 1.0. Broadly, these are biologically curable diseases, conflict such as war and violence, accidents such as plane crashes or machinery malfunctions, and natural disasters or ‘acts of God’ such as flooding and drought.
For Death 1.0 we often have simple fixes; by using a seatbelt, we halve our risk of death and serious injury in a crash. By mandating bans on assault rifles, we reduce the fatalities in public shootings. By using vaccines, we can create herd immunity and prevent the development of complications; the COVID-19 vaccine is believed to have saved 20 million lives in the first 12 months of its rollout.
In general, Death 1.0 ‘fixes’ are preventable with sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics, disarmament, treaty, law and order, and safety regulations. Death 1.0 fixes suffer downfalls when humans either a) choose to break the law or b) neglect to follow safe protocol.
Since 1800, famine has become 1000x less threatening to humankind, extreme poverty rates have fallen from 90% to fewer than 10%, war-related deaths have fallen by over 25x, and homicide rates have fallen by 7x. In the last 100 years alone, we have become 89% less likely to die by natural disaster, 95% less likely to die while at work, 98% less likely to die in a car crash, and 99% less likely to die in a plane crash.
In this time, life expectancy has risen from 30 to 73 years. Now finding ourselves with 21st century technology, we may find ourselves opting-out of death indefinitely during our lifetimes.
IV. Death: Type 2.0
The perplexing thing about death therefore becomes: why has the total achievable lifespan barely budged? In the last 75 years, in which life expectancy has risen from 48 to 72.4 years, the oldest generation have gone from 110 years old to 116. Since the 1980s, the oldest known Americans have gone from 115 years old to only 116 years old. In fact, the only American in history to live longer is Sarah Knauss, reaching 119 in 1999. [4]
Figure 4. Age of the oldest verified person on Earth (1955-2022).
The sad truth death is that it can be relieving, especially if it is a long and painful process. The erratic nature of a dementia patient can make life hard for carers and loved ones. As we go on living, the body becomes frail and decrepit, we lose our mobility and become increasingly susceptible to incurable disorders and diseases (congenital or chronic diseases). As we grow old, our youthfulness dissipates and our memory deteriorates, slowly dissolving our freedom.
Technology will allow us to slow, prevent, and reverse the aging process. These are the ways we will extend the human condition. Death 2.0 is any death that is not ‘curable’ in the traditional sense, it includes dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory and digestive diseases and diabetes. While these ways to die number only 10 of the 31 causes of death that kill over 100 people each day, they were responsible for 76% of deaths in 2019.
Figure 5. Deaths by cause; Death 1.0 in grey, Death 2.0 in red. (2019).
The challenging thing about longevity is that even if we cure all Death 1.0 known to man, we will inevitably die from Death 2.0. Rates of Death 2.0 has only been accelerating as we have fixed the more immediately threatening Death 1.0. Alzheimer’s and dementia-related deaths are rising twice as fast as deaths globally, with similar trends in cancer (see Figure 6). [5]
Figure 6. Cancer-related deaths of all kinds (1990-2019).
At current trends, 15% more people will die each year in 2030 than in 2022. By this time, the prevalence of Death 2.0 will be 40% higher.
V. The War on Death
Death 2.0 is not preventable by any of the aforementioned ‘fixes’. To cure non-communicable diseases (NCDs) we require more sophisticated therapies.
At the heart of type 2 death lies a simple biological principle; as we live, our bodies get damaged, and this damage is often invisible to the naked eye.
Figure 7. The three-factor age process.
That said, there is no law of evolution that condemns us to eternal mortality. If we picture an analogue vinyl spinning inside each of us from the moment we live to the moment we die, we can visualise the process of aging in its simplest terms. Importantly, this vinyl writes itself indefinitely; it will not stop spinning at the end of each song, it will simply generate more.
The health of the vinyl is instead determined by its robustness. The more we scratch it, the less effective it becomes at playing. The more it damages, the easier it becomes to further damage it. Of course, if we damage it too much, it will break.
Figure 8. “The Spinning Vinyl” of aging.
By using technology, we can edit our risk of breaking the vinyl. Scientists have already proven that we can scratch it, accelerating the aging process in mice so that one twin can be half the age of its sibling, and vice versa. We can slow aging by preventing the vinyl from getting scratched, and we can stop aging by preventing it from being scratched at all. But most excitingly of all, we can repair the vinyl.
By repairing the vinyl, we reverse our risk of Death 2.0, extending our lives indefinitely.
It is important to note that the damage that causes pathology happens on a molecular level; to repair the metabolism, we would need to conduct invasive surgeries, a.k.a. “maintenance” work, alongside taking medicines that may help regenerate cells or eliminate ‘junk’ and molecular build-up.
One cause of aging (muscle wastage, immobility, diabetes, kidney failure, heart disease, dementia and loss of sight and hearing) is mitochondrial mutation. Mitochondrial mutations are in almost every case a congenital disorder. We cannot change our behaviour or act more rationally to prevent mitochondrial mutations; we require invasive surgery.
That said, we can stop behaviours that accelerate the damage process, effectively slowing the accruement of scratches to our vinyl. Habitually smoking cigarettes is carcinogenic, meaning we increase the risk of lung cancer by breathe in the smoke. By cutting out cigarettes we do not stop ourselves aging, we are simply being kinder to our bodies.
Sunbathing and other forms of radiation exposure can increase the risk of genetic mutation, causing skin cancer. Strokes are linked to high blood pressure and lack of exercise. By avoiding sunburn, working out, and eating healthily, we can reduce our chances of Death 2.0. These are mitigators; behaviours that support our pursuit of longevity (and generally improve our mobility, energy, and quality of life). These behaviours I hope to explore in greater detail in a future essay.
Up next, I plan to study how damage can be not just prevented, but reversed.
Notes
[1] - Interestingly, older stories are known to us. The Pyramid Texts date back to c. 2400-2300 BC. The Enmerkar and Lugabanda poems are datable to the Third Dynasty of Ur. The Australian Aborigine Dreamtime stories, passed down orally, may be traceable up to 10,000 years ago.
[2] - The time between creation and the Flood was 1,656 years. In that time, only six generations had passed. After the Flood, the downward trend continued, shortening each successive generation; Noah’s children died at 400-500 years old, Abraham died at 175, Moses died at 120.
[3] - Okay, the Spanish Flu is an exception, but it puts into perspective how deadly historic “flu seasons” have been. Nowadays 0.0052% of the world population dies from flu each year. See here for stats.
[4] - Only one person in history verifiably lived to over 120 years old. This was Jeanne Calment, born in 1875. We should call her the first “hypercentenarian.”
Also, odd fact but – Sarah Knauss, oldest American ever, died just one day before the 21st century.
[5] - For relevant statistics on aging, read more here.