How long, then, should we live?

A post where I would especially love your comments

I’ve suggested before that I think major ethical questions for Christians and the whole world going forward will be topics around what might generally be called “bio-hacking”. Some people use that phrase for something as simple as, I took a multivitamin this morning, look at me hacking my body - OK, that’s noncontroversial. But, although I can’t know this, it may soon be possible to reliably do much more than that, including choosing or modifying the characteristics of children.

What if a treatment (genetic or otherwise, let’s say), could remove a genetic disease from a child before they are born, or increase their probable IQ by ten points, or make them inherently a little stronger, or a little taller, or their face more symmetric, and so on. Should such practices be forbidden, because we are then playing God (not to mention a long list of pragmatic dangers I could produce, like all the school children are blond in this grade because that was the fashion at the time)? Should (as some transhumanists think) such practices be, at least ethically, mandatory, because of course you have a duty to make sure your children are as intelligent as you can (and if not, society will just leave them behind, so it’s certainly bad for them and you). There are some fuzzy lines (I suspect most of us would endorse eliminating a disease if we could do so without other effect) and hard questions here.

Living forever

Last week, I listened a recent episode of ARK Invest’s For Your Innovation podcast¹. The interview was with Peter Diamandis, author of a new book, Longevity Guidebook, and a man who, he’d be happy to tell you, intends to live forever. He is 63 years old right now, and he does look great - maybe those 80 pills he says he takes everyday really do help - but that tells you how soon he expects science to conquer aging.

He proposes the idea of “longevity escape velocity”. Right now, he claims, for every additional year you live, the advance of science has (on average, of course) extended your lifespan by three months. Eventually he expects we will achieve longevity escape velocity, where for every year you live, science can extend your lifespan by more than a year, ergo (unless you die of something stupid), you are now immortal.

One comment Diamandis made, which I’m not sure I believe, is that the human body isn’t really designed to live past age 30, and yes he did use the loaded word “designed”. (And every single cell of your body is running a billion chemical reactions per second, he says, imagine that - how silly to think a doctor could keep track of them all.) A hundred thousand years ago, he suggests, on the African savannah, you’d hit puberty around age 12 or 13, have your first kid a couple of years later, and by age 28 or so you’re a grandparent. Food was scarce, the last thing you were going to do is take food from your grandchildren, and so you soon would just die. So after age 30, the human body is basically done living and on a steady decline. (Cheers to most readers!)

One reason I’m skeptical of that story is, though I’m not an expert in anthropology, from those modern anthropologists whom I have read, I thought the modern consensus was that, unlike your poor modern soul, hunter-gatherers only had to spend 3-4 hours a day working for all the food and other supplies they needed. (Agriculture was a mistake!) So, the sense I’ve gotten anyway, is that food often was not scarce for ancient man, he easily gathered or hunted enough of it. But such stories do make it clear that people like Diamandis are admitting, of course we’re using technology to make the body do stuff it wouldn’t otherwise do. Naturally, it dies.

More believable to me, he made the point that you have basically the same genome at age 0, and 20, and 50, and 100. Yet you look quite different at those ages. Why? Well one reason, anyway, is because of which genes are turned on, and which genes are turned off (epigenetics). And if we could learn how to control that (and we are, he said), that will be huge. There is a reason some people are 105 years old and still going to the office, and others are 60 and can’t get out of a chair. (Your body also experiences mutations as you age, e.g. cancer, yet he seemed to treat that as a minor factor.)

But what should we do? Diamandis mentions that he was recently at a conference at the Vatican actually, running a panel on the morality of immortality (which he flipped into the immorality of mortality). I do have to give the Roman Catholics credit for realizing the importance of tackling these topics. He mentions a rabbi also on the panel said look, humans used to live to 900 years, and then we sinned, and now we’re capped around 120 years. Diamandis asked the crowd, raise your hand if you’d like to live to 150 years old, expecting everyone to raise their hand… he got about 20% of the hands. Why? He thought, OK, people think 150 years old is a vegetable in a wheelchair, they don’t want that existence - but what if you could be a vital 150-year-old? The hosts of the podcast suggested, maybe it’s because you’re at the Vatican. These are not atheists, if they die, they go to be with Jesus, that’s good for them.

What is the proper answer here? I’m not sure. I do think (and you’ll see one Christian that sort of disagrees in just a moment), we generally believe that extending the human lifespan is a good thing. I’d wager very few Christian doctors cure the cancer in a 60-year-old and think “sorry, delayed your meeting with Jesus, that was a mistake”. But we almost all also have the perspective that God decides when you die. Death by suicide, even for a very ill 90-year-old, is wrong. But also, that 90-year-old is not obliged to take technological measures to extend life, say. If you would naturally die in a week, but hooking yourself up to this machine would probably extend life by five years, we don’t think you have any moral obligation to attach the machine, it is OK to naturally expire. But even here there are probably fuzzy lines. If a child is dependent upon you, say, the moral pressure to attach that machine might now surge dramatically, some prudential judgments might be needed.

I don’t have all the answers here, but I almost never hear a Christian actually say, “living too long is bad”. Who actually said that, recently? Anthony Esolen of all people. Let me give you his quotation.

I don't know why nobody makes what seems an obvious point, which is that there is no advantage to mankind to extend general longevity on earth beyond the extreme end of the third generation. Assuming some stability in the total population, it is inevitable that the more old people there are, the fewer children there can be, in absolute numbers and, more important, as a percentage of the population. Supposing the ghastly thing that some people dream of, that of eliminating physical death for mankind on earth, what would be the result, but to freeze the race -- no one new, no rejuvenation, hardly a child in sight (to replace the occasional suicide, maybe); all habits dug into grooves lasting indefinitely? That is not stability, and certainly not organic health for the human race; it is stasis and a kind of living death, turning earth into a deep-freeze, like the bottom of Dante's Hell; love itself would dry up, because, such as we are in this world, we take for granted what we never fear in any way to lose. Imagine a world without children. It seems like a flat rejection of everything that Jesus teaches us about blessedness.

Clearly this comment functions more on a statistical level (it would be bad “for mankind”), not on the level of individual decision making. And as he begins, almost nobody actually says this. But it’s an interesting comment. “We take for granted what we never fear in any way to lose.” Immortality would have to mean no more children, which seems absolutely awful (is that not the expected situation on the new Earth, though?).

Would love your comments on this one.

1. I learned about the podcast because we invested in their Venture Fund. It is the only way I know for “normal people” to invest in SpaceX, which comprises 16% of the fund as I type this. You can only invest via Titan or Sofi - here is a Sofi referral link from us if you’re interested.