Do you want to live forever? (Or Genetics, Medical Science, Ethics and Stuff)

If you are reading this and are relatively content and happy in your existence and I said ‘Hey what if you could stay like this forever?’ there is no one of sound mind who would not take me up on that offer.

I want to live forever, there seems more that I want to do than a single lifetime would allow, I’d love not to age.

I’d also love to see an end to diseases: Cancer: Gone; AIDS: Gone; Dementia: Gone; everything, every last one, a blight on our species no more. I think we can all agree on that, right?

But

At what cost?

It is predicted that ageing could be effectively halted and even reversed within less than a hundred years and advancements in immunological science are predicted along similar timescales. We are going to be living longer and possibly indefinitely, if one avoids serious physical injury. But, again I ask: At what cost?

Let me be clear, You will be disappointed if you are expecting an argument based on defying ageing and disease being ‘against God’  or humanity ‘playing God’, I have little interest in either concept, and this is not a post critical of science’s unrelenting quest for answers either. Science and scientists should be applauded for seeking to address the problems of ageing and disease, I would certainly never seek to discourage this quest for understanding, but there are ethical questions arising from human immortality that, when given thought, make what superficially seems like a positive advancement look far less so. If I get something wrong please shout out and let me know.

Let’s imagine today we have cured ageing and all diseases; our children can be born without any risk of ageing or disease and existing humans can be genetically manipulated to enjoy the same. What now?

Who gets the cure?

It would be very easy to say every single person on the planet should be given access to the cure. You might think, and it’s hard to argue against, that if some can enjoy eternal youth and life, well then everyone should enjoy the same right. Ignoring the logistics of this endevour, there are some pretty big ethical problems.

Today, millions upon millions of people are living in total poverty and suffering starvation. If these peoples are given the cure, they will not age or suffer disease, but they will starve to death just as they would have done before and, those that don’t, will enjoy an eternity of poverty. So, you might think that we could withhold the cure until they can be helped to catch-up. We would enjoy our immortality while they continue to die in their masses until we are satisfied they have reached the correct level of social and infrastructural development to be given access to the technology. For your immortality, is that a call you would be happy to make?

Okay, how about this

Let’s forget poverty, let’s pretend everyone on earth is at the same level of societal development, such as that, at least in the aspirational sense. enjoyed by most Western Countries.  Let’s cure everyone on earth of ageing and disease. That’s right, all 7 billion of us can live forever and have children who will also live for ever. The 7 billion of us who are currently alive, along with the billions who have gone before, have done a pretty top-notch job of buggering this little Planet of ours. Heavy industry, resource stripping, reliance on unclean means of energy production and mass consumerism have all taken their toll on our Planet’s essential systems. We vastly over-capacity based on current practices, so it’s hard to advocate allowing a situation where natural wastage through death no longer occurs. The numbers just don’t work, more people only ever means more environmental impact and makes it less likely we’ll ever develop the means, as a species, to venture into the stars in any meaningful sense. No, if we all want immortality then we make some difficult choices.

As I see it, the necessary cost of immortality for all would have to be a Planet-wide ban on procreation. If we all live forever, no one would ever be allowed to raise children. You might think that’s a reasonable price to pay for your eternal life on earth, but look wider. Future generations have often sought to solve the problems of past generations, it’s one of the main reasons we move nearer to this technology. Sometimes problems have been solved due solely to the unique vision of particular individuals. Whatever area you look at, be it social history, technology, medicine, the arts, you will find these unique visionaries who changed things for the better or took things in new directions. The consequences of immortality could stop this happening, humanity would be at risk of stagnation. If we stopped procreation, the knowledge base would be stuck at it’s current levels. Often it is not what is known, the core information, but the way it is put together by the individual and we are (and are not) unique. We would be accepting adding no more uniqueness to our pool. It can only be guessed at what this would mean over the long term.

Terrible but necessary

In my opinion, the possible ramifications for the use of such technology are terrible, I see little hope that it will be in the best interest of much of the population of the Planet, but nonetheless it may be in the best interests of the human species as a whole. If we don’t want to die here on earth and want to explore the stars, even the nearest ones, then I do believe the technology to remove the burden of ageing and to cure all diseases must play a part in a much wider landscape of difficult questions and ethical debates.

So, now you know some of the potential costs, it’s back to my first question, dear reader: Do you want to live forever?

Next time

My next post will look at exactly what we might need to do to leave this planet and it gets a lot more morally and ethically ambivalent than this.

Other Posts and Further Reading

Me: We’re all Going to Die Here

Me: Extra-Terrestrial Life: Chicken or Pork

Senescene: Should we cure Ageing

BBC News: We will be able to live to 1000

The ethical debate of life-extension therapies (Video)

If you don’t like these Thoughts, stick around, I’ve got plenty of others.

The Relentless Tick-Tock of Time

We met a guy in his 80’s who was climbing Ben Nevis the same time we were for my best mate’s stag weekend. We got talking and he told us he had both his knees replaced, only 1 kidney and had fought and beaten Cancer 3 times. Somewhat concerned for his wellbeing, we asked why he was climbing this mountain and not taking it easy. He scoffed that this would be his twelth summit, but Nevis was small compared to the other mountains that he had climbed, we were impressed. He went on and what he said next will stay with me the rest of my days: do you know what it’s like to get to 60, nearly die and look back over a life where you haven’t done enough? So much lost time, I’m not wasting another second of it, if I die on this mountain or any other then so be it…

I’ve never been one for wearing watches.

I’ve been bought some lovely watches over the years but, aside from fleeting appearances, I’ve rarely ever worn them.

I’ve never wanted to feel beholden to time. I don’t know what it is, I just don’t like time that much, never have. Yes, I realise this is ludicrous as we are temporal beings, living lives governed by the passage of times.

I wake up to an alarm in a morning during the week, it’s 6:30, cats fed. it’s 6:35, in shower, it’s 6.50 I’m getting dressed, 6:55 I’m finding new and ingenious ways of ingesting caffeine, then debating why the don’t make a stronger type and it’s 7:10, I’m waiting for a bus…meetings today, scheduled, to times. interuptions…

Wandering Giants once well fed now slimming down and slow, political…Time’s lost. I’ts Five PM…

Tick -Tock

Tick-Tock

Just recently I’ve started to really feel the passage of time, it’s presence, taunting, I’m not exceeding my own expectations! Need to be doing more, something. Tick-Tock kinda want to be great, giants will improve become more graceful over time Tick-Tock but looking for something more immediate.

…and yes, I realise this is called existential angst and will pass, just odd, never really been more aware of the passage of time than right now. This is an affirmation. I need to do more. I want to look back and say I’ve done great things, good things and lots of things, I want to leave marks, lots of them…I waste too much time.

I need to do more!

I’m going back to ignoring time as much as I can hoping he gets bored and leaves me alone.

Tick-Tock

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror.  It’s passing, yet I’m the one who’s doing all the moving.  ~Martin Amis, Money

These are my thoughts, if you don’t like them, I’ve got some others…

Branches, Seagull, Infinite Storms, Lancelot and Guinevere

The Branch Snapped Off In the Infinite Storm

From these feet begin the unexplored land

Coiling upwards to assault the eyes that hold,

Made profound on account of this heart

Emptied of improbable diamonds

By sleepwalkers’ hands,

All buried at sea,

Eerie as the dreams of ghosts;

As my branch snapped off in the infinite

To seagull begging young is brought.

Downpour comes into my dreams

Yellowed hands and blackened feet;

Free-wheel circular flagstones

Rattle in the throat of night

Tie a sleeping mountain,

This silent body;

The downpour raves

Between your thighs,

Soliloquy of stones and water.

If you liked that one you can listen to it over on my Audioboo

Lancelot and Guinevere

Having an affair

Without ever being in between the sheets

Talk and talk, cross space between often,

But no nearer each other.

Give everything can

While frozen to a line,

The sword that lies in sleep; and watch what cannot

Touch, unspoken as intimacy grows.

It was Lancelot who was bound,

You’re Guinevere, who knows her knight

Is hooked; only she can change the rules

And take her forbidden body to his –

Did she drop a handkerchief or a straight hand to the groin?

Or was the first moment

Lips no longer talking, eyes no longer watching but blurring,

And hands holding onto this moment in another life,

Fate standing there with a new garment to slip on.

All before had been guarded

And reversible

Interchangeable

Dance of friendship,

All now irreversible

Time-chained,

Sequential path of lovers.

It isn’t only armies who burn boats

So that they have to stand and fight.

The gesture tests us,

There on the table is the matchbox we have fiddled and played with,

Emptied

Filled with talk.

OK Guinevere,

Strike a match.

Want to read more?

Go on, you know you do. Find more here:

Without You, I’d leave aborted poem-foetus on the doorsteps of random strangers

Two Poems – I am Parenthesis and Boredom

Searching for Eve

There are few stories in the Bible that I find more noxious than that of Adam and Eve. The central message of the tale can be paraphrased as ‘women, it’s all your fault. It’s vile misogyny and we allow our Children to be taught it as if it’s some nice moral tale. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong, so I went in search of a different Eve.

This piece was originally written as part of a research group into the Female Goddess. Is it speculative in parts? Yes. Still beats biblical Eve hands down in my opinion. Hope you enjoy.

All About Eve

 

I would dearly like to try and save the image of Eve, mother of humanity and to do this I’m going to take a fairly sizeable leap away from tired, misguided religious dogma and its associated misogyny and into the field of early human evolution and present a much more wholesome case for the Eve of genetic memory.

Enter right Mitochondrial Eve a figure from our biological evolution who, perhaps most importantly is real and allowed to exist without Adam’s rib with not even the merest hint of a pointlessly-placed tree bearing forbidden fruit or a serpent in sight. So who was Mitochondrial Eve? She is nothing more nor less than the most recent common ancestor for all humans living today and can be traced back to roughly 200, 000 years ago. Mitochondrial Eve has her counterpart in Y-Chromosomal Adam who can be dated back 90,000 – 60, 000 years ago. So how does this relate to the story of Eve?

To begin with, it doesn’t really, the Homo Sapian genus spread onwards, expanding exponentially until about 70, 000 years ago when it hits a rather alarming genetic bottleneck that reduced a large population of humans down to possibly as few as 500 breeding pairs but certainly no more than 10, 000 breeding pairs. Humanity was going through the roughest patch of its entire evolution. As for the cause of this bottleneck? Well that’s a tricky one as we don’t really know, but the best theory that science seems to have come up with is that of the Toba Extinction Event.

The Eruption of Lake Toba, in Sumatra, Indonesia is one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever to take place on the planet with estimates that after the initial destruction, floods and a variety of other nastiness the entire planet was plunged into a 6-10 year volcanic winter event with almost all sunlight being blocked out by huge clouds of ash. Although the Toba event carries the title theory, there are corresponding genetic bottlenecks in other species dating to exactly the same time, it is fair to say the very survival of genus Homo Sapian after this event is statistically improbable, yet survive they did! But what does this have to do with Eve?

Imagine the survivors of this event, don’t forget they didn’t all survive in one place. Here we have a population of only 10, 000 breeding pairs at most spread across the entire planet, small pockets of life seeking survival in conditions humans have not experienced since (though will likely experience again before the end of our history). It seems likely that the female of the species played a role more important than ever before? This Researcher wonders if the fact that early cultures revered the female goddess so much more than later cultures is a direct result of Genetic or cultural memory that comes from the centuries after Toba.

Here we have a very different Eve, not living in the Garden of Eden, but living in hell-on-earth revered amongst early societies for the ability to bring new life, to rebuild what was lost. Admittedly this last part is speculation on my part (though I’m confident I am not straying into Dolphin-riding Atlanteans territory), but if I have to believe one view on Eve or another then I’ll pick the mother of humanity revered for bringing life after great catastrophe rather than a 1-dimensional construct produced by men to control women.

Bibliography and Further Reading

 

Chesner, C.A.; Westgate, J.A.; Rose, W.I.; Drake, R.; Deino, A. Eruptive History of Earth’s Largest Quarternary caldera (Toba, Indonesia) Clarified (March 1991); Geology 19: 200–203.http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~raman/papers/ChesnerGeology.pdf. Retrieved 03/10/2010

Dawkins, Richard; The Ancestor’s Tale, A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. (2004) (“The Grasshopper’s Tale”); Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. pp. 416.

Gibbons, Ann; Human Ancestors Were an Endangered Species. (19 January 2010). ScienceNow. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/119/2.

Would Love to hear any feedback, good or bad.

You know the drill, if you don’t like these Thoughts, stick around, I’ve got plenty of others. x

Without You, I’d leave aborted poem-foetus on the doorsteps of random strangers

MADNESS

We poets in our youth begin in gladness,

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness

–          William Wordsworth

I am afraid to joyfully dig so deep
(Until the voices sing me to sleep)
But I am suddenly faced with choices
(I am aware of different voices)
At night, with the voices at their most bright
Slip into sleep, sheep into fright.
I feel the tightening of elastic,
Smell slow burn rubber,
Taste the word: ‘snap’
In sanity, like the sea, laps
At introvert, infidel shores
 Below me, madness hangs in stasis
Whilst, I dig around in gladness
Taste happiness and flee from trouble
Waiting to burst that bubble.

 A Song and A Dance

You make the atoms in my bones dance in their spaces

I shake, judder, like an express train. Believe me

The atoms in my bones are dancing in their spaces.

My insect heart, tiny life drumming

its fast metabolic rate in my ear. We couldn’t

make love. I would miss you by lifetimes.

Too quick for a courtship lasting centuries.

Broken down to atoms dancing in my bones by the look

in your eyes. Like the light at the birthing party for stars.

This is longing

Unfixed

As an explosion

Tearing

Through words like fire, breaking everything down

to shaking ash. We have to start at this collapse,

Inorganic

Lives without language – mountains and rivers,

coalescing before language creeps over like foliage

We carry our atoms like memories and when we meet

The atoms in my bones are dancing in their spaces,

Uncrowded by deliberation of slower things.