Will we be immortal by increasing our life expectancy?

Pieter van Lint - Allegory of immortality

This method is based on the following idea: if we could manage to increase our life expectancy by more than one year per year, we would automatically be immortal. Mathematically, this idea is correct. But is there any chance that it will happen in practice?

One problem is that the increase in life expectancy is slowing down, and has even reversed.

First, we must clear up a misunderstanding. Two completely independent concepts should not be confused:

Four ways to achieve immortality

Herodotus

As I have explained in previous posts in this blog, some people believe that we are about to achieve immortality. Of course, depending on the way to do it, it might not be applicable to everyone, because it would be very expensive. Perhaps it would just be feasible for a few enormously wealthy people. Or maybe it could be done in a more democratic way, so that everybody would be immortal. Many journalists, politicians, tycoons, philosophers, futurologists, and even ordinary people are convinced that sooner or later all of us, or at least some of us, will be immortal.

This is not a new hope; it comes from deep in the past. One of the oldest known masterpieces of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written 4,000 to 4,500 years ago, deals with the quest for immortality. We also have the legend of the fountain of youth, which would give immortality to those who drink from its waters. According to Herodotus, it would be located in Ethiopia, although some say that Ponce de León searched for it in vain in Florida.

Productivity measures for the increase in life expectancy

In my previous post in this blog I spoke about the article entitled Are ideas getting harder to find? which can be downloaded from the Stanford University website. In this paper, the authors also analyze the increase in life expectancy in the USA and the effort necessary to achieve it, and reach the following results:

Will we live 500 years?

James H. Schmitz

A few years ago, especially in 2015 and 2016, news began to appear in the mass media announcing the imminence that our life expectancy is going to rise in an accelerated way, so we’ll soon achieve immortality. At that time I wrote in this blog three posts (this, this and this) where I declared myself skeptical about these forecasts. In another post, also published in 2016, I distinguished between two very different concepts:

• Life expectancy: the average duration of human life. Although it depends on the age of the person, the value usually given corresponds to the moment of birth. Life expectancy has been growing progressively in recent centuries, mainly due to advances in medicine, although recent data from the UN seem to indicate that this increase is decreasing.
• Longevity: the maximum duration of human life. Its value seems to be around 120 years, and no significant increase is noted in recent decades. In fact, there are only two people who were thought to have exceeded that longevity, the Japanese Shigeziyo Izumi and the French Jeanne Calment, but both cases are currently in doubt. The first lost his title of the longest-lived man in the world when it was discovered that his date of birth could actually correspond to a brother of the same name, older than him, who died quite young. In the case of the French woman, there is a controversial Russian study that asserts that her daughter could have exchanged her identity for her mother’s when the latter died, supposedly in 1934.

Is the increase in life expectancy accelerating?

Nick Bostrom

Some philosophers, such as Nick Bostrom and the transhumanists, have concocted an updated version of Nietzsche’s superman. Their forecasts are based on two scientific advances presented as imminent since several decades ago: immortality, which will be attained when the advances in medicine increase life expectancy beyond one year per year; and artificial intelligence, the design of super-intelligent machines. Both advances could be combined to attain immortality through artificial intelligence, by downloading our conscience (something we cannot even define scientifically) into a super-intelligent machine, so that it would go on existing inside the machine.

Unfortunately for transhumanists, the UN data do not confirm their expectations. Let us look first at the data about the evolution of the maximum life expectancy in the world from 1950 to 2015 (see table 1). These and the following data have been taken from https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Download/Standard/Mortality/.

What is immortality

Pieter van Lint - Allegory of immortality

Immortality is in fashion. Every few weeks, the media publish news or interviews related to this matter. In addition to the one I mentioned in an earlier article, let's look at two others, quite recent:

•         We will live 1000 years (Aubrey de Gray, May 1, 2016).

•         Man is about to attain immortality and artificial intelligence, which will turn him into Homo Deus (Yuval Harari, September 11, 2016).

But first we must define what we mean by immortality; otherwise, we will hardly know what we are talking about. As one reader pointed out in my previous article, living 1000 years is not the same as being immortal. If you live 1000 years and then die, you are not immortal, you have just lived longer. This applies, whatever the duration of life. Living 1000 million years and then dying would not be the same as being immortal.

Those who believe that someday we will be immortal do not put all the eggs in the same basket. In recent years, three different ways have been proposed to achieve immortality:

Are we about to become immortal?

Arthur C. Clarke

In 1965 Arthur C. Clarke published a short story, titled Dial F for Frankenstein, later published in the collection The wind from the sun: stories of the space age. In that story Clarke proposed the following scenario:

When all global telephone systems are connected via geostationary satellites, the number of components of the global system will exceed those in the human brain. As such a system will have access to the information in all the computers connected to the network, we’ll have a very complex system with an extremely high amount of information. If conscience arises automatically from such a system, the computer network, connected by telephone, should be conscious and, being far superior to any human brain, will take control of the Earth.