Immortal Imperative

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Unattributed (with apologies)

Immortality as a topic has not had nearly as much said about it as has been said about money, or cooking, or sex or some other matters, but all the same it is one of the oldest topics in literature, and has been remained so in every generation. In fact it is a major theme in the oldest partially extant work of literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Like much of ancient literature, that epic presents philosophical challenges to this day; our forebears did not lack creative insights, and immortality remains one of the most confusedly defined and poorly understood concepts in amateur philosophy — which is saying a great deal.

And in most of professional philosophy the situation is not yet much better in my opinion.

So, in my role as nothing like a professional philosopher, how am I to mend the matter? And in any case, does it matter at all?

I cannot see my way to dramatic progress in mending the philosophical matters in my lifetime. but the material role of immortality already does matter greatly from many practical points of view, including the material survival of humanity, as opposed to the survival of mere humans, or even mere primates. The sooner that issue is clarified, the better our chances of making something of ourselves as a species; and the better the chances of the very survival of our community, of the heritage of humanity, of our civilisation, and of our future.

If any.

And the sooner we clarify the issue, the more substance we can lend to whatever it means to speak of "our future", when none of us yet has any prospect of material survival.

So: I see no harm in trying to set something worthwhile going for "our" future.

Some preliminaries:

I keep six honest serving‑men
(They taught me all I knew);
There names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who. . .
Rudyard Kipling

Firstly, apart from practical considerations concerning the basic points of this discussion, there are several philosophical points to consider, in particular some major points of material philosophy: and the first is the question of what I mean by “material philosophy”.

As I define them, the difference between material philosophy and formal philosophy, is that any formal philosophy, as an intellectual discipline, is based on arbitrarily chosen assumptions — axioms — that need not have any reference to, nor dependence on, any matter of external fact or experience, or any external realities or substance. I discuss this matter in greater detail in another essay I have published at:
https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-point_19.html

Ultimately everything meaningful in such a formal discipline depends only on the axioms and the relationships between the axioms.

There is nothing else for it to depend on, except, arguably, a metaphysical basis for reasoning from assumptions.

Accordingly the formulator of a purely formal discipline has no need to apologise for any assertions made within the contexts of those axioms, because, as long as its own internal assumptions are mutually logically consistent, there is nothing more to that formal philosophy than matters of personal interest or taste. Any conclusions cogently drawn from those axioms emerge according to internal rules of operation, and accordingly depend only on axiomatic rules of form: hence the term: “formal” philosophy. Such a philosophy is an academic exercise, an exercise in “if‑then‑else” reasoning, and if there is any mattering to be done, it is not in the philosophy itself, but in the associated metaphysics: the thinking about thinking about thinking.

That sort of thing is “angels on pinhead” stuff — and none the worse for that, as long as you don’t confuse it with dealing with reality. However, throughout the prehistory of serious philosophy, confusion of the relationship between formal philosophy and reality has been rife; it still is rife in most quarters — as far as I can tell.

In contrast, what I call “material”, or “applied”, or sometimes “empiric”, philosophy differs from formal philosophy in one essential respect: its assumptions must be sufficiently consistent with the nature of the objects to which it is applied, if it is to have value — utility, or point if you like. In this respect these assumptions differ from what I call the axioms of formal philosophy: they need not deal with the whole of the subject matter, nor need they apply with higher precision than is relevant to the objects of consideration and the nature or objectives of the reasoning process, but they must apply with sufficient precision, consistency and relevance to support functional reasoning and conclusions about the ways the objects under consideration act or interact.

This requirement commonly entails the concept of successful confirmation of prediction.

To the extent that it fails to match the intrinsic aspects of its subject matter, any applied philosophy is flawed, fallacious, futile, or is at best a limited model of material fact; in other words: such a failing applied philosophy is formally wrong — it may be dismissed in those failing empirical respects at least. Fundamentally it never is possible for any assumptions or conclusions to match reality completely, but it commonly is possible to make assumptions that satisfy one’s requirements sufficiently closely to be valid, at least in those aspects that are modelled by the philosophy; and it commonly is possible to test, assess, develop, and adjust those assumptions by prediction and experiment.

Arguably that sort of philosophy is the most important basis of what we might call empirical science.

Examples of branches or topics of applied philosophy, not necessarily distinct, include schools or versions of the respective philosophies of science, of epistemology, and of ethics.

The largest category of philosophy, whether formal or applied, I largely ignore: that one generally amounts to intellectual confusion or triviality, and the only self‑styled philosophers who defend defining topics within the category as philosophy, are the dupes, incompetents, demagogues, or parasites that propound it. Among these I classify many schools of religion as well as of existentialism, the views of Henri-Louis Bergson, nihilism, Marxism, and some forms of deconstructionism.

There always are plenty more where those came from, both ancient and derived.

In general the lines of thought and passion that I find in such dismissible fields are best described in terms of Wolfgang Pauli’s immortal: “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!” (That is not only not right; it is not even wrong!) I do not know whether he was referring to any philosophy or to anything more material at the time, but it certainly is fair comment on such schools of thought.

Such topics I’ll call “dismissible” whenever I need to refer to them.

I exclude from the category of dismissible fields of philosophy, another category that I largely ignore as well — valid formal philosophy: that category resembles (arguably includes) mathematics, in the respect that, ideally at least, philosophies of that type are based on formal axioms, and are internally consistent, from which it must be possible to trace any compelling assertions (formally, theorems) though not always uniquely. Aspects of formal philosophies also may be necessary in developing the metaphysics of applied philosophies.

In this connection I ignore Gödel‑undecidable assertions, which from this point of view, if anyone could demonstrate one in a given axiomatic structure, could be seen as a category of conjectures, rather than theorems. I have no quarrel with that, but it is not of practical relevance to the present discussion.

One way or another, the major substance of this essay is material, applied philosophy, which arguably is the category of philosophies that are least forgiving of error or quibbling, though they may demand that we work on the basis of tentative assumptions and limited precision.

If you proceed to read this essay, you will encounter some technical terms and some technical discussions; they are generally elementary — this is not intended to be a technical work — but if your interests lie in fields to which such items are alien, you can safely ignore them unless you choose to make a study of the topic; they do not affect the intent of the thesis, only the support for the development of some of the technical arguments.

On the other hand, if you do want to look up the material, you can find most of it in Wikipedia or Google online; I did not want to stuff the text with explanations that most readers would not care about. Have fun. In writing this, I did have fun, largely, though I am not certain that I would have written it at all if I had realised how much work it would entail. I am no typist, and there was a lot more to it than typing.

In what follows, I shall apologise for any need to apologise further.

Physically possible . . . Or perhaps not . . .

"But it is said: Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle
and quick to anger. The choice is yours: to go or wait."
"And it is also said," answered Frodo: "Go not to the Elves
for counsel, for they will say both no and yes."
"Is it indeed?" laughed Gildor. "Elves seldom
give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift,
even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill."
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

One note of caution: I am one of those who do not for an instant believe that we are approaching the limits of scientific progress, leaving nothing to discover beyond dotting some t’s or crossing some i’s, or occasionally adding a few digits of precision to some measurements or determinations of empirical constants. In fact, I suspect (without cogent support) that to achieve that status of near‑finality, would demand some assailable forms of self‑reference.

However, as matters stand, it seems likely that certain aspects of the necessary constraints on the nature of reality may indeed be absolute within our universe. Accordingly, for convenience, I accept some assumptions as being in practice non‑negotiable, such as:

· the constant speed of light in vacuum is an absolute, and it is an absolute limitation on the speed at which information can be conveyed from place to place. Accordingly, for planning purposes, we can neglect any future prospect of faster‑than‑light travel or communication. (And any reader who thinks that quantum entanglement violates this assumption, has not understood the topic; it does not.)

· the nature of information consists in material states that may rationally influence one’s assessment of the relative strength of alternative hypotheses; accordingly the course of events that depend on the physical existence of material information, is random when such information does not exist.

· there consequently are inescapable constraints on measurement of items that depend on the existence of particular information that such measurement is to determine, and this fact places consequent constraints on the precision of description of any events or any other entities

· the nature of quantum events entails uncertainty in the form of limits to even the existence of information constraining their precision

· the conservation of matter or energy to within the limits constrained by the existing information.

And so on.

Such things imply limitations on the scope of possibilities in our future; for instance, I do not believe for a moment that we, or anyone, ever shall be able to conduct much in the line of two‑way communication between parties in galaxies megaparsecs apart.

I state that, not as fact, nor even as an assertion of faith, but as a working hypothesis of a high degree of confidence.

Simultaneously, I do not deny the value of information exchanged, or at least directed at, partners many parsecs apart.

But suit yourself about which hypotheses you prefer to entertain.

Another aspect that arises unavoidably in this context, is that of biological evolution. If you do not understand evolution, whether the Darwinistic aspects or not, then either drop the whole topic, or take time out to inform yourself from competent popular sources; until then, this essay is unlikely to be rewarding.

There are plenty of popular introductions to Darwinism in its various senses nowadays, almost as many as there are hysterical frothings from the various New Agers, fundamentalists, and self‑styled creation scientists. Easy, but adequate, introductions would include certain works by such authors as Richard Dawkins (especially “River out of Eden” and later editions of “The Selfish Gene”), or John Maynard Smith (“Evolution and the Theory_of_Games”, and “The Origins of Life”) and Daniel Dennett (“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”). There are more. . .

Personally, though that essay is not adequate in itself, I introduce some relevant aspects at:

https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2014/01/normal‑0‑false‑false‑false_2.html

The difficulty here is that though the concepts of evolution by natural selection are so simple that opponents uniformly have to begin by misstating them, their implications are about as complex as the total subject matter of biology.

And that subject matter in in itself is beyond reasonable conception as a whole, though that reflection in turn is beyond the grasp of any biological illiterate.

But if you are seriously interested, only not yet persuaded, don’t let that put you off; if you had to understand everything about any field before you could anything about it, you would never understand anything about anything.

And for anyone with more between the ears than would profit from limiting oneself to a primary school education, the subject of evolution is breathtaking.

Now then: in the pre‑human past of the last billion years or so, evolution by selection continued for as long as external realities influenced the reproductive success of any particular genetic lines. Such natural selection is “heuristic”, meaning something like “hunting”, in the sense of “trial and error”, in which less favourable attributes are sifted out generation after generation, and effective adaptations are refined into established norms. After a long period of consistent heuristic selection most of the organisms tend to settle down into well‑defined ecological roles. Once that happens, selection in a given ecology tends to favour stability and to maximise the effectiveness of current genotypes and resist deviation from established roles. High degrees of specialisation tend to emerge plentifully.

Such a period of relative stability is often presented as an interval of non‑evolution, but that is a delusion; selection in a stable population is as tight as it can get, it is just that the phenotypes are so close to locally optimal, that most deviations promptly get stamped upon. For example, unusually short legs, or unusual colouration, become marks for predators.

Such selection amounts to evolution for stability, though not actually stasis, and incidentally, is one of the two main bases of what has been called “punctuated equilibrium”.

As a rule, such a period of relative stability either begins after the chaotic after‑effects of some major upheaval, such as invasion by new organisms, or major natural disasters or climatic or other discontinuities; when things settle down long enough, a new stable period starts. Occasionally, rarely, the discontinuity may be caused by a genetic event, but whatever the cause or form, we have to deal with a comparatively random, stochastic, event or phase.

The new stability commonly results in radiation into multiple new forms, but the details depend on circumstances.

Such relatively sudden radiation is the other aspect of punctuated equilibrium; for example, when some previously non‑critical attribute meets some radically novel challenge; say, a skin fold might form the basis for development of flight membranes, or elongated scales might develop first into insulation against temperature, then into a medium of display, then into flight feathers.

In practice anything quite so dramatic rarely happens in the wild, and the transition stages never last for long in evolutionary terms; progressive differences between members of the population pretty soon provide the basis for further heuristic natural selection that amplifies the radiation into exploitation of the new ecological niches, creating yet more niches in the process. In such processes less favourable errors are sifted out generation after generation, and functional adaptations get refined into established norms.

Heuristic selection in this sense, works many an apparent evolutionary miracle, but a challenge that it rarely meets, is to develop a new, favoured line that depends on survival of an intervening series of generations of low fitness., Successful stochastic changes are intrinsically of low probability, and therefore infrequent.

Generations of low fitness usually do not survive for long enough to establish major novelties.

That form of obstacle to major evolutionary changes has rarely been overcome in the first five billion years or so of this planet’s history. Only in the most recent few thousand years has something new under the sun emerged; it came in the form of “artificial selection”, which we more properly might call “teleological selection”: systematic selection with particular objectives in defiance of selection pressures arising from low natural fitness. Teleological selection speeds up evolution in particular directions by factors of hundreds or thousands; commonly in directions that could not have survived in the wild at all.

However, in this essay we deal with something beyond teleological selection in evolution, something that in our age is new under the sun, not in fleeting millennia, but that is emerging within decades: genetic and molecular‑biological synthetic engineering, rather than stochastic, or even heuristic, selection.

Such work already permits us to accomplish production of organisms by design: organisms that simply could not have emerged from heuristic selection at all, because the genes either had never existed before, or had never coincided in mutually fertile parents.

Uninformed reaction to such genetic engineering has attracted uncomprehending and hysterical criticism on a scale to rival reactions to chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare. And yet, within a century or two, and for the foreseeable future, some of the engineering to be considered in this essay will be necessary on a scale and sophistication unprecedented “under the sun” on this planet.

On Assumptions

ON PROBLEMS
Our choicest plans
have fallen through,
our airiest castles
tumbled over,
because of lines
we neatly drew
and later neatly
stumbled over.
Piet Hein

Excuse my apology for that long introduction.

To begin with, let me introduce you to the two main agonists in this agony; both are members of the genus Homo; whether you choose to regard them both as Homo sapiens, is up to you:

Homo ephemerens is the human of our time and of our past million years or so, flourishing, if that is not too ironic a term, from whichever date you care to choose; that is largely a matter of definition. Some authorities like to define it as starting something like a some two or three hundred thousand years ago, and others from a few tens of thousands of years ago, till . . . well we may see, or we may not see . . . Suit yourself which figures you prefer; it will not affect the following discussion very deeply.

Homo futurens will be our descendants in the not‑too‑distant future, say some thousands of years. As I intend to show, Homo futurens will have to be immortal or pretty close to immortal. And if anything like an immortal species is to arise at all, a good deal will have to happen on a pretty short schedule. And to achieve that, Homo ephemerens will have to achieve some functional form of civilisation on an even shorter schedule.

First let us consider what, if anything at all, anyone reasonably might mean by “immortality”.

There are several naïve definitions, and the most radical are the most primitive and probably the least useful: generally an idea of something along the lines of living throughout all time without any question an ending. It is the sort of immortality that many religious dogmatists completely thoughtlessly tend to attribute to their gods and to their souls, even though they still are unable to define it either cogently, or even meaningfully.

That sort of thing reflects the naïveté of pre‑scientific cosmology and physics: we may cheerfully ignore it.

Similarly we can omit the concept of invulnerability: unconditional survival, impossibility of being killed.

The fact is that any form of survival depends on one’s physical state, and no physical state is infinitely immune to destruction. Collision of the planet with a large asteroid or the sun, could evaporate a diamond inside a block of tungsten, never mind living matter in a skull; even being hit by a nuclear bomb that falls and squashes a human without exploding, could disrupt any relevant physical human state. Such an event accordingly would make nonsense of any human’s physical immortality — or any relevant physical immortality whatsoever.

Even Superman had to treat kryptonite with appropriate caution.

For anything on our side of our event horizons in this universe, invulnerability is not so much impossible, as meaningless; whether it could in principle be meaningful anywhere beyond our horizons, I leave to other minds to speculate. It is not relevant here.

To dodge such questions as the body’s unavoidable vulnerability to physical violence, some parties fall back on more question‑begging claims, such as that it is not the body, but the spirit that is indestructible.

That is a bold gambit, but it fails in the face of the physics of information. Until someone can exhibit anything like the existence of a disembodied spirit in any cogent, meaningful, let alone relevant, material sense, we may comfortably dismiss that class of existence, let alone any such a class of immortality.

I freely confess to dismissive disbelief in spooks of any sort, or in any entity that is independent of physical reality; believers may feel welcome to try to persuade me of my error, as long as they accept that I feel no compulsion to allocate high priority to the discussion.

After all, I for one am not yet immortal, and my resources of life and time shrink as I write.

Meanwhile, any theories that assume the existence of disembodied consciousness must fail because practically any physical influence, whether of trauma, disease, or pharmacological or physiological disturbance of the function of any brain will affect the consciousness in that brain; quite a small disturbance may be enough to destroy the consciousness completely, instead of assuaging reasonable doubts concerning its immortality.

One might equally persuasively claim that music recorded on a magnetic tape is immortal, even after it gets scrubbed by magnetism: in reality, once that copy of the information is gone, finita la musica: that copy of the music too, is gone!

There is a slight reservation here: according to some definitions, information in terms of thermodynamics is nominally no more destructible than matter or energy, but it does not follow that the meaning of the information — its semantics if you like — is indestructible.

To appreciate the point, suppose you get a message, written in a soluble pigment on a dry sugar cube. Suppose you accidentally drop the cube into your tea, where it dissolves, message and all. The material components of the pigment are not destroyed, but you need not expect to recover the message by drying out the tea to recover that pigment.

So, from that point of view — the relevant point here — I repeat: even though the information in the sense of Boltzmann’s entropy may not at any stage be reduced quantitatively: after the message is gone, the information that it once could have conveyed, its intended meaning — its semantic content if you like — is gone! It might be replaced by other semantic content, or by none, but it is not recoverable unless a backup copy is available for reference, and there are serious logical objections even to that concept.

A more familiar version might be: "Sorry teacher: the dog ate my homework!"

That topic recalls Jake’s funeral: the presiding rural preacher had worked himself into a frenzy of ecclesiastical rhetoric, and roared: “Jake ain’t daid: he’s sleepin’!”

In the awed silence that greeted this assurance, a voice from the back called out: “I got ten bucks says he’s daid!”

History does not relate whether anyone covered the wager, but I know how I would have bet.

It is surprisingly difficult to define immortality in practical terms, and there are several different contexts that generate different criteria.

The simplest is to speak of living functionally and indefinitely until something drastically damages the body, such as a shot through head or heart, or decapitation, or getting eaten by a shark or a shoal of piranhas, or running out of air or food, or indeed after falling into the sun after some five billion years or so; you may extend the list of premature terminations according to taste.

Absent such physical challenges, if you really are immortal you simply go on living till you are killed or run out of resources of food, air or the like.

Or until you fall victim to some disease.

“Really?” you object? “Surely immortals would be disease‑free?”

Trust me: in the real world there is no such thing.

To begin with, there is the not quite serious “principle of microbial infallibility”, suggested by Ernest Gale in 1952 and variously resurrected since then. You may read a nice discussion of the idea in an article by Maureen A O'Malley and David A Walsh in: “Rethinking microbial infallibility in the metagenomics era”, FEMS Microbiology Ecology, Volume 97, Issue 8, August 2021, fiab092, https://doi.org/10.1093/femsec/fiab092

That topic usually is discussed in the context of dealing with pollution, but the relevance here, is that it is not foreseeably likely that there could be a practical way for a living body to be impregnable to every possible microbial attack, or indeed by every possible poison. Even if anything of the sort could be possible, that body would have to be so specialised as to have scope for no other function than warding off microbes and poisons.

Of course, it would be perfectly practical and sensible, while engineering your immortal human, to build in improved defences against all the common hazards, including diseases, so that, at need, swimming through raw sewage during an epidemic would be a trivial inconvenience rather than a hazard — but invulnerability to all conceivable microbes and poisons would be a futile extravagance and an obstacle to versatility.

Instead, a more effective evolutionary strategy, one that we and all our ancestors already have used nearly successfully since the Precambrian, is to live life as well as we can, with whatever precautions are practical, and react to completely new infections only as they crop up — new infections always do crop up from time to time. What usually is cheap and effective enough, is reliance on ordinary preventive hygiene and vaccination, supplemented by curative technology (“medical treatment”) in reaction to a novel infection or venom.

Add to this a physiology that includes a few hundred enzymes that digest all the common molecules in the capsules and cell membranes and organelles of various pathogens, but not in one’s own body; that should meet the case indefinitely, cheaply, and effectively.

It should be unnecessary here to explain the term: “evolutionary strategy” but someone always objects, and I lack the patience to discuss it here at length, so I recommend that if you do not understand the term in its evolutionary context, you read the article: “Evolutionarily stable strategy” (“ESS”) in Wikipedia, and if that won’t do, read a recent edition of “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins.

Meanwhile: infections that do occur, are only a minute fraction of those that could in principle strike us, and one way or another we often can avoid new infections instead of confronting them directly. Even as things are, no one gets every disease that could cause death, disability, or morbidity. I for example, though all too mortal, have so far escaped Ebola and rabies and anthrax without vaccination, even though they are commonly fatal contemporary diseases, and I have defied smallpox and SARS‑CoV‑2 by means of vaccination, and measles by having my immune system shrug off a viral attack in my childhood before measles vaccine was available.

We do not at present live long enough to die of everything deadly; and the longer we live the more opportunity we have for improving our defences against the diseases that do in fact attack us.

One aspect that has not been of major importance to humanity on Earth as yet, has been toleration of ionising radiation; yes, some of us have died of it, or been disabled by it, and radioactivity and UV exposure have been public bugbears for some time, but the harm so far has been minor, compared to disease, disaster, and senescence. All the same, the amount of damage that we currently face from minor sources of radiation, such as from potassium and carbon in our food, quietly mounts up as we age, though our bodies do already have some natural means of repair. Still, at the rate humans currently need running repairs, would‑be immortals would run into serious problems from radiation damage in the first few thousand years of extended life.

However, as I shall explain, that is not the worst of it: our destiny, if it is to extend past another few ignominious millennia, must face challenges beyond those of our planet. As we explore elsewhere we shall be exposed to levels of radiation orders of magnitude beyond what we generally encounter on Earth. Even on Earth, a lifespan of millennia will entail far greater accumulation of penalties from radiation exposure, than are relevant to our generations so far.

Accordingly, Homo futurens must be able to shrug off exposure to radiation of an intensity that would fry Homo ephemerens of today in short order. This is not as impossible a challenge as it might seem: many organisms, ranging from cockroaches to bacteria such as Deinococcus radiodurans, are far less susceptible to radiation than mammals are; we simply have not been much exposed to much worse than solar UVA and UVB in the past. However, we already have modest DNA repair mechanisms and congenital skin colours to protect us from either too little or too much UV. Improving and elaborating such defences would be minor projects compared to some others that we would need to undertake.

As matters stand, we humans already carry on as a potentially immortal population of very mortal individuals. Such a potentially immortal population as we are now, with indefinitely increasing technological resources, should carry on at least as well as any population of immortal individuals, and members of such populations should behave no less prudently than we do now — some of us anyway.

But nowhere in all that, is there any logical need to establish anything like an explicit life expectancy for individuals: in principle there is no more reason for your hundred‑million‑year‑olds to need to or want to die, than your 10000‑year‑olds, or your 100‑year‑olds — or 10‑year‑olds.

Nor for anyone else to want them to die, except for matters of taste or personal convenience.

I admit for example that I am not so sure about some parasitic politicians, monopolists, and sundry social paralysis ticks . . .

We must leave such matters for future generations to sort out.

But if everyone, whether a population, or a member of a population, has to die somehow sooner or later, whether after a hundred years, or a hundred million years, why the fuss? It all comes to the same thing in the end. There hardly seems to be much point to living a bit longer just for the sake of living longer. In principle that hardly differs from what we have to face already: as things stand, we outlive many small animals by factors of hundreds. I deal with various justifications for indefinite life later, but the immediate, relatively trivial, personal, capacity of the immortal in the terms I consider here, is the ability to live healthily and functionally for as long as accidents and malice can be avoided, and otherwise for as many millions of years as might seem pleasant and rewarding.

Whatever can work in the normal course of events in the immortal body, can go on working, or can be replaced or regrown without special attention.

Such functional immortality would leave us without immediate fear of death as individuals, either of ourselves or of anything we value, but with the option to quit at any time we wish to stop the world and get off.

An eat‑your‑cake‑and‑have‑it situation: “Death, where is thy sting?”

Together with: "Life, where is thy sting?”

But, as you will see, that is a minor detail in the scheme of the theme: cheating death is beside the point: it is hardly even relevant.

Nor is personal fear of death.

Why? Or Why Not?

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?
And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
F.Scott Fitzgerald

Immortality of such sorts, just staving off senile decay, sounds simple enough; so why make a meal of it?

Why? Firstly because various people, such as some ancient Greeks, and Jonathan Swift, raised pertinent objections before the physical or psychic obstacles and implications were at all understood. To this day it is fashionable to decry the very concept as horrifying, obscene, and blasphemous in mundane contexts. The Greeks had the myth of Tithonus, who was given eternal life; however, by an administrational cock‑up, eternal youth had been omitted from the small print, so he accordingly shrank progressively till he degenerated into a cicada, and his descendant cicadas still are complaining about it to this day.

In his turn in his day Swift invented the immortal Struldbruggs, whose case partly resembled that of Tithonus, in that they too lacked eternal youth, though without dying or shrinking into insects. It did them no good: at about at the age when normal people die, Struldbruggs went gaga instead, like any other oldsters, and they stayed that way.

Tithonus probably had a rather easier fate than the Struldbruggs, I think; at least he could complain audibly and indefinitely.

Now, such themes dealt with what happens if you bungle the achievement of immortality: it does not follow that immortality inevitably must entail disaster: even in the Greek version the assumption was that the immortal gods already had eternal youth, not to mention other advantages, but that they generally had a good time of it all the same: all that nectar and ambrosia, plus having plenty of sex with each other as well as any particular mortal that took their fancy. . . If we are to assume however, that the songs of the bards of that day portrayed their gods fairly, those gods seem to have been unimaginative, if not downright obtuse, about what to do with the immortality that they were born with.

Still, the cautionary tales deserve serious attention from anyone coveting immortality of any sort. Another warning, equally serious and more immediately pertinent, appears in Susan Ertz’s novel “Anger in the Sky”: “Someone has somewhere commented on the fact that millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon”.

And Eric Hoffer pointed out that when people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

In some of his science fiction stories Larry Niven raised some related and perceptive points concerning perpetual boredom when life extends indefinitely.

A common theme among sour‑grape doom merchants who express their own dread of immortality, is that the idea of eternal life is terrifying. Well — it might terrify them, but as the reward for devoutness many religists hope to spend eternal life singing praises in heaven. As a bonus they conceive the ghastliest eternal hells they can invent, into which they consign religious rivals for entertainment of the deity, the devils, and themselves as righteous witnesses.

In comparison, they make the Greek gods seem quite superior.

Hellfire aside, the assumption seems to be that that no immortal, good or evil, could have the mental or temporal capacity to deal with eternal secular challenges, nor that material immortality might come with an off‑switch for anyone who wants to stop.

But all those objections fail to deal with the essence of the problems, or with the question of what could be done about those problems. They ignore the fact that the same questions could be directed at the problems of why we should put up with such fleeting life as we already do have, rainy Sunday afternoons and all. Remember Hamlet with his reflections:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, . . .
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life . . . ?

Many things might have changed since the days of Shakespeare, or indeed of Hamlet, but the off‑switch remains available to anyone sufficiently weary of immortality. Actually, I have read at least one science fiction story in which death was a hard‑earned luxury; and a chilling story it was too; but it was just a story all the same: to forego indefinite life just because someone else might forbid one’s death, would be too dramatically stupid to earn anyone’s sympathy if the means were at hand to end it all.

But so far, none of that amounts to more than reassurance that, if afflicted with immortality, and not physically prevented from action, I would not be doomed to putting up with it indefinitely or unwillingly, in defiance of repressive legislation against euthanasia or suicide.

Another objection, more realistic and accordingly more daunting, is the fate of the Struldbruggs: humans have limited brains, and accordingly limited mental and emotional resources. Even if I, as one horrible example, were to gain indefinite life tomorrow, I could not do it justice in my present form. As things are, at my age I already have lost most of my memory and my mental capacity for learning or thought, let alone originality and creativity. I have forgotten most of my youthful skills, attitudes, and capacity for facing challenges. And I am not yet one millennium old: what would remain of me, of my mind, after the first thousand years or so? I would be hardly better off than any of Swift’s creations.

Before being able to do anything profitable with immortality, or being in a position to tolerate a longevity of even one millennium, I would need means to remain mentally adequate to apply my gifts benignly, either for myself or as a member of society, say in the role of a conscious doorstop or a sandwichman. If I could not manage anything like that, then I surely would find indefinite life a living hell of frustration and boredom, if I could appreciate it at all. To justify such an existence, let alone enjoy it, I would need greater mental and physical capacity and resilience, than anyone alive today.

More about that later.

Another view that people assert is that extended longevity is unspeakably selfish. There I would be, eternally occupying resources that other people are entitled to!

That too however, is a simplistic moral view, so simplistic that I will not follow it in detail here, but do at least bear in mind that everyone who is alive at any time for any practical span of time, does so at the expense of others. The planet is limited, food is limited, living space and energy are limited, and as soon as anyone dies, others contend for his leavings, and those who succeed, exclude yet others in their turn: who is to say which claimant is the most deserving, or for how long? Rationally, any members of society who contribute usefully to anything, thereby earn their place in society and their share of the resources of society, irrespective of how long they continue to function. What other justification could there be for any existence, other than possession being nine points of the law?

Other than by force or acclamation (which itself arguably amounts to a form of force), it is difficult to justify anyone’s existence morally in any social system other than on a basis of equitability: your existence should confer at least as much benefit as your absence would, whether for a moment or an aeon, otherwise no one’s presence could be justified at any time on the grounds of anyone else preferring his presence to his space.

The only material justification for any existence, or for society to tolerate that existence, would be by yielding benefit greater than its consumption, or possibly, greater benefit than that of any rivals.

On the other hand, for as long as anything's existence does in fact confer greater benefits than its absence, the continued presence is thoroughly justifiable, and the intention to stay on for another few millennia could only be applauded, for as long as no rival claimants to the resources could promise still greater benefits. And even then, the displaced people might be of more use in new roles — as draught‑excluders, say — than slitting their wrists when they get fired or got bored with their old jobs.

And that remains true whether or not any rivals for the old jobs have as yet been born.

The related complaint: that extended lifespans would entail increased overpopulation, is even more nonsensical. Population is a function of the rate of reproduction compared to the rate of attrition: as long as the mean rate of reproduction is limited to one offspring per member of the generation, timed at the same mean rate as that of population attrition, the net population will remain stable or shrink. This remains true no matter when in the life cycle of the parent the birth occurs.

In practice reproductive rates greater than 100% are required, and that excess offers opportunities for genetic improvement of the population. As I discuss later however, the point is academic, because, if humanity is to expand beyond this doom‑laden planet, population expansion too is necessary.

And all such concerns remain valid irrespective of which members of the population are to be the parents of the following generations.

This too, I discuss elsewhere.

There are other ways and reasons why and how longevity matters to a human population. I mainly discuss them as they arise, but at least one I mention here because of its immediate importance.

That concern is the smothering effect that short lived members of a community impose on the scale of projects that they, or their community, are willing or able to commit to. In a colony of ants or termites, this hardly arises: the very behaviour patterns of each insect in the community are stereotyped, not intellectual; such innate behaviour guides each insect either into working on a relevant role without boredom or protest. An example of such a role might be to assist in the building of a nest that will be needed beyond the builder’s lifespan, but will be completed only by its descendants. Other colony members might work equally selflessly, mindlessly, on the supply of food and similar resources to colony members that in turn do work necessary for the nest, or for launching the next generation.

No such worker ant ever will see the task ended: there never will be a celebratory party for nest completion. And if you could ask an ant: “why do you work like that? What is in it for you? You will never benefit from the fruits of your labour”, then it neither could grasp the concept, nor formulate a reply.

Of course, if ever there could be an immortal member of such a colony, that ant could notionally remain as valuable as any ordinary member, but any single member’s replacement cost to a large colony would be trivial, and the value of an immortal member would not be significantly greater than that of a disposable member, and its vulnerability would not be far less: a squashed immortal ant would hardly be distinguishable from a squashed mortal ant. Accordingly natural selection generally adapts colonies to have cheaply reproducible deciduous workers and soldiers, but long‑lived reproductive castes that stay comparatively safely inside the nest, continuously replacing relatively disposable workers and soldiers by the thousand.

In much the same way, in our human bodies, new cells routinely replace spent cells in our skin and hair, but new neurones and synapses insufficiently replace the old ones in our central nervous system in the mature brain. And yet, each spent cell originally was created with the full genome and organelles descended from the zygote that founded the human body.

This leads us to one of the most crucial points of the entire discussion, one of the greatest inhibitors of human projects or progress; and it is a direct consequence of the brevity of our life expectancies.

Currently, humans rarely have occasion to contemplate such questions: not many parents look beyond the good of their children for more than a generation or two. Even Pharaohs, millennia ago, no matter how many associates they could sucker, or how many slaves they could command, mainly acted each for his own day and mostly for his favourites. The idea of planning for his afterlife was less material than planning for a picnic; in fact too vague to be called planning in any rational sense.

They seldom engaged in projects, no matter how grandiose, that each Pharaoh in turn could not expect to see the completion of. Similarly, though in the middle ages some cathedrals did take generations to build, even those usually had not at first been intended to take so long; for the most part the initiators of a project, rightly or wrongly, had expected to see its completion.

Commonly, those involved in the engineering, but who did not expect to see the completion, did at least plan to ride the current gravy train for the rest of their lives: in contrast, sponsors largely aimed for personal gratification or glorification, sometimes successfully.

Sometimes it turned out that what delayed completion of a long project simply was the inadequacy of the then available technology for building domes, vaults, walls, reinforcing, and buttresses. In some cases the technological inadequacy manifested itself in the collapse of the incomplete structure. Sometimes completion of the job had to be deferred until someone was born who could advance the technology and nurse the project to completion of the domes and other challenges.

And sometimes the local community simply lost commitment when they failed to see anything in it for them. Then it was up to future generations to continue the project if it was to be completed at all.

I sometimes am amazed that schemes like Stonehenge or some of the ashlar stonemasonry of the Inca ever got completed at all, let alone in any one lifetime.

Miracles While You Wait!

From childhood to youth is eternity; from youth to manhood, a season.
Age comes in a night and is incredible.
Ambrose Bierce

Let us begin by concentrating on one of the first things to get clear: the principle of how to achieve functionally indefinite life — until we know enough about how, there is little point to discussing it at all, no matter how nice or dreadful or imposing or dutiful it sounds. The most obvious way, once we have dismissed the traditional mystical elixirs of life or magical charms, is to tinker biologically with our bodies as we get them. This idea too is unattractive: its history has been ugly and unproductive, what with monkey gland injections and similar quackery.

At best, quackery irks me; and that particular line of quackery has never been of the best.

Recent evidence suggests that transfusions of youthful blood into old people could achieve definite benefit, but the promise is far from clear, the benefits are modest, whether real or not, and though current studies may yet lead to material progress, they still amount largely to groping in the dark. Certainly, if such transfusions do actually work, even modest benefits should be worthwhile in themselves, and may yield clues to more radical progress, but so far there is no prospect of their achieving major strides towards real immortality.

Many science fiction plots assume periodic doses of anti‑ageing pharmaceuticals, but the ideal would be to avoid dependency on such crutches altogether, and aim for self‑sustaining, self‑regulating, functional immortality. Every baby born should, with proper parental care, should grow into a functional immortal.

Whether our immortal descendants procreate by mating or synthetic construction of new bodies, or what their new bodies would look like, or even whether humans always will have genders or not, will be irrelevant; one thing that is pretty certain is that sexual activity would not have the same sorts of significance for immortals, as for us.

Nor would addictive drugs.

On the way to immortality in the sense that I discuss here, there necessarily would be preliminary stages of technology to extend life by decades or even centuries, without conferring true functional immortality. Some of the stages would be necessary for indefinite life, but would not in themselves suffice. John Wyndham, in his characteristically thoughtful novel: “Trouble with Lichen” came closer than most authors, to writing something meaningful in exploring implications of increasing human lifespan by a factor of something like five or ten. Those implications were indeed important, but in the context of the topic of this essay they are trivial. Also, the story did not suggest technically persuasive means of achieving even such minor longevity — which would have been irrelevant to Wyndham’s plot anyway.

All the same we cannot talk constructively about prospects for true immortality for humans before we can engineer the instructions for the equivalent capability into our reproductive systems; to re‑engineer every baby from scratch would be futile; we might as well stop reproducing, and simply manufacture our descendants like robots. To achieve innate immortality we would have to augment our children's genomes with the genetic specifications for Homo futurens.

Accordingly, we need to consider what such augmentation would demand.

Who? and Cui Bono?

An amoeba named Sam and his brother
Were having a drink with each other
In the midst of their quaffing
They split themselves laughing
And now each of them is a mother.
Unattributed

Myra Hindly, the so‑called “Moors Murderess” after several years in prison, applied (unsuccessfully) for release on the grounds that she was no longer the same person as when she had been involved in the murders. Whether one supports her view or not, the fact is that none of us is quite the same as yesterday, and far from the same as we were at birth. It is like the ancient Greek paradox of Heraclitus: that no one can step into the same river twice — by the time you step in again, water has flowed and the river has changed.

Even that is over‑optimistic: the river changes even while you are stepping in; and during the same time you change too.

Those observations have some merit in themselves, but our views of the very concept of identity have moved on in the last two and a half millennia: long after the day of Heraclitus, Hermann Minkowski bequeathed to us concepts with names such as such as “world line” or “time line” or “world tube”. The existence of any one of us at any instant amounts to a three‑dimensional cross‑section of that person's four‑dimensional world line. But our total identity, at least for the period under consideration, is the whole world line to date, in which one can certainly see oneself as one entity.

In my personal view one’s own future does not exist unambiguously before you reach it: I reject determinism, and accordingly fatalism, but that topic I defer to other essays.

Of course, the world line concept is more complex than one at first might think: each particle of our being, every cell, every molecule, has its own world line, so a human’s world line is really a four‑dimensional tangle of the world lines of somewhat more than a trillion trillion atoms and clouds of subatomic particles at any one time, many of which world lines keep swapping in or out of any human body's world line during that person's existence. Such a tangle is sometimes called a “world band”, but we need not concern ourselves with that distinction here; for our purposes “world line” will do.

The concept of world lines and bands partly gives us a basis for dealing with the identity problem, but not in all its aspects: one reasonably might see oneself less as a body, than as a personality: a subjective identity. We might not welcome that idea, but most people generally would accept that chopping off a finger — or even a leg, would not change our identity by much: subjectively we would still be the same person. Looking back over the decades, I still see what seems to me to be myself as myself, scars, missing tonsils, and all.

After all, as someone once said: “A body without scars has not been lived in.”

Seen from the perspective of immortality, that thought demands a great deal of assimilation.

We still might debate whether anaesthetics, dreams, drugs, panic, temper, or trauma — things that change or interrupt one’s perception of oneself or of the world — should count as changes of identity, rather than details in one’s world line; but for the most part one sees oneself as being the object of one’s self‑perception. One sees it in the perspective of the world line as one perceives it from one’s position in the current cross section. It is a perception such as a stream might have as it rushes between mountains and gorges; it might have begun as a braided stream over a high plateau, and broaden out into a broad, leisurely river on the plain below; it changes its character, but is mostly the same water, until that water loses its identity in the sea.

The analogy to a human life is suggestive.

All in all, Myra Hindly would have found it convenient if she could have persuaded the authorities to take a more accommodating view of her change of identity.

Simple? Perhaps more often than not, but not always. Consider: under deep general anaesthetic your personality generally stops.

Stops flat.

There is no darkness, no dream, no discontinuation of self‑identity. If the twenty‑first century anaesthetist knows his stuff, then on waking, one is not aware of having been out, of there being a gap in one's world line. One commonly has to take on trust the assurance that one has been absent in spirit: one is not personally aware of the interval, and must rely on assertions of witnesses, plus external evidence such as pain, confusion, and stitches.

One remembers one’s life and identity from before and until losing consciousness, and one sees it as continuous with one’s identity on awakening. In his short story: “Under the Knife”, H. G. Wells introduced a theme that since has been re‑masticated for generations, but it remains vivid.

But our more recent anaesthetics are less inclined to inspire such creativity while unconscious: they tend to leave an interval in which one no more existed as a personality, than one had existed before birth or would exist after final death.

As a material analogy one might see it as being like a dam stopping the flow of a stream with a closed outlet pipe that, when opened, continues the flow of the stream some distance down the channel — while the valve is closed, there is no stream.

Consciousness is a process, not a fixed object.

A more pertinent, if less vivid, analogy might be the playing of a vinyl recording such we used before laser disks temporarily took over as the new technology. One could interrupt a track in mid‑note by lifting the needle out of the track, knowing that if you dropped it back at the same point, it would complete the note and continue.

To any listener who stopped listening at the same time, possibly because of being anaesthetised, and who awoke to continue from the same spot, the music would not seem to have stopped at all. Similarly, any device such as a recorder slaved to the same player, would reproduce the original track, without indicating a break.

From the recorder’s point of view there never would have been a break.

At this point, for a fuller discussion of such concepts I commend interested readers to the book: “The Mind’s I” by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett; it is entertaining and stimulating. On the assumption that you do read that book, I shall take human consciousness for granted as a meaningful entity — in particular as an entity that consists in an evolving state of the physical information handling system within a human brain, and within the environment of that brain.

That being so, it implies that the human identity amounts to the information plus the mechanisms comprising and supporting that consciousness. Copy that information for that consciousness from the brain of say, Lynn Margulis or Roger Penrose into any other compatible brain, and that new brain would then identify itself as whichever person the personality had been copied from, memories and all. If we then assassinated the originals, would we have killed Lynn Margulis and Roger Penrose?

Many people would say “yes”, but the two bodies that received the identities would deny that those, the consciousnesses in the old brains, had been the originals. To them in the new brains, it would be exactly the same as having woken from anaesthesia.

Very well, but suppose that the old brain contents were not destroyed — now we have two of each conscious identity, each entity sincerely swearing that it is the original. Suppose too, that all witnesses to their original identities were dead or gone. Now who is to identify the original world lines? Or decide on their immortality or otherwise?

But let’s take matters a bit further — suppose we were to record the minds of those two at the top of their competence and maturity: now we wait until the originals trail off into senility or die. Then we establish their recorded personalities into the new bodies, either of volunteers, or of dispensable healthy criminals with good brains: young bodies whose brains we would wipe first before downloading the stored personalities. Then they each would swear that they were just the same lovable old Lynn and Roger as ever, only transported into the future, and with no memory of the years since the recording was made.

Will we have extended their lifespan?

That is arguable. To us as observers we would say yes. But to them it would be as if they had woken from anaesthesia while young, and been reborn young into the future. All their experience in their old bodies in the mean time would have been lost to them: wasted. Whether it would be possible to repeat the operation indefinitely at say, 30‑year intervals, letting them become indefinitely old subjectively, is an open question, but in any case I am deeply sceptical whether it would be practicable at all in principle, and I wonder what kind of brain would be necessary to receive and support the recording.

Not a very useful or practical immortality even if it were possible, I think.

Nor is it obvious how we ever could extract or add the memories of the older deceased versions.

Well, we could perhaps have recorded the memories of the older versions shortly before death, and installed those memories into the spare young bodies, surely?

Perhaps. We do not at present have any realistic prospect of anything of the type. Still, even if we could see how to do it, it is no satisfactory scenario. The physical natures of their respective brains seem likely to interfere. It is not at all clear that even in principle it might be possible to install a mind into a brain that differs from the original without destroying one or both, or without creating something new and different.

Well then: how about producing clones of the young versions of the immortals and installing the minds in the clones?

Better perhaps, but no better than installing the same mind into identical twins: twins, and their brains, are never fully physically or mentally identical. If you doubt that, check their fingerprints and retinograms. They will differ grossly.

Possibly billionaires would be interested in buying themselves a sort of mental immortality that way, but pardon me for regarding mind grafting as probably unpractical and almost certainly unsatisfactory. H. G. Wells, with characteristic brilliance, conceived something of the kind in: "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham", but his narrative was necessarily vague about the actual mechanism.

In short. . .

In short, as I see it, we need to develop ways of achieving simple physical immortality rather than chasing after dubious concepts of mind recording and copying. Even if future technology should make such a thing practical, which is by no means certain, a great deal of the necessary biological technology is already far, far more practicable, and we can already see our way to developing all the progress to full biological immortality. And advanced biological engineering would not demand doubtful ethical complications such as voluntary sacrificial recipients of the recordings.

It still would present two challenges however: the lesser challenge would be that the subject would need innate, biologically practical, functional, physical immortality.

The greater challenge by far, would be the need for functionally indefinitely maintainable mental capacity, both intellectual and emotional.

In those terms a new, clean, mental and physical capacity would be established genetically before conception, and developed by education throughout the first few centuries or so of life.

If we ever could extract mental information from a brain, as a heritage, and possibly implant aspects of it into other people’s minds, that certainly could be invaluable, and could be a great comfort to people who wanted to leave this world, but not to waste their mental legacy, but I do not see it as having much to do with immortality as considered in this essay.

If Not That, Then What?

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done:
and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?
It hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things;
neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come
with those that shall come after.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 — 1:11

But not even extension of our working, rewarding lives by centuries is the essential object of this essay.

Our theme here is not a more‑or‑less‑fixed life expectancy of a few centuries, but at first a functional life expectancy of many thousands of years at least, and eventually indefinite.

Not infinite, please note. This discussion is constrained by physical realities, whatever those might turn out to be, and infinity is a formal mathematical or logical abstraction of convenience, not of material relevance here. Throughout this discussion I assume, and am of the opinion, that our observable universe has no room for physical infinities.

This has many implications that one sometimes needs to bear in mind; for instance, in the real world there are no physical irrational numbers, nor any need for them.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that by the time we have mastered the requirements for really long life, the remaining technical and physiological obstacles to achieving indefinite life should be trivial in comparison; in fact, indefinite functional “human” life should be technically easer to achieve than any particular preordained life expectancy such as three thousand years and ten.

Reasons for choosing functional immortality as the theme, are irrelevant to this section; and anyway without achievable means the discussion of human immortality would have been about as useful as a discussion of perpetual motion. However, I begin by demonstrating that humanity’s prospects for developing means for achieving immortality are realistic, though not trivial.

As yet, we lack clear means of indefinite extension of our lives, even as futilely as in the lives of the Struldbruggs. All the same we now are living in the first period within human history — in fact in biological history on this planet — in which anything of the kind could be worth serious discussion. To begin with, the rate at which biological studies currently are advancing, suggests that within a century we should be in sight of practical approaches to conquest of senescence.

And to conquer senescence would be the first step at least; it would be essential in overcoming our current ephemerality. However, that couldn’t be more than an intermediate step towards functional immortality of a sort; in itself it would be of limited ultimate value.

Biologists have attributed biological limitation of lifespan by senescence, to various causes, adaptive or otherwise, and in my opinion most of their reasoning has been mistaken at best. They commonly have discussed, with varying degrees of approval, such ideas as senescence being:

· nature’s way of dealing with overpopulation,

· the release of resources for the benefit of the next generation,

· a merciful release of the aged from progressive Struldbruggian dysfunction . . .

And more. . .

Explore the literature or extend the list according to your own taste. Most of it is nonsense anyway; and short‑sighted as well.

The nonsensical nature of the silliest reasons most frequently arises from failure to recognise the implications of the nature of death, which in most species is wasteful at best. Another blunder is failure to understand the nature of the selective cost of adaptation to extend longevity. And yet that very concept offers a hint at how we might cure the social wastefulness of dying.

As I have said in an earlier section, all multicellular organisms undergo some form of metamorphosis during their lives: metamorphosis is necessarily intrinsic to biology in general, and to cellularity in particular: in most species each multicellular body is a colony of cells that starts from a single cell. Usually that cell arose from the fusion of two parent cells.

The next phase is when that single cell splits into two and each new cell splits again, but without separating.

So far, so trivial (at least it might sound trivial) but already, as the process repeats, the new colony must start developing its shape and function; its needs, its form, and its function, change throughout the process. Recent evidence suggests that even the very first cell division is not completely symmetrical in all cases.

During this first growing phase of the cell colony its shape and function must be suited to the colony's growth and resources. The growing cell colony commonly is supplied at first with food from the parent that had produced the egg cell. After consumption of the parental supplies the next phase comes, which commonly deals with having to find food for growing the colony (the body, if you prefer) until it is time to enter the next phase.

All these phases differ between species, but what is common among nearly all, is the fact that there almost always is such an actual, functional, sequence of phases, and any such a sequence intrinsically amounts to metamorphosis: make of that what you will.

The majority of the minority of people who know the word metamorphosis at all, tend to think of it as referring to the growth and development of insects, in the sequence beginning with the egg, then the larva, often a pupa, and finally an adult or imago.

But in contrast to insects, humans do not undergo metamorphosis, do they?

Do they ever!

Because a baby has the same number of fingers and toes and heads and ears as the adult, human metamorphosis might be less obvious to the unthinking, than the metamorphosis of a caterpillar changing into a butterfly, but all the same, the process of human metamorphosis continues throughout life, and is particularly complex in various ways.

Think about it!

But none of that finer detail is the point of this essay — for now, take this for granted: even the earliest stages of the cell division cannot happen in just any old way: everything must be just so or nothing will go right. If matters were otherwise you might equally well expect to dump a pile of bricks and expect that the result would be a house. In the birth and metamorphosis of an organism, every step in bodily growth and development must be coded for, and the coding for each step has been developed and transmitted through millions or billions of generations through the past three or four billion years.

And here we are today — with every phase of our metamorphosis tuned by natural selection. For the biology of his day, Shakespeare with his seven ages of Man was not badly off target.

But, miraculous though natural selection and its products might seem, its power is limited by a lack of teleology: Mother Nature never began by saying “let’s give this species such and such marvellous features”, and proceeding to sculpt the product accordingly and exactly according to that plan. Instead selection within each line proceeded probabilistically by producing as many young as possible, then at every stage, thinning out the less successful, less “fit” forms.

Not consciously of course — that process of natural selection is not design at work: it simply is the way material things work: no more intentionally than water consciously intends to flow downhill rather than up.

Now: however simple the idea of natural selection might seem to the uninitiated, its implications are far too complex for discussion here. I recommend that anyone in doubt should read works by the current greats in the popularisation of evolution, such as Maynard Smith, Dennett, Dawkins, and by now many others. There also is a lot of Good Stuff on the internet, but be careful how you vet what you read: the WWW offers miraculous quantities of Good Stuff, but it is swamped by vast volumes of rubbish, and, what is worse, near‑rubbish.

None the less, let me try to simplify the topic, reducing it to a sentence or so: evolutionary fitness is measured largely in terms of how successfully each generation survives and reproduces its own features in its turn. (To forestall niggles, this remains broadly true whether or not you like metaphors such as “selfishness” in genes or in anything else.) Generally, though not universally, success is measured in how many offspring survive to reproduce successfully in their turn. And a perfectly fit organism (if ever there were such a creature, which there never could be) would lose none of its young to natural selection, because, by definition, each one falling by the wayside would be a reproductive loss.

The essential implication is that selection, natural or otherwise, effective or otherwise, is a costly process. Although evolution in the sense of adaptation proceeds by imperfect reproduction and probabilistic discards, every selection essentially is a penalty in terms of any discards: if it had not been a failure, each discard could have been an addition to the propagating population. Accordingly, for the most “successful” natural selection, the discards must be as few and cost‑effective as possible.

This implies that, other things being equal, the simpler and fewer the selection criteria are, the greater one could expect the evolutionary success of the population to be. Selection cost is in any case a pervasive principle, but it is especially so in non‑teleological natural selection.

Now bear in mind that our primary topic in this essay is selection for longevity. The longer the functional life span of an organism, the more opportunity the individual has in which to accumulate resources and to reproduce.

This is true: and it sounds marvellous, but meanwhile, it also implies that the surviving individual must have accumulated resources such as food supplies. Food supplies always are at a premium in the wild, so there always will be rivalry for resources, whether the rivalry is within the same or between different species or populations. There also will be competition for material supplies or territory or mates or anything else for which rivalry is possible: competition commonly in the form of who‑kills‑whom, who‑expels‑whom, who‑mates‑with‑whom, or who‑eats‑whom. The more intense such rivalry, the greater the probability that any individual organism will never live to an advanced old age.

And that implies that the poorer the chances of a long life may be, the less it would be worth investing in selection into old age, and correspondingly the more important it would be to reproduce while young. Think: it can increase your fitness to invest in a good strong heart for fighting, fleeing, feeding or anything else, until you have produced some young, but if the chances of your living long enough to reproduce again afterwards are very poor, then it would be a waste to invest in selection for keeping your strong heart going after your last probable litter; you would have done better to concentrate on selection for a stronger heart and larger litter to improve your chances before you have reproduced, selecting for those features earlier, more reliably, and more briefly.

If the chances of living to reproduce more than once are very poor, then for a species to extend its potential heart‑life by costly discards in natural selection, would be a bad evolutionary strategy. It would pay better to accept a cheaper, less durable, heart that wears out in early senescence after one early round of successful reproduction: grab your winnings and run! Many intelligent species of octopus, for example, follow that strategy; they feed insatiably till they breed, then die.

What is more, the more elaborate the necessary adaptations to combat senescence may be, the more costly and specific those adaptations are likely to be, and that implies a higher natural selective cost because the probability of successful selection for elaborate and specific attributes would be lower. Think of it as being like investing in a Formula 1 racing car for daily errands, or betting on a tossed coin landing on its edge instead of on one face. Commonly the mechanisms for maintaining and renewing bodily functions not only are different from the mechanisms for generating them in the first place, they also need to be more complex, because they must allow, not only for the creation of structures, but also for their replacement and possibly improvement or refurbishment, and their mending when worn or harmed.

For example, it is futile to grow permanent teeth, unless you first make room for them by shedding your milk teeth — and the processes for making and mending the different sets of teeth differ in important ways. And various species vary widely in their replacement strategies for teeth and other consumables and durables.

That concept of replacement is ubiquitous in the wild. There are many examples of living structures that outlast, outperform, or out‑wear marvellous synthetic substances. All the same, if you isolate the natural substances and compare them with the synthetics, they do not perform impressively. Consider the incisor teeth of rodents that remain sharp long after steel models have been worn down; or the integument of water beetles, that remain water‑repellent after synthetic polymers have failed, or shrubs or trees that last indefinitely for thousands of years, during which time pillars of stone or concrete have failed, toppled, or eroded.

And yet, if you take an incisor tooth out of a rodent and test it in competition with say, steel, its performance is not particularly good. Is there something about being in the mouth of a rat, that makes the tooth magically do the impossible?

Not really. . .

The fact is that such cases work in the wild, not by striving for the impossible, but by strategies such as replacement, maintenance, and propagation: rats’ living incisors keep growing from below, and they get worn down and kept sharp by perpetual honing in use; the water beetles' integument is protected by continuous secretion of a disposable water‑repellent layer; and the long-lived plants grow continuously by somatic reproduction; in many cases, hardly a scrap of the original tissue remains after a few centuries. And in cases where the original tissue does indeed last, it often remains only as dead tissue in passive roles — such as the supporting heartwood in the trunk of an old tree.

An obvious corollary is that early reproduction plus early senescence is one common strategy among many that we can recognise in evolution.

Another corollary is that the alternative strategies do exist. One such is that of the “Pando”. You might find it interesting to look up the name, but if you do, then reflect that Pando itself is a dead end: it can only grow, not reproduce. It is a giant growth of root suckers from a single aspen tree in North America, possibly 80000 years old, though it is a sterile triploid.

That might not sound like much when one is used to dealing with evolution over millions of years, but bear in mind that, depending on whose criteria and whose figures we use, Pando is roughly as old as our entire current human species: Homo sapiens. Not one of our cities, not one of our lines of nobilities, not one of our civilisations, not one of our nations, is anything like as old. Even agriculture as an organised class of activity and technology, is less than one fifth as old.

There are similarly old somatic growths, mallees of over 10000 years old in Australia, and unlike Pando, those do in fact reproduce both sexually and somatically, as well as defying fires and droughts, so, logically, they are not dead ends. They are in fact beautiful examples of defiance of the principle of selection for early and rapid reproduction.

Humans of course are not limited to any pure strategy; they could adjust their biology to their objectives. There is no biological reason that an individual could not shed a tooth to make way for a new one, or shed a damaged finger to grow a new one. There is no reason we could not reproduce by budding, ending up as conjoined twins whose brains began as being identical in structure, and nearly identical in content until shortly before separation.

Alternatively, periodic buds could be provided with all the desired improvements, and take over the brain, shedding most of the old body without wasting the mental capital. This would not be suitable for all reproductive requirements, but could dispose of many of the desires for immortality, and for conservation of the resources that otherwise would be lost at death.

In such an option there would be something of the legend of the phoenix: many people have read that the phoenix burnt up and re-arose from its own ashes, but not many realise that that was something of a parable — the reason for that way of reproduction was that there was only one phoenix.

That theme could be expanded in many directions. At some time humans, or some populations anyway, might decide to forego gender. Gender has served its turn in many respects for the last billion years or so, but in teleological evolution there is no logical need for all its aspects.

At a more conservative level, contemporary humans and bristle‑cone pines too, are examples of two different strategies based on longish lives and modest reproduction. We both are what we are because of the emergent nature of our world. In our human case, if the selective pressures that we encounter drive us into non‑specialist intelligence, dealing with our environment on the basis of learning from experience and teaching our children as we do so, then our reproductive senescence begins to matter less and the importance of our cooperative, technological, and educational contribution to our reproductive community, grows and renews accordingly.

Humans are not alone in this; we find similar effects in species such as elephants, apes, and arguably in some parrots, whales and so on.

But all the same, at present, in relying on our intellectual heritage, our human species is off the scale for variety and complexity. And, to match it, we have a longevity perhaps twice what we would expect in physically comparable animals. And our standards of technology and intellect are unique as well.

That of course is not nearly so gratifying to our vanity and our prospects as a species, that it justifies our smugness. Our incompetence as a community is so disastrous as to constitute our greatest hazard to our own existence. So far we bid fair to pollute our ephemeral planet worse than any of the previous extinctions in its existence so far.

I frankly guess that we shall yet doom ourselves to ending as a nasty transient smear in our expanding sun, unmourned, unremembered, and futile in the scheme of things.

If that role attracts you, read no further; immortality is not for you or yours.

In this connection, you might find it worth reflecting that any system, including any ethical or social system, that by its own nature implicitly or deliberately strives against its own success, whether it does succeed or not, can hardly be expected to survive; nor is there any cogent reason to indulge it to preserve any such an entity from itself: natural selection militates against its survival.

Artificial selection, and larger scopes of definition of systems, and of selection, are more complicated, but they are not immune from the principle.

These essays are nothing better than my personal effort to do something towards inspiring perceptive minds to avert that futility.

To achieve survival in spite of our current ineffectuality as a population, may be possible, but it will require more than just moping about the sadness of things, or relying on divine intervention; we have a lot of our own social paralysis ticks to deal with before we can create a long‑term evolutionarily stable strategy.

One consequence of our post‑reproductive longevity in a (heaven help us!) intelligent social species, is that, as we grow older, we may notice that the body tends to have organs that obey rules of selection that suggest “planned obsolescence”: whenever the transience of a particular organ is a major factor in reducing the functional longevity of a population, then natural selection favours adaptation to lengthen the durability of that organ till it more closely matches the longevity of the rest of the body; individuals with their functional reproduction curtailed or constrained by some particular fallible organ would reproduce less effectively — nothing more is necessary as a basis for selection.

When such an organ has adapted to the extent that it is no longer the major constraint, it will no longer be the primary selection constraint. Some other factor or factors would succeed to that role. There commonly will be other lines of selection in effect, but the general trend commonly is for such competing functional attributes to match each other.

That is the simple basis for the phenomenon of apparently planned obsolescence in the faculties of any compound organism. It obviously is not planned, but spontaneous obsolescence, and in a giant sequoia the effects of the selection would differ radically from the effects in an annual lupin. And such obsolescence for an Aldabra giant tortoise would differ from that for marsupial Antechinus species that mates frantically for a brief period, and dies after a single season.

None the less, the obsolescence of organs and tissues within the body is neither precise nor rigid. As long as a long‑lasting feature requires no extra cost, it will not be selected against actively, even if we take either functional or imperfect organs with us to the grave; nature presents many examples of accumulated organs that retained their shape long after the disappearance of the rest of the body. Whole cliffs of chalk consist of trillions of shells (tests) of Foraminifera left behind millions of years after the animals themselves had died. And Earth is scattered with the remains of keratinous structures of hair, hooves, and feathers that have outlasted by centuries the animals that had borne them.

When over‑engineering is cheaper than precise engineering, it isn’t over‑engineering.

But still, the obsolescence effect does generally end up with many of your bodily faculties gradually fading over much the same period.

One of the associated penalties is that we become “old” (technically speaking “senile” which does not specifically mean “gaga”). We age a bit at a time: in ageing, people spend about half of their lifetimes discovering new disabilities and complaints. The process covers a period of a few decades after the phase of primary reproduction: during senescence one loses earlier aptitudes, strengths, knowledge, and skills.

Some exceptional personalities attempt to compensate for senescence in various respects, retaining productivity and gaining wisdom by application, character, social pressures, genetic talent, and hard work. Ernst Mayr for example, continued his work as a zoologist and evolutionist, till he died at an age of over a century; Arnold Beckman was active as a scientist, businessman, and philanthropist all his 104‑year life; Paul Erdős died in his eighties as a still‑practising mathematician; Euphemia Haynes was a mathematician who worked and taught till her death at 90 — the list of such people is quite long, but what makes them remarkable is just that they truly comprise a small, and exceptional, minority.

Now, each of the forms of senescence could in principle have been prevented by suitable changes in genetic make‑up; however, for the reasons I have mentioned, natural selection could never have gotten round to it in practice, so those of us who last long enough to outlive the terribly and tragically short period of reproduction and education, successively rediscover the cliché of generation after generation: that old age is not for sissies.

We have as yet no well‑defined means of consciously and deliberately extending our lifespans, functionally or not, but remember again: we are living in the first period in biological history on this planet in which we can contemplate any such prospect at all rationally.

Is this view in any way realistic or relevant? After all, if we cannot yet do more about our longevity than regular exercise and foregoing smoking, then is there any point to discussing it at all, except in nonsensical tales of science fiction or fantasy?

I say yes.

Such selection and adaptation has happened time and again in the wild: plants such as sequoias and bristle cone pines may live and reproduce for millennia; clones of some kinds of aspens and mallees might survive for more than ten thousand years; animals such as giant clams and whales may live for centuries, and a few species of tortoises may live over two centuries. The Greenland shark may be the record holder among extant vertebrates, with an estimated longevity of perhaps 500 years. Some sponges seem to live indefinitely.

In each example, the longevity is the consequence of particular selective pressures in their ecologies.

But, differently, and most interestingly from our point of view as animals ourselves, humans are roughly twice as long‑lived as might be expected from their size and rate of life. Years ago in one of his essays Isaac Asimov pointed out that mammals' lifetimes are surprisingly constant, when measured in the number of times their hearts beat before they die. For most of them it is something like a billion heartbeats per lifetime: small animals like mice and shrews tend to have a shockingly high rates of heartbeat: some 10 to 16 times per second, and they die in just a few years. Elephants, given the chance, can live nearly as long as humans, but their big hearts beat slowly: only about once in 2 seconds, and they too die after roughly a billion heartbeats.

But modern, first‑world human hearts, depending on who is doing the counting, commonly beat some 2 to 4 billion times before old age stops them.

That is just a rough and arbitrary measure; there are all sorts of complications: our ancestors only lived about half as long as we do, reducing their heartbeat count to just about that of a fairly long‑lived mammal — long‑lived, but not twice as long as might be expected.

This view is simplistic, but by any practical measure, modern humans as a species currently are right off the chart; the trend is persuasive, to put it mildly. Interestingly, as an item of trivia, the Greenland shark may run us very close: they are the longest‑lived vertebrates currently known. Their lifespans are nearly ten times ours, and their heart rates are said to be a little short of one tenth of ours. But such figures are uncertain and hard to research or verify.

Anyway, it does not affect the conclusions.

That topic of heartbeat counts has been discussed in various ways and contexts; the general tenor of the speculations is that when humans became intelligent enough to support a social structure that included speech, tool‑making, and child‑raising, they benefited from having functional clan members surviving beyond prime reproduction age. Such members could not contribute directly to reproduction, but they could and did contribute to the protection and education of the younger generations, and to various household tasks.

The longer they could stay alive and functional, the better they could identify threats and sources of nourishment; also, the more intelligently they could manage social structure, house‑holding, and tool‑making, and the more substantially elderly members of their communities could contribute to the genetic and intellectual heritage of subsequent generations.

There is more to it than that of course: isn’t there always? For example, elephants and some species of whales seem to have undergone significantly similar selection, but humans also happened to inherit an unusually versatile morphology and ecology that led to unusually versatile discovery and manufacture of tools and weapons, and mastery of fire and various materials, ranging from stones and fibres, to ores and glass. Elephants and whales lacked the circumstances and anatomical members to rival such development.

Nor is that the whole story; in these respects many other primates are not radically different from our immediate ancestors, and yet not many seem anywhere near to rivaling the genus Homo in such developments. I shall mention population bottlenecks, and I suspect that some of our closest fellow‑apes passed through some crucial evolutionary bottlenecks during the last million years ago, and that those led to our explosive growth in brain size and in neuronal interconnectivity within those brains.

But no matter the details: in human evolution there has been strong selection for longer life plus functional intelligence and technology. That is far too complex a development for any simple summary: by any measure the advances have not been bad going for Natural Selection over a period of some 10000 to 1000000 years, depending on who is counting.

Actually, to appreciate just how great a development the increased intelligence has been, one must study both the nature of the comparative mental capabilities of other animals, and the range of mental disabilities one finds among humans. Not every notionally normal human is capable of all the attributes that we assume to be human and not to be rivalled by any other species.

I for one, am deficient in various artistic skills, and in precision manual work, among other things.

Unfortunately however, there also was concomitant selection for warriors and politicians and priests. If humans' inherent social and moral structures had been more like those of termites and less like those of monkeys, then we already might have been twice as long‑lived as now, and twice as intelligent too. Still, even as things stand, our life expectancy is sufficient to show that something still better might be possible for us as a community or as a species.

The problem is that the greater the community and the greater its technological capabilities and the greater its capacity for internal rabble‑rousing, putting the interest of the parasite ahead of that of the community, and the interests of the demagogue ahead of anything else, the greater the scope it offers for selfish religious and political exploitation.

One major reason for this dilemma emerges from the concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy or "ESS" as defined by John Maynard Smith and George Price in the 1970s. For details, see the article on "evolutionarily stable strategy" in Wikipedia: pay particular attention to its list of references.

The fundamental problem driving evolutionary strategies, is the concept of conflicting interests or objectives in the community, or, if you object to those words as being anthropomorphic or reific, think of them as modes of competition for selection; evolutionary strategies have nothing to do with conscious human strategies.

Natural selection includes many factors, and competition is a class of such factors. For one thing, natural selection, in all cases of practical interest here, refers to selection of functionally cooperative populations, or combinations of such populations. Members of those populations share particular complexes of heritable attributes, and as long as a stable group persists under stable selection, it will survive and increase in its adaptation to its niche, its ecological role. We say that it now is subject to persistent stabilising selection. This incidentally, is the basis for the valid aspects of the school of thought known as punctuated equilibrium.

As long as the evolutionary challenges to such a group remain unchanged, we have an ESS. It may remain unthreatened until new challenges arise. For example, such a challenge might take the form of a new predator, or an ecological collapse, say because of climatic change or extinction of a vital symbiont, or because a new disease or predator appears. The population might have to re‑adapt its ESS if it is not to go extinct — as indeed, species frequently do. We see such extinctions most frequently and dramatically in island populations.

What concerns us here is that even in mainland situations, and even if no novel external challenges appear, then, as soon as a population is large enough for sub‑populations to emerge, sub‑populations whose interests compete with the original, more inclusive population, the ESS becomes vulnerable to evolutionary instability: certain sub‑populations may distort or destroy the inclusive population by domination, perversion, parasitism, overpopulation, or simply disruption.

In that respect, humans are worse than rats: a colony of rats will try to mob and murder any strange rat that does not have the right social smell, but within their own community they are unselfish and tolerant towards individuals and pups. And also in that respect humans are inferior to ants, termites, or bees. If we are to amount to anything better than our history so far, of greed, superstition, futility, bloodshed and betrayal, we shall have to overcome much of our inborn nature.

There are plenty of counterexamples among human communities, but individual humans commonly think no further than their own, narrow, short‑term interests. If you doubt that, then watch the behaviour of any violent mob or partisan football crowd — or any competitive, notionally democratic election, or period of despotic rule. As a species, we were adapted to village‑sized communities, and to commitment to our families, especially nuclear families, our familiar neighbours, and our community leaders. We commonly displayed animus towards alien communities, even those alien in name only. This is reflected in our political structures and their uniformly brief and disastrous histories.

As a functional analogy, think of a tumour: in an organism a new cell emerges that produces a subpopulation of cells different from the earlier, parent generations of cells in that organism. The subpopulation might be harmless, or even beneficial, depending on the nature of its differences, but commonly it disrupts the functioning of the inclusive population, say by blocking a nerve or blood vessel; or it becomes a parasite that consumes resources without providing enough of a compensating benefit to the inclusive population, or it aggressively invades, harms, poisons, or displaces "healthy tissue", "primary population tissue".

If you like: it becomes a cancer.

At first sight, that cancer can justify its existence on the basis of its own success: if the tissues it displaces cannot survive, they have "no right" to survive (a simplistic and dangerous misconception, but very tempting to the naïve). In the normal, non‑teleological concept of evolution, that is fine, but teleologically it is not so fine, because in destroying the inclusive population, or even by incapacitating it, rendering it uncompetitive with other populations, the cancer destroys itself as well as the supporting organism.

In such a respect, the cancer is worse than a parasite that afflicts the host, and worse than a parasitoid, that kills the host, but goes forth to find new hosts: it kills the host and destroys itself in the process.

From the naïve point of view, the cancer would be a fitter Darwinian entity than deciduous tissues such as epidermis or erythrocytes. As I said: any ethical or social system, that by its own nature implicitly or deliberately strives against its own success, whether it does succeed or not, can hardly be expected to survive. And any cancer is a prime example.

So, if there is one thing that Darwinism has nothing to do with, it is naïve points of view. And naïve points of view are universal among would‑be critics of Darwinism as an inclusive body of theory.

Now, that cancer concept, both physiological and political, has been pervasive throughout human history and even recent prehistory. That has happened to many other species as well. Like physiological cancer, political cancer in its early stages may seem superficially impressive on the principle that success is its own evolutionary justification. "Social Darwinism" is the popular term, and it has become a term of abuse, but actually those who claim the term "Darwinism" as endorsement of their political principles, if they are sincere at all, fail in their understanding of even the basics of genuine Darwinism, let alone of Darwin himself, who was a gentle, kindly person.

He also was a deeper thinker and better scientist than any of his critics that I have ever read or debated.

Darwinism as a concept sounds simple, but its implications and its technical advances are far from simple. Darwinism, like various forms of "neo‑Darwinism" today, resembles the original theory about as closely as current microbiology resembles the microbiology of Darwin's day: the biologists of that time were no stupider than those of today, and their theories were no more unreasonable in the light of what then was known, but in every scientific or technological field since then, certain changes have come about as advances emerged.

And the changing perceptions of the half‑educated laity seem to pursue ever widening bounds of misunderstanding, delusion, and militancy. Quackery and the associated dogmata have never been more profitable for the social parasites, or more harmful to the population.

As for politics, every tyranny that I have heard of, that its perpetrators claim to have based on pre‑Darwinian or pseudo‑Darwinian apologetics, fails on the principle that success in evolution demands a more factual basis than claims of racial, political, dynastic, moral, or intellectual superiority, a more practical basis than military force, and a longer‑term outlook for success than short‑term destruction of immediate opposition.

A strategy that maximises one's children, but exterminates one's grandchildren, is not Darwinistically competitive; in fact if it leads to any sort of dead end within a modest number of generations, it is as suicidal as any strategy can become.

Any such a strategy thereby illustrates the brick wall in naïve natural selection: it is practically without teleology. It cannot look beyond immediate advantages such as muscle and greed in the individual. Intensive natural selection cannot prevent the disaster of extermination by destruction of long‑term necessities.

The closest that Natural Selection, as opposed to artificial selection, can approach teleology, is when the ill effects of domination are not absolute. For example, a currently useless, but potentially beneficial gene might be recessive, or an environment might be extensive enough, or might offer refugia sufficient to accommodate survivors enough, to take over when Ate overtakes the non‑teleologically dominant population.

Such apparently teleological flukes may occur via population bottlenecks, in which the dominant population loses ground and a small population of teleologically valid attributes can establish itself in the face of waning opposition. It might begin in remote regions where early competition misses the opportunity to exterminate the new lines, so that the new lines can adapt or radiate till the population achieves stable domination of its environment.

In support of my dismissal of naïve political Darwinism I cite the continual eventual failure of every despotic political entity throughout history. Such delusions required no Darwinistic justification, and all of them perished on the rocks of non‑teleological shortsightedness. For examples, consider the aftermath of the rule of Alexander, Rome, Timur, The Golden Horde; consider the Spartans, who started invincible, then softened and petered out, Charles I of England, Wilhelm II of Germany, the Pharoahs with their genetically pure sister marriages, and every subsequent version of royal dynasties with their claims of divine sanction or personal superiority. . .

The pattern repeats in wide ranges of details, and frankly, I see no way for it to end until we change human nature, so as to change the nature of human society as a consequence. Recent political developments world‑wide seem to me to be playing the same tune as the last 10000 years or longer, with populations thousands of times larger.

As I see it the fact is that with a short lifespan, we are trapped in a squirrel cage: a tragic treadmill of dark ages, enlightenment, despotism, conflict and continual destruction and fouling of our own nest till we destroy our planet’s biosphere, leaving the dregs for the rats, roaches, ants, and bacteria to start the next round of evolution until our sun runs out of hydrogen and roasts the lot.

And good riddance if so.

Make no mistake: in spite of religion, idealism, or ambition, whether personal, familial, or national, our planet is arithmetically finite and vulnerable, and our solar system is finite and vulnerable, and unless we can overcome the smug omphaloscepsis of the evanescent, the mantra of “It will last my time. . .” we shall amount to nothing better than a blot on what for a few billion years had looked like a promising prospect for that rarest of developments: a viable, open‑ended civilisation in this universe.

Rarest? If you prefer to say “unique”, I am in no position to deny it.

Meanwhile, Humanity is living on borrowed time.

One way or another:

· as long as we are confined to Earth and our environs, Humanity is mortal.

· as long as we are confined to our solar system, Humanity is mortal.

· as long as we are confined to our solar system and our our neighbouring stars, Humanity is mortal.

· as long as we are confined to our arm of our galaxy, Humanity is mortal, though our chances by then are pretty good.

· once we have colonised a good sprinkling of stars across our galaxy, Humanity, though not impregnable, would be hard to wipe out completely.

· Once we have established a foothold on a few galaxies, it is hard to see what could exterminate us; but not until then; unless there is a big crunch or similarly universal disaster in store..

Enrico Fermi reputedly asked, concerning the lack of evidence for alien life, in particular alien civilisations, in our apparently empty universe: "Where is everybody?"

In my opinion, for what it is worth, that is where everybody, if anybody, is: either absent, or so rare, and so far, and so evanescent, and so likely to wipe themselves out, that there is no one out there for us to find.

Should we care? Should we consign ourselves, our future, to the same fate as Fermi's "Everybody"?

Suit yourself, but I prefer to leave inkblots to Rorschach, and to aim for something that puts entropy to better use.

But then, what are we to do about it — and how? Teleology sounds good, but what difference could our teleology make to our future, in the face of non‑teleological natural selection?

Certainly no single thing will suffice, but it does not follow that nothing at all will ever change matters; nor that any improvement is impossible, as our history has suggested so far. What our history certainly does show is that if we want to survive as anything better than a fossil anomaly, we shall have to grow out of our pre‑technological, unscientific, illogical, counter‑philosophical, tribalistic, toxic, obsessions, and begin to apply the opportunities and advances that have been showing the way for centuries.

In short, in taking our Homo, as given, we might need to begin to earn the sapiens if we ever are to achieve the status of Homo futurens. Or anything better than Homo ephemerens.

If we ever achieve that, then we might be the first in the universe to do so; the local, currently observable universe anyway. Then the answer to Fermi would become:

“Here is where everybody is, and we are everybody.”

To achieve anything of that kind, the current rate of progress in research in biology, in particular in biochemical, biophysical, bio‑architectural, and bio‑informational fields, must be sustained, integrated, broadened, and deepened. We need to identify and tune our bodily mechanisms that deal with physiological maintenance, reconditioning, and reconstruction of states and components, and shedding of outworn components. Our excretory, circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems, our peripheral nerves, sensory organs, and connective tissues, need such improvements, and they need actual replacement of entire organs where appropriate. Reconstruction and shedding of scar tissue need both improvement and elaboration.

We would need better management of our stem cells and telomeres, and improved and elaborated control and editing of mutations in our somatic tissues and organelles.

Think of that sort of thing as: "running repairs, reconditioning, and refurbishment"; possibly remodelling as well.

Immediate improvements along those lines, not surgical or pharmacological, but physiological, certainly could increase our lifespans. At first the increase might amount only to a few centuries, but even that would be significant — in fact it could transform our entire social and economic structures in more ways than I could begin to foresee. Family life, career and population structure, ecological consumption. . .

There would have to be no end of necessary reconception and adjustment.

And management of social parasitism.

And make no mistake: change entails pain.

But contemptible failure to change entails death and corruption.

All the same, all the changes that I could imagine along the lines that I have just described, ultimately should be beneficial.

But bear in mind: they do not amount to immortality in the sense I have discussed; in fact, without further adjustments, they could lead to disasters.

For instance imagine the intellectual burdens they would entail. Even today most people's minds congeal long before they leave school. It is a respectable intellect that continues to grow and create after say, the age of thirty; and if you try to stimulate congealed minds into information overload, or even common sense, or with continued education in the same mode as used to work in primary school, you cause resentment for threatening their self‑esteem and security. At that age education seldom can rival influences such as propaganda and mob slogans.

As for the ability to sustain creativity, or even mental recall or receptiveness, into what we now regard as old age: that is exceptional.

Even to do justice to our current lifespans we would need to do something about our mental metamorphic programmes: we need to scrap the reliance on assimilated impressions, opinions, experience, and wisdom. Something like retaining the level of flexibility, hubris, and receptiveness that we attained as we neared the end of our educational growth, and settled into a career, is what we would need.

But if we could manage that within any one mind, it would suffice only for a century or two, to be optimistic. Our brains really are limited in capacity. Swift recognised the problem in his conception of the Struldbruggs, in such passages as ". . . the usual way of computing how old they are, is by asking them what kings or great persons they can remember, and then consulting history; for infallibly the last prince in their mind did not begin his reign after they were fourscore years old. . ."

Well, give or take a few centuries, the same eventually would apply to our own brains as they work at present.

But again, in principle such changes could be achieved with artificial selection plus accumulated genetic technology and in vitro fertilisation. I expect that there could be significant advances by the end of the 21^st century.

On the other hand, some of the changes we would need before we could be equipped to deal with a genuine and satisfactory immortality, would take forever if we were to rely on simple selection, even artificial selection of in vitro fertilised zygotes.

So I deal with the necessary measures in the next section.

Lowest level: physiology & choreography of Mendelian genetics

On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands; and he, that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
John Donne Satire III

Speaking loosely, by "Mendelian genetics" I mean the concepts of inheritance arising from the comparatively naïve comprehension of inheritance as first explored by Mendel. That discipline was developed and expanded by subsequent genetic research up to the early decades of the twentieth century, plus the biochemistry and molecular biology of the third quarter of the century. Since the pioneering days of the science of genetics, so many complications have been discovered that no single universally acceptable concept of a "gene" has yet been defined, so I do not apologise for using the term loosely; by "gene" I simply mean any item of heritable information that influences the expression of one or more recognisable attributes in an organism, for at least a few generations.

And in particular, but not exclusively, I mean information coded into nucleic acids duplicated in reproductive processes.

Among intellectually immature and technically ignorant writers, there is something of a fashion to sneer at early work in genetics. In the light of subsequent discoveries, some even dismiss traditional views of genetics as delusional. Actually though, much early research was brilliant, and remains brilliant in hindsight — it also was of great practical and intellectual importance in agriculture, medicine, and the comprehension and philosophy of evolution and of biology in general. And it too remains relevant. Since the mid‑nineteenth century, genetic research has yielded successive advances in an enormous field, with no end yet in sight.

So much for “the end of science”!

In the light of how much we now have discovered of genetic molecular biology, establishing heritable immortality into humanity would seem simple: just a matter of introducing a few dozen or a few hundred genes or even just alleles of existing genes into the genome — “what could possibly go wrong?”

And yet that is far from correct. Blunders have occurred and will continue to occur: that always is a given in research. Science is hard work for the long haul: only quacks and dupes promise clairvoyance. It is not for ill‑informed parties to pronounce on historical advances in dealing with a recalcitrant universe; and it certainly is inappropriate to indulge such persons with much attention.

To begin with, the obvious first steps towards increased longevity are to work our way through the population, removing harmful genes by standard techniques of selection and genetic modification. This is not as easy as it sounds, but it already is attainable with patience and it can be done without political compulsion. As long as there are halfwitted populations of New‑Age irrationals and various religious fundamentalists, who condemn, as impious or politically incorrect, anything that they cannot understand, there always will be resistance to population improvement; but in this essay I decline to waste effort on controversy with quackery. Ignorantly refractory populations should in any case evolve into shorter lives, lower intellects, and poorer health than educated parties with positive attitudes.

Natural selection in action.

And please note that application of all such principles is independent of any context of race, nationality, or politics, whether meaningful or not.

And the only compulsion is to prevent inequitable behaviour.

Though admittedly, that is in itself a tall order. In human history anything of the kind has been rare, local, and of short duration.

Anyway, the concept of minor and obvious gene tinkering looks simple. But such tinkering is not as simple as it looks. Consider a few examples among many that I do not undertake to discuss (for one thing, I commonly do not know the details well enough for constructive discussion).

As a convenient example to begin with, we have known for centuries that humans, are prone to scurvy, and that it is a deficiency disease. About a century ago, guinea pigs, and our fellow‑apes and monkeys, were found to be subject to the same deficiency disease.

We then found that the reason is that we, and other susceptible animals, lack a functional gene for the enzyme called L‑Gulonolactone oxidase; it catalyses one of the steps in the synthesis of ascorbate from glucose. If you wonder what that means, relax, the details don't matter; if you do know what it is about, but your studies of the issue have stopped at the identification of that specific step in the metabolic pathway, you might find it instructive to look up some discussions of the topic in comparative metabolomics; like many such topics, it is more complex than it seems.

All that concerns us here is that at some time in the past our gene for L‑Gulonolactone oxidase became non‑functional. The loss did not matter much at that time, because our most convenient diets included quite enough ascorbate to prevent scurvy without our having to produce our own. That lack of a penalty in terms of selective cost could explain why we never mended the loss of that gene function.

So, obviously, it would seem harmless, sensible, and effective, to replace our human vestigial L‑Gulonolactone oxidase gene with a working copy, and voila: no more scurvy on long sea voyages or in jails or foolish diets!

Very likely.

All the same, we have reason to suspect that in at least some species, the adjustments in adapting to loss of that gene turned out to be positively favourable in context; that gene has been lost several times in various species, and I for one have not seen any compelling reason why that should be so if the effect were neutral.

That does not strictly imply that we are better off without the gene, but for us simply to re‑install it might be less harmless than one would expect.

As I write this, we do not yet know. But we could try it out on monkeys and guinea pigs. If they thrive without dietary ascorbate, we could start a programme of research on human tissue cultures.

There might be all sorts of complicating factors; for one thing, there might be complications with the associated promotional structures in the genome — it is common for an introduced gene to behave disappointingly when first introduced — consider the history of golden rice: the first strain produced, was hopelessly unacceptable commercially, and it was inadequate metabolically — the anti‑GMO Rifkin and Proxmire groupies gleefully howled their contempt.

For the geneticists and agriculturists it was useless to waste resources on refutations and on explanations that what mattered was that they had achieved the functional installation of the gene; they then simply followed their usual procedures for improvement of the strains, till by now, just a few years later, golden rice is a crop of increasing importance and value to people whose staple diet is rice, and who are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, and many of whom actually suffer the deficiency.

The golden rice is quite a tasty rice too, and has not yet been shown to cause people who eat it to grow fangs and exude green slime. . .

There are other examples of agricultural genetic engineering, such as triticale; the field of genetic manipulation, though still in its infancy, is exploding, and such projects present more than one lesson for those with a capacity to learn. For example:

Genetic engineering is unstoppable; love it or loathe it
It can work miracles, or what would have looked like miracles till recently
Even work on the simple forms is not nearly as simple as it looks
Even minor miracles demand unforeseen work, patience, and investment.
As always in engineering, uninformed criticism is counterproductive; remember the Scottish admonition: “fools and bairns shouldnae see things half done”.

In humans there will be many such genes, scores for certain, maybe hundreds or thousands in a genome of tens of thousands, genes that will require adjustment, repair, rearrangement, or insertion, before we get down to looking at immortality. But human engineering is not a simple matter of trial and error, of selecting out the misfits, as we might do in the genetic engineering of plants. In animals, especially humans, we would need to be confident that at worst the treatment would be harmless before we inflict it on anything to be born alive and sentient.

In working with plants we generally assume that the concept of suffering is irrelevant, and that simplifies matters.

In mammals, still including humans, selective engineering would imply in vitro fertilisation, selecting only viable embryos for implantation.

We still are at the stammering stage of this sort of work, especially in humans. We can eliminate implantation of embryos that have faulty copies of genes, and some work has been done on correction of gross, well‑understood abnormalities such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, but at the time of my writing this, genetic engineering of humans is seldom yet practical, and the main emphasis still is on selection rather than correction.

This is beginning to change, as well it should: for example healthy three‑parent children have been produced, using mitochondria from a donor, but don’t hold your breath for pro‑lifers to accept the principle; anti‑eugenic brigade snatches at any opportunity for condemnation of any action that might ease or prevent suffering that in their opinion an all‑wise, all‑loving God might have imposed — they argue for example, that elimination, even of pathological genetic abnormalities reduces the gene pool, and increases inbreeding.

It is hard to know how to deal with such ignorance, so in this essay, I simply ignore it where I can, and let them propose the enrichment of the gene pool with Duchenne, Lou Gehrig’s ALS, Huntington’s disease, and the like.

Still at this level, I already have hinted at the fact that an apparently desirable gene might entail unexpected effects when combined with other, vitally necessary genes. There is far more to it even than that (isn't there always!) Exactly where the gene is situated relative to other genes on particular chromosomes, and which introns it must have and in which positions, can affect whether it will work at all, or will work at the right time, or in the right way.

You cannot fix a clock with missing cogs, by shovelling more cogs in: the right cogs must fit into the right places in the right ways.

And that requirement remains even if we do not consider the engineering of genes outside the nucleus, genes in organelles such as mitochondria for instance.

Clocks within clocks so to speak.

There is no simple boundary between the problems of engineering genetic code and problems of engineering heritable information at higher levels. Still, I hope that it already is clear that even at the lowest level, tinkering with the codes of life is not for the faint‑hearted, and certainly not for the incompetent.

And yet, with every child we conceived and every seed we planted throughout history, we never hesitated in our ignorance of associated suffering and waste that arose from our thoughtless propagation.

That is what natural conception amounts to.

And yet the “pro‑lifers” and GMO‑haters represent that sort of thing as a virtue, even now as we become capable of preventing it . . .

And yet, disposal of inviable embryos is the least unkind of all the ways in which God does it anyway; it happens all the time at the rate of thousands per day, so it follows that selection of embryos to avoid disasters is no sin in itself.

The main difference is that God’s method lets more suffering and more waste through.

Pardon me if my contempt is showing.

But anyway, it might take a few centuries before we have finished the necessary genetic housekeeping to clean out most of the major sources of misery, frustration, waste, and disease in our genomes.

Note that the relevant procedures need not reduce the functional gene pool at all; it probably would broaden it by adding desirable genes, such as perhaps L‑Gulonolactone oxidase, or by adding extra copies of desirable genes so as to protect ourselves from common poisons, or adding genes for enzymes that variously could synthesise most of the essential amino acids, or to digest foods such as chitin, cellulose, or atmospheric nitrogen, or digest the cell walls of sundry pathogens and parasites such as cholera bacteria, spirilla, malaria, Ancylostoma, Necator, and tapeworms.

But those are details. Such items certainly could improve our health and longevity as populations, but I doubt that they would more than double our effective individual maximal life expectancy.

Intermediate level: Structures of components and substances

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
            Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
            'T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
            Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper—even a rag like this,
            Survives himself, his tomb, and all that 's his.
                        Lord Byron     Don Juan

Personally I suspect that the challenge of attaining the necessary comprehension of the complexity of the functions of our "non‑coding" Nucleic Acids (NAs, not just DNA) will dwarf the recent, monumental, difficulty of reading, editing, and organising chromosomal DNA.

And that was the Good News.

The Bad News is not the already formidable difficulty of predicting the effects that all our tinkering will have in the cell: we can investigate that by a bit (a big bit!) of tissue culture work. The trouble is that a large slice of our objective is to plan what the effect will be in practice: firstly on the tissues, and next, on the architecture of the human body.

And even after that: the effect on the architecture of human society.

There are at least three major aspects to that, and in all of them we have to understand the roles of the genes, in the sense of DNA functional units of code. Those roles differ and become increasingly obscure as we proceed.

Even that is an oversimplification, so prepare to put up with a lot of the hand waving that the complexity reduces me to.

For one thing, the cell must control the activity of gene transcription of DNA. It is not enough for the cell to have all the genetic DNA code that it needs at any stage of life. Think in terms of the following laboured analogy in terms of a vast choir performing a complex drama:

Assume that every member of the choir has a copy of the score for the entire performance, much as each bodily cell starts out with a copy of the entire genome. Most members will be singing only certain parts; some will be singing softly, some loudly, some in certain keys, some in free interpretation according to the activity of neighbours and audience reactions. Some will sing only during the overture, some only in particular scenes, some will sing differently in response to the acoustics of the hall or the performances of other choirs in the same hall.

Every performance will be different, not only according to the music sheets, but according to how the performance progresses. Some of the singers will not sing at all. Some will sing only if prompted by their fellows or rivals.

Forgive that strained analogy, but I hope it is clear that if each performer does not ignore most of the programme that is intended only for others in the choir, the result will be cacophony and the choir will fail.

Now, in many ways the body is rather like that choir. It would have been simpler to control the choir if each performer was given only the relevant part of the script and music, and perhaps had any limbs amputated that were not required for the performance, but no, except for our gametes, each of our bodily cells gets its full double complement of genetic coding exons, plus regulatory and intron DNA.

This is true even for cells that shed or silence all or part of their genomes, such as mammalian XX somatic cells that silence one of their two X chromosomes. In the zygote both X chromosomes are active; somewhat later in embryogenesis, a more or less random one of the two is silenced except in particular roles such as cell division and meiosis.

Mammalian erythrocytes are a different example: the erythrocytes arise from reticulocytes; and reticulocytes actually shed their entire nuclei as they mature into erythrocytes. Doing without the nucleus leaves the erythrocyte smaller and more flexible. Such measures are analogous to amputation of flautists’ legs once the orchestra has been seated: flautists can perform just as well while seated.

Never mind the details, which are overwhelmingly complex, and still are being studied in as many organisms as we can, ranging from bacteria to baleen whales, and from diatoms to sequoias; just accept that if it is not correctly organised and structured, then no matter how good it is, unwanted genetic material will be useless or suicidal.

Once again, remember that everything I have said is oversimplified in another sense as well. We are not just simple gene machines, not even at the cellular level: our very cells are compound organisms. Our mitochondria within our cells are bacteria with their own genomes and their own non‑genetic heritable structures.

The point is that trifling with the genome itself, let alone non‑genetic components of our heritable information, is a very messy matter. Tinkering with plants and animals hardy ever works right first time; we do what we can, then select any partial successes from the products, discarding our far more numerous failures. And then we repeat the selection cycle while tuning and adjusting the quality of the product. More often than not, there are no resounding successes at first, and we have to propagate generations to select from before we achieve a real triumph.

But the key is planning followed by selection; and selection implies sacrifice of the unsuccessful products.

But can we do that with humans?

Yes and no.

No, we cannot produce batches of designer babies and cull all the failures. Even if it were legal in anything like a modern socially acceptable ethical scheme, the physical costs and emotional stress would be horrendous. Besides, some of the failures would show only after decades of growth and adult life.

And yet yes. . . after a fashion.

We routinely do something like that already with both natural and in vitro fertilisation. In IVF any would‑be mother produces several ova, maybe a few dozen, and the father produces several million sperms, and even in the wild, as opposed to IVF, far more failures are flushed away than most potential parents realise. In in vitro fertilisation, any responsible practitioner will begin by eliminating any obvious flops before selecting the most promising zygotes or blastocysts. Then, as far as is practical in the light of what is known of the parents’ genetics, the apparently sound embryos get checked for the likeliest undesirable genetic shortcomings. Only the ones that survive the tests are considered for implantation.

Spontaneous or artificial, that is selection: cold‑blooded, murderous selection.

And yet, without it there would have been at least one less live baby, and very likely not a healthy baby, if there had been a baby at all.

And, if that still strikes you as brutal, just remember: in every natural conception, without any selection of the type practised in IVF, out of perhaps some trillion sperms and thousands of ova, we would have had just a few live, functional births, or none at all.

Not even to mention the notionally functional but really tragic births, of which there are thousands daily.

Before decrying the heartlessness of IVF, think again about the tenderness of the divine will, as revealed in natural reproduction. . .

As always, we must view such ideas with reservations and in context. There is continual progress in research. For example, even as I write, there are growing volumes of research into the culture of organoids: multicellular structures formed in tissue culture. Organoids behave more like tissue in organs than isolated cells do. This obviously increases our options for the investigation of the viability of doubtful genomes, without materially increasing objections to disposal of non‑viable structures. An organoid of say a few milligrammes of liver or lung tissue could be disposed of with no more compunction than we feel when wiping off a smear of blood before applying a plaster to a cut.

Say not the struggle naught availeth. . .

Higher level: Architecture based on structures

The Seven Ages of a Newspaper Subscriber

From infancy, from childhood’s earliest caper,
He loved the daily paper.

Propped on his grubby elbows, lying prone,
He took, at first, the Comics for his own.
Then, as he altered stature and his voice,
Sports were his single choice.

For a brief time, at twenty, Thought became
A desultory flame,
So with a critic eye he would peruse
The better Book Reviews.

Behold the bridegroom, then—the dazzled suitor
Turned grim commuter,
Learning without direction
To fold his paper to the Housing Section.

Forty enlarged his waistline with his wage.
The Business Page
Engrossed his mind. He liked to ponder well
The charted rise of Steel or Tel & Tel.

Choleric, pompous, and too often vext,
The fifties claimed him next.
The Editorials, then, were what he scanned.
(Even, at times, he took his pen in hand.)

But witness how the human viewpoint varies:
Of late he reads the day’s Obituaries.

Phyllis McGinley 1946

At no level is our bodily architecture monolithic: given the internal cell architecture, bodily architecture begins with the way that functional combinations of cells interact to form tissues, and the way that tissues function as multicellular structures, and the way that multicellular structures comprise organs and limbs, and in general the way that the functional combinations of bodily components are integrated into functional bodies.

Even if it were possible to get arms, legs, livers, and so on as viable independent items, then if they were not combined functionally, the results of just tumbling them together might resemble works of Bosch or Picasso:

To see what I mean: think about how the current human body starts out. Like any other mammalian body it begins as the zygote: a single cell that must be viable in its own right in its own role.

If the zygote is not viable as a single cell, then it makes no difference how viable it would have been if it somehow had been helped into the first multicellular stages of development: "You can't get there from here".

That is just the start. We are only now beginning to appreciate how invisibly complex the rest of embryogenesis can be: even at the first cell division the two daughter cells already differ internally, and differ in ways that matter.

But, if you happen to be already familiar with some principles of embryogenesis, then you know that they include such things as: the forces that control the dimpling of membranes; the acceleration of cell multiplication in some places, while cells pause in other places, or die as required; the patterns in which control chemicals migrate through cell populations; the way cells stick to some neighbours, but slide over others; the way in which certain functions are activated in some cells and different functions in others. . . It is all horribly unobvious and complex. New discoveries are published even as I write this.

But anything that favours the growth of embryonic cells must be good, surely?

Not at all surely.

It might be good in some ways in some parts of the embryo for some stages of development, but it can be deforming or fatal in other parts or in other stages. In fact, in the embryo many crucial constructions, some cellular, some tissues, some entire organs, simply are scaffolding for the building of later, vital parts, some of which must be shed still later after serving as scaffolding or other temporary functions in their turn.

The materials of cells that die during healthy embryogenesis largely get recycled during the growth of the embryo, but whether wasted, scrapped, sacrificed, or recycled, those cells must die. That is in the nature of scaffolding as a function.

Think: your embryonic hands started out as as barely‑formed paddles. Look at your fingers. To form them, uncounted millions of cells had to die during embryogenesis: if they did not die as was necessary for your fingers to separate, your hands would have formed as paddles or webs: nearly useless unless you happened to be aquatic. In fact some people actually are born with some of their fingers or toes partly joined if something of that type goes wrong. That can be a serious nuisance and if the cause is genetic it may be associated with other bodily and mental shortcomings as well. This is not because a bit of useless web is in itself a major problem, but because errors in the genome are repeated in every cell and the consequences can show up in different ways in all sorts of places during the lifetime of the body.

Nor does this principle lapse after birth: the newborn child should not have teeth if it is to suckle harmlessly, but as it gets weaned, lack of teeth becomes problematic. So the teeth grow later, and their eruption requires the deaths of more millions of cells as those teeth grow through the jawbones and the gums.

But the cells of the external hard tissue of a tooth die as they mature, so the tooth cannot grow after that tissue has matured; in fact, the cells forming it must die during the formation of the tooth, so the first milk‑teeth cannot be adult‑sized. Instead they are shaped like upended cups with hardly any roots, permitting the growth from below, of the adult teeth that will eject them, sacrificing yet more millions of scaffolding cells in and around each milk tooth in the process. It would be more efficient to swallow and digest milk teeth as they are shed, but after all, one must support the tooth fairy, and anyway most of the shed blood and soft tissue goes down the hatch instead of going to waste!

And throughout life we daily shed billions of skin cells, blood cells, nail cells, hair cells, and gut linings; and don't forget sperms, and menstruation. . . Some of the shedding may be harmful and contribute more to senescence than to development, but, one way or another, unless we shed the right parts in the right sequence and in the right places, we shall have problems: some merely nuisances, some serious, and some fatal.

It happens; not everyone is lucky.

Some of the unlucky ones contribute to natural selection.

The topic is too much to elaborate on here, but I hope that I have made it clear that there is more to building and maintaining one's body throughout its career, than the nucleic acid coding of the genes determine directly, and there is more to processes of growth and development and living function, than adding permanent material to bodily structure. The processes of building and discarding and replacing temporary scaffolding and consumable infrastructure in the body, are various and vital — and if anything stops such processes, even in the adult body, the results commonly are horrifying.

In fact, apart from stopping such processes, either overdoing any of them, or doing them in the wrong place or at the wrong time, can be disastrous or fatal. Consider conditions such as thalassaemia: in its commonest forms it does not involve anything unfamiliar in the body: mainly just some degree of failure to replace foetal haemoglobin when adult haemoglobin becomes necessary. That does not sound like much, but the consequences are pathetic and tragic.

If haemoglobin production had happened the other way round, say too much adult haemoglobin or too little foetal haemoglobin before birth, the chances of a child being born alive or partly functional at all, would be poor.

Well, sad as it might seem, that too is natural selection in action, and in such simple, brutal forms, natural selection often is uncomfortable to contemplate.

But the relevant point is that all sorts of events need to be both functional and functionally scheduled and located for the right time and place and manner, and according to contingencies. Different processes are required at particular stages in life and in response to emerging developments. Concentrations of hormones appropriate to adults in their prime, could cause disasters in children; in fact they may cause distressing effects in adults past their prime as well.

Nor are the same concentrations appropriate to all adults.

All of which raises a fundamental, nearly universal, concept: that of metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis is intrinsic to the nature of arguably all forms of living organisms; certainly every multicellular organism in some way or another, grows by the addition, modification, organisation, and deletion of cells, largely in precise sequences and contexts. And by the very nature of such processes, metamorphosis is intrinsic to them all. Such metamorphosis could be regarded as equally inseparable from engineering, but that does not invalidate the principle in biology; and the concept certainly is fundamental to biological immortality.

It goes beyond that: just as the functional internal state of a cell depends on more than its genome, so does the architecture of higher levels of complexity depend on more than the cells that compose them; Consider tissues, structural components, and organs for example. The principle shows in such matters as the nearly(?) ubiquitous occurrence of versions of homeobox genes. Nearly(?) all complex life forms are not just constructed of cells, but of functional units in turn constructed of cells according to controls of time, place, and manner.

I say more about metamorphosis later on, but I always have to oversimplify: the topic is too complex for detailed treatment in context, even if I were privy to all the internal detail, which of course, I am not.

Anyway, organisms are not just put together like toy blocks or Lego pieces — there are other principles as well. Some of those principles work analogously to origami: artistic paper constructions. Examples include transformations such as curving, folding, crumpling, or tension; they can create or control forms and functions that simple addition, subtraction or repetition of sheets of paper — or of living tissue — could not achieve alone.

Anyone doubting those assertions, I commend to a study of elementary embryology and comparative morphology. In particular, I invite such sceptics to demonstrate how naïve Mendelian genetics and biochemistry would suffice to describe and determine complex organisms, any more than description of the sheet of paper can determine the artwork of the eventual origami model.

Friendly warning: save yourself the effort. They cannot.

Note well: fields of fact and study such as traditional genetics, I take to be no less relevant than any others; I simply point out the necessity of all such component fields in combination, for the generation of the emergent effects, processes, and structures fundamental to complex organisms.

And the field is more complex even than that suggests. A healthy mammalian body comprises more than mammalian organisms; at the time of writing it is not even clear how many organelles such as mitochondria are endosymbionts with their own residual genomes, or vestiges of one‑time endosymbionts from earlier stages of evolution. In some organisms (not in any mammals as far as I know!) we find organelles such as hydrogenosomes that actually have shed all their genes: their ancestors had eventually ceded all their genes to the host genomes, but the ghosts, the shells, of the endosymbionts uncannily continue their vital functions in the cell, sustained by the genes in the nucleus, and the mechanisms within the cytoplasm.

If the nature of such genetic ghosts does not strike you as eerie, I do not know what will. But eerie or not, the concepts are vital to the theme of what it takes to build a body or comprise an entity.

Almost equally eerie are the viroids; they are the conceptual opposites of hydrogenosomes: instead of a shell, or cell, that lacks nucleic acid code, viroids, unlike real viruses, do not have any protein capsid or shell wall at all. They are just naked nucleic acid code.

Anyway, eerie or not, the fact remains that even within your cells there is war to the end: it turns out that there is a tendency for your cells to reject some lines of mitochondria, or for mitochondria resident in a cell to destroy rival intruders; as a rule, all your mitochondria come from the mother’s cells: mitochondria from the sperm generally get ejected or destroyed; it is not a simple matter to establish alien mitochondria in a cell.

The sheer complexity of the interrelationships of the various components becomes overwhelming; it instances multiple forms of organisation that are only distantly related to chromosomal codes, and are passed on in other ways. Furthermore, your nucleic chromosomal information is not the only nucleic information that must be passed on. It has been clear for some time that the roles of mitochondria extend to more than energy production; they have control functions and fight their own wars within their host cells. There is an ecology in each cell, and the effects on our bodies may be hard to trace. They take on different forms in cells in different tissues; the same species of mitochondria in say, muscle cells, differ from those in lung cells.

At another level, people speak of physical metamorphosis as if it were peculiar to insects: insects grow from eggs to larvae to later stages, but the only thing special about such metamorphosis in say, the Arthropoda, is its comparatively abrupt division into instars; groe for a while, then shed the skin, change the form, grow, and change again.

Even that is imperfectly distinct; a wide variety of physical development may occur within a single instar as well as between instars.

Metamorphosis is intrinsic to the life cycles of practically all forms of life; ask any slime mould. Consider the life cycle of birds and reptiles with their eggs and later development. Such metamorphosis is marked and pervasive in chordates, including humans, as well as invertebrates and plants. As humans we metamorphose several times between syngamy and birth, and even afterwards we pass through several stages that are implicitly recognised, though not always marked by abrupt changes of skin and metabolism.

One corollary is that for most forms of life that undergo metamorphosis, the same genome must inherit all the necessary information for all the different life stages, plus the control of when and how to perform the transformations between the stages, plus also when and under which circumstances the information for each stage in the metamorphosis must be suppressed after that stage is past.

Amazingly, in some species, in which more than one symbiotic organism in turn participates in the life cycle, each species may maintain its own genome. Essentially such an arrangement resembles the team activity in a relay race. The most spectacular example I can think of was described by Lewis Thomas, in his book: “The Medusa and the Snail”. He describes how two species from completely different phyla, and without any relevant sharing of genomes, take turns in the metamorphosis of alternating generations. And if either member of the relay fails, the line stops dead for both of the participants.

I shall have a good deal more to say on metamorphosis in following sections.

One way or another, information embodied in details of scheduled processes and bodily structure and infrastructure, is as vital as information in the translatable nucleic acids of the cells, whether in nuclear genes or genes of organelles or symbionts. That information constrains everything from the colour patterns of feathers and pelages, to the entire anatomy and physiology of the organism, whether animal, fungus, or plant. And cell life and bodily life in general are not to be understood or remodelled arbitrarily by changing a few nucleic acid genes.

Accordingly, the heritable information intrinsic to any cellular organism extends beyond the digital code in the nucleic acid. It extends beyond the structure of the so‑called non‑coding DNA in the chromatin. It goes beyond the mitochondrial DNA and even beyond the relatively volatile information of epigenetic modification of genetic material, and epigenetic modification of the histones that affect the expression of various genes.

In particular I refer to cellular structures that are necessary for cell function: not just the molecules of plasma membranes or cell walls or nuclear membranes or cytoskeleton, or endoplasmic reticulum, and the like, but the preassembled structures themselves. Even the apparently featureless cell membranes that form the boundaries between cells in an organism, contain patches and structures of functional molecules concerned with attachment or separation or communication between cells in contact. Any multicellular organism has a physical structure of breathtaking complexity and specificity.

And new examples are constantly being reported. Another discovery at the end of the 20^th century was the proteasomes — their functions are still being explored.

You might like to look them up online, but we need not discuss them here; all we may be sure of is that they are not the last of the novelties.

And cellular and tissue structures differ vastly: just try comparing the cytology and histology of fungi say, with that of animals or of plants. Or try comparing the embryology of a bee with that of a bird. (Still, the correspondence is closer than one might expect; if you are not familiar with the topic, you might like to look up “Homeobox” in Wikipedia or your favourite textbook.)

Now, as I shall show, immortality would require comparatively modest changes to such processes, structures, and information, but some of those changes would be demanding to identify, combine, and implement. Those that require modifications to nucleic acid sequences would be the easiest; those that require other nucleic acid modifications or reorganisations would be more demanding, and those that depend on modifications of pre‑existing structures, whether sub‑cellular, or histological, or macroscopic, whether transient or persistent, are largely beyond our present knowledge or foreknowledge.

None of which means that nothing is possible — just do not expect it to happen all by itself, or easily, or predictably, before a lot of preparatory work has borne fruit. If I somehow were to collect a spoonful of all the distinct molecules, including the complete DNA chains and proteins, that go to make up a cell, then that still would not give me a live cell, any more than I could unscramble an egg, and could hope to get a chick if I incubated it.

The very folding of the proteins in an egg is critical to their function, and beating the egg disrupts much of their folding.

Think: if I could give you a full supply of the total set of distinct molecules that go into the structure of a cell of any species, how would you be able to fit them together to make a viable cell? It would be like taking a pile of building material or of car parts, and hoping that it would assemble into a house or a car. Even if you gave that building material to a mason or mechanic, he would probably make a mess of it if you neglected to include a design specification: even if the product was not a useless mess, it could be quite the wrong kind of building or machine.

For a simpler example: if I gave you a barrow‑load of Scrabble‑style tiles, containing exactly the letters and punctuation comprising a particular book, of which you did not know the text, then just putting them together to make anything coherent at all, let alone the original document, would be a major challenge. Your chances would be pretty poor even if your tiles contained the isolated words, instead of just the individual letters. You would be doing pretty well just guessing the language of the original text.

Consider for example: “dglyovjtnaoer qupuz xbo edwsrihk fceom”.

In this I am not thinking of the difficulties of reconstituting the original document, but of producing anything that even made sense at all, let alone the same sense as the original: Instead of nonsense, it might well produce the exact negation of the original. Compare: “quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs” with “quick brown dogs jumped over the lazy fox”.

Same letters; not at all the same meaning, even if we do not change the typeface or the ink.

In real life that is just the beginning of the matter: even looking at two living cells, superficially similar, but one being a solitary amoeboid protist, and one being a cell, say a macrophage taken from the bloodstream of a metazoan, we could not swap them: their apparently anonymous cell surfaces differ in radical ways, and so do the genes for the proteins they contain. With the wrong patches of molecules on the cell surfaces, even if the molecules were correct, you would never manage to assemble them to get a metazoan organism. Nor could either cell even survive in the environment of the other, let alone flourish.

And even if you do have the right protein molecules — even if they are in the right places, then if those molecules are not properly folded, they will not do, any more than you can fit a right‑handed bolt into a left‑handed nut — even if their pitch and size and material were to match perfectly.

You might see this as changing the typeface or the ink, and this time it changes or destroys the message.

In practice to change such an architecture selectively — making changes where necessary, without causing problematic changes elsewhere — is not as a rule possible at all; certainly not simply by changing nucleic acid coding. Our evolutionary history has left us with bodies full of archaic details that usually, in terms of selection penalties, are less costly to tolerate than relying on natural selection to correct them.

In some ways evolution by natural selection is a little as though our bodies were like designs for some early motor cars, the proverbial “horseless carriages”: legend has it that some models included holders for buggy whips. Those holders were obviously redundant once the “carriages” no longer used horses for which drivers needed whips. Such no‑longer‑necessary features in designs for novel devices, are called skeuomorphs (variously spelt).

Evolution to date has left our bodies and our life histories full of such skeuomorphs. Some of them simply are useless, but easy to ignore; some are harmful; some are deadly to interfere with.

This, incidentally, is a major confusing factor in contemplating the history of life and the questions of identifying the MRCA (most recent common ancestor, in some contexts called LUCA: Last Universal common ancestor) of all extant life forms on this planet.

The point is that research is putting us into an increasingly strong position to tinker with the DNA coding in our cells, but at the time of my writing this, we do not yet know even how far we are from knowing how to manage our non‑coding nucleic acids, and even further from knowing how to manage our organelles and our non‑organelle structures such as cell membranes.

Even though we know very well that all such items need only be put together suitably to make a functional, living body, and put together differently, could make different living bodies — including immortal living bodies.

That was the Good News.

When we need to tinker with the improvement of the existing structures, then the dead hand (or, arguably, the very vital hand) of our evolutionary history, is not to be dismissed with impunity. So much of our structure is the consequence of the need to base functional adaptations on yet more fundamental established developmental structures. Our bodies contain many engineering absurdities: skeuomorphs that reflect the nature of our evolutionary development.

Famous examples include: the recurrent laryngeal nerve; the dangerous way in which our respiratory tracts and digestive tracts cross over and invite disaster; the way in which our reproductive and excretory systems interfere; the way in which we give birth to large children through small passages; the way in which our lungs cannot simultaneously inhale and exhale; the way in which our pleasure centres render us prone to addiction; and all that.

And oh yes, above all, let us not forget. . .

The way we achieve maturity, congeal, senesce, and die wastefully, at ages ridiculously counterfunctional for a teleological, technological species.

There are plenty more. All of those attributes of our bodies, and more, could be improved immensely, if only we could find the ways to achieve the ways. Some obviously are hardly worth meddling with — such as the recurrent laryngeal nerve in humans.

Still, consider the advantages of having the oesophagus passing up in front of the trachea instead of behind it, together with a few associated adjustments.

A simple, harmless improvement, surely?

Sadly, if you inspect the way in which our embryology works, the way in which cells combine, and tissues fold, you will find that, improvement or not, that change would not at all be simple. The reason that the two passages cross over is not determined by a few genetic codes, but by the way that the structures originate early in the embryonic development of the body's architecture. I am no embryologist, and as I type, I have no idea how one would go about tackling such challenges without inviting disaster.

I do not deny that re‑engineering such a system could be possible or worth while; far greater morphological rearrangements occur during the metamorphosis of various insects for example, but I have no idea even of how to approach even the challenge of planning such a challenge, whether in insects or in mammals.

And the same goes for various other items I have mentioned.

Natural selection has whimsical ways of dealing with skeuomorphs. Some, such as the recurrent laryngeal nerve, it simply ignores, just extending the nerve a bit at a time to match any changes of bodily form. The detour might be modest in a human, but the same embryogenic processes in long-necked organisms, say a gerenuk or a giraffe, make for a drastic detour of the nerve from the skull down past the aortal arch above the heart, deep in the chest, and back up to the larynx, not far from where it started.

And all pointlessly.

The recurrent laryngeal nerve is a popular challenge to the idiocies of intelligent design apologists, but in our current context it is of interest mainly as an illustration of the lack of teleology in the course of natural selection, and how that lack leads to sub‑optimal adaptation of a body plan (“Bauplan”, if you like) in response to a change of way of life. It might lead to a gradual adjustment that leads to grotesque extremes, sometimes trivial, sometimes fatal.

One common form of adjustment is by reduction of unused structures to negligible vestiges, such as human male nipples, or to total absence, such as some lizard legs and most snake legs. But some snake species do retain vestiges of hind legs that they use in various ways in mating and social dominance.

Sometimes just a part of such a vestigial limb remains and serves an essential function, often modified almost beyond recognition, such as birds’ fingers, while the rest vanishes — some legless animals, such as pythons, retain just a couple of claws that are all that remain of the hind legs and pelvis. They are the parts that after some one hundred million years of irrelevance to locomotion, still serve in some activities related to dominance and sexual activity.

Sometimes some parts of an organ need to be sacrificed or converted so as to perfect the function of the rest. For example, look at a bird’s wing: its basic morphology is the same as that of the human hand plus arm, but most of the wing acts as a folding shaft to hold and control the feathers that form the flight surface. The part that matches the hand is hardly recognisable as such, but it bears the primary feathers and the alula: the slot that is inconspicuous, but of great importance in various flying control functions; it looks suggestively like a thumb, but the embryology is confusing, to put it politely.

In this connection it is instructive to compare the wings of birds with those of bats and pterosaurs. All those wings derived from the same ancestral fore‑limb, but each in radically different ways. However, it is equally important to compare them with the wings of insects — whose wings share nothing whatever with such limbs or such ancestry. All the embryology of the vertebrates is based on the same basic structures, and none of the emerging wings can avoid the resulting constraints: “If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs —if we had some eggs”. The wings of insects are based on very different basic structures, and their development is practically unrecognisable in vertebrate terms: our morphology and bauplan are radically different.

But in all those wings with their different prehistories of natural selection, their emergence has been based on existing morphology that adapted to the new function in different ways. And yet, they all had to be fit enough to support survival and reproduction in every generation. For example, though insect wings differ from vertebrate wings in almost every other way, none the less, wherever their functions do match they resemble each other in their matching respects.

We know that the wings of pterosaurs and of birds, and of bats emerged independently, and differ considerably in their architecture, each of them achieved breathtaking sophistication and effectiveness without even borrowing from each other. And yet, the emergence of the overall architecture in each case turned out very similar.

Among the invertebrates only the insects achieved true flight, and it is fairly plain that their morphology of flight is very similar. Mainly two pairs of wings attached to matching segments of the thorax. And yet, it is pretty clear that though the underlying morphology is more or less the same, the emergence of flight, at least among the Ephemeroptera (mayflies), the Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies), and the rest, was independent, and different.

I oversimplify, but the details do not concern us here.

Our desire to re‑engineer our functional morphology so profoundly might seem pretty hopeless in this respect, but I recall a remark of Edmund Burke’s: “Well! some will say, in this case we have only submitted to the nature of things. The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.”

Instead of capitulation to that adversary however, he then proceeded to urge action in the face of that adversary.

Similarly, though the tyranny of the skeuomorphs may be daunting, we know of many insects that re‑model their morphology dramatically during their metamorphosis. Consider Hemipteran stink bug nymphs, whose four repugnatorial glands throughout their immature instars are borne in specific positions on the backs of specific abdominal segments, but during the final ecdysis, relocate to two ducts on the sides of the adult thorax.

Rather like having your kidneys relocate to your throat on your 21^st birthday. . .

Or, among vertebrates, consider the order Anura, in which aquatic larvae with gills and elaborately fish‑like morphology, commonly with more tail than anything else, and usually with a detrivorous, apodous way of life, re‑engineer themselves into carnivorous, leaping, tailless tetrapods with lungs for respiration.

Even more amazing is the way in which Drosophila fly larvae pass through a pupal stage in which their organs dissociate into an apparent mush of separated cells, but somehow manage to retain certain classes of larval memories into the adult stage. In case this seems incredible, or at least interesting, you might read the research as published at doi: 10.7554/eLife.80594

In comparison, minor alterations to our early embryonic ontogeny would seem to be far less challenging. Do not be too dismissive however; our own embryos undergo their own remarkably homologous metamorphosis. There even used to be a word for part of the effect: recapitulation. The phenomenon still is real, though its theoretical significance has changed drastically since the late nineteenth century.

Comparative biology of adaptation by natural selection is a wonderful field of study, but I must not spend too much discussion on the details here. However, the relevant point remains: that the more fundamental the structure is, from which adaptation is to develop, the more difficult it is to deviate from that structure, and the less promising success will seem. The concept of “evolutionary opportunism” is pervasive; if natural selection is to function at all, it must have something to select from. Flying squirrels might conceivably evolve into pterosaur‑like fliers at any time within a few million years, but the chances of pigs doing the same in a hundred million years without some radical artificial genetic engineering, would not seem promising at all.

However, those are items that we comfortably may leave to our immortal descendants: if we do not destroy our civilisation, and we continue our advances in science, our offspring would not be limited to natural selection, nor even to teleological selection: they could work on a basis of creative engineering.

Some of the items those engineers would need to learn and predict before they could perform routine miracles, are barely within our current scope for rational imagination, but let us not be too pessimistic: research produces both challenges and prospects of achieving one‑time impossibilities; not many years ago the problem of predicting modes of protein folding for example, seemed quite intractable, and yet recent software manages large parts of it.

Naïve immortality as such, in the sense of overcoming physical and physiological senility, can be tackled a few physiological steps at a time. Such challenges seem to me to be far less overwhelming obstacles than morphological reconstruction. I suspect that if we could establish commitment to the project, we could achieve the necessary adjustments to our metabolism in a few centuries at most. Cellular adjustments such as active maintenance of our telomeres, and histological adjustments, such as indefinite shedding and renewal of gut and connective tissue, replacing senile tissues and organs with error‑correcting stem cells, and assorted improvements in nutrition, disease preemption, and so on, should present no great challenges.

Morphological reconstruction is far harder to predict or engineer, but I bet it would take far less than one millennium to master the skills necessary for management, planning, reconstruction, and innovation of morphogenesis. During the research and development phases, our still‑derisory life expectancies could increase by centuries per century of progress. On the way we might be improving human (and no doubt AI) brains to the extent that we could master challenges currently beyond us.

The information that goes into specifying your body is neither deterministic nor comprehensive. Compare your fingerprints and lesser blood vessels in organs on your left side with those on your right: they largely depend on the same genes, and yet they match in no more than their general schemes. To match the two sides in detail would require more information than could fit into your genetic code. Even if the code (impossibly) were to have enough capacity for the necessary information, there would be no way in which such detail could be translated into the uniquely precise product. It would be like demanding that anyone should bake two cakes that match crumb for crumb, simply by following the same recipe.

Even if one could manage that, it would not follow that the notionally identical cakes would look or taste any better than routinely effectively identical cakes. Similarly, there is not much likelihood that the venation in the retina of one eye would work better than that in the other eye.

Fortunately however, we do not have to wonder about such physiological details and mechanisms, because, even if some of them do happen to matter, tinkering with multiple slight changes would be most effective in working towards the fundamental object: effectively indeterminate immortality. Make no mistake: just to extend our working, rewarding lives by a few centuries would be beyond much of our technology of today.

All the same, as miracles go, it should be well within our current biological comprehension.

Also, note that sophisticated and elaborate morphological determinism is not unrealistic. Humans have significant and roughly consistent morphological and functional differences between the structures on our left‑ and right‑hand sides, especially internally, and there are differences between dorsal and ventral, proximal and distal, medial and lateral structures, so let us not be pessimistic about prospects for our descendants to lack Adam’s apples and never to choke when swallowing, and their ability to maintain an uninterrupted song while eating and delivering a political speech during a long‑distance run.

How special can we get?

In times of change learners inherit the earth;
while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped
to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer

It is hard to overstate the significance of teleology to our future evolution, or even to predict its effects. Teleological evolution overturns all sorts of long‑established principles. For example, in the history of evolution on our planet, think of specialisation.

In pre‑human biology, where you have a generalist population in a given ecology, every organism does what it can to achieve what it can with what is available. However, if some subpopulation happens upon a resource and a strategy for more effectively exploiting that resource in that ecology than rival subpopulations can, then it may concentrate on that resource and neglect rival resources. We say that it then is specialising in that resource. Such a resource might be inanimate, such as a rock or a cave or a body of water; for instance, in the Amazon, some populations of parrots regularly visit local cliffs of kaolin mud; they eat the kaolin after feeding on poisonous fruits that otherwise would make them very ill indeed.

Those fruits plus that kaolin in combination amount to an important resource in the birds’ lives, and that resource gives them an advantage in being able to supplement their food with fruits that competing species cannot use; but if ever the kaolin supply runs out, or becomes inaccessible, that population of parrots would suffer, and might even die out.

They would then have paid the penalty for specialisation.

I do not know how the plant in question disseminates its seeds, but it would not be surprising if it were dependent on the parrots scattering the seeds, possibly by voiding those seeds in their dung. That is a common form of adaptation in ecologies. It it were to turn out that they were dependent, and that the kaolin were no longer available, so that the parrots could no longer eat the fruit, then the plant might die out, whether the parrots survived or not.

Yet another penalty for specialisation.

When two or more species adapt to mutual specialisation in which they depend on each other, then if the relationship is profitable any rivals that failed to specialise would be at a disadvantage. That sort of symbiotic relationship is called mutualism.

If the mutualism is obligatory, that is one form of specialisation.

In the long term, specialisation is the kiss of death for any organism that originally, when circumstances made it advantageous, began to exploit some particular resource, say some flower or fruit or root, or prey item, or building material, or shelter.

After a few generations, we find that subpopulations of that successful population do even better, and heritable changes that favour the strategy begin to dominate the reproduction of that subpopulation. For example, local hummingbirds and bees will tend to have mouthparts of the right lengths and thicknesses to service particular classes of flower. The flower in turn might produce more seed if the form of its flower attracts the most effective pollinators, and it might change in form, scent and appearance in ways that attract and reward just those pollinators. This might make it less attractive to generalist pollinators, which in turn should suit the plant, because nonselective generalists are likely to to serve flowers irregularly, and with mixed pollen.

As a result of such selection pressures, dedicated pollination partnerships occur in many forms; they might last indefinitely and result in extreme adaptation, and accordingly extreme mutual dependence. That in turn, is likely to end in a stasis of no advance and no return, in which any further apparent improvement entails excessive penalties. In such cases, especially in a stable, rich ecology, such as a large, old, tropical rain forest, or in biodiverse ecoregions such as fynbos, there are all sorts of organisms that cannot flourish elsewhere.

However, sooner or later, in a few years or a few million years, either the two partners might fuse absolutely, resulting in what amounts to a single species, as has happened to eukaryotes and mitochondria, or green plants and their chloroplasts. Otherwise something might happen to harm one or both the partner species; such an event might be a new disease, or a change in climate or predators: time and chance happeneth to them all. And whatever harms one of the partners, harms both; commonly both species will die out while the generalists, those that had managed without specialisation, or had united so closely as no longer to amount to specialisation, survive and take over.

Sooner or later, once things settle down, new specialisations develop in the surviving and stabilising populations, and the cycle of specialisation and generalisation repeats itself, as it has done for more than a billion years on this planet. That cycle is intrinsic to biological evolution by natural selection — in stable conditions specialisation beats generalisation, and when conditions change, it is the generalists that take over — for a while. Strict specialisation of independent partners is the kiss of death to a species.

However, the power of specialisation is so great that, in many organisms, natural selection has developed multiple versions of specialisation in a single species. We see that in any species with a programme of metamorphosis that comprises distinct functional stages. Consider by way of illustration what is known as hypermetamorphosis in some insects.

There is no shortage of spectacular examples, but life cycles in the wasp family Eucharitidae will do. Details of each species do not concern us here, but they all subsist on suitable species of ants. Males and females are winged and short‑lived, and the genders are functionally specialised: males to find females and mate; females to mate and lay large numbers of microscopic eggs, of which few are likely to find hosts. This strategy too is a specialisation: a notional alternative would be to lay a few large, carefully tended, eggs that the parents would nurture. Some Eucharitidae lay their eggs on plants that the ants frequent, and at the stage of hatching each wasp larva is specialised to survive quietly on juices of the host plant, till it gets a chance to ride a foraging ant back to its colony. There the rider of the ant changes its skin and adopts a different specialist role: that of feeding on nourishing ant larvae in the shelter of the nest. Once it has accumulated enough fat and protein to support itself as an adult, it changes into a pupa that has no function other than to change from a fat larva, into a winged adult wasp with enough internal resources to continue the cycle.

Here we see a whole range of specialisations in one species, but how unique is that really? And what in particular does it have to do with us: the genus Homo? Be sure: it affects us intimately throughout our lives; that sort of thing happens all the time, all about us, within us and among us. If you consider the life cycle of Homo sapiens, the stages are less distinct than in the Eucharitidae, but just as vital. We pass through more stages than you might recognise, until you begin to pay attention. Look at the differences between the functions of babies and toddlers, between toddlers and pre‑teens, teens and nubile adults, young parents and established professionals. . .

More about that later.

The long run, in short. . .

Experts have
their expert fun
ex cathedra
telling one
just how nothing
can be done.
Piet Hein

An important principle in the future history of our bodily research and engineering is the fact that progress in the study of biology tends to accelerate as it advances. There were more fundamental advances between the time of Darwin and the start of the 20^th century than in all previous history. Those advances in turn were dwarfed in the first half of the 20^th century, and another explosion of information and technology began with the establishment of molecular biology during the following 50 years.

At the start of the 20^th century the cliché was that the heart, brain, and spinal cord were off limits to surgery. Exceptions were generally exploratory attempts with poor prognosis, and often immediately fatal.

Currently, people who have not studied the history of medicine, commonly do not realise how recent, or how radical, many of our routine medical practices and technologies have been. Ignoring often disastrous exploratory attempts, even blood transfusions were hazardous until after WWI, and transfusions were not routine till after WWII. Heart surgery was practically unknown till the 20^th century, and the first successful heart transplants were in the late 1960s. And yet, by now there are thousands of heart and kidney transplants alone, annually, in the United States alone, and transplant surgery is not even an American monopoly.

And the rate of acceleration of medical advance has not decreased during the start of the 21st century. A few years before writing this, I, for one, underwent cardiac ablation in preference to a pacemaker implant: local anaesthetic, catheter, no drama, routine procedure, immediate effect, no recurrence several years later. A decade or two earlier, it would have seemed miraculous.

And although none of this guarantees anything, it seems likely that once we get started on advances that say, double our life expectancy, the subsequent rate of advance towards the first forms of functional immortality might take only another century or two.

And everything after that might become really interesting.

Consider some things that would need attention in increasing longevity.

Practically all our bodily components get constructed and installed during our growth and maturation, both before and after birth.

Maintenance or replacement of those components is limited; they are adapted to preparation for reproduction, and support for the current community and for the next generation. They take the form of protection, education, and accumulation of resources. At the time of writing, such replacement and maintenance occupy anything from about twenty to sixty years for most of us. As individuals we start with naïve vainglory that tails off to pathetic senescence, during which our physical and mental capacities continuously stagnate and decay.

For examples, consider various categories of obsolescence of organs or their component tissues. In the following list I ignore nonessential consequences of simple excess or self‑indulgence such as obesity or addiction; even immortals cannot be proof against their own crotchets or blunders.

· Some organs simply run out of supplies, such as gonads once all the gametes have been expended.

· Some, such as teeth, need scheduled replacement sooner or later, but are only available for replacement a limited number of times.

· Some, such as hair and epidermis, have limited capacity for renewal or maintenance of quality as our cells and connective tissues senesce.

· Some, such as dermis, mucus membrane, joints, bone, muscle, and marrow, become senile in various ways, such as failure to maintain their mitochondria and telomeres, or commitment to notionally permanent structures without provision for replacement or repair during a limited lifespan. As such items age, the results include poor function, poor quality of connective tissues, poor maintenance of somatic chromosomal integrity, and poor replacement of somatic cells.

· After maturity, human eyes, brain, chemosensory and auditory functions, simply are not adapted to indefinite maintenance and function; they more or less wear out in various ways, and the organs are not replaced, whether worn out or damaged. Skin, connective tissue, muscles, and tendon wrinkle and tear, retinae and cochleae lose sensitivity. Gerontology is at best a struggle to maintain instead of renewing components that eventually must fail.

· Some organs, the brain in particular, simply run out of capacity, retention, or quality of function.

One could elaborate and refine the list variously, but for our purposes I shall deal with concepts of how such constraints could be dealt with in principle.

There is no fundamental obstacle to the first constraint. The continued function of gonads is neither essential to quality of life, nor to social value. It does not follow that all constraints are always worth dealing with in the same way, but that does not generally have much to do with longevity, and there is no reason why every mild constraint must be abolished. After all, human reproduction is not usually limited by gonadal incapacity.

The second class of item is less trivial. Some such are troublesome because of their architecture. The teeth that we shed differ in their form from the teeth that replace them. To supply an indefinite supply of teeth, we would need to redesign the human dentition. This is not impossible; sharks and some reptiles already can replace teeth indefinitely, but for humans there are complications, and the necessary re‑engineering could be difficult, though ultimately worthwhile.

Items such as hair and epidermis would be simpler to improve than the likes of dentition, but still challenging. We not only would need to schedule their growth and replacement, and to replenish their telomeres indefinitely, but also would need to monitor their genomes for unwanted mutations to maintain function and to preempt cancers. It might be a good idea for such tissues to segregate their essential functions onto limited chromosomes and to eject the irrelevant material before birth, or inactivate it after its function is complete. We do something of that type already with our erythrocytes, though less elegantly, and still less elegantly with female X‑chromosomes.

But one way or another, such items should not require much in the line of architectural changes in embryonic ontogenesis, and accordingly should be far less challenging than many other necessary changes. None of the items is necessarily trivial, but senescence of tissues, joints, and the like should be less challenging to mitigate than other principles in the list; however, some aspects are less trivial than one might think. For example our entire external skin is kept covered with keratin, by coating it perpetually with shed cells and replacing the shed cells with new cells grown from deeper skin tissue. But that is not as simple as it sounds: the epidermis on our soles is not the same as on our palms, which in turn differs from the fingertips, arms, eyelids, armpits, scalp, and so on. Some differences, such as the need to form callus tissue, must respond to environmental circumstances, but some are congenital, and all must be consistent with the teleological biological engineering of the organism.

But none of those challenges is a show‑stopper, and I doubt that many of them will remain unsolved by the end of the twenty-first century.

The remaining problems are far more formidable. Eyes and inner ears for example, and possibly our olfactory organs, and certainly brains, are not adapted to undergoing much in the line of maintenance; they get installed before birth and they are not open to much development after early childhood, let alone replacement. At present, to change that would be beyond much of our ability even to plan for.

All the same, it does not follow that meeting the challenge would take more than a few centuries, which is not a long time for such an advance. Our descendants should thereafter regrow eyes as casually as teeth, and maintain inner ears as easily as muscles.

Biologically speaking however, the final item in my opinion, is perhaps the most forbidding challenge of all.

The biggest block

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain
Our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain.
Awake but one, and, lo! what myriads rise !
Each stamps its image as the other flies.
Samuel Rogers

Roughly speaking, mental capacity may be seen as comprising two aspects: computational, and storage.

Computational capacity would be vital for dealing with the range and complexity of environments that our descendants routinely would have to face, not to mention the challenges of continuous education and acquisition and maintenance of skills for centuries on end. The idea of settling down to comfortable maturity, as reasonably affluent people commonly do nowadays, would be suicidal for even the slightest approach to functional immortality; retirement would hardly support a bearable existence for any human in our current form for even one thousand years, let alone indefinitely.

If not retiring sounds unattractive, then what would you prefer instead? Billions of souls mindlessly singing “Halleluiah!” for millennia on end? Or playing bridge for all eternity?

Bring on those rainy Sundays!

For anyone with such limitations, but without such preferences, there always is the suicide option. No one said that immortality had to be easy for everyone, let alone compulsory, and particularly not for persons ill‑equipped to deal with immortality, to earn it, or to do it justice.

I say more about brain power in later sections, but be sure that if we are to develop the power to creat a population of immortals, we had better create them with the mental capacity to deal with complications that beggar our imagination in our day; complications social, technical, and physical.

And that would imply brain power that would need comprehension in multiple dimensions at once, to an unprecedented depth.

A greater difficulty than limits to computational capacity, no matter how capable the brain might be in terms of intelligence or creativity, is the limited storage capacity of a brain, and together with that, the mental power necessary for continual organisation, access and use of that storage and its content: after enough years, 21^st century humans, even those with excellent memory, forget much of their laboriously accumulated information, often the most valuable parts of it, and distort much more — within the brain the signal‑to‑noise ratio rises, and neglected information (even some information in active use), turns out to have a half‑life, often a frustratingly short half‑life.

When I try to imagine the information one would gather during so much as a single millennium of functional life, I do not believe even a good, well organised 21^st century brain could make much of it; it would merge into a blur of half‑forgotten generalisations and re‑established prejudices, limited only by our capacity for perspective. The capacity for creativity would be vestigial. However, the eventual loss to society that the death of such a brain would entail, would be all the greater for being all the vaster than what we struggle with in our single century of life. The loss, both in terms of factual recording and of skills and personality, would be huge every time.

As I see it, our brain, even after improvement in function and efficiency, would need to increase in size, even to deal with a life expectancy of a few thousand years. How large a brain would be necessary, I cannot guess.

This sounds unpleasant, as well as cumbersome if it implies a bigger head, but that need not follow at first: by means of anatomical adjustment, we could compensate for a significant increase in brain bulk: there is no logical need for many of our currently cranial functions to be inside the head. The sensory functions of eyes, ears, and nose, might well be kept close to their associated organs in the head, but intellectual functions, such as of identity, awareness, emotion, speculation, teleology, formal information processing, and long‑term memory together with its organisation, could be safer in say, the torso, perhaps as internal outgrowths of the spinal cord.

Such adjustments might lend a new significance to concepts such as “gut feel”.

The brain’s physical control functions, such as currently dealt with by the cerebellum, might be distributed near to various organs of physical activity, rather than being bundled in with the rest of the brain.

But even adaptations to deal with lifespans of a millennium or two would be trivial in comparison to the scale of functional lifespan that we are considering here: millions or billions of years. No reasonable brain architecture could hold it all, let alone access it all or interconnect it all. Exactly what to demand of such a brain structure, I do not know, but if there is no practical means of dealing with it, any prospect for our indefinite future looks futile.

Science fiction stories tend to imagine aliens or human descendants with huge heads that look much like the abdomens of termite queens. The brains commonly would be kept alive, but immobile, in special incubators. As with so many ideas in science fiction and fantasy, that idea, widely copied, seems to have originated with H. G. Wells, in his 1901 story: “The First Men in the Moon”. Consider this small edited extract:

“[The Grand Lunar's] brain‑case must have measured many yards in diameter. . . this quintessential brain looked very much like a thin, featureless bladder with dim, undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within. Then beneath its enormity and just above the edge of the throne one saw with a start minute elfin eyes peering out of the blaze. No face, but eyes, as if they peered through holes. At first I could see no more than these two staring little eyes, and then below I distinguished the little dwarfed body and its insect‑jointed limbs, shriveled and white. The eyes stared down at me with a strange intensity, and the lower part of the swollen globe was wrinkled. Ineffectual‑looking little hand‑tentacles steadied this shape on the throne. . . It was great. It was pitiful. . . . attendants were busy spraying that great brain with a cooling spray, and patting and sustaining it.”

That sort of approach to creating an adequate brain is not in principle impossible, but it is not clear that it would suffice for an indefinite life, much less be necessary for anything human; to be sure, we might engineer our offspring several generations down the line, to have larger, more powerful, more functional brains than ours, but anything so bulky as to limit functional mobility or increase vulnerability, would seem to me to be unacceptable. I am confident that there are adequate options for dealing with the problem of mental capacity, but let us pass on for now.

The Impossible Takes Longer…

I felt slightly queasy when at lunch Francis winged into the Eagle
to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.
James Watson: "The Double Helix"

As I have said, and shall say again, we now are living in the first period in this planet's history in which a species can rationally and realistically discuss prospects for radically changing and managing its own biology, survival, development and dissemination, either physically or in terms of essential ideals. The rate at which biological studies are advancing, suggests that within a century or two humanity should be in sight of practical means of conquering senescence and counterfunctional education, after which we can concentrate on whatever new matters really matter.

What is more: our being is based on more than our genes; more than our genomes and epigenetics; more than our cells; more than our tissues and organs; more even than our bodily architecture.

In fact I am not at all sure just what the fundamental components of human attributes might turn out to be, either physically or emergently.

First we need to recognise that teleological selection is not the whole story in teleological evolution. For one thing, selection of any kind, even teleological selection, cannot work if it lacks the material to to select from; selection itself is in some degree subtractive; it implies decisions on what to admit, and that entails to discard in the same process. The desired genetic material must exist in the population, or come to exist by stochastic variation or by heuristic evolutionary opportunism. For example, as things stand today, we cannot select buffalo that grow wings adequate for flight; squirrels or mice may have attributes on which to base functional flight, but our buffalo of today have diverged too far from anything that can fly. To make any such selection look promising on any reasonable time scale would demand too much of stochastic variation.

Now, at present our human genome is distinctly impoverished compared to most unspecialised species; that seems to be one of the consequences of our population bottleneck, or bottlenecks, sometime in our last million years or so. By their very nature, bottlenecks tend to cause impoverishment of genomes — that is not necessarily bad in all ways, but it often is bad in many ways; it tends to lead to specialisation and other seductive evils, sacrificing long-term versatility for short term effectiveness.

In our case it means that teleological selection will not in every way support all the lines that we might wish to follow; to begin with, we will need to import more genes, and of course we will need to engineer the functional integration of genes from other species into our genome. And not even that will suffice: we shall have to engineer altogether new genes that never existed anywhere before.

All this is possible; it even promises to be practical and rewarding, but I do not expect every reader to like the idea at first sight; some of the resulting teleological designs might be shocking to our conceptions of today, but appearance is an aesthetic matter; functional immortality is independent of taste, whether according to our current fashions, or to fashions and functions that might appeal to Homo futurens down the ages.

Our athletic descendants of just one thousand years to come, say four‑armed, and eight‑eyed, or whatever they choose, might look better to us than our chimp‑like ancestors would, and in turn, our distant descendants might think we look about as attractive as cripples, or possibly as attractive as Homo erectus or even Pan troglodytes.

Of course, if you happen to fancy chimps, do not let me influence your personal tastes. . .

In general, physical improvements intended to fit us for indefinite futures would play hob with aesthetic standards; it would be best to suppress any revulsion at the idea. However you see it, our right to criticise such in remote generations would be less than our right to criticise our immediate children’s taste in clothing and hairstyles — years after they had left home.

Remember, we are contemplating future lifespans that would exceed the entire duration of the history of anything like the genus Homo so far — not just our written history since classical times a few thousand years ago, but our past few million years, thousands of times longer past than our most venerated pre‑civilisations. Compared to the changes in appearance in a person who has lived for five or ten million years of enterprise and varied activity, our own changes of clothing, hair, figures and so on, would seem practically static in some respects, and evanescent in others, as well as archaic, pointless, or even alien.

Bear in mind that we made the changes from chimp, in fact, from worm, to our present phase of humanity, without any help from technology — it is called “evolution”.

We continue to evolve, no matter what naïve observers and anti‑evolutionists say, or like, or dislike. Over the timespans that we are discussing here, we will change beyond recognition, with or without the aid of technology or fashion. So, to get excited in case some of our descendants make choices of their own, would be as irrelevant as it would be futile. To each generation its own decisions, now, and in the past, and in the future.

So much for our descendants’ functioning and appearance. Functional changes, less conspicuous, though too fundamental for us currently to imagine, would emerge inevitably during lives spanning millions of years.

But such details are trivial compared to the more relevant demands of immortality. Arguably, however one chooses to define them, the mental aspects, spiritual aspects, and accordingly the ethical aspects, of human nature are even more important to ourselves and our role in the universe. And they require adjustment even more vitally than our anatomical human nature does.

Personal immortality is important beyond any common conception, but societal immortality is more so.

But Why So Greedy?

Inside every old person there is a young person wondering what happened.
Terry Pratchett

It might strike you that there is something insane about wanting immortality at all, or to quibble about whether to live for a thousand years or a million, not to mention forever. What is the practical difference, and in any case, what would the point be? Would it be heaven or hell, would our population be an enrichment or desecration of our universe? And would we be able to share our universe amicably with any other species we encounter, either from our own planet or elsewhere?

Once we begin to speak of life spans of, not centuries, not millennia, nor even millions of years, then the mind begins to boggle. We come face to face with realities beyond anything that religions have reasonably dealt with to date. Even Christian concepts of eternal harps and hosannahs, and Muslim concepts of dozens of houris, and various versions of nirvana, have become figures of fun among doubters.

Suppose we leniently bargain for just a few million years of religious harmony and orgy . . .

For most reasonable people such imagined afterlives sound like that eternal rainy Sunday again, only raised to far higher powers. Even if divine powers extended mindless repetition painlessly forever, with no time off for good behaviour, what would be the point? The very idea of such a reward could be bait and incentive to pathologically limited minds at best; like bribing three‑year‑olds with sweeties.

Some decades ago I had the weird experience of sensing eternity within seconds, waiting for repeated laboratory measurements to complete. At first the delay was trivial, then, after enough repetitions, every twenty‑ or thirty‑second measurement, even as I watched the column of liquid advancing, seemed to take forever. That was at least interesting as a delusion, but imagine what would have become of it if the sensation were extended for a few hours or days; then imagine eternal ecstasy: even a conscious orgasm lasting for a few years would be a nightmare of pointlessness.

I am irreligious anyway, but no such religion that touts any eternity of that sort would tempt me for a moment.

“Darling, the ceiling needs painting . . .”

Well then, if even paradisaic pleasures of sex, music and worship must pall, what possible incentive could tempt one to desire merely mundane immortality?

Plenty.

In fact, that is largely the point of this essay.

Effective immortality has little in particular to do with cephalic pleasure centres, but a great deal to do with material values: objective roles in life, and the purposes that drive them.

Consider human life as we know it and have lived or suffered it throughout our history. We are born and protected and fed and educated to deal with our established ways of life for a few years or a few decades. We win, or get allocated, a role in our society, which we fill for a few more decades. If we are good enough, or inherit enough, we win respect and selfrespect for our acquired skills and wisdom, or just our affluence or success. Just possibly we are good enough to create or locate new wisdom or benefits for ourselves or our community.

Then, as Bierce put it, age comes in a night and is incredible.

Successively we lose our skills, our status, our receptiveness to new ideas or new circumstances, and our value to the community. We lose most of the benefits we earned or provided. Any of our developments in skills, in invention, in teaching, in creation, in short our potential bequests to the community, go down the drain of mental decay and social inertia.

That is the sort of thing I experience, and I am neither the first nor the last nor yet the first of the last. The competence and command of skills that I inherited through education, or learnt from experience, or that were expanding as I worked, or that had petrified as my opinions congealed, disperse like eddies in a stream.

Conserving and propagating such things are reasons for wanting a brain adequate to live on for; and to live on in developing instead of decaying in senility and resistance to novel insights. When tired of one profession, given a sufficiently powerful brain, one could enter other roles with a fresh mind plus mature experience of former fields.

Rather like re‑booting a computer, or, better still, upgrading software.

But even that must pall, or overburden a finite brain after a few millennia.

Some authors are fond of mentioning the human brain as the most complex thing in the universe — well. . . there is room for speculation about that, but whether it is or not, there is not even a trace of a justification for asking for the current standard to be the ceiling. We live in a universe beyond anything we can imagine, and we cannot assert whether there are greater brains out there or better values or virtues, or how far away they might be, or how much time and scope we have for catching up. If we meet any sentients out there that are less formidable, materially or in intellect, we had better try to improve on our past record of abuse of our supposed inferiors, by the demonstrable inferiors in our own ranks.

Conversely, if we meet our own superiors, we had better be in a position to justify their goodwill, and to raise our own standards to justify our membership of their community.

But whether we are indeed the greatest, or even unique, that does not justify our sitting on our laurels; squashed laurels rapidly turn into soiled bay leaves. We see horrible examples of that about us every day and everywhere. The only way to go is up; the only way to lapse, is down — there is no level shelf for us to rest; it is not for nothing that “on the shelf” is a pejorative metaphor.

Even if nothing comes of our striving for immortality, we must strive for improved intelligence, health, assets, and quality of a physical and mental life worth living.

There also are more practical reasons to wake up and sniff the coffee: reasons of opportunity, reasons of values, and reasons of peril; if we do not deal with certain current trends they will mean the end of humanity and of our world.

Remember that when we ascend beyond earlier ceilings of conception, we find ourselves with new mental horizons. The baby who wants nothing more than the nipple, later wants sweeties, and the toddler wants more than that. The pre‑teen has different perspectives of self‑image and toys and sport. The teenager develops more advanced views of group‑identity and gender consciousness with all that those entail. The adult moves into successive roles in which family, politics, money, and threats bulk larger and may fade away in various stages. And at each stage, the earlier preoccupations tend to fade, either into less prominence, or even into actual distaste or destruction.

Many of our community of Homo sapiens are not mentally equipped to outgrow or outlast various juvenile preoccupations; the football or baseball fan who has nowhere to go once the TV broadcasts of games lose their attractions, is in a pathetic state indeed, and would have no use for another thousand years of adulthood. For such people such longevity would recall the Chinese observation that “To those that have no teeth, the gods give nuts”.

That concern has not gone away; as Erma Bombeck put it:

Men who have a thirty‑six‑televised‑football‑games‑a‑week‑habit
should be declared legally dead and their estates probated.

This essay is not directed at such.

And, even more immediately, some things more important than personal senility have been hobbling humanity throughout our history, and will continue to do so.

Watch this space. . .

Futures’ Fetters

A society grows great when old men plant trees
whose shade they know they shall never sit in
Said to be a Greek proverb

A modern businessman, contemplating a proposal for investment, however attractive or vital, rarely will consider it for a moment, unless he can foresee completion within sufficiently few years, and in particular, completion for his own satisfaction and within his expected lifespan. This is not necessarily irrational: there commonly are good practical reasons for such refusals. Nor is this a new tendency: precedents in various forms may be found throughout thousands of years of our past.

So?

So really large projects for the long‑term benefit — for the very survival — of humanity in even the modestly long term, simply never get contemplated, never mind essayed.

Recently it took persistence, sweat, and abuse to move those in power so much as to undertake the (literally!) vital surveys of near‑Earth objects that threaten to collide with the planet, and as things stand at the time of writing there is as yet precious little support for equally vital, but far longer term, projects for colonising space or asteroids, let alone other planets or stars.

I ignore the proposals for Mars colonisation at present, because, like some cathedrals in the past, current proposals for Mars simply are not yet viable, though I cannot say when, or how, or whether, or why, they might become viable in future.

In essence, I argue that although the bottom line does remain important in assessing the worth of any project, the bottom line of any current page of the project is not the only bottom line of importance to humanity; as long as the end of the document presents the right sort of desirable outcome, someone is bound to be pleased.

But short‑lived members of society, such as we are, rarely are able to look past page‑end, and if they do, their perspective tends to be an inadequate basis for sound judgement in the long run.

And looking past page‑end should matter to anyone who considers the survival of life on or from Earth as mattering at all. And if nothing of the type matters to such people, let them ignore all such issues. They are the ones who might have inspired Bierce to write:

"Who art thou that weepest?"

"Man."

"Nay, thou art egotism. I am the scheme of the universe.
Study me and learn that nothing matters."

"Then how does it matter that I weep?"

Perhaps amusingly, in his novella “The Time Machine”, H.G.Wells dropped a broad hint at the sort of world we might expect if we betray our outward urge: a world sordid, cold, and futile. His details were striking rather than compelling, but that was altogether understandable, given the state of scientific work at the time; and the principle was spot on.

Some self‑centred people, even some loudly devout people, claim that there is no point to conservation of humanity and the planet, because the point of Creation is the spiritual afterlife rather than anything material; speaking for myself, I am irreligious and value the universe for the material entity that it is, but if the adherents to the Abrahamic religions are at all sincere in their own faith, they will cherish the world we live in, not just the planet, and not least because of God's biblical allocation of "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth".

Because that is asserted in the old testament (as translated in KJB Genesis 1:26) all Abrahamic believers at least, should bear the implicit responsibility of such dominion in mind. There is a tendency to overlook altogether the fact that dominion implies responsibility, both for conservation of God's gifts and for return on His investment. To destroy His creations out of greed or irresponsible stupidity is blasphemy, and must bring down retribution both for the directly guilty and those who had permitted the neglect or other abuses, and for any of their descendants.

I cannot answer for other faiths, but see no reason to honour or obey any faith that contradicts that principle. The equivalent implications would apply both to believers and unbelievers.

So far humanity has not done well; not now, not in the last few hundred thousand years. Christians in particular should note the principle’s significance in its re‑affirmation in the parable of the talents, both in Matthew 25:14‑46, and Luke 19:12‑26.

But the real importance of the implications of short‑term, bottom‑line obsession is not what it means to businessmen or their offspring, but the nature of the projects that get rejected immediately because they will not yield short‑term profits — or, for that matter, short‑term benefits.

Try the experiment of enquiring from arbitrary members of the population, what they see as the long‑term future of our planetary community, or what they see as the planetary community at all: any particular species? any particular nationality? any particular race? any particular religion? any particular political party?

Typical responses are short‑term and short‑sighted, or mentally limited. Such minds commonly can see no further than extension of the status quo; and those that can, rarely can recognise the importance of such implications; the perpetual chorus is: “It will last my time. . .”

This not only affects their own futures, but repeatedly affects the course of histories. It is particularly conspicuous in the histories of autocrats and despots, such as the Alexanders and Khans and Cromwells, who either behaved as if they were immortal, or as if they or their establishments could live forever in the persons of their sons who could carry on their rule indefinitely. That hardly ever worked at all, or if it did, only poorly for a few generations or so — the merest blip in history, even history on our current scale of awareness.

Even proverbially, we have the expression: “Clogs to clogs in three generations”, in recognition of how the short‑term affluence of the enterprise of a first generation entrepreneur might be sustained by the second, and yet dissipated by the third.

Consider the reported secret address Hitler made to his generals just before World War II: ““There probably will never again be a man with more authority than I have, but I can be eliminated at any time by a criminal or a lunatic. There is no time to lose. War must come in my lifetime!”

He was only fifty years old at the time of that meeting.

It has been speculated that if he had held off from war for four more years at the rate he already had been preparing Nazi armed power, and had shed some of his counter‑functional obsessions, he could have won the war, probably handily and profitably.

More to the point of this discussion, if he had had a life expectancy of a few centuries, he could have taken over the world, and if he had had the insights and the concomitant good sense, he could have taken over the world without war — or with very little anyway.

But he was of the stuff of Homo ephemerens.

Typical.

Homo ephemerens is no Peter Pan; ephemerans, not long after becoming established in their roles, become unemployable — who would employ a 60-year-old who is insecure, needs retraining and lasts for 5 years, when a 20-year-old can pick up new training faster, start for lower pay, and last for 40 years?

In contrast, after a thousand years, Homo futurens, if functional according to the principles in this discussion, could train faster, benefit better from experience, and in any new job, could last for as long as suited all parties.

But however one looks at it, the functional perspective of a future of just a few centuries, let alone immortality, together with the mental power to match, should have protected humanity from most of the blunders of past leaders. But throughout human history those attributes would have been of limited use in a human body with a lifespan of a few decades; not to mention an even shorter duration of mental competence and adaptability.

Note that to employ the power of extended functional life span, one does require extended depth of education and civilisation in which mutual regard, equality and equitability are respected and supported. A thousand‑year rule by say, Genghis Khan or Timur might not have been much fun. However, thousand‑year rule by an unpopular despot might be intrinsically unlikely if the population were similarly long-lived and reasonably intelligent; sooner or later they would rub the wrong person or group the wrong way, and leave by the same door through which they came to power.

Conversely, a leader valued by long‑lived, intelligent, and responsible population, could well remain at the helm for as log as desired, leaving in favour of someone else when wishing to follow another career.

There are various aspects to the importance of longer‑term perspectives; they respectively demand lifespans adequate for launching projects on various scales, plus for seeing them through. Consider this arbitrary list of prospects and the scale appropriate to each:

Earth‑wide and below:

CANDLE WISDOM
If you knew
what you will know
when your candle
has burnt low,
it would greatly
ease your plight
while your candle
still burns bright.
Piet Hein

· There are many reasons for the futility, fatuity, and obscenity of the way Homo ephemerens has wasted and disfigured this planet in the last few hundred thousand years; ignorance plus the tribal mentality were enough to start with, but the reason that the innate vandalism of the species simply has intensified as our powers increased, has largely been because of the way that adaptation to the brevity of our lifespans has paralysed our mental development, blinkered our foresight, and hamstrung our conservation and development of projects for our future. For the simple reason that the relative long-term scales are so much greater, I do lay emphasis on off‑planet projects and colonisation, but our home planet will overshadow our pioneering by large factors for the foreseeable future; we will have to do a great deal of engineering and development to ourselves and our home before we can outgrow this traumatic, and possibly ultimately deadly, birth‑struggle.

◦ To date, most of our planet has remained either degraded or unexploited, and for the foreseeable future will remain that way. I cannot personally imagine or prescribe all the opportunities for projects that await us on or within Earth, and that at present our brief lives and our meager and avaricious mentalities limit us to; some I have written about elsewhere, concerning our resources of energy, water, and the like, but consider a few examples of projects that long-lived Homo futurens could rationally undertake, even with a life expectancy of just a few thousand years plus the intellect to undertake them.

◦ For one thing almost entire cities could be replaced by park- or farm‑land if practically all buildings in current cities were replaced by suitably‑designed high‑rise frameworks accommodating dwelling and business structures that could be rearranged according to requirements. They could extend to heights of a few kilometres. Helipads and recreational areas could be spanned between towers. A single helical street could serve for foot and light vehicle travel, and a couple of linear‑motor lift shafts accommodating multiple lifts that could bypass each other, could serve for heavy or long-distance transport. The savings in streets and real estate alone could pay for the construction. I’ll publish more detailed descriptions elsewhere sometime.

◦ Similar buildings could be constructed floating at deep sea, and extend as far below the surface .

◦ Shafts too deep for human mining could be sunk into the mantle for energy, self‑renewing power extraction plus suitable mineral material for building or for ore extraction. Even water might be valuable in the distant future. We know there is water in some regions of the mantle, though it seems unlikely that it ever would be relevant for extraction, even as a byproduct. Its concentration in the relevant minerals is likely to be less than 1%.

◦ Projects for extraction of core material that has invaded the lower mantle, rich in heavy siderophilic elements, could be developed to melt their way into depths where most material is permanently molten. If this could work, it should solve most mining requirements on the planet indefinitely, including precious elements such as the osmium‑iridium‑platinum group.

◦ The mantle could be a good place to discard certain wastes, eg excess CO2 that could be carried downward till tectonic convection carries it upward again to be released in vulcanism tens of millions of years later. Solids such as waste salts, solid isotopes, and similar items would best be stored securely on the planet’s surface or in orbit. The dread of all the harm such items could do on the surface tempts lesser intellects into trying to isolate them underground permanently, but the logical solution is to store things compactly where they are accessible; either to control them or to exploit them in future years if new threats, uses, or needs are found.

· These are just a few items of project types that no sane member of Homo ephemerens would contemplate for an instant; their return on investment would be too risky, and development would take centuries or longer.

Earth‑wide and surroundings:

THE CURE FOR EXHAUSTION
Sometimes, exhausted
with toil and endeavour,
I wish I could sleep
for ever and ever;
but then this reflection
my longing allays:
I shall be doing it
one of these days.

· given a human lifespan of say, a millennium, together with matching mental capacity, it should be possible a for a modest number of national leaders, each favouring the best interests of their respective and collective populations of citizens who have millennial lifespans and intelligence to match, and keeping their planetary environments in mind, to establish a world‑wide, healthy, population of affluence and mental capacity, in political stability and ecological balance with the planet.

Within one such a generation, technological advances should be beyond our prediction; to get the idea, compare our current way of life with that of our ancestors a thousand years ago — what we now speak of as the Dark ages. If you could snatch an educated man of that day in a time machine and transport him to our day, what would he make of it? What would he make of microwaves, movies, calculators, telescopes, motors, clocks, radios, chocolate, printing . . .

Things are moving much faster now than in those days; even within my lifetime I have seen much wishful thinking materialise and become banal within a few years of replacing items once taken for granted as permanent fixtures in our lives.

Within another thousand years from now, barely a tick of our historic clock, the Solar system could be explored and mapped to beyond the Kuiper belt, and every planet and every large planetoid should have a few associated spacecraft for communication, observation, and resource management for spacecraft. Remote spacecraft, possibly associated with large asteroids or small planetoids, would host observatory craft with appropriate telescopes and gravity wave detectors. Cataloguing of the mineral resources in the millions of Kuiper belt bodies would take many centuries, as would the technology for exploiting them. Development of off‑Earth colonisation in the Solar system would advance progressively. Space communication relays should by that time be routine. Robotic scouting and mining of the Solar system, including the Kuiper belt, should be major sources of materials for use off‑Earth. Interstellar pioneering and prospecting robot craft should be numerous, and so should various forms of space colonisation.

Human exploration of space, with the associated technology should be well under way, though colonisation still would be in its earliest phases

Biological research would by then be beyond prediction, but the practical route to indefinite immortality should already be well‑understood, and development of the human form to meet various functions would be routine.

Solar system and Kuiper belt:

THE OPPOSITE VIEW
For many system shoppers it's
a good‑for‑nothing system
that classifies as opposites
stupidity and wisdom.

because by logic‑choppers it's
accepted with avidity:
stupidity's true opposite's
the opposite stupidity.
Piet Hein

· given a lifespan of say, a hundred millennia, and a Solar system in stable affluence, it could be profitable to colonise regions of the solar system largely with robot craft designed for the scavenging of space debris and solar wind. They could mine asteroids and comets, and protect vulnerable targets, such as Earth, from expensive and deadly collisions. The economics of communication, of servicing spacecraft and satellites, of research and construction of space colonies, all would become realistic and attractive, both in their own right, and as a basis for future development. Mining, terraforming and colonising parts of currently unpromising bodies such as Mercury, some moons, and other bodies would all become realistic and attractive.

Interstellar communities:

There are, of course, risks.
In fact, there are three distinct kinds of risk:
the known ones which we can and shall prepare against;
the known ones which we must trust to luck to avoid;
and the entirely unknown.
John Wyndham

· Communities that include multiple alien planets would follow, as well as space based communities spread over say a few thousand light years. That might seem ridiculous, but bear in mind that the most apparently rewarding populations of stars in our galaxy are spread over many tens of thousands of light years; galaxy‑wide communities would comprise networks of parties separated by kiloparsecs.

Intergalactic communities:

THE ONLY SOLUTION
We shall have to evolve
problem‑solvers galore‑‑
since each problem they solve
creates ten problems more.
Piet Hein

· Intergalactic communities would span gigaparsecs. Their very nature would be alien to us; so much so that I barely more than mention them here.

None of these would make sense to human business, sociology, and politics as we exist at present; the final two are beyond any easy comprehension at all. In subsequent sections I say more about the demands that longterm space travel would make of the travellers.

Now, I could imagine someone objecting: how does that sort of thing sound any better than the heavenly promises of eternal tedium that various religions make?

That is a matter of taste, as well as truthfulness; but what I am peddling is constrained, not by the promises that primitives committed to sacred texts, but by political will to invest in exploration, pioneering, research and development: discovering, building, and enriching.

Such things grow with the growth in scale. If after your third billion years, you lose interest: exit voluntarily, or pursued by a bear.

Immortality on those terms also comes with an offer we had better not refuse for long: at present rates of political progress, I wouldn’t give better odds than even money for survival of human civilisation, or even of humans as a population, for another century. Better make it out into space before the rats or cockroaches beat us to it. I hope you do not think their civilisation is likely to be any more attractive than ours.

And if we fail to destroy ourselves by war, but refuse to assume our necessary responsibilities and commitments to progress, then very likely we never will have the choice: we will perish in our own waste and pollution before our sun expands and burns us up.

Some people would regard the idea of the futures that I urge as obscene and blasphemous; some would say that it would have been better if we had remained with the chimps as just another ape, instead of emerging to ruin the planet and kill each other. And some of them are equally adamantly opposed to humanity being able to escape from our shell to despoil outer space as well. I understand their negativity but they would be on a par with Uncle Vanya; not Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, but the futile “Back to the trees!” counter‑progressive from Roy Lewis’ book: “The Evolution Man”.

The option of just letting things follow what naïve people see as the “natural” course of events, has no merit; it is not even dignified. Look back on our planet’s history of successive disasters and extinctions; they progressed pretty handily without human agency. Look forward to the next interplanetary disaster, and the next solar catastrophe — one that next time does not miss the planet.

As for changing human nature and human anatomy and function; the slightest hint of anything of the type horrifies people who happily follow volatile fashions of clothing, food, entertainment, rabble‑rousing, New Age debauchery, political correctness, ignorance, and anti‑vaxing; all of them products of human nature. Pardon my declining to take such people, or their values, seriously.

As I see it, one’s choice of personal values is largely arbitrary, but only until they clash with others’ values. Most people value human progress in one form or another, so the back‑to‑the‑trees reactionaries are unlikely to have a long‑term effect on human policy. It is the old story of the futility of stasis.

If we still are confined to this planet when a planet‑killer happens by (which could happen at any time with just a few centuries’ notice) that would be the end for humanity, and possibly for life on the planet. If however, we had by then expanded to the solar system or beyond, loss of the planet would be no worse than a calamity, and even might be an opportunity to access the hardly imaginable mineral wealth currently locked away in the core of our planet.

And yet, to parties separated by millennia or geological epochs, what would we on present‑day Earth seem to amount to? To our descendants whose populations span galactic clusters, our current perspectives might seem as limited as the perspectives of a planarian in a pond, or of a plant in a pot seem to us in turn.

Whether there are scales beyond even those, say a perspective of event horizons, or even of multiple universes, I lack the power to speculate. Arthur C. Clarke’s novel: “Childhood’s End” might hint at something of the kind.

Or not — I cannot say.

But I can say that if we do not free ourselves, we shall die in our fetters, and die in a far shorter time than it took us to recognise those fetters.

Not Whether or What, but WHEN?

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes

The vast majority of people that I ever have met, who believe in the second coming, including the nuts who claim that the END is AT HAND, actually do not believe a word of it; they think they do, but in fact they do not understand the nature of the world they inhabit. The Second‑Coming freaks do not generally look beyond a few eruptions of cemetaries, and in fact the first reasonably realistic account I ever read of the possible end of our world, was in the H. G. Wells short story: “The Star”. It was a brilliant story, and if you have not recently read it, I recommend that you read it again — thoughtfully. It ends perhaps too optimistically, but hints clearly at what the less optimistic outcome could have been.

And yet, events far less gross could wipe out all civilisation, and possibly all vertebrate life on the planet. For a more modern, but far longer, far more detailed, fictional impression, you might read “Lucifer’s_Hammer”, by Larry_Niven.

Whatever you read, think about it.

Independently of those references (there are many more by now) imagine a moderately large nickel‑iron Kuiper‑belt body, say 50 kilometres in diameter. This would be big, but nothing unbelievable; on the continental scale, it would be a pin prick. Larger items than that have left enduring marks on Mars, Luna, and Mercury. Suppose that this one hits Earth on a nice hot spot, such as Yellowstone. Such an event could cause a really big mess; not much of North America would be left functional. In fact, not much of the Northern hemisphere would be left functional.

And that might be the Good News; I think that Niven was overoptimistic. Southern hemisphere countries need not feel too smug about their immunity: at the other side of the world, in the deep southern Indian Ocean the shock wave from an impact at Yellowstone might focus, and cause the grandmother of tsumanis, stirring up the deep water.

Now, the deep ocean contains layers of concentrated CO₂ solution. There is far more CO₂ down there than in our entire atmosphere. Bring such a solution nearer to the surface, and it bubbles out vigorously like soda water. If you doubt the principle, go online to look up the Lake Nyos event to get the idea.

In fact, that is the optimistic postulation; as I understand it, there is more CO₂ down in the deep ocean, than there is air in our atmosphere. Start a major release there, and you could kill all the major animal life on the planet; never mind climate change: all the mammals and birds at least, would die of CO₂poisoning (CO₂ does not just smother you; 5% in the air you breathe can kill most mammals, including humans, fairly rapidly). It could take centuries for the atmosphere to recover, and perhaps a billion years before evolution could make up the setbacks to large life forms. By that time our sun would be starting to show its age, and there would be no guarantee of intelligent life, let alone of civilisation, emerging again at all.

And for all we can tell, we might be the only planet in the universe where civilisation has emerged, or would emerge again if we dropped our baton. Some people would say: “Good riddance”, and perhaps I even realise why, but in their very protestations they illustrate the vandalism that they deplore in humanity, and they exemplify the uneducated slum ethics of pointless destruction.

If the impact were in the mid Pacific, the CO₂ might be even worse, though I have no idea how bad the quake and volcanic damage might be. However, I reckon that it would be the worst impact on this planet since the Archean period.

Now, there is a population of possibly millions of bodies, equally threatening, or worse, out there in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, not to mention in interstellar space, but most of them are well‑behaved and keep out of the inner Solar System. That makes sense because most of the ones that trespassed too close to the sun either got mopped up by the planets billions of years ago, or, more often, fell into the sun.

But a few new ones and old strays remain, and we cannot afford to ignore them. It has been some sixty million years since the last one hit us, and that impact is believed to have been the main cause of the extinction of most of the dinosaurs of the time. Our dino killer at the end of the Cretaceous was much smaller than the one I described, and the bigger the body, the rarer, but there are more out there.

The catchphrase is: “We can be sure it is coming, just not when or where!” But for an impact of that size, it would not much matter where. The concept is not new; Ambrose Bierce, in his essay on “A Mad World” summed it up as follows: “. . .in our little annual circle round the sun are points at which we are stoned and brickbatted like a pig in a potato‑patch — pelted with little nodules of meteoric metal flung like gravel, and bombarded with gigantic masses hurled by God knows what. . .” What is new is that we are the first generation in a position to estimate the nature and probability of such disasters, and to contemplate prevention of the impact of some, if they happen to be detected early enough.

No new thing under the sun . . .?

We decidedly live in an age of things new for those who have eyes for what is to be, or no longer can be.

The relevant point is that for as long as we are confined to this planet, we cannot be sure of surviving modest scales of threats and we have no chance at all of surviving anything really large, such as a collision with a rogue planet, of which there are billions in our galaxy.

No, I am not saying it is time to panic; in a galaxy of our size there is a lot of room for rogues to miss us, but Wells was not in the least stretching reality in “The Star”. And if we were to detect such a body on the way in the next few centuries, we would not have the slightest chance of deflecting it with any technology that we can foresee.

Especially not if it appeared as suddenly as in his story.

A nearby supernova (say as close as Alpha Centauri) could kill practically all life in our solar system with radiation. We have not detected any prospective supernova anywhere close enough to be a threat in the foreseeable future, but then we also do not know whether any wandering white dwarf or small black hole is about to swallow a nearby star with similar effects in the next million years or so.

Or something much smaller simply could swallow Earth.

And that sort of thing we cannot foreseeably ever do a thing about, except for giving it lots of room; and giving it room would mean abandoning Earth for somewhere else, which we cannot foreseeably do on any effective time scale.

Some such events could render the solar system itself uninhabitable for millions of years, or forever. Some could render entire clusters of stars uninhabitable; for example, collision of a couple of large black holes could ruin everything for many parsecs in all directions, and also for some millions of years. To escape such things, we would have to predict them for millions of years into the future, so that we would be in a position to avoid them. For such purposes we should tend to colonise solar systems in uncrowded regions of the galaxy, far away from the galactic core, where such collisions would be frequent.

And there are all sorts of other threats, ranging from pandemics to wars to mass psychopathology: if we pack all our eggs into too small a single basket, pack all our futures in too small a single solar system, we doom ourselves and the futures of our peoples and their civilisation. . .

What would it take?

. . .after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Rudyard Kipling

The last ten thousand years or so have shown that, confined to a measly little planet, a lifespan that is too short, and is lived in too low an intellectual and educational standard of population, precludes anything like a stable, progressive, public‑spirited, and compassionate government. Anything of that nature requires many improvements, but I cannot think of any requirement more essential than functional longevity. It is not the only requirement, but without longevity the others would be ineffectual in a population of evanescents: evanescent populations with a high turnover of juveniles are too vulnerable to invasion by demagogues who mobilise immature, uninformed zealots as their power base.

Here we encounter concepts of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs), or at least socially stable strategies (SSSs). The concept of an ESS is of an evolutionary strategy that is so stable and sound that it cannot be displaced by any rival strategy — the concept is well described in the later editions of “The Selfish Gene” and in various online texts. SSS I coined rather guiltily as my own ad hoc neologism, but I am relieved to say that when I checked online, I found that I had been scooped; SSS is already in use to refer to socially stable strategies, and accordingly I can use the concept and the initialism with a clear conscience — legalistically at any rate.

SSS is a concept analogous to ESS, but it describes a social strategy — a legal or political system that can shrug off any challenges in a stable society, events such as when a major leader is replaced or dies.

I conjecture that no SSS is possible in a population of evanescents.

That is part of the essential reason for my writing of this essay.

Now, let us assume that we have a population of youngsters with a lifespan that sees them attaining their prime at say about 200 years old, healthy and affluent with a life expectancy of perhaps 1000 years; they would not hesitate to tackle massive projects with an expected development and investment period of perhaps a century or two. An example of such a project might be to invest in development of their own genomes and education, or in on‑planet super‑buildings, power supplies, ecological conservation, ocean dwellings, and similar ideas that no evanescent of our day would give a moment’s support.

On the other hand yet more long‑lived enterprisers would also be more open to off‑planet projects in space dwellings, asteroid prospecting, and preparation for colonisation of planets such as Mars and Mercury (no, I am not joking, and yes, I did mean Mercury; if you cannot see why, think a little longer). Some of the gas giant and ice giant moons might be viable prospects as well, but let us not get side‑tracked.

By the time we are in that range of functional longevity, the rate of progress towards immortality should be rapid; perhaps the very next generation after a longevity of 1000 years might be in reach of full immortality. It is hard to guess how things will already have developed, but by that time our pioneers should be well established in the Kuiper belt, and some might be exploring the Oort cloud. Remember, apart from the sophistication to be expected of the bioengineering of the day, everyone should by then be eager to contribute to the incoming population of immortals.

After all, who would want their children to be as short‑lived as themselves?

Anyone who would be so spitefully, stupidly, counterfunctional, we could ignore; no action against such people would be necessary: they and their offspring would vanish within a few centuries. After say, another millennium, only sociologists and historians would remember them.

That sort of population cleansing is called “Natural Selection in Action”, and it would require no special genetic engineering to accomplish it.

By that time we should be looking at populations of billions, both on‑planet and off‑planet, with half‑lives in the range of millions of years or indefinite. Progress towards immortality in the later stages would not be like our current struggles after indefinitely tortuous advances and dead ends.

Why body anyway? Who ordered that box?

But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one’s whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen.
Charles Dodgson

I already have mentioned that, although I would expect development of functional longevity to be the prime objective of the generations I am discussing, there almost certainly would be populations who would want to modify their own features or those of their offspring — hopefully for functional rather than aesthetic effects. In our own day we have boob jobs, tattoos, anabolic steroids and the like, but that sort of thing is not generally heritable, so I accordingly ignore it.

The scope for artificial, once‑off embryonic modification of the body, would be even greater, not to mention surgical and histological modification of the mature body, for example by introducing suitable stem cells, but I largely ignore such measures too, because in principle nothing of that type would be more stable in its genealogy and descent than a nose job. Such things do have their place, but not as part of the physiological reproduction of a biologically functional, genetically defined, population. The point of this essay is to deal with self‑sustaining adaptations, not orthotics or prosthetics or cosmetics or ad hoc technological extensions to the organism.

If you like, you could say that what we want is a population of people, any adequate group of whom could support and reproduce itself functionally, if dropped into a friendly, but virgin, environment without technological aids. This criterion is arbitrary, but it negates issues such as those raised in E. M. Forster's story: "The Machine Stops", or the dangerous Darwinian implications of specialisation.

And by the time we have achieved even thousand‑year life expectancies, our scope for research as a basis for designing genetically stable embryonic ontogeny should be well advanced.

By the time we are in that range of functional longevity, the rate of progress towards immortality should be rapid; perhaps the very next generation after a longevity of a thousand years might be in reach of at least the first phases of full immortality; we don’t have to pass through all the stages one order of magnitude at a time.

By that time, both on‑planet and off‑planet, we should be looking at populations of billions with half‑lives in the range of millions of years or indefinite. What the practical difference would be between million‑year life‑expectancy and immortality, I am uncertain, but I see no point to aiming for any special limit; one’s chances of survival of adventitious threats through millions of years would be slight anyway.

Be that as it may, progress towards immortality in the later stages would not be like our current struggles after indefinitely tortuous advances and dead ends.

Within a few centuries of today, I would expect subsequent progress to be more like the advances in flight technology during the twentieth century: after millennia of futile dreaming, obsessive technophiles managed a few miserable machines that could hardly get up effectively enough to kill their pilots.

The nay‑sayers gloated because heavier‑than‑air flight, though seen to be barely possible after all, patently was futile.

But within a single lifetime there were military aircraft that could kill people in their millions, as well as jet airliners and air cargo industries that practically murdered the business of passenger ships and even much of the sea transport industry.

As for practicality of human genetic engineering, at this time of writing, we are in the early stages, and already our rate of achievement is beginning to take off irresistibly, in the face of prevalent Luddism.

In our present context there is no reason to exclude any particular degree of morphological or even genetic change within the life history of any individual or population; all that is for the participating members and bodies of society to work out for themselves in their times and social situations. If anyone decides to specialise as a dwarf who would be functional in spacecraft, in trees, or underground, or as riding on an emotional, intellectual, or professional partner, or as a massive brain in particular professions, or anyone else decides to specialise as a giant for heavy work in nature, agriculture or engineering, then, once such things are attained, who is to complain as long as social equitability is maintained?

Such modifications down the ages of any one life might be sustained or repeatedly changed according to personal preferences or to changed circumstances. The various roles that individuals might adopt or adapt to could be seen as castes in the biological sense.

It is important to understand that I use the term caste here without any value‑related, faith‑related, race‑related, class‑related, or even species‑related baggage. It would have no more social or legal significance than a member of Homo ephemerens changing a job or a uniform in our day. The enormous range of forms of symbiosis and colonial existence within current and historical biology can give some clue to the types of role that might become desirable in the world of Homo futurens.

To prevent confusion in reading this set of essays, remember: in this context there is no social, moral, or professional pejorative implication attached to any caste, nor the term, explicit or implicit, such as has arisen in various human societies or faiths. The term is functional, neither disparaging, nor adulatory. That also applies to any term that anyone might see as politically incorrect.

Why humans? What about robotics, aliens, animals, and AI??

What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven it;
the molten image, and a teacher of lies,
that the maker of his work trusteth therein, to make dumb idols?
Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach!
Behold, it is laid over with gold and silver,
and there is no breath at all in the midst of it.
Habakkuk 2:18 — 19

There are many imponderables in the entire topic of immortality, and, for sheer lack of capacity or competence to deal with them, I must ignore most of them. One such topic is the essential nature of the subjective emotional awareness that forms the basis of our human values; it is not a purely formal philosophical concept, but comprises the actual existence of our minds. Without it we would be no more conscious than a computer running an artificial intelligence program.

Without that subjective awareness, anything the universe means to us would be vacuous. What it might mean to anything other than members of humanity, is an open question. It is not essentially a new question, but it never has been expressed cogently, or even very coherently, before some of Nietzsche’s works in the nineteenth century.

Not that I especially revere Nietzsche’s works, though he often was original and quotable, but his Zarathustran works were more dramatic and more quoted than most.

Personally I think that Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” was more thoughtfully compelling, but it too was more expressive of the nature of the problem and too speculative to be more than stimulating to thought, or offering any convincing basis for development of any conclusion more material than a teleological civilisation of teleological populations.

Think: suppose we were to replace a human with a purely mechanical mechanism (whether an electronic, or electromechanical, or purely mechanical, device, makes no difference; it still would be a structure of industrially available dead parts). A sufficiently advanced device could pass very convincing Turing tests, and some of them are doing pretty impressively already.

We still have no way of assessing whether such a device possesses any functionally human equivalent to our emotional existence; our assessment of our own internal subjective, emotional consciousness. Even our assumption of that equal, and possibly identical, form of consciousness in our fellow‑humans and presumably some animals, is arbitrary. In spite of a confusion of published assertions on the topic, no cogent basis for demonstration or diagnosis of anything of the type has even been suggested, let alone predicted.

We still lack a cogent and coherent solution to the practical and conceptual mind‑versus‑body challenge of the Chinese room puzzle of John Searle. I cannot say that it never could be solved, but personally I never have seen any promise of a satisfactory resolution. It is not practical to pursue the topic here, but you can find a good discussion in Wikipedia in the entry “Chinese room”.

It is important to remember however, that that subjective consciousness of ours is not independent of material reality; even minute meddling with the physical attributes, operation, and environment of the brain affect one’s physical impressions and emotions, and the subjective reality in one’s brain entail causal material information, and accordingly, of existence. I discuss some related material at
https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-point_19.html

and at:

https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2014/01/intelligence-in-societies-mainly-in.html

Now, suppose we were to replace all biological humanity with such purely mechanical devices. In terms of our current level of understanding, that would mean human extinction, and arguably the extinction of life. The upshot would be the end of meaning in a dead universe. An external observer could not tell the difference from the behaviour of such a univerese, but “there would be no breath at all in the midst of it”. Biological constructions, or sentient animals, or alien partners, or even new generations of humans might fill the role, but how could we tell?

How could we tell? Should we care? Would it matter?

Given the nature of our current human biological values, certainly we must care; we do not yet know what we are, or why, or even whether there is any “why” at all, but we know as nearly as we can claim to know anything, that whatever it is in us that cares, it cares for that.

Should we fear?

Are AI and industrially produced devices not already poised to replace humanity, leaving a universe of uncaring death?

That is not in principle impossible, but in the light of current understanding it is not a necessary or desirable outcome. AI and robotics, like weapons, are human creations; they could be used to destroy humankind, but they need not be used in that way, nor need they be more desirable as our destroyers, than say, starvation, bombs, disease, accident, or supernovae.

Also, nothing in contemplating such technological advances and the futures dependant on them, limits our scope to inorganic machines; long before we complete our conversions into immortality, we could be generating and breeding novel organisms to participate in our civilisation or civilisations on a cooperative footing. We could have citizens in the shapes of centaurs or whatever took their fancies, and citizens comprised of colonies of corals or ants.

By the time we have achieved effective immortality, we should have passed beyond the concept of maintaining our humanity in our current senses, and be concentrating on our teleological evolution in our various contexts. As we are now, our ideals and interests are not the same as those of our chimpanzee ancestors; do we wish that we could revert to such simplistic futility? Or do we wish to improve, to build, to advance if you like — an element of “Excelsior”. You might find that amusing or tragic, as you prefer, but if so, think of a remark of Robert Townsend in his book: “Up the Organization”:

If you don’t do it excellently, don’t do it at all. Because if it’s not excellent
it won’t be profitable or fun, and if you’re not in business for fun or profit,
what the hell are you doing here?

Whether you regard that as profound or banal, it is fundamental as part of the answer to people who keep whining about being unable to discern the purpose of life: if there is nothing that you want or purpose to try, then what the hell are you doing here?

By all means, anyone who wants to tune in, turn on, and drop out, do so — that too is called natural selection — join the smallpox virus and Levuana moth in obscurity. After one more generation hardly anyone would know that you ever existed, and no one would want you back if they did know.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will do what we can and try to make a lasting, positive difference.

Where would it lead?

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas

First, let’s make this clear:

I don’t know where it would lead.

There are too many variables in the sheer range of biology, technology, and even sociology, logic, and ethics, for me to do better than handwaving.

But let’s see whether handwaving can achieve anything. Call it abduction, if you like.

· How would humanity end up?

. . .the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong —
but that's the way to bet.
Damon Runyon

First, let’s make this clear: I have hardly any idea of how humanity would end up either.

I can’t even tell what the concept of “ending up” would mean in such a context. For the foreseeable future there always should be a tomorrow, even after billions of years, and unless we end up in the final whimper of a universe that is spread thinly and inviably over indefinite and practically empty space, or in a universal crunch that mirrors a primaeval Big Bang, it is not clear to me that there ever should be an end.

Even before either of those could happen, the human population, if not wiped out prematurely, with or without other species that emerged from Earth or from other alien planets, could be spread over colonies separated over distances of billions of parsecs. That implies not only separation too great for the exchange of material objects as in commerce, but separation too great for any known forms of mutual operative communication.

Between the despatch of a trans‑cosmic message and its arrival, the delay would be so great that there would be time for entire galaxies to form and disperse or implode. There are hints at such considerations in the book: “The Sirens of Titan”, by Kurt Vonnegut. The story is characteristically brilliant, but even as it stands, its view is constrained, much as mine is in this essay.

But my point here is that before our descendants could have disseminated over such distances and times, they could be far more alien to our biology, and even to our lines of thought and perception, than we are alien to our own past of a trivial half‑billion years or so on this planet. We might differ from what by then would be our distant descendants, the futures of our hopes and ideals, more than we differ from our least recent multicellular ancestral worm of hardly more than half a billion years ago here on Earth. Whoever wrote “. . .until the twelfth of Never; and that’s a long, long time” had little idea of what he was singing: such scales of reality are finite, but beyond our comprehension.

Finity is in many ways more difficult to comprehend than infinity.

There are too many variables in the sheer biology, technology, and even sociology of an indefinite future, for me to present anything better than handwaving concerning such alien contexts of existence.

The best I can think of is to list a few thoughts as follows, not necessarily in any special sequence, and by no means cogent, complete, or coherent.

Reproduction, ontogeny & metamorphosis could be far different in future: reproduction could be genetic or somatic, but it could, and should, be less traumatic than our current system: at present we pass large, altricial young through limiting rigid passages. The process is a typical product of non‑teleological natural selection, and has nothing to recommend it: it is is slow, limiting, painful and dangerous to all concerned, and is complicated by reproductively irrelevant emotional complications.

Hardly anything of the type could make sense in any teleological system. To begin with, a rationally functional reproductive passage for young of a size smaller than the parent, should pass through a flexible port under voluntary muscular control, say, in the abdominal wall of the parent, perhaps near the navel; but such details need not concern us here. You might like to compare the human system with the parturition of various species of Glossina, in which the young are born full sized and independent, with cooperation between mother and young.

The evolutionary adaptations that led to humans, after a long pregnancy, bearing large, helpless babies in the form of vulnerable caricatures of adults, were the opportunistic outcome of heuristic adaptation. The result, like many such, has been a source of routine suffering and tragedy. Teleologically, humans could have done better, something more like the metamorphosis of insects. To get the idea, readers might like to consult an article on the even more elaborate options presented in hypermetamorphosis, an idea that I introduced in an earlier section. Humans could more comfortably deal with a brief pregnancy, say a few weeks, bearing precociously functional young. The baby might perhaps be rat‑like, though possibly chinchilla‑like would be cuter.

In either case, it certainly would lend some affection to the conventional expression: “rug‑rats”.

Relegation of birth trauma to unwanted and unmourned Freudian clichés would be a kindness to humanity, even more welcome than dispensing with the likes of premenstrual syndrome and period pains, not to mention obstetric hazards, delays, and suffering.

In an improved physiology, future versions of our human descendants’ embryos could develop in a uterus closely in contact with abdominal regions of the brain, as I have suggested them previously, and as each embryo brain grows, it could be provided with direct mental content from the abdominal regions of the parent’s brain, so that at birth it is intellectually, socially, and largely physically, as functional as say, a mature, house‑trained cat or monkey. Or even perhaps a toddler.

The memes implanted in this way into the brains of the unborn, would be transmitted by communication via the equivalent of a cerebral placenta, not by nucleic acid coding. In some ways transmission from the parental brain would resemble our already established mammalian transmission of disease immunity to germs that are ubiquitous in the parental environment.

However, those memes need not be the only non‑genetically transmitted items; avoidance of local threats, concepts of speech and number, and preferences for local foods are other examples of items that could assist newborns to establish themselves in their physical and social environments.

Once born, the young would be active, growing like weeds, and learning like babies as their brains grow, only more so; the adult brain could be many times larger than that of the newborn, in fact larger than the newborn itself. While they grow, the physique of the young would change as radically as that of an insect egg metamorphosing into a caterpillar, or a caterpillar into a pupa, or a tadpole into a frog. There would be no phase of helplessness; at each stage; even if dependent on parents and society, each baby or adolescent would be able to look after itself in any reasonable environment.

However weird that might seem to us at first thought, it is less weird than our current intrauterine metamorphosis.

Whether it would be good to maintain the function of feeding the young from the mother’s body, I am uncertain. It is not logically necessary, but there might be advantages. I leave that for Homo futurens to settle without my interference or approval.

It might seem unrealistic to engineer anything along such lines, but heuristic natural selection has achieved many equally profoundly metamorphic life histories, and teleological evolution should be able to engineer as much or more, and to do so a lot faster, and with less pain or disaster.

A conceivable hazard might be that any information passed on in the womb might amount to obsession, prejudice, or dogma, and in particular might cause dogmatic mental stasis that would be difficult to mitigate. However, what I have in mind for such maternal instruction, would be thirst for information, affection for, and trust in, parents and associates, recognition of threats and means of avoidance, sense of number, semantics, and similar basics. Some items of intrauterine education, such as recognition of parental accents, music, and possibly tastes of foods, may be significant in today’s human children already, so the principle might be less alien than it strikes one at first.

Steven Pinker, in his lucid and factual book: “The Blank Slate”, describes similarly significant, though less dramatic, innate mental functionality. The principle is practically universal in multicellular animals, and necessarily so.

Of course, the natural retort might be that we might as well go to the logical conclusion and lay eggs, and that idea certainly is reasonable; the oviparous principle has lasted in various biological lines for some half a billion years, but there are advantages to the rug‑rat viviparity. It would lend itself more simply to such items as intrauterine education for one thing, and a functional rug‑rat would not need as much yolk as an egg, nor be as vulnerable as an egg, nor be as easy to scramble, and it could bond mutually with the parents more immediately.

The design of notional improvements to the body is an entertaining game, if dispensable at our state of development, but one item that the hominidae forfeited too precipitately, was the tail. I think that a prehensile tail along the lines of the prehensile tails of the Atelidae, should be a material asset. We should want it to be strong enough to swing from, and usable as an extra arm. It might be nice too, if the tip could have two thumbs for fine gripping where appropriate.

But by the time the likes of extra limbs would be practicable, I am sure that our descendants would have developed far more imaginative configurations than just a useful tail.

Teams or Titans; or ‘twixt?

He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river:
its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say.
“You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing
where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path
that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to
the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?”
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Whether in biology, decision theory or engineering, there is no unique approach to design; if ever there were a unique approach, that topic would not be design; it would be no more than implementation. For each approach the advantages and disadvantages depend on the challenges, the resources, and the acceptability of the intended outcome.

In evolution by natural selection, to combine selection for multiple resources in any single species is a very demanding strategy and the higher the degree of integration of multiple genetic adaptations required in any single organism, the more the demanding the selective cost will be. That cost tends to rise exponentially with the number of attributes to be selected for at the same time. Furthermore, to achieve the necessary integration of attributes increases the degree of specialisation in the population, and reduces the organism’s flexibility in the face of changes in the environment.

And in organisms with life expectancies of decades, in populations spread over significant distances and varied circumstances, changes in the environment are likely within a lifetime; when lifetimes are on a scale of millennia, if no change has occurred in such a long period of stasis, the constant circumstances commonly will have led to a high degree of social and biological specialisation, with consequent loss of flexibility.

Over periods of millions of years, change is almost inevitable, and such a change frequently will cause extinctions among specialised organisms.

To predict the probability of change is one thing; to predict its nature and its effect on organisms and populations and ecologies, is a problem on an altogether higher scale of difficulty, or even impracticability: our observable universe is chaotic in nature. To design organisms in anticipation, so that they can meet challenges resiliently, is rarely realistic.

Homo futurens would not be exempt from such principles, except to the degree that teleological selection or genetic engineering can be applied. But teleology certainly can affect the form of developments and events.

Mutualism, Teamwork, and Teleology

Some therefore cried one thing, and some another:
for the assembly was confused: and the more part
knew not wherefore they were come together.
Acts of the apostles 19:32

Now, one might object that in this context we are not discussing natural selection, but teleological design; therefore it certainly is possible to combine functions in ways that would be implausible in heuristic selection. This is true, even though natural selection does often produce incredible, often incredibly beautiful, combinations of functions; but in even the most spectacular examples, mutualism tends to play prominent roles.

Remember that mutualism in this sense is symbiosis in which all participating organisms benefit from the relationship. Each partner contributes its benefits to the others, generally while satisfying its own needs.

The fact is that when a capable partner can perform a function in return for mutual benefit, then, if it is a function that is not in the repertoire of a partner species, it rarely is in the interest of the incapable species to develop the function from scratch. Most often the simplest way to achieve the function is by parasitism or predation, as when a tiger gets its food from grass, by eating the herbivore that eats the grass. Sometimes the effect is more stable, as when an animal carries the seeds of a plant that provides the fruit that the animal needs for food.

Sometimes the relationship becomes so specialised that a plant will poison or otherwise discourage animals other than its mutualistic partners.

Very commonly animals become absolutely dependent on fungi and other microbes that convert indigestible material into food; various ants and termites culture and protect such fungi that convert plant material into balanced nutrition that becomes the entire diet of the colony. One step more intimate, we find in many animals, most prominently ruminants, that they eat low-grade plant material that they store in their guts where their gut symbionts digest, or pre‑digest it, and enrich it with micronutrients.

Sometimes parasites or disease organisms actually carry alien genes that get taken up by the host, which then might integrate the gene into its own genome. More often they might be taken up as endosymbionts that live as mutualists inside the host cells, so intimately that, until not many generations ago, they have been seen as organelles. For example, we now realise that mitochondria and plastids are examples of such bacterial endosymbionts, and in fact the distinction between endosymbionts and organelles is fuzzy and context‑sensitive.

Now, in contemplating teleological design of Homo futurens, the obvious approach might be to say that it is easier and more reliable to incorporate into the subject, any attribute that a mutualistic organism could offer. Certainly that might be true in many cases, but there are limitations.

For example, some vital functions, such as photosynthesis, certainly could be incorporated realistically, but would be of no value in a mammal or bird; photosynthesis depends on either an unrealistically high intensity of light, or a skin area of hundreds of square metres, or a very slow metabolism — in fact activity levels as low as that of the plants that normally provide animal foods.

It takes a lot of photosynthetic plants to feed a single mammal or bird.

Of course, if activity levels were the operative problem, one could imagine a deeply philosophical Homo futurens who is willing to spread out in the sun and think without moving, but even then, such a philosopher would have to think slowly or spread out very wide, because even a slow brain is generally very energy‑hungry; our philosopher could do better to feed on plant foods grown on wide areas of farmland and leave the photosynthesis to the plants; or feed on animals that in turn feed on even wider areas of vegetation, or perhaps on machines driven by sun or fuels, rather than committing to personal maintenance of a photosynthetic metabolism, while spending a great deal of time in the sun.

Photosynthesis of carbohydrates is not the only possible use of photosynthetic energy from the sun. Conceivably, as humanity has done for millions of years, Homo futurens might rely on solar energy for the creation of specialist micronutrient chemicals such as the D‑vitamins, but for most energy‑demanding metabolic processes, farming photosynthesis out to plants would seem to remain the most practical option.

That also would be the most practical option for many other items of dietary deficiency that are so unlikely in a reasonable diet, that there would be no point to synthesising the substances; for instance, given a reasonably balanced diet, lack of most vitamins and other essential nutrients such as unsaturated fatty acids and amino acids is unlikely in humans.

But that is not invariably a clinching argument. There is no guarantee that every staple diet will be adequate, or desirable to produce by agriculture, logistics or other technology: scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, and other deficiency diseases have been common throughout history when changing situations have exposed humans to unbalanced diets or other unhealthy circumstances.

Accordingly, since we would not wish to condemn Homo futurens to avoidable dependency on specialist foods, it would make perfect sense, if teleological genetic engineering were available, to incorporate synthesis of all the most important vitamins, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids and so on. Suitable enzyme functionality exists in extant organisms; that is where the compounds come from as things now are. The teleological design of a few hundred metabolic functions would be minor in comparison to some other molecular biological challenges; the energetic costs would be trivial, and the resulting independence of a wide variety of foods and gut organisms would be valuable in the consequent versatility of acceptable living circumstances.

Another category of increased versatility would be the ability to digest non‑nutritive substances such as cellulose, similar refractory plant components, and harmful substances that at present are dangerously toxic, such as poisons and non-nutritive saccharides and proteins present in some seeds, and many classes of cyclic peptides. How many such items it would be worth incorporating, we cannot predict as yet, but there is obvious scope for such abilities.

Another class of talents would be the ability to recycle what are currently metabolic waste products. Examples include porphyrins that we currently shed from degraded haem. Also, the nitrogen-rich waste products of our metabolism tends to end up as urea or uric acid; it should be more economical to spend a bit of extra energy to convert them to amino acids.

Such changes to our nitrogen economy might render us nearly immune to protein deficiency, but, still at an acceptable energy cost, it might be practical for us to incorporate the metabolic ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen. Then if we could digest cellulose at a reasonable rate, we should be able to subsist on wood shavings, water and air.

As long as our trophic appendages are up to the challenge of some such foods of course.

How much of such an approach would be practicable and worth it is a question for the future; this part of the discussion is purely for illustration of some remote, but important, concepts.

Now, most of those functions, and more, could be implemented by cultures of mutualistic organisms carried within organs of the subject. Some of that occurs already in the human gut, particularly the colon and appendix. The gut cultures also are important in controlling disease organisms and in presenting various immunogens to receptor tissues in various gut regions. More elaborate cultures are maintained in most long‑lived herbivorous species, ranging from termites to elephants.

The trouble with such mainly microbial cultures as opposed to innate digestive functions and antipathogenic defenses, tends to be that they are bulkier and slower in action; however, they tend to be more broadly effective than innate mechanisms, even if they are less specific and efficient in their action. For the simple reason that microbes are ubiquitous and barely limited in their versatility, we could be confident that Homo futurens will tolerate and employ such cultures, though more compactly than ruminants, or possibly even Homo ephemerens.

The fact is that though there might be hundreds, even a couple of thousand, extra heritable functions to add to achieve the type of immortality we have under consideration, there is no clear prospect of it ever being worth incorporating them all into one genome.

However, the concept of mutualism is far broader than just metabolic and defensive; there are many circumstances in which we might wish to consider extra organs or extra company more intimate than just spouses, pets, servants, and friends. I am sure that we all have wished for an extra hand in struggling with a screw or pliers in awkward situations; similarly we may have wished for longer legs or arms, or eyes behind or the ability to see in the dark or hear different frequencies of sound or light, and so on.

And in times of solitude we may have talked to ourselves as a substitute for company.

Now, all those things could in principle be built into future bodies of Homo futurens, in a sort of anatomical analogy to the proverbial Swiss army knife, and very good too, but with analogous shortcomings. They add bulk to the body, and many of them are seldom used, and cannot in all ways be used as independently as a tools in a separate body: some will interfere with each other.

Of course, a member of Homo futurens should be able to shed some classes of attachments to the body, but it could not be a trivial operation; even for Homo futurens, removing extra eyes or limbs could not be a casual matter, like shedding a waldo; it commonly would require elaborate remodelling of the body.

Well then, when actual bodily redesign is undesirable, there are alternative strategies for some purposes; the simplest would be cooperation possibly within teams, either casual, or contractual, which would be analogous to marital connections in our day; or some partners could be aliens or non-human animals or robots, possibly in the form of waldos.

So far so familiar, except that members of some teams could very likely be more intimately connected than by speech — just as brains with shared thalami or connected thalami can share subjective experience, so separate brains in separate bodies with electronic communication between thalami should be able to cooperate with coordination practically as close as if the bodies were shared. And then the teams need not in principle be limited to just pairs; it would be interesting to watch a game of football in which the teams minds were thus connected. But to my mind watching a crew of builders or similar industrial activity, or the crew of a major vessel or some forms of research or ranching, would be a lot more interesting.

Herding cats might not seem so impossible anymore.

Again, a composite body could be partitioned into separable sections, say a centaur‑like or manlike central part, but with separately viable, but largely interdependent, units for various functions. The main head‑and‑body unit might be roughly of the same conformation as our current Homo sapiens, but some of the units could attach at times of rest, physical inaction or social interaction, or when their specific participation is appropriate. Otherwise they could park or go their own ways, much as team members or pets would. Of course, their mutual emotional attachment would be more intense than any such familiar role, even between identical twins; while attached or communicating actively the units would combine in subjectively amounting to one person.

An obvious example of such an attachment could be a tail‑end‑charlie, perched suitably behind the main body, looking back, up and sideways, with four limbs for locomotion and manipulation when not attached to the central body. That would take care of the need for extra arms and eyes. Another unit riding in front could also contribute functional limbs, but with its major function being extra brain power for handling detailed data storage, reference and calculation.

Whether such partners need be connected at the thalamic level or not, is an open question, and possibly with various answers depending on various considerations. It might be worth speculation along the lines of work done on patients whose brain has been split surgically at the corpus callosum, thereby in effect separating two mentalities into the respective two half brains. Such brains seem to work with very little apparent effect of the surgery on the behaviour of the body, until experiments on one half of the brain at a time reveal that each half has its own consciousness. Even if they are not clearly conscious of their separation, they work effectively as a team controlling the body.

Something of that type might permit another form of effective control of bodies and minds by teamwork.

Work on a girl, half of whose brain had to be removed to deal with catastrophic and untreatable epilepsy, showed that she was able to continue a largely normal life, though with certain functional restrictions in handling advanced mental functions; the reports I read were superficial.

Works of Oliver Sacks also have suggested vividly that there is a great deal more parallel processing of minds, as well as a great deal more mutual interference going on in our brains, than we normally realise. I mention this again in the section on the brain.

By now it should be clear that there are many rival considerations in establishing immortal lines and societies. At present we can do no more than speculate on which approaches will be most effective and most acceptable. The scope for future teleological study and engineering is beyond reliable estimation at present.

Anatomism and anathema...

Failure to build on the heritage we receive, is betrayal of our past,
and to mummify the heritage we bequeath,
by condemning uncomprehended what our children might build,
is betrayal of our future

One more time: we now are living in the first period in this planet's history in which a species can rationally and realistically discuss prospects for radically changing and managing the biology, survival, development, and dissemination of humanity, and even its essential definition, either physically or in terms of abstract ideals. The rate at which biological studies are advancing, suggests that within a century or two we should be in sight of practical means of conquering senescence, so that we can concentrate on what matters beyond that.

In fact I am not at all sure just what our fundamental physical and emergent components and attributes might turn out to be.

The very meaning of life would change beyond our ability to predict.

In our own past we have consistently failed to predict the significance and consequences of our various projects and advances. Modern physics, chemistry, biology, maths, cities, transport, war, sociology. . . Everything not only has turned out materially differently from what anyone expected, but qualitatively differently as well.

Ozone holes, lead pollution, plastics pollution, political functionality, futility of mass education, climate change, ethical collapse are symptomatic of failure to establish ESSs, or at least SSSs.

If we keep bumping our heads against such comparative trivialities as regime changes on one minor planet, what should we expect of future generations of some really fundamental changes? One of the most destructive classes of change is when the heritage of the past is lost, together with its modifying influence on patterns of behaviour and social infrastructure.

As a modest, but significant, functional example of such a loss: my death as an immortal should imply a greater loss to myself and society, than my death as an evanescent mortal: if I, old and mortal as I am, were to die tomorrow, it would cost me no more than a very few decades of life, and cost my community a few decades of my services; on the other hand, if in spite of being functionally immortal, I were to be killed tomorrow, it would cost me, and the community that I serve, an indefinite number of millennia of my service.

What those millennia would have meant to me if I had survived as functionally immortal — or how I could have used them constructively in the interests of anyone or anything else — is another matter, but there is no reason to assume in general that any socially functional members of the community are of more value dead than alive, either to themselves, or to the living world, irrespective of their respective ages.

And when it does happen that anyone’s death is preferable for all concerned, then such a death is accessible always, even for immortals. It would be desirable that it would pass with as little pain as practical, and as little waste of the deceased’s heritage or resources: suicide too, would take on a new significance, and so would many other aspects of ethical codes and social relationships.

It is sobering to think how fundamental the implications of mortality and longevity are for our everyday lives. Tinkering with them must have momentous implications and consequences.

A common emotional reaction to what our immortal descendants would look like, is the product of visions of inhuman science‑fiction caricatures: perhaps creatures with huge bald heads, no teeth, vestigial naked bodies, all the usual themes. Oh, and often including evil human emotions as well — malice, vanity, megalomania, and all that. However, no matter how juicy the idea might be as science fiction, nothing of the sort need follow in real life.

I doubt that such a thing could follow anyway. Many of our innate reactions are small‑minded and childish at best, and to control them requires education, hard work, and goodwill.

Nothing I have supposed so far implies that immortal humans need look radically different from current humans, not before the new generations desire it anyway: most of the essentially new attributes might be internal or inconspicuous: tissue renewal, brain maintenance, vital organ replacement, and so on. Teeth might be renewed indefinitely, one at a time, inconspicuously and painlessly, much as happens in many species of sharks: any generation of teeth might have a half‑life of several years, each matched pair of teeth being replaced without fuss as the new pair grows; eyes could be replaced spontaneously one at a time every few decades, even more casually than we currently replace lenses or spectacles, and without surgical intervention. Skin would remain young, and hair and nails could be redesigned to be less troublesome; cochlear hair cells could regrow continuously.

And so on.

Anyway, personal choices of appearance and function are not for us to prescribe, hardly to evanescent contemporaries, and certainly not to immortal descendants.

On the other hand, it does not follow that the human appearance of our immortal descendants must remain stagnant in the state of some version of our 21^st century Übermensch, the product of thousands of years of alleged civilisation: within a few centuries of developing the necessary immortal technology, you could expect to see new anatomical designs: something more creative and imaginative than people with gorilla musculature supporting big brains and noble profiles, or Barbie‑doll anorexia. In their day those new generations might wish to add improvements on the Homo sapiens of their parents, or even their birth. Why not extra limbs, extra eyes, more functional feeding, breathing, and sensory organs?: All that sort of thing might emerge in response to technology, whim, even fashion. It is not for us to define, much less dictate, what the essence of human nature is, or what it might be, or what humanity might want to become in the indefinite future, or even just a few generations down the line.

In our own day we have every reason to believe that society, and indeed individuals and teams, can benefit from variation in size, shape and other attributes; for some purposes we want giant brains, for others gigantic strength, and for yet others midget stature.

Not long ago a South African university advertised for a team of compact speleologists (who mainly turned out to be petite young women) to explore recently discovered caves containing ground‑breaking fossil discoveries behind narrow apertures deep underground; the very idea gives me the horrors, but there were many applications from brave, intelligent, and competent youngsters, and the project has turned out to be ground‑breaking and dramatically successful.

The point is that that was just one example of how variations in personal attributes and tastes can be valuable. Decades ago, in works such as The Seedling Stars, James Blish, with characteristically stimulating insight into unexplored lines of thought, speculated on the production of human forms suited to currently impossible environments.

He rightly rejected any idea of such forms being in any way less human than our current habit might be; and similarly in our day those petite speleologists are equally human, and so would the tail‑end‑charlies of future Homo futurens bodily teams be.

We might well expect Homo futurens communities even just one millennium into the future to be as varied as the specimens in any microscope slide of pond water, and yet fully human.

Always assuming that Humanity lasts another millennium. . .

There is no reason to argue that our current morphology is the only human option, much less that it is the best one possible. Once teleological evolution and technological elaboration take over, the sky is no limit: natural selection is not teleological: but even teleological selection cannot select from non‑existing features. To supply the missing features we need teleological construction or reconstruction. More on such matters soon. . .

Some of the designs that might emerge could be shocking to our current eye, but,as I already remarked, appearance is an aesthetic matter; functional immortality is independent of taste whether according to our current fashions, or the fashions that might appeal to Homo futurens down the ages.

Don’t sneer! We ourselves would look pretty weird, downright effete, to our ancestors of one million years ago, and those chinless wonders in turn would look attractive only to very specialised tastes of our day. Go back some five to seven million years, and our line would look more like chimpanzees than humans.

To be wedded to our current anatomy, both for our future descendants, and for anyone who from now on adopts functional changes to her or his anatomy, would be no better than sexism, racism, or speciesism all in one. So I coined the term “anatomism” for such bias; I could perhaps more justifiably have settled on “morphologism”, but I suspected that fewer readers would be familiar with the distinction.

Seventy‑Million‑Year Itch.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Perhaps a better title for this chapter, as an analogy to the proverbial “seven‑year‑itch” might have been: “Seventy‑million‑Year Rainy Sunday Afternoon”.

After all, this essay deals with immortality, not transitory restlessness. Seventy million years is only about one fiftieth of the age of life on this planet, and as recently as seventy million years ago, the Atlantic ocean was already more than just a strait. So we don’t want to indulge our impatience unreasonably childishly.

Still, the topic of individual lifespan in our sense implies some sort of continuous consciousness — a mind, a subjective consciousness if you like — and that implies a brain that can remain functional in dealing with both the outside world and the world within. This is less obvious than it might seem: every pollen grain you swallow, every skin cell you shed, is the end of a continuous chain of largely faultless nucleic acid reproduction over a period of billions of years — not a fleeting seventy million.

But that succession of genomes does not count as individual survival in our sense: what counts here is conscious, subjective, mental continuity, and to some extent to support that, somatic continuity, rather than reproductive, or even genetic continuity.

Just think: I can look back to my childhood decades ago, and I remember things that I said, did, and thought, and they often are very different from what I would have done in the hindsight of decades, and yet, I still see that child as me.

All the same, no human who knew me all those years ago would know me on meeting me unintroduced now. And anyone seeing me in a photo as a curly‑headed four-year-old with my mother, could hardly pick me out of an identification parade of old codgers. Remember Heraclitus with his river that changed every time you stepped in; remember that you too differed each time.

And yet, remember Minkowski’s time lines. They offer a basis for a practical conception of entities that have an existence extending through a period of time. Here we can take it for granted, but I have produced an essay that discussed that concept, among others, in greater detail in terms of the ship of Theseus. It should be accessible online at:
https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-point_19.html

Other discussions along similar lines are available online, including in Wikipedia.

But the upshot is that informally we can regard the world line of the subjective consciousness of a brain as a continuous entity for as long as we can regard the brain as having a continuous existence.

But that too, demands that the brain does not run out of function for lack of resources, and for continuous existence, you need memory. It takes a lot of memory to cover decades of life, and if you change those decades to thousands or even millions of years memory, the necessary volume is huge.

Seventy million years is not indefinite, but as we, our minds, experience life at present, most of us are not satisfactorily able to make the most of even our seventy years of adult life. Certainly some manage it, but in my opinion those are the exceptions: Joe Average does poorly. I for one have forgotten more than I now know.

Part of that is a problem of education, but frankly, I uncharitably doubt that even half of today’s human population is mentally equipped to be sufficiently educable to deal productively with our proverbial threescore years and ten, let alone a million times as long:

our contemporary human brain commonly is inadequate.

If that is intellectual snobbery, make the most of it; for sceptics and cavillers I prescribe a course of watching commercial television or online interviews with allegedly randomly‑chosen members of the public: generally prosperous‑looking products of our schools, or even of tertiary education. When the TV and social online media fail, such types can hardly deal with a rainy sunday, even by recourse to reading. What their minds would make of even a modestly extended lifespan — say a thousand years — without the external discipline and stimulation of a job or military authority, I cringe to imagine. During a second century, or sooner in such minds, I would expect a pandemic of running amuck and suicide, or massive addiction problems.

Even as things are now, adjustment to a decade or two of retirement after say, four decades of employment, defeats many people. Careful preparation, paternalism, and instruction can help educated employees, but even among those the frequency of failures is dismaying; what is anyone to do about it?

Given humans’ currently prevailing standards of mental powers and education, there hardly seems to be much one could do at all, beyond preparing them as well as might be practical, then looking after them as well as society can afford, till they drop off the twig. And that is a lot better than has been the rule throughout history — during which a forty‑year lifespan would be more realistic.

And yet, consider the large minority that do make a life for themselves in retirement, and at the very least continue to contribute to the needs of the family in various ways, sometimes remaining effective breadwinners, leaders, and educators, repositories of insight, education, and wisdom for their families and the community; such specimens show the way. If their bodies could remain healthy and functional for longer, and their brains could support them healthily and functionally for longer, people like that could remain welcome as valuable and valued members of family and society for as long as they last — or are willing to last.

Extension of the lives of such people could be indefinite, on a scale of say a few centuries; nothing like immortality, but none the less invaluable in many cases. By all means let us invest as much as we can in fighting off senility; anyone who does not like the idea is likely to be expendable, and need not be goaded into drop by drop enlarging the Flood that rolls hoarser with Anguish as the Ages roll.

At the same time, in contrast, we could in good conscience support those who rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But to an immortal, or even anyone with a lifespan as short as a few thousand years, after a brain inadequate to deal with more than a few centuries of experience or activity had run out of its functional capacity, it would be about as useful as a skull‑full of dough, and a good deal more tormenting; a brain, ordinary by our current standards, with the inability to maintain maximal function for one currently usual lifetime, would be useless for a greatly extended lifetime. Whether any such persons’ extended survival or euthanasia were up to them or not, would hardly matter after a century or two.

So if we are to mount so much as a militant gesture at a much‑extended lifetime, we first need to improve the maintenance, regrowth, extension, and recovery mechanisms of our brains. After early childhood, our current human brains have little capacity for growth, development or recovery from wear and tear and senescence, let alone injury. Adding the necessary mechanisms for such facilities might make the brain bulkier, but we cannot even tell yet whether the current bulkiness of our brain is logically necessary to support our current levels of function; brains in some animals achieve remarkable functionality in spite of being remarkably small.

One might add that although some people with pathologically small brains certainly are hardly functional, it does not follow that those whose brains are impressively large will turn out to be proportionately brilliant. Judging from size alone, it is hard to guess what would be necessary to enable brain inflation to support genius levels of function; neural interconnectivity seems likely to be relevant, but there is more to the matter than any single attribute.

The implication is that gross functional expansion of brain structures is likely to be tricky. We have no reason to doubt that there would be realistic scope for raising routine human mental power and emotional quality to beyond what we currently regard as brains of genius, and genius to yet higher levels. Furthermore, it should be possible to do so by genetic engineering, so that the results would be heritable.

At a more modest, but dramatically important, level, some functionally crucial expansion and qualitatively more advanced restructuring of human brains seems to have happened to Homo sapiens during that population bottleneck less than a million years ago. I personally have a suspicion that the bottleneck was associated with our being the only surviving line of anthropoid ape with 46 chromosomes instead of 48. What is more, I suspect that we could support the idea that that was the point at which Homo sapiens emerged as a species.

But, right or wrong, that is a matter of historic detail.

As things stand, our conception of how our brains work, in particular in dealing with problems we do not yet understand, is still derisory. It may at this point be worth remembering a quip by Emerson Pugh:

If the human mind were simple enough to understand,
we’d be too simple to understand it.

But that need not imply that each of us must understand all of the brain and mind as a prerequisite to improving the human brain progressively; after all, no really complex scheme of engineering or development in our technology is understood throughout by any one person, let alone every person involved.

Nor would anything like complete understanding be necessary in practice; in our current infrastructure I master and use all sorts of facilities without fully understanding much of any of them, but I still function happily and productively in my little role in society.

But even the millennium of lifespan that would require such brains of genius would be trivial in comparison to the scale of functional lifespan that we are considering here: millions or billions of years. No reasonable brain architecture could hold it all, let alone access it all, process it all, or interconnect it all. Exactly what to demand of the requirements of such a brain structure, we cannot yet tell, but if there is no practical means of dealing with it, our future looks pretty futile. As I have remarked, science fiction stories tend to imagine aliens or human descendants with huge heads that look much like the abdomens of termite queens. Such creatures commonly might be kept alive, but immobile, in special laboratories.

Remember the Grand Lunar of H. G. Wells: that sort of approach to creating an adequate brain is not in principle impossible, but it is not clear that it would suffice for an indefinite life, much less be necessary for anything human. To be sure, our offspring several generations down the line might have larger, more powerful, more functional brains than ours, but even such improved brains would be most unlikely to bulk so large as to limit mobility or increase vulnerability; that would seem to me to be an unacceptable price for a personal library and office.

Crutches or Amplifiers?

It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power;
but who hath duly Considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?
Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it;
Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record,
and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations.
Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs,
transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days' work;
comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy
"Let there not be," and the many‑coloured creation is shriveled up in blackness.
George Eliot — Daniel Deronda

In some ways, in our own time, however incoherently, humans as a species already have been dealing increasingly flexibly with the problems of limitations on brain power and capacity. Our measures began with the development of traditional abilities, recounted experience, and oral education. They then progressed into writing. The indefinite accumulation of intellectual heritage that had begun with oral traditions, in which wisdom and erudition were passed down in gossip and in stories, in teaching and in apprenticeship, developed into the establishment of professions: hunters, gatherers, stone nappers, memorisers, leaders, ecclesiastics. . . . .

More recently, we have expanded our capacity for data, our ability to extend our mental capacities in dimensions unanticipated in past millennia. Early stages of the expansion included technological advances such as Napier’s rods and counting frames. They since have progressed to calculators and various classes of computers, communication technology, and media for information storage and processing.

And of course, opportunistic social parasites soon emerged and increasingly propagated. They took destructive advantage of positions of authority or prestige, and of the gullibility of their communities — they were the witch‑doctors, priests, shysters and hereditary despots. Such were with us from our inception, and there is no prospect yet of their going away as long as it is easier for Joe Average to study for a parasitic profession, than it is for society to deal with its professional manipulators.

The fact is that most people are happy to attach themselves to whomever is presented as the boss, and whatever id the group claiming loyalty; those are the basis of faith and of loyalty.

They also are the prey of the social parasite.

This is a problem, because the manipulators show every sign of being a greater threat to human, or post‑human progress, or even existence, than anything else in our environments. But on the hopeful assumption that we ever can overcome that childhood disease of our race, I continue to develop this theme.

Such developments as writing, followed by books of various sorts. dismayed early major intelligentsia such as Socrates and Plato; they rightly feared that writing would reduce the need for unaided memory, or its exercise; their perspective in their day could not compass the costs, inefficiencies, incapacity, and unreliability of passing on matters of fact or formal concepts except by human messengers.

Nor, at first, did they appreciate the necessity and difficulty of storing information without permanent records. (The future difficulty of storing and managing those records, would have been beyond their contemporary horizons.) They lived in too early an age to realise the scale of conception and storage and access to relevant reference information, that the world increasingly presents and demands control of, by any community wishing to remain functional.

There were of course, yet other shortcomings to their perspectives; semiotics as a recognised discipline was still a long way away from proper recognition, let alone development. For instance the opponents of literacy had failed to recognise that writing was merely an extension of an earlier, subtler, but arguably even more fundamental channel of communication: speech and abstract vocabulary. I am reminded of some of my own childhood reading in “The Coral Island” by R. M. Ballantyne: . . .

"Suppose, now, Peterkin, that you wanted to build a ship, and I were to give you a long and particular account of the way to do it, would not that be very useful?”

“No doubt of it,” . . .

“And suppose I were to write the account in a letter instead of telling you in words, would that be less useful?”

“Well — no, perhaps not.”

“Well, suppose I were to print it, and send it to you in the form of a book, would it not be as good and useful as ever?”. . .

Given that I read that before I was eight years old, and was able to remember it into my old age, and access it at desire, it seems to me to reflect something of importance in the principle.

Since the first speech, the first writing, followed by the first books, then increasingly advanced printing technology that brought about floods of books, together with an increasing preponderance of wasted time, ink, and paper, such media have transformed intellectual and technological realities for humanity.

And, have there been associated adverse consequences?

Certainly.

Will those adverse consequences get worse as the developments multiply and intensify?

Inevitably.

Would it not have been better to forbid writing as the naïveté of ancient philosophers urged?

Bear in mind that it is quite fashionable to say so: “good old days” and all that. . .

But the very idea fails inspection. For thousands of years humanity was trapped in a lobster pot of intellectual sterility, for lack of conservation and lack of propagation of information and intellectual intercourse. Certainly, on two or even three continents, the genius of two to four millennia ago had in its time repeatedly burgeoned breathtakingly, but each time it then had repeatedly ground into sterility, with most of the advances being in applied technology and skills rather than accumulation and dissemination of advances in competence and concepts.

Once printing, even in the face of exploitation and legislation, had gained a foothold in a few countries in the fifteenth century, the eruption of intellectual cross‑fertilisation could no longer be contained: in our last two centuries or so, the sheer volume of material and intellectual advance, and in the nature of research, has dwarfed the fruits of our entire previous million years or so, of history and prehistory, most of which has simply vanished anyway.

By say, the start of the nineteenth century, the day of the universal polymath was fading in an atmosphere of available information too voluminous for individual minds and short lives.

The accumulated tragedy of lost intellectual heritage is starkly illustrated by what we have learnt from the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism, a product many centuries ahead of its time and technology, lost for over two thousand years. Far from denying the genius of the ancients, whether intellectual or practical, this does show how widespread literacy empowers large populations of intellectually talented people who otherwise would have plodded sterilely on in bucolic ignorance. Certainly the unthinking, untalented, uncaring, always we have with us, but such we always must suffer, however ungladly; that burden does not prevent external aids and education from unbinding fine minds from the paralysing burden of having to repeat trivialities. To remove such encumbrances enriches the culture of the intelligent.

Nor may we ignore science that has enabled us to tame diseases that in the past have caused misery and death to billions, science that already has permitted us to see more of the world than dreamt of even at the start of the twentieth century.

True, given the way the uncivilised apply the fruits of civilisation, we still threaten to destroy ourselves, and possibly good riddance if so, but at the same time, no previous generations have been in a position to realise that, though stones may fall from heaven, we can deflect such stones if we start early enough in applying the tools that science, based on our heritage in science, has afforded us.

Accordingly, when science enables us to improve our unaided brains to such an extent that the intellectual material available to Joe Average dwarfs the intellect of the finest polymaths of the past, and even that begins to bog down as lifespans extend into thousands or millions of millennia, we still have certain classes of option: one of them is professional specialisation — specialisation is the bugbear of the little mind that bewails the separation of cultures.

Professional specialisation is in essence a compromise, a confession of imperfection. As crutches go, it often is unavoidable; but remember to specialise only where the alternative would be worse. I’ll say more about that later.

Imagine that the effective field of the power of some great mind is say, just one arm of a galaxy, then by all means let such a mind refrain from detailed concentration on the stars and ecologies and politics of planets in neighbouring galaxies. And that arm might be just a wisp of some billions of stars. Not even a demigod can be expected to comprehend everything worth understanding about even such a modest region. It is not even possible to know everything about one planet. And compare that with having to comprehend everything about a universe of billions of galaxies scattered over trillions of parsecs, with everything dynamically in the process of increasing entropy.

Even individual genius absolutely must rely on functional degrees of specialisation in dealing with recorded reference material for meta‑enrichment, amplification, and comprehension, of data and fields of subject matter. Most of the information simply is unavailable; most of the rest is more than any brain can hold. And most of the residue has to be condensed, with the rest discarded as probably non-essential. No matter how great any material brain might be, even a single galaxy is too large for it to master everything, including other brains, within that galaxy, never mind the universe.

The impossibility does not arise just from the matter of overwhelming fact and detail; on a far greater scale the emergent interrelationships between facts and details — the scale of the combinatorics of reality — increases exponentially with the scale of the details.

But all is not lost. We learn to organise, to generalise, to treat different things in terms of what makes them different and how they are similar enough to treat as being the same in the right respects.

But that is not all. Long before we come to such a pass, we should have achieved some sort of telepathy: not the mystical telepathy of fantasy and science fiction, but the ability for brains to communicate spontaneously with as much intimacy as the various sections of the brains within our skulls commune with each other. Such a form of telepathy, based on the technology of communication plus access to physical brain connections, would amount to a sort of mental Wide Area Network, only subtler, using various media of communication. That should mitigate the problems of both capacity and of computation: simply wonder publicly about something mysterious, and a web of companion minds could pass the question outwards till either a comprehension emerged, or a new item of ignorance was registered as fair game for exploration.

Or till everyone agreed to dismiss an item of triviality or futility.

Mind you, the scope for mental viruses. . . !

Next, apart from organic brains, the network should include multitudes of intelligent computers and data storage media that continuously store, structure, cross‑reference, and compact information of all sorts, and communicate dynamically with live brains.

Each human brain could easily limit its content of data that are not of sustained interest, to make room for everyday functional brainwork. Readers with a comprehension of computer databases and cloud storage, will recognise some themes in that conception, but should also recognise the sheer primitive naïveté of the cloud storage of today, in comparison with what our descendants of just a few millennia to come, would take for granted.

Note that what I have described in the minds of Homo futurens resembles in principle the way in which we in our day use records, data, reference works, conferences, online software, gossip, and so on, though with brains and facilities as far removed from our current standards as Homo ephemerens, as ours are removed from those of pre‑classical schools, and as those in turn outranked the intellectual standards of paleolithic gropers after technology and civilisation.

Note that nothing I say here belittles the greatness of the minds that conceived those first advances; instead I urge that we respect them and that we in turn add our contributions to our heritage.

The finiteness of our brains and bodies does not yet justify despair. Even imperfection can achieve a good deal. Consider what our even our current pathetic appearance would look like to our own ancestors of about 100000 years ago, whether Homo or other hominins; for that matter, even our current racist political problems are largely fuelled by our range of superficial appearance, even when the functional differences between our populations are practically negligible.

The importance of the foregoing speculation is that the apparent brick wall of brain capacity in finite human bodies is not essential to the definition of immortal humanity. The seventy million years — nor seventy billion, need not present difficulties of scale.

We can handle them.

All the same, as the billions mount up, new scales will appear that would not concern limited lifetimes, but would affect immortals.

Specialisation, Training, Change, Education, Castes.

      Our choicest plans
     have fallen through,
our airiest castles
     tumbled over,
because of lines
     we neatly drew
and later neatly
     stumbled over.
             Piet Hein

Specialisation occurs in such varied forms in various circumstances, that I touch on only a few unavoidable aspects. In the context of the difficulties of a limited brain in dealing with unlimited information, specialisation is one of a range of necessary strategies for coping with an arbitrarily complex world, and it entails serious risks or consequences; professional educational specialisation commonly leads to silo mentality of intellectually paralysing intensity.

When genetic ecological specialisation arises in the course of natural selection, it may be worse than educational specialisation, in that it can lead to extinction when the environment changes. In contrast, teleological development, if sufficiently sophisticated and competent, can in principle overcome the penalties of genetic specialisation, but it is no trivial matter to manage specialisation in the face of unstable challenges.

Homo futurens however, would have to navigate such challenges repeatedly within one lifetime, never mind one epoch. It would be necessary to change caste repeatedly to match requirements.

In the life of any one member of the species Homo futurens, apart from facing ecological challenges, there would be scope for an indefinite number of successive, more or less functionally specialised, professional roles as the millennia pass. The main difference between such specialisations and ecological specialisation, would be that those professional roles would not be biologically predetermined, but would be notionally under the control of the individual; the individual could plan and react to circumstances as seems fit.

Such a succession of professional roles in life would have something more like human dignity, than anything we find so far in Homo sapiens, if you like . . .

And instead of being slaves doomed to specialisation, a community within a teleological species in which individuals understand, and can modify, their roles and evolution to adopt or create new options, could remain viable indefinitely.

Think of it as another item in a Brave New World.

All right on the night

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet,
balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying,
take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations,
analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer,
cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
Robert A. Heinlein

Another hazardous concept is that of perfection; I have nowhere spoken of achieving perfection, either now or ever. For one thing I do not think that any ultimate form of perfection is meaningful in our real world.

Secondly, just like specialisation, I suspect that anything resembling perfection in the real world soon would turn out to be suicidal. As in specialisation in natural selection, in which genetically determined specialisation is extinction‑bait, perfection could only exist with reference to given circumstances; whenever the circumstances change the perfection would have to change equally rapidly and functionally, or it too would lead to extinction.

No, what I in my limited mind, in my limited society, in my limited environment, would prescribe for the future of my species, would be a role in the enrichment of our universe for as long as it lasts, and to exploit the increase in universal entropy to the maximum.

And perfection is the enemy of the good; the striving for perfection has destroyed innumerable projects: let perfection take care of itself. Instead of committing to some perfectionistic specialism, some forms of Homo futurens should be able to modify their bodies to not necessarily permanent needs.

Any process of adapting a physical body according to particular tasks would be non‑trivial; gross bodily changes could not happen overnight. An immortal who wished to grow new organs or bodily configuration would presumably not mind working at it for a few years, and applying the new talents for a few centuries, much as we might dedicate a few months or years to perfecting a skill or fighting a disability in our time; whether to retain all the concomitant changes when the needs lapse or change, would be a separate decision.

Such changes do occur in nature, but not at will nor indefinitely repeatedly. In most ant species, individuals exchange food, and in some species, known as honeypot ants, some members of the worker castes, known as “repletes” can accumulate syrup to support the colony in times of shortage. In a prosperous nest, half the workers may be active foragers or labourers and in some species repletes may not have started out as repletes.

Most castes in nature are determined at about early maturity, but that rule is not rigid; in many species, alpha reproductives will inhibit reproduction in all the other colony or pack members, but when the dominant members die or are supplanted in such a colony or population, some of the younger members may take over, in some species even changing their gender to do so.

Among immortals as I have described them there need be no such constraints, because all their actions would be teleological, and many castes could on principle change almost as easily as current humans can change professions.

Examples of notional castes in Homo futurens could be analogous to living repletes among ants; they could be living librarians who manage data, living references who memorise data and data relationships, possibly acting as arbitri elegantiae or authorities in other roles or forms. Some could be managers of space‑colonies or space‑craft, and others could be various classes of community managers, consultants, or judges. Some could specialise in mental and electronic communication

There are no end of specialist professions even today, and there always will be more in future. The big difference is that any Homo futurens would in principle be able to change roles and study new roles as they please. Some forms of change might indeed seem hard to conceive‑— for example, once a memoriser had lived for a million years as a data storage service specimen, and grown an outsize brain to accommodate the products of the profession, it is hard to imagine such a person being able to shrink the brain again to adopt the role of an active‑bodied explorer or pioneer.

But that sort of problem I am willing to bequeath to future generations to deal with.

Or to exploit.

The Outward Urge.

Du grosses Gestirn! Was wäre dein Glück, wenn du nicht Die hättest,welchen du leuchtest!. . .
du würdest deines Lichtes und dieses Weges satt geworden sein,
ohne mich, meinen Adler und meine Schlange.
Aber wir warteten deiner an jedem Morgen, nahmen dir deinen Überfluss ab und segneten dich dafür.

Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine. . .
you would have grown weary of your light and of this journey,
without me, my eagle and my serpent.
But we waited for you every morning, took from you your superfluity and blessed you for it.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Whenever we begin to think in terms of anything like meaningful material immortality, we find that to think in terms of a single planet, or even a single solar system is absurd. As I point out elsewhere in this document, this planet is finite in capacity, finite in longevity, and, above all, unavoidably insecure. Whether the planet’s ability to sustain life will last until the sun expands or not, its ability to support humanity in anything but a global slum is limited — very limited.

You might argue that this is all to the good, that humanity needs discipline, constraints, even pruning. There might be merit to such objections, but they are no better than academic: not everybody accepts those objections, or if people do, they rarely are willing to adopt the role of the prunings, nor even to sacrifice their own values or convenience in favour of parties with rival claims on resources.

Some zealots go to various doctrinal extremes: those in one category argue in effect that man is vile, the universe is beautiful beyond comprehension, and that it should remain unspoilt by human hand, or for that matter by human presence; for humankind to wipe itself out is the only tolerable option. Others go to opposite extremes, and see humanity or, at the very least, human souls, as the supreme items of value in the universe, so nothing should be conserved that does not promote human numbers and worship.

I do not trouble myself with any such class of points of view. Primarily, I see the universe as being what is observable in any way, and that implies that humanity cannot foreseeably occupy more than a trace of the capacity of such a universe; if ever we do, then it will devolve on the humanity of that future to deal with it. But I also show that the very nature of a human population occupying the observable universe is hard to define, even if the universe is not finite, but extends beyond what we can observe in principle — which is not yet established.

What is more, without sufficiently functional brains, it is not clear how immortals could exist at all, and, given adequate brains, their intellectual perspective should be sufficiently deep to appreciate the scope for indefinite maintenance of resources, and to apply the necessary measures to conserve and increase them.

Whether this would imply a finite objective or population, is not at present clear, but that is not relevant to us here or now.

What can be sure of is that we need to populate our solar system, or die, and having populated our solar system, or at least begun to do so systematically, we should need to expand outwards to other systems. From time to time, stars would explode or expand, and visiting planets or black holes or similarly unavoidable visitors or bearers of disaster would inevitably appear; at present, we are ephemeral, and our options for dealing with such things are still ignominious.

However, it is clear that our scope for improving ourselves and equipping our descendants, is promising.

Always assuming we don’t kill ourselves first—either violently, or incompetently.

Most likely both.

One alternative, the suicidal approach, the idea that the universe would be more beautiful without humanity (or possibly without any life at all) I reject absolutely. Beauty with no beholder is not beauty at all. I am not a great fan of Nietzsche, but he beautifully expressed this point in his prologue to Also sprach Zarathustra, though I differ with him on the concept of the star having any interest in the matter; I reject his view, that anything inanimate could care for the appreciation or blessings of anything sentient, whether human animal, or machine; as I see it the emotional relationship is one‑sided.

The sun no more cares for my appreciation than the stone on which I stub my toe sniggers when I trip and curse. The perversity of the inanimate really is inanimate, and I need no more apologise for my spite, than feel virtuous for my appreciation.

Accordingly, yes. Sentient regard for the universe is necessary for the beauty of the universe — a sort of emergent effect, if you like. Without humans (or any number of alien species somewhere) it would be neither beautiful nor ugly; at most it would just be; and even that is debatable. It certainly would not be anything more than indifferent — which is not a lot better than downright ugly.

I realise that this assertion is semantically unacceptable to many philosophies, but apologists must see to their own assumptions; these are mine.

Anyone who fears that a universe would be aesthetically vandalised if technological life were to be established on every potentially habitable planet (out of the question, I am certain) may be consoled by the realisation that practically all such planets would be around dwarf stars of K‑type and G‑type, conceivably with a job lot of M‑type and F‑type. Such stars are not visible to the naked eye at distances of more than a few parsecs, so even a crowded universe would not be visibly less beautiful than an empty one, once you get beyond the city lights.

Never mind the difficulty of detecting the presence of planets around them at all, populated or not.

And value of another type is that of purpose. Intellectually immature heart‑searchers in every generation have snivelled about the incomprehensibility of the meaning and purpose of life, and the general gloominess of things; such people fail to realise that those things are essentially personal; they depend on one’s own values, sense, and courage. If you lack such things, choose your friends more sensibly.

In his really quite intelligent book, “The Virginian” Owen Wister put the following quote:

When a man ain't got no ideas of his own, he'd ought to be kind o' careful
who he borrows 'em from.

And such values of morality and beauty depend on mind, subjective‑and‑objective mind. They mean nothing without goals and progress. Before the emergence of mind from the process of biological evolution, there is no such thing: wherever there is universe beyond perception, there can be neither purpose nor value.

That is one of the core principles behind the parable of Zarathustra: without a mind the concept of value, virtue, or beauty is meaningless, but mind is not in itself sufficient; one needs courage, creativity, and the intelligence to build and admire, rather than to consume, destroy, and defile.

And although immortality and ubiquity and amplified mental power do not guarantee achievement of such things, they do increase the scope for them.

And without those things, we really are doomed. And doomed to a messy and contemptible end at that.

As Wells put it:

Human history becomes more and more a race
between education and catastrophe.

And my confidence sinks lower and lower.

But surrender is no option if civilisation is to survive.

Beyond the Body

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet
Eric Hoffer

In the light of the foregoing discussion, the immortality of the body of the individual seems like a conceptually simple topic, but the deeper implications are far from obvious and they extend far beyond physiology and psychology. I am painfully aware of my own inadequacy to deal with the ramifications, but since I have nobody to piece out my imperfections in advance, I am reduced to asking readers to piece them out with their own thoughts as they proceed.

For example, consider the implications in terms of sociology, ranging from intimate psychology of family, the less intimate relationships of neighbourhoods, and the looser sociology of populations, nations, and of inhabitants of separate planets, separate stellar systems, and even separate galaxies.

Immortality is not for mentalities limited by tradition or familiarity, any more than disciplines of obstetrics or waste management are for the fastidious or prudish. Many of our unthinking sentimentalities would be as offensive to our descendants and as ill‑suited to their circumstances, as some of their preferences might be to some of us in turn.

Twas ever thus. Many of the mores of our own ancestors were shocking to modern minds, and many of ours would have disgusted them. I do mention a few examples, but they are speculative and superficial, and would change continually during the future history of our population or populations.

And, as I shall repeatedly show, many of the necessary disciplines and technologies for the continued survival of the genus Homo simply would not work for Homo ephemerens at all.

How Many?????

It has in fact been calculated that in this country alone,
over thirty percent are subclinically neurotic,
or as a psychiatrist would say, "stark staring bonkers”.
Over thirty percent. Just think: that’s every third person.
Happily, there's only two of us.
Michael Flanders

Apart from bodily changes, there would be social changes practically beyond our imaginings.

As I already have mentioned, one strident objection to immortality is that it would lead to overpopulation. As I pointed out however, immortality is not, and could not be, the same as invulnerability, and a good job too. Death still would stalk the streets and the bedrooms and wherever else life might occur.

So what would immortality imply for this theme of overpopulation?

For one thing, it would reduce death to the consequence of population attrition by adventitious circumstances.

In plain English, people who could not die, still could be killed. Time and chance are not mocked. Poison, disease, daring, strife, violence and accident are with us always.

And that has radical implications.

For another thing, absent special circumstances and reproduction, any given fixed population with a constant probability of adventitious deaths could be expected to have a half‑life: there need be no individual life expectancy — or arguably more properly, death expectancy — but a given population in roughly consistent circumstances would have an attrition rate such that during a given half‑life, the population would be reduced by about half.

Most popularly, “half‑life” refers to isotopic decay, but the principle is of far, far wider relevance.

Consider a population of about eight billion; that was the human population of Earth shortly before my death (having increased from about two billion when I was born, but never mind that). Assume the members of that population to be functionally immortal in the terms we discuss here, and assume the population half‑life resulting from attrition to be a million years: modest, but reasonable.

Then, starting from day one, that would imply about four billion deaths in the first million years, two billion in the next, and after some twenty‑two million years or so, we would be down to one or fewer of the individuals we had started out with. For a perspective of such a time scale, if we started somewhere near the start of the Miocene period, we now would be approaching the last member of our population. Look up the details and you will see that there have been some changes on this planet since the start of the Miocene.

However, more realistically, if we were interested in a stable population, neither exploding nor petering out, this would require that births would replenish the gaps left by mortality. In any year we could expect some 5000‑6000 adventitious deaths in a population of about eight billion immortals with a half‑life of a million years, so to maintain a steady population at that rate, we would budget for that many new mouths per year, balanced by the roughly equal number of deaths.

Looked at superficially, that sounds like a lot of deaths, but it is only about one ten‑thousandth of our current planetary annual mortality, which in turn is too low to manage our planetary population growth, let alone our natural selection to maintain or improve our gene pool.

Such figures need not require fine adjustment in practice: in principle we could maintain control if we permitted one surviving birth per person’s lifetime. In a monogamous family this would imply two children in most nuclear families, which commonly is a healthy number. No one, male or female, could claim to be subjected to unfair discrimination or deprivation.

Nothing is simple of course; such matters as the timing of births to meet societal requirements, would need management.

Please note that this is not the same as the idiotic fiats of the Chinese government in the late 20^th century, in which they tried to limit their people to one child per family; not only could that never be made to work, but the effects on the population dynamics were disastrous, and at the time that I wrote, had not yet been fully mended.

In practice, far more advanced reproductive practices and sociology should have succeeded our current mores by the time we settled into a stable population. Parents could have optional recourse to IVF techniques to ensure healthy babies with desired genes of their own choosing. That should suit both the community and the parents. Such considerations should remain operative even after we had superceded some aspects of our biology that we hardly questioned in the past; the foregoing figures were just for illustration.

Furthermore, as I shall point out, we would need to expand our outward urge to colonise space and a small percentage of the planets out there, therefore appropriate population growth should be necessary for as long as that continues: indefinitely. During certain periods the timing of births, and the allocation of extra reproductive licenses would have to be scheduled. We will not always be limited to the carrying capacity of a single planet.

For one thing, the question of overpopulation would take on new forms as humanity expands into space. Material trade, import and export, between Earth and space colonies, and in particular, colonies on other planets, would not in the foreseeable future be measurable in substantial volumes, though special staff and information and particularly valuable raw materials and equipment could be shared and exchanged. The export of massive goods from planets with gravities ranging from say, one tenth Earth gravity to two Earth gravities would necessarily be costly, and the cost of expediting deliveries acceptably would be huge. Just the exchange of information between partners parsecs apart, would be costly.

Another aspect is the question of emigration to relieve overpopulation: that expedient is something that we can neglect, irrespective of any traditional science fiction scenarios, or whether there is anywhere for surplus population to emigrate to.

Imagine as a toy example, trying to balance the current birth rate of Earth by emigration to say Mars, always assuming that by that time we had some sort of Martian infrastructure established.

Given our current population growth rate, that would require something like shipping a hundred million people per year, more than a quarter of a million every day of every year.

And that was the good news; you could not just stack the emigrants like cordwood and send them off; emigration is not the same as packing for a holiday; emigrants would need their equipment and supplies, which would have to outweigh the people themselves.

And the logistics would be still worse; it would amount to raising about a hundred super‑sized cruise ships every day, with no time off for holidays or to allow for delivery or management problems.

And, I repeat, that is only for keeping our present population stable, so that the rate of emigration would have to continue forever. And there are practical difficulties as well, such as the assumption that all the emigrants would be willing to go, and that there were forever somewhere for them to go to and settle and support themselves once they got there.

In comparison, the problem of managing a planet’s population indefinitely, freely, humanely, and healthily by political means is relatively trivial, as I already have described. The only constraints are on the same level as any other conflicts of interest, such as by combating theft, violence, and similar forms of harm and frustration, in terms of equitable norms.

Brain and Brains

What? came the word of God out from you?
or came it unto you only?
I Corinthians 14:36

Multiprocessing, as a concept, was poorly recognised in the days before computer technology outgrew its early naivete. At first the idea seemed ridiculous, that one could need such a thing, given how powerful these new computers were. And anyway, they were far too expensive for such extravagance as using them in teams.

Things changed rapidly; a good deal of early development in computing had to do with simultaneous operations in units and in teams; and the principle grew until we now have multiprocessing in various forms for various functions, both in handfuls of processors, and in hundreds of thousands, variously intimately coupled and almost independent.

The same applies in the body and in the brain. It applies in teams of people and in nations, but, as human affairs go nowadays, the connectivity is feeble and vague, in fact, often counterfunctional.

Within the human brain multiprocessing is pervasive, but poorly understood. I mentioned the works of Oliver Sacks in this connection; he made it plain, not only that we have parallel processing in the brain, but that there seem to be separate personalities with separate talents in the same brain, and that sometimes the death of one part of the brain may liberate an unsuspected personality drastically different from the one that people had known before.

Less drastically, many of us have the experience of waking up with the solution to a nagging problem that had stumped onself before going to sleep.

In my one-time role as an entomologist, I personally had the eerie experience too, of standing close to the characteristically mottled trunk of a Sclerocarya tree for a some tens of minutes, watching the behaviour of certain ants. After a while, I had the almost subliminal impression of the word ”legs”. It repeated in my mind so long that I suddenly became subjectively aware of it. . . How. . .? What. . . ? I forgot about the ants and looked hard at the bark some 20 or thirty cm in front of my face. Nothing special, but. . . wait. . . there was a certain symmetry to the mottling, a pattern that resembled the markings on the legs of some grasshoppers. I concentrated and slowly made out the contours of a long‑horned grasshopper flattened against the bark, but I could not make out the head at all.

Now, understand, I was a qualified entomologist with practised eyes, and was used to seeing things that the layman often could not detect even after having it pointed out. I gave up, reached out and lifted an exquisitely camouflaged katydid. To me, beautiful beyond description.

But the point is that “legs. . . legs. . .” impression. Something inside my head had, independently of the rest of my mind, detected the anomaly, and had struggled to bring it to the attention of head office. (Pun forgiven?)

In Homo futurens conscious multiprocessing will have to play huge roles and huge varieties of roles, both remotely and intimately: teamwork to the nth degree.

Multiprocessing also will be necessary, both in permitting independence of thought and creativity, and in cooperative thinking: brainstorming to the nth degree

Multiprocessing of brains and minds could be based on the practical options for telepathy, whether by shared bodies, shared brains, brain‑brain communication, or pheromones, either pairwise or in swarm mode. This could extend beyond simply partnered brains; our normal human brains already are somewhat vaguely modular; and within those modular structures each of us gets only vague impressions of rarely voluntary multiprocessing. And our internal multiprocessing is variously mediated by neural and chemical and physical communication.

I find myself, as it were, of two minds,
both more or less in agreement with each other.
Peter Ustinov

We see various forms of multiprocessing in colonies, castes, swarms, siblings, conjoined twins, and social structures. If the connection is intimate enough, and formal and efficient enough, there is no simple limit to how many component brains can combine, tightly or loosely, into one or more mental structures of various topologies. The participating brains, or components of brains, need not be spectacular; if they so choose, participants might look much as we currently do, though ofter a few millennia, that would be astonishing anyway.

The main limitation, beyond early technology, would be long distance communication between brain components. For distances between efficiently coupled brains on this planet, communication delays would rarely need to be as much as 0.1 seconds, too little to be noticed in most mental activities.

At lunar distances the delays would exceed 1 sec, and further away within the Solar system it could rise to hours; such delays need not preclude cooperative thinking, but certainly would limit it to special techniques and applications.

Much worse, what we might call our local slice of our Oort cloud could be taken to be about a light year across, meaning that communication delays of months could be routine.

Inter‑stellar, inter‑galactic, and cosmic communication would have radically different modes and functions in this connection.

Long‑term mental integration of individual minds into communities might sound like Nirvana and similar religio‑philosophical concepts, but there are differences as radical as between on the one hand, a community or an ecology of individuals, and on the other, a stasis or an agglomeration of what had once been individuals. For communities of immortals with an outward urge, there need be neither any necessary loss of mental individual identity nor need there be fusion of identities. There certainly need be no involuntary personal lapse into total loss of function while still alive — which you might call “death”, if you like.

There is room to conceive mental predation and assimilation or rebellion within interactions between minds; you could think of an ecology of minds and identities. Such possibilities are so remote that they are beyond my ability to discuss coherently, but we have had analogues to that sort of thing in human communities throughout the history of Homo sapiens. Variations on such themes have permeated fiction, politics, and psychology throughout the indefinite past.

The nature of functional communities of such types could be open‑ended while the universe lasts in a habitable form, and we have no sign yet of our running out of new frontiers of growth, even if we expand beyond our current red‑shift horizon; and currently that seems unlikely in less than trillions of years, by which time any of our current views would be so trivial as to be alien, no matter what happens.

There is no reason to regard as terrifying, or obscene, mental growth beyond our familiar boundaries of mind and community; what do you suppose we, as we are today, would look like to our own ancestors of a thousand years ago? Or ten thousand? Or to pre‑literate ancestors of a hundred thousand years ago? Or to chimps? Or to pre‑primate ancestors? Or to mammal‑like reptiles of the Triassic?

Should we demand that we should stop developing now, or that we return to those recent developments of perhaps the last two‑ or three‑hundred‑million years?

If not, then how can we demand that our descendants of perhaps two‑ or three‑thousand‑million years in the future, limit themselves to our current mores, prejudices, limitations, and intellectual norms, if any?

Function and Fun

It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.

They say to mountains, " Be ye removèd" They say to the lesser floods " Be dry."
Under their rods are the rocks reproved — they are not afraid of that which is high.
Then do the hill tops shake to the summit — then is the bed of the deep laid bare,
That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly sleeping and unaware.

They finger death at their gloves' end where they piece and repiece the living wires.
He rears against the gates they tend: they feed him hungry behind their fires.
Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into his terrible stall,
And hale him forth like a haltered steer, and goad and turn him till evenfall.

To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden - under the earthline their altars are
The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again at a city's drouth.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His Pity allows them to leave their job when they damn-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's days may be long in the land.

Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair or flat;
Lo, it is black already with blood some Son of Martha spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness to any creed,
But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.
Rudyard Kipling

Although the principle of keeping the population functional, independently of technology would require that at least the majority of the population would be fertile and virile, reproduction in a socially sound state would be far too important to leave to chance; however executed, the biology would be carefully planned. Sexual intercourse would be relegated to its emotional role, and as a physical pleasure in our lives, it would be assimilated into friendship, shared communication, thought and challenges, cooperative and competitive attachments, shared physical, mental and emotional pleasures and projects.

I suspect that that idea alone would be enough to put many readers off the whole concept immediately, but think about it: just because our descendants, millennia into the future, enjoy themselves differently from the way we do, does not mean that they do so any less happily, more poorly, or more obscenely; there is scope for a great deal more pleasure, more intense, more varied, and far less inclined to lead to misery, pain, hazard, rejection, and social waste and harm, than our current obsessive relationship to sex as sex, when it really is no better than a derivative of reproductive urges for the control of uncomprehending animals.

Wanting to stick to physical sex as the most important theme in human emotional lives in future communities, would be no more sustainable, nor more dignified, than for a baby to insist on nipple fixation throughout adult life, and for the dummy pacifier to be the basis of the literature of all human relationships and objectives.

Some things must be outgrown if there is to be growth at all. I do not think, by way of analogy, that most of us would wish to limit our current sex lives to nipple fetishes — so why should we permit our future social, reproductive, and emotional culture as adults, to be limited to physical or notional coitus?

Having rewardingly played out such urges for most of my life, I have nothing to complain of, but to work towards nothing better or more constructive in the future of our line, would be ignominious and tragic.

I find you want me to furnish you with argument and intellects too.
No, Sir, there I protest you are too hard for me.
Oliver Goldsmith

As we grow in physical stature and in skills and knowledge and intellectual stature and in the challenges we face and the prizes we may win, so our tastes and satisfactions grow as well, much as the satisfactions of artists or engineers have outgrown the imagination of chimpanzees cracking nuts with a rock, or a toddler piling toys.

The question is fraught, to say the least, of maintaining an interest in life for millions, if not thousands or billions, of years (Earth years! I could express the durations in seconds or the vibrations of atomic nuclei, but the units would be too unfamiliar to be helpful); even Irma Bombeck’s TV‑football‑addicted man could not keep it up for more than a few centuries, even as a Struldbrugg.

Swift’s imagination fell far short of real immortality (but of course that was irrelevant to the point that he was making).

Personal values that affect the decision whether to adopt or abandon immortality, should include considerations such as responsibility for the assets that your mental, informational, and physical skills, and personal attachments, mean to the community. Should you wish to bow out as a member of the community, it could be resignation, but it should be better to archive what you own or represent, to maximise their value to your heirs in the community.

You then could in good conscience abandon your residues for whatever use they might be, whether after a century, ten thousand, a million, or a billion years of satisfying service. Note that the very idea of a productive life of even ten thousand years, let alone a billion, would require a level of mental power beyond anything that has lived to date, as far as we know. Sponges, trees, and oceans would be a different matter: here I am considering only sentient lives and willing association with the relevant communities.

However we look at it, given at least potential immortality, for it to be better than a burden, would demand at least values, challenges, and satisfying achievements.

Without values, you can have no wants or objectives; Whether this is good or not, decide for yourslef; the answer depends on your values. In some science fiction the point to the story is when a robot says “Want to stop wanting!” But if a sentient stops wanting, it is as good as dead. It recalls Bierce’s: “If nothing matters, then how does it matter that I weep?” Conversely, for as long as one has operative values, one has something to live for. It might not suffice, nor be a survival factor, but it is a basic requirement.

Challenge is twin to value. If you do not have some objective defined by your values and your circumstances, you might as well check your pulse to see whether you are still alive. If we were to limit ourselves to a single planet, or even a single solar system, it is most unlikely to support any one person’s dedication for a few thousand years, let alone a few million or billion.

On the other hand, given a galaxy, or a galactic cluster, or the observable universe, and there is no simple limit to the values offered and challenges presented to any person or to any community.

And the scope, scale, and nature of the potential achievements in our universe would also be indefinite. Infinity might be a vacuous concept, but as I write, I cannot see where a viable civilisation of humans, species, aliens, and synthetic organisms, would run out of frontiers, mental or physical.

We need not pity our descendant Homo futurens for what I anticipate to be their tolerant uninterest in marching bands, football matches, shoplifting, graft, superstitions, cruelty, or rape, or crossing themselves, or kowtowing. I say that, not necessarily out of disapproval or self‑righteousness, but because I cannot see them running out of better things to do or to strive after:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
I thought as a child: but when I became a man,
I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
I Corinthians 13:11-12

Our world is greater than our planet, and it has more dimensions than our planet, and more than ourselves as a community. And we shall have to grow into those dimensions.

Or perish.

You?. . . And what army. . .?

Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems
unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s
separate parts or any subassembly of the system’s parts.
There is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts
the existence of a human being.
Richard Buckminster Fuller

Commonly, one aspect of this entire discussion gets overlooked: the fact that there is little point to being the only one with functional immortality in a population of evanescents. It need not follow that everyone in the community must be functionally immortal, though there is no obvious reason why any persons in good standing in society should be forced to be any less mortal than they prefer. At the same time, for a constructive and functional immortal to have no one to rely on for support of long‑term schemes or perspectives, seems to me to be a longer‑than‑life‑sentence to futility.

No, what I envisage is that any people who are equipped either for extended or indefinite constructive participation in society, both in their own interests and those of their fellow members of the community, should be able to live functionally for as long as they choose in their circumstances.

And I would choose the same for their alter egos, their adherents, their pets and their tools, such as computers and robots.

I grant of course that, in more ways than I am equipped to conceive, the societies and legal systems of functional immortals necessarily would differ radically from societies of evanescents. Concepts would arise concerning property rights, family commitments, contractual constraints, and social structures and responsibilities. Concepts of the tenure, jurisdiction, and nature of commitments, laws and constitutions, would need to be developed: not just local, or confined to particular planets, satellite colonies, solar systems or constellations, but extending across and between galaxies.

It is hard to conceive the consequences of interstellar or even intergalactic distribution of interdependent agents: in current terms the very idea of a community of populations separated by delays of years, centuries, millions of years, or geological epochs, is in itself alien, but the realities of distance, communication and development entail such things relentlessly.

Science fiction by the most far‑sighted thinkers has hinted at a few of the aspects, but frankly, none that I can think of has explored such aspects to any depth. Some short stories by the likes of Poul Anderson and Eric Frank Russell spring to mind. Olaf Stapledon deserves a mention of course, but I find his views less cogent or stimulating.

Nor are my own views more penetrating of course; I recognise little more than that the very concept of functional immortality implies imponderables.

Without such recognition we would be left with the likes of the sordid space operas and effete and corrupt tyrannies that commonly constitute the scenarios of such science fiction.

And of our day‑to‑day politics and transactions.

Self, Society, Social contracts, and Species

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a
Manner of thy friends or of thine owne were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
John Donne Meditation 17

Many concepts of our society, including many of those concerning ethics and technology would require adjustment and development in our immortal future.

Bear in mind that immortality on the assumptions in this essay implies an existence as unbounded by space as it would be unbounded by time. If a body of members of a hegemony were to elect to move out of locally established authority, and seek their future at a new home in space, then whether or not they succeed, one thing that they need not fear, is running out of options.

Consider a few topics:

A conqueror arose from the dead. "Yesterday," he said, "I ruled half the world."
"Please show me the half that you ruled," said an angel, pointing out
a wisp of glowing vapor floating in space. "That is the world."
Ambrose Bierce

Concepts of ownership, of dominion, of inheritance, would demand reconception. Ownership of fixed property would present difficulties when dealing with people whose life expectancies are indefinite or at least on the scale of millions of years. For example, since the peak of the last ice age alone, less than a tenth of just one million years ago, huge expanses of land have been flooded and are now straits or open sea. Great Britain was a single region attached to the continent; one could have walked dry‑shod from Ulster to Paris via London, and from Denmark to Sweden over the Kattegat.

As it happens, even if the sea levels during recent ice ages were the same as today, which they were not — at those times sea levels dropped by more than 100 metres — you still would have been able to travel those journeys over the ice. But never mind that; more to the point, huge tracts of valuable land, amounting to something like the entire area of South America, now are sea floor on the various continental shelves.

Over longer periods of a few tens of millions of years, far more drastic changes than our Pleistocene‑to‑recent ice ages have occurred: just five million years ago, the Himalayas were not the highest mountains on the planet. Ten million years still earlier there were no Himalayas to speak of at all, either in the regions of the colliding continents, or at their future locations.

Arguing about who owns such territories, would seem no more reasonable to an immortal, than argument in our day about the ownership of ice floes as real estate. Even if the item were of indefinite duration, one’s interest in it would change from time to time, especially if it were an object in outer space, with perpetually changing social and physical significance.

Inheritance of material goods, such as dead men’s shoes, would change its meaning, or lose all meaning; most such items would never outlast their possessors: in our time inheritance occurs largely on the death of the previous generation. Possession of non‑material assets, such as technologies, authority, status, and information, would usually change when it is mutually desired to transfer, copy, or modify them. What would we make of copyrights or patents? We have enough trouble with such items already; they largely have lapsed into a mockery. After a few thousand years, would we still honour Aristotle’s copyrights if he still were alive?

I cannot say, but it is a principle that would have to be settled somehow, and settled in the context of a number of other considerations concerning interests and conflicts of interests.

Enmity, affection, perceived debts, and clashing interests, must evolve, but one hopes that immortals would be above passing on, or propagating, anything so destructive and futile when it is not logically necessary. The essential objective should be to maintain an ESS, or SSS in appropriate contexts.

Million‑year feuds, and concepts of loyalty to recognised social bodies or social hierarchies simply could not endure; loyalties depend on contexts, and contexts change faster than continental drift or interstellar journeys.

Principles, ideals, friendships, and familial commitments, we glibly tend to idealise as being fundamentally absolute, but of course they are not; for such bonds to last even for a single Homo sapiens generation, is probably less frequent than their sundering, or at least their readjustment. One reason for rising divorce rates in the modern world, apart from changing connections, values, and freedoms, is simply that individuals with professional commitments are subject to greater pressures for separate activities of the spouses, than would permit long‑term intimacy; consider current mutual relationships between say, prominent personalities in fields such as sport, entertainment, politics, even business and science. Such divorces commonly are amicable, even affectionate, possibly regrettable, but just not practical to avoid.

From many points of view, such associations have no sacred or mystical significance such as: “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder”; they amount to civil contracts on various agreed terms, and accordingly are intended to be altered or discontinued as all parties agree.

Such considerations would be magnified and multiplied indefinitely in personal relationships between immortals, or even between people with active life expectancies of say, a few tens of thousands of years, and with intellectual abilities and professional careers quite off the scale of anything that current evanescent humanity could deal with.

Sometimes family commitments are assumed to be absolute, but even in our less‑than‑century‑long life expectancies, we often see generations separating within decades or less. Less than two centuries ago, if a family member set out to establish a living in a distant country, it amounted to a life‑long severance, commonly with little or no contact by mail.

In a community of immortals, we could imagine that a parent meets a child borne and brought up when the parent was perhaps centuries old, and both are now over a hundred thousand years old. What would the relevance of the difference of a few centuries in their ages amount to, especially if each had forgotten the other completely?

It does not follow that they would mean nothing to each other; they could value each other deeply as mutual colleagues or fellow-citizens, which could entail considerable affection in such a society.

Communities in the sorts of populations envisaged here, could include “Homo futurens” of whichever forms might emerge, but many other forms of populations should emerge down the aeons, and across the parsecs.

Participating factors might include:

· Several species of humans could come to co‑exist in the same community after having evolved apart for possibly several million years — a good deal of speciation could emerge over such periods, especially over interstellar distances, or even in greatly varied regions of one planet.

· Several species of animals other than humans, deliberately or otherwise, could have developed into full sentience, possibly with immortality, and with intelligence on a human scale. That theme is popular in SF, and variously exploited, but it nowhere would be more probable than in a community of immortals of high intelligence.

· Even within a single species, we could develop different physical castes; some could be dwarfs that ride on partners as team members for various purposes. Some could be variously independent, but closely associated into mutually telepathic communities, swarms, and teams that might be collectively immortal, but individually no more than very long‑lived; this would resemble colonies of insects with long-lived reproductive castes, but more or less disposable castes of workers or soldiers. In our own bodies, we have what amount to castes of disposable cells in our skin and guts.

· Sentient plants, or microbe cultures, or swarming organisms, might be developed for functional roles in particular circumstances, though it is hard to imagine their emerging spontaneously. Not that any of the previous examples could be expected to emerge without conscious, technological development.

· Truly sentient, artificially intelligent technological devices could be developed into citizenship; our current views and technology of artificial intelligence are not yet nearly coherent enough, let alone competent enough, for us to predict anything along those lines, but a genuine understanding of the nature of subjective consciousness could emerge; less than two centuries ago we had hardly any understanding of magnetism or electricity or atoms or genetics among other disciplines.

· By the time we have penetrated a few parsecs into neighbouring space, we might have found intelligent, or sub‑intelligent, alien species and we might find our relationships to be mutually rewarding.

· We should not be too exclusive in our conception of aliens. They are likely to differ more radically and variably than what we might expect, but that need not imply incompatibility. It need not even imply greater alienness than that of our descendants by that time. Consider what a billion years of travel and descent and teleological breeding could do to our species. Just half a billion years ago our vertebrate ancestors had barely begun to differentiate from the Chordata; they looked hardly more like us than like flatworms; it took them tens of millions of years even to begin to develop jaws, and hundreds of millions to develop chins. After another full billion years or so, spread over megaparsecs of space, how much further might we differ then from our current status as emergent apes? We might by then look more like other aliens than like our proud stature of today. Would we even still be using DNA for our genome by then?

Don’t bother to ask me what those descendants might be like; I don’t know either. In just a few million years, much evolution of many kinds is possible. But those products would be our future, and it could be a future more than worthy of our past — or than of our present. Let us hope so, and as well as we are able, work towards it. . .

During the teleological evolution of populations of immortals, subpopulations might arise in various ways. They might be more or less transient; they might lead to social or personal resentments, but logically they need not and should not; subpopulations could be analogous to infertile castes in a colony of social insects such as ants or termites. In such insects ephemeral castes such as workers may coexist amicably with long‑lived castes.

Furthermore, many eusocial insect colonies commonly include inquiline species that have various roles in the colony. Think of them variously as guests or pests, or even cattle or slaves. Some inquiline species might be closely related to the species of the colony, others may be practically unrelated. Some are outright enemies: parasites or even destructive; some are more or less harmless or even fulfill valuable roles. Beneficial inquilines are not generally closely related to the species of the colony, for example, ant nests might include aphids that feed on sap from plant roots and provide honeydew for the ants that protect them; aphids and ants, for example, are practically unrelated. In contrast, inquiline ant species might be parasites, or slaves, or even outright predators.

The same is true of cells in the cell colonies that constitute the living bodies of multicellular organisms. Our short-lived skin cells live for the good of brain cells and for the good of other cells that live for brain cells. And our brains and their cells generally do what they can to save the skin as an organ.

However we look at it, if humanity is to last, our reflexive animosity of the us‑versus‑them type must be controlled.

In particular, not only will there be human castes in human populations, much as we have separate professions today, but when we have spread far enough, we will very likely encounter alien sentient species, as well as Terran domestic species that we have bred into high, more or less human, levels of sentience. It is not yet clear to what extent it would be practical to build functional sentience into artefacts of types similar to what Asimov proposed in his later robot stories, but if it were to prove worth while, they too should fit into society as compatibly as any other subpopulation. Our colonies should accommodate such subpopulations with as much mutual benefit as possible.

In 1950 J. W. Groves published a short story: “Robots Don't Bleed”; I read it in the late fifties, with enjoyment, but without immediate conscious recognition of its significance at that time. Not to quibble about technical points, such as we always must allow for in speculative fiction, it is about emotional involvement with sentient artefacts, and as such it really deserves respect for its recognition of some social and emotional implications of future technology.

Such entities, biological or technological should have their appropriate places in society, just like any other participants.

Society in the future will have to make adjustments of many kinds that are currently hard to imagine. In my own life I have seen developments that in retrospect I would hardly have believed, and in life style they repeatedly have caused changes that I hardly would have believed. They also, to an extent that I hardly would have believed, have failed to materialise changes that I would have predicted. But that is the reality of technically competent speculation; if it were precise it would not have been speculation or stimulation to creativity, and no more than pedestrian scheduling.

Such more or less synthetic organisms and devices. If sentient, should be distinct from non-sentient machines and tools, as a simple and practical matter of ethics. As for non-sentient creations, consider thoughts such as those of Kipling in “The Secret of the Machines”; it ends:

                  But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
                                     We are not built to comprehend a lie,
                  We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
                                     If you make a slip in handling us you die!
                  We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings —
                                     Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!
                  Our touch can alter all created things,
                                     We are everything on earth — except The Gods!

                                    Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,
                                    It will vanish and the stars will shine again,
                                    Because, for all our power and weight and size,
                                    We are nothing more than children of your brain!

However, as soon as any form of consciousness of rival participants arises, there is logical scope for conflict of interests that, as seen from a higher perspective, should be no more than a matter of strategic allocation and expenditure of resources. In practice, a population of assorted sentients, even sentient robots, could decline destructively into conflict.

To achieve an SSS in such a population, the very values of all the particular entities could require restructuring. Where two entities clash in interests, one approach could be for the sentients themselves to fuse and discard the material objects of dispute, much as we might sever an arm to save a body, or graft branches of mutually fertile, but self-sterile, plants onto the same rootstock, or donate a kidney or a heart.

In maintenance of an immortal body or structure, social or physical, there will be need for overhaul of tissues, organs, limbs, or even of discarding, renewal or redesign of some body parts. Our study of evolution and ecology in nature, and of engineering and history, and of our own physiology, dependent, as it is, on endosymbionts and organelles, shows that accommodation is possible, indeed is powerful, but requires control; in his poem:”The Secret of the Machines”, I think that Kipling was wiser than he knew.

Well, he wrote it before the start of the 20^th century, so it was quite an impressive feat of clairvoyance.

Childhood Diseases of An Immortal Social Species.

Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought
subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part.
Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined
by an accident of birth or residence.
The Western hoodlum who cuts the tail from a Chinaman's nowl,
and would cut the nowl from the body, if he dared,
is simply a patriot with a logical mind,
having the courage of his opinions.
Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave
and blind as a stone.
Ambrose Bierce

Apart from the topic of how to achieve immortality there are topics of how to avoid or ameliorate the associated problems and challenges of immortality (our ancestors were uncomfortably perceptive with their parables of the likes of Tithonus and Struldbruggs, but there are more besides). Other topics include questions of how to profit from, and maximise, the opportunities and benefits that functional immortality might entail.

The foregoing text includes some discussion of physical, conceptual, and individual challenges to achievement of functional immortality, but I think that the social challenges will be even more exacting. The reason, as I see it, is that, intimidating as they are, the problems of physical immortality are surmountable, technical, and accordingly subject to solution by technological approaches; it might take a while, but probably not more than a few centuries. Ultimately no magic elixir or super surgery should be necessary, just some biological engineering.

The social challenges however, take us out of technological engineering, and into game theory. Those challenges will never be met until we achieve an SSS — if ever we manage that. It is not clear that any satisfactory SSS is possible at all, and if we do achieve it, it will be under eternal attack from parties who at best wish to perturb the system to suit their interests in opposition to rival interests, however inequitably.

And there I neglect mention of those who fancy the idea of tearing the whole system down.

They are a minority, but not a comfortably small minority.

If we are to take over the universe, or participate with fellow civilisations in taking it over, in any sense better than mutual destruction or beggary, then such an SSS is vitally necessary.

The main consolation is that we live in a universe that extends to such vast distances (something like 15 to 50 billion light years in every direction, depending on your criteria, with no indication that that horizon is where it all stops). Given such a scale of distances, there is no prospect that anyone who does not like any settled region need hesitate to pioneer in any direction. The density of galaxies looks uniform wherever we look, and a largish galaxy such as ours hosts some hundreds of billions of stars. Even if only one star in a million has life‑bearing, or even livable, planets, that means it would take a long time to populate even a single galaxy.

So long in fact, that by the time it could be worth emigrating from one galaxy to another, the first galaxy could have been recycled; galaxies tend to be, not thousands, but millions, of parsecs apart.

And with stars so far apart and expensive to visit, it would be hard to imagine any kind of serious interstellar war. By the time an invading army, or even a missile fleet, could arrive, the both the home nation and the target might have changed or even gone extinct.

Even trade in communicated information would be a demanding exercise, however profitable that information might be — for someone.

As a strategy in the context of war, MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) assumes that two defined antagonists each can be confident of eliminating the other, but not confident of their own survival if they do so; this only works while both sides have the same assessment of the situation. A war under such conditions would be like a pillow‑fight on a plank balanced over a wall: knock your opponent off, and when he falls, so do you.

Interplanetary war where each side has ample nukes and delivery capabilities and only one or a few planets that can be wiped out more or less simultaneously, would be much like that; as soon as any rival is established over too many planets, and is too dispersed, parsecs apart, then MAD becomes more demandingly unrealistic, unstable and expensive. It makes little sense to spend a billion years preparing to wipe out a rival that either will not be existing any more, or will not be the same thing by the time you have reached it, nor will be in the same place as when you started. Rather like growing trees to make swatters for flies on a wall that probably will be gone before the trees are big enough to supply swatter materials. . .

And when the flies have swatters of their own.

It supports Harold Macmillan’s assessment of Jaw‑jaw being better than war‑war.

Even for Homo futurens, interplanetary war would rarely be practical once the adversary would be widely established on many and varied bodies. It would be difficult and hazardous even in close interstellar war, and slow as well. Between populations many parsecs apart and spanning many parsecs themselves, it is hard to imagine war making sense at all.

Unbounded space — to get there from here

. . . the final end of Eternity — And the beginning of Infinity.
Isaac Asimov

At all stages of humanity’s voyage into immortality, and into the universe beyond, many aspects of the achievement of immortality would be important. In this section in particular I consider mainly the material value of appreciation of the content of accessible space. We need to comprehend the respective scales of local and of remote space, their implications, their threats and their associated needs for resources or promises of resources and rewards.

And we need to appreciate the relevance of immortality to the relevance of the resources.

That comprehension will not come without cost; and yet, the potential emergent rewards are indefinite; for example: immortality of the community could be dependent on potentially immortal individuals. As a rule one would expect the community match and exceed the immortality of the individuals.

Furthermore, immortal communities of could lend the accessible universe something like Zarathustrian meaning, purpose, and accordingly, values.

Apart from that, there is the nature of the definition of community. The commonest shared aspect of the nature of human society is “US” versus “THEM”, with subtexts that favour “US” rather than “THEM” or even that imply hating and fearing THEM rather than US.

And “US” and “THEM” continue from sibling rivalry, through family loyalty and rivalry, through team loyalty and rivalry, through district, city, and national loyalty and rivalry.

And that is only the beginning. The loyalties and rivalries change and conflict internally and externally with time, place and associations.

If we cannot modify those basic drives to unite in striving for human growth, I confidently predict our miserably ignominious end; for one thing, our solar system will not last forever, and if we fail to achieve immortality, we will be snuffed out together with it, or probably a lot sooner.

Bear some principles vividly in mind: nothing involving long‑term or large‑scale occupation, investment, or development beyond the planet or the current generation, could be of much interest to Homo ephemerens; short lifespans demand quick returns. Even solar system prospecting and engineering projects within the solar system would require thousands of years, so in our current form we will not achieve much.

Interstellar initiatives, in contrast, would require more like millions of years; to satisfy an interest in terms of returns on million‑year investment, and unfamiliar forms of returns at that, when most projects would extend over millennia, millions of years, or even aeons. They would be beyond the comprehension of humankind of today, let alone our interest in investment.

Such considerations might give pause even to immortals, but they need not inhibit our commitment to something greater and better than we can imagine at present.

So, still do not sneer: much of our current modern life would seem both impossible and futile to our ancestors in previous millennia; our perspectives of our descendants in turn, are unlikely to be more perceptive than our own ancestors’ views of us were.

Let us consider some reasonable speculations, though only superficially; I have discussed some of them in other essays, so I avoid going into detail here.

In recent centuries we have achieved more material and scientific advancement than in all our earlier history and prehistory (and increased our rate of harm and destruction beyond anything that they were willing to believe).

We have exceeded all our ancestors’ comprehensions of space, and our rate of increase of comprehension increases, not only by orders of magnitude, but in several dimensions at once. This is not because we are dramatically more intelligent, but because our progress in science and technology underwent step changes.

So far, our merely material gain in comprehension of the range of threats to humanity in this solar system, plus a few hints at how to deal with some of them, could outweigh all the costs of our research, but at our present rate, we also can start mapping resources, and increasing them and making something better of humanity, than being the despoilers of our planet.

What resources might those be? That depends on the context. To begin with we could look into our own solar system, its moonlets, meteoroids, comets, and asteroids. Those contain a high percentage of valuable materials. It is true that most are stony, and not of much value as such, but some have a lot of metals, ice, and volatiles in their composition; they could be of value to space expeditions and colonies. Even the stoney materials, we can apply to bodies to be built or colonised, such as Mars or Mercury; their value would lie in the energy of their momentum and the volatiles in their ices.

The most obviously valuable off‑planet bodies would be nickel‑iron meteoroids and asteroids. Nickel and iron are of obvious value on Earth of course, but they are not so valuable that it is worth going into space to retrieve such meteoroids for processing; in the long term it probably would be cheaper for us to work out how to extract minerals from below Earth’s crust.

Still, we might be attracted by traces of iridium in some large metal‑rich meteoroids.

Even that is speculative, but on a more mundane level, any materials that could be essential for operation of industrial satellites, or as components for space dwellings or accommodation in asteroids or moons, would be precious. That still might not sound very valuable, but out in space the major cost of most of the material from our planet is the energy needed to lift them into space. To redirect the trajectories of meteoroids to where they might be useful, would generally be far less costly than lifting them. Even when the desired material occurs on bodies as massive as Luna or Mercury, the gravitational cost is only a fraction of what it would take to lift it off Earth.

The first region that we need to explore for colonisation, is our own solar system. Our earliest generations of space dwellings could be artificial satellites; the next might be on or inside our large asteroids or smaller moons.

After that we could expand into the Kuiper belt, and then the Oort cloud.

Crazy?

Possibly; it certainly won’t be magic. Our solar system is stingy in terms of obviously valuable materials and colonisable planets. Even the low‑hanging fruit will be challenging; judging from what we have found by investigating meteorites. Perhaps 5% of the material in the belt and cloud is likely to be valuable — we cannot yet tell what we might find there, but we can be sure that, though colonisation will be a constant challenge, the alternative will be worse in the long run.

Still, that figure might be pessimistic: Earth formed by accretion, and yet its metal core accounts for nearly one third of the planet’s mass — if there was not some sort of strong selection for heavy metals, and if the primordial material that accumulated to form the planets was not greatly from the remnants that we now find in the system and the Kuiper belt, then there might be unexpectedly much heavy metal to reward interplanetary prospectors; far more than 5%.

Anyway, even on Earth, extraction of moderate‑value minerals usually must work on pay dirt far poorer than 5%. If it is practical to prospect for resources in all those regions of space, then the volume of mineral resources, including elements that supply fission power, might render it possible to have space colonies on a scale similar to the scale of the population of planet Earth.

In contrast to communities on Earth, those space colonies would be spread so widely that no single catastrophe would be likely to wipe us out, even when our sun expands and grows into a red giant in another billion years or so.

When we think in terms of the future of humanity, it is criminal to keep all our eggs in one basket, or in one solar system, for that matter; we must master many fields if we are to colonise our solar system, or more than our own solar system; for instance:

· Establishment of the necessary infrastructure for logistics

· Means for prospecting for valuable resources

· Means for transporting finds to where they can be processed and used

· The necessary off‑planet engineering skills and resources to produce usable products and install them

· Sources of power for installations for dwelling and industry.

The first phase would be to invest in space‑related technology; not colonising anything immediately, but establishing infrastructure: two categories would be necessary immediately, and the machinery should have power supplies with great longevity — centuries at least. Equipment nearer to the sun than say, Venus, might subsist on solar power for as long as the sun remains stable. Most of such craft would be robotic, reporting back to control bases with information and to receive orders, and they commonly would be designed to last indefinitely, subject to needs and practical requirements. Their missions might last for centuries or millennia, depending on details:

· Thousands of communication hubs should be established in appropriate orbits, either in independent trajectories or in orbit around major bodies. According to function, units could be placed anywhere from near solar orbit, to beyond the Kuiper belt. No nontrivial craft should be out of communication for long, or so remote that communication would be difficult. Each craft should know, and whenever necessary, precisely report, its own foreseeable coordinates, and those of its near neighbours and central command stations. Communication hubs would need to be equipped for communication in any direction, and part of their function would be to provide communication facilities for other craft whose facilities and functions do not include long‑range, high‑power communication. The communication hubs would be the communication and navigation nodes in a space‑based wide‑area‑network.

· Together with specialist communication and navigation nodes, we should have many space observatories of local and remote conditions. They would cover all wavelengths and fields, including gravitation, particle fluxes, local chemical fluxes, temperature, and visual astronomy and astrophysics. They would occupy various stations, ranging from inner solar system to the outer regions of the Kuiper belt, and would cooperate to locate, observe, and report all phenomena of interest.

· Such observatories would enable us to extend our coverage of desirable and threatening bodies and conditions ranging from inner solar system to well into interstellar space. They should enable us to determine which nearby stars would offer good prospects for planets worth colonising. They would include duties such as spotting accessible smaller bodies that promise well for exploitation. There are supposed to be billions such in the Oort cloud, and probably assorted at that.

· Prospecting craft would perpetually be seeking and assessing smallish bodies for their value or the hazards their orbits present.

· Some retrieval craft would accumulate valuable small bodies for processing, and despatch their loads to processing centres

· Retrieval craft for larger bodies would ride large meteoroids and propel them to processing centres or other targets; they also might deflect bodies that have been determined to be on dangerous trajectories.

· Rocky small planets of no value as such, say with negligible atmosphere, such as Mars and Mercury, but either free in the void or in uninhabitable orbits around useless stars, as long as they have valuable cores, might be split open by steering large, convenient bodies into collision with them to expose the core. Such cores would frequently contain more concentrated masses of valuable heavy elements and isotopes than the entire crusts of larger planets, and the more they were stripped and mined, the more would be exposed, and the higher the concentrations of elements of interest. They would have to be mined and managed by robot installations, and their yield would have to be shipped by robot craft. The products of one such body would exceed the entire accessible resources of most habitable solar systems, but such projects, either mining the materials, or shipping the products, could be of interest only to immortals.

· Some craft would amount to drifting warehouses for storage, dispatch, and maintenance of the running stock of resources, and accumulated products of processing and refining. Some such would be established on large asteroids or small moons or in orbit. Some would be industrial sites for construction and processing of necessary resources, either for use in space, or on planets when appropriate.

· Once the various utility and research vessels were accounted for, and the Kuiper belt explored and occupied, thousands of exploration craft could be sent out in small scouting teams along trajectories selected by scouting craft on their routes through the Oort cloud, out into interstellar space. Those scouts would need powerful communication facilities anyway and they would report back continually and accelerate outward all the way, to continue leapfrogging from star to star. Partly the point of sending them out in teams would be to reduce the chances that any one team might be wiped out mysteriously. They would report back, not only on local conditions around stars, but on detectable rogue bodies in free space, and on the nature of observable objects, not to mention signs of life. Teams might be large and hierarchical, with specialist members for long‑distance observation and communications. Such robot craft would be many times cheaper than crewed craft, and in some ways more versatile.

· With millions of rogue bodies in each galaxy, there inevitably would be some on promising trajectories that would have them either colliding or missing promising targets narrowly. Given something like a million years forecast, it should be possible to deflect either useless full‑on collisions or near‑misses into glancing hyperbolic contacts that would expose planetary cores, or even splash neutron star material into accessible space. Quark soup splashed into free space might condense into valuable isotopes, possibly including superheavy elements in islands of stability inaccessible to direct human manipulation.
The value of such products might be direct, for instance as sources of energy, or for purposes of research.

· Thousands of interstellar communication hubs would drift between the stars in trajectories that would make them available for exploration craft to return information to base, and to pass instructions to the exploration craft. By the time that transmission between craft is of the order of light years, it would be a serious drain on the resources of scout and prospecting craft to do their own long‑distance communication and detailed navigation. Such communication hubs would need massive nuclear power‑generation, or might even rely on solar power near a star, but details of function and design I must leave for engineers among our descendants.

· If a scout craft reports a promising planet before leapfrogging to the next star on its way, it would be followed by a robot evaluation‑ and‑beacon team dedicated to that alien solar system. That team would park for detailed and prolonged data gathering, plus reporting home. Assuming improved, realistic engineering in future, passage time between stars might vary between about 1000 years and 10000 years one way. Messaging delays would at first be years to decades, but if we ever reach the other side of the milky way, it would be more like 100000 years.
And for intergalactic distances, the figures would be more like millions of years, and for cosmic distances, billions of years. The universe might not be very large, but we certainly are small — and slow.

· Don’t take these figures as anything like precise; I present them only to convey the sort of practical considerations that we should have to face; in context the reasons to discuss immortality rather than longevity should be obvious.

· Before there could be any question of human interstellar travel, let alone human interstellar colonisation, the exploratory teams of robotic craft would have to have supplied advance information. Even with an entire solar system’s resources behind them, the costs of actual colonisation would be so high, and the logistics would be so demanding, that we would need to be very sure of our incentives and practicalities before we commit to such a mission.

· As for our colonising alien galaxies or clusters, on the terms that I have been discussing, I cannot deny that we might do so, but I do not know how to imagine it, bearing in mind that even from our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy, any light that reaches us today, started its journey some 2000000 years ago — before there were any modern humans at all, let alone any biblical creation. That might not be long in terms of the life of an immortal, but it still is a pretty long time for effective communication, let alone control or logistics.

· There is good reason to expect that our scouts should find life on some alien planets, but my bet is that life would be rare and even more rarely sentient, let alone capable of civilisation.
Why do I think that?
Well, if you were to choose at random a century in the history of Earth so far, in the hopes of finding recognisably modern humans, the chances of success would be something like one in five thousand; if you were looking for modern technology, more like one in twenty million.
Even if you were looking just for multicellular life, your chance would be about on in ten. You could argue those figures, which are largely thumb‑sucks, but the point is that there is no way to represent the probabilities as favourable.
And that is not speaking of searching in every solar system, nor even looking in every rocky planet, but just concentrating on rocky planets in stable orbits within the habitable zones of G‑type and K‑type stars
So don’t despair, but don’t hold your breath for finding new friends around just any newly visited star.

· As a fairly confident guess, planets in a stable orbit, with suitable moons or companion bodies in the habitable zone around a young G‑type or K‑type star, planets that could support life handsomely, but have not yet developed detectable life, would be more frequent than similar planets that already have developed detectable life, let alone planets with technologically effective populations. Such worlds, apparently as yet sterile, or perhaps with only Prokaryotic life forms, as far as we could tell, could be seeded with microbial cultures designed to match their observed environment, and to supply the inoculum with the necessary biochemical and genetic bases to hit the ground running;
It took Earth hundreds of millions of years to develop unambiguous living cells at all, probably more than a billion to produce the first Eukaryote, and another billion to produce functional multicellular organisms. On Earth practically all our lines of recognisably multicellular life stem from ancestors of half a billion years ago.
We could short‑circuit the emergence of a few dozen biological breakthroughs by carefully planned and monitored seedings of organisms fitted to exploit each successive ecological plateau. Instead of about four billion years, we could achieve it in a few tens of millions of years, leading into something like an accelerated Cambrian explosion.
Bear in mind that the planners of such schemes would not base their programme on guesswork; they would have at least a couple of millions of years of actual hands‑on biology to work from.

· Seeding life onto planets that already have developed life up to say, multicellular levels, would probably be futile, though the temptation could be strong; by that time the planet could be expected to be awash with biochemistry that would be incompatible with ours, and in a position to swamp whatever we could donate. Obviously such evaluations and decisions, both technical and economic, would devolve on the experts of the day, but that is my bet. Aspects of that line of reasoning I have pointed out in a different context in an essay at:
https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2020/07/panspermia‑on‑rocks.html

· Such solar system explorations, never mind seedings, would not be possible for Homo ephemerens; they would be lightning‑like from the point of view of the planet, slow from the point of view of Homo futurens, but eternal as seen by unmodified humanity, who consider a history of a few thousand years as interminable, never mind unprofitable or even impracticable.
For a rich immortal, a few such projects could be enjoyable and even profitable. Within say ten million years he could create self‑sustaining worlds, each a different monument, and each an ornament for a world that otherwise would have been futilely, wastefully mindless.
As an alternative to an eternal chorus to mindless hallelujahs, or eternal, mindless orgasms, this strikes me as altogether on a higher plane of dignity, interest, and gratification. The outward urge would be the right kind of kind of vocation for an immortal, and justification for immortality.

· Anyone contemplating the cheerfulness with which I assume that any of my interstellar survey, scouting and pioneering craft can simply stop in a solar system and decide which planet to visit, and accelerate out again, might understandably assume that the whole scheme is dismissible crackpottery. I sympathise, and I accept that in some solar systems there is indeed no scope for any realistic project. However our craft would have a long ride in, with purpose‑designed instrumentation and good preparation. Scouting craft would be preceded by cheap, fast, single‑purpose survey craft dispatched to any region where it could detect stars that would justify a scouting visit. Any doubtful star, a scout simply could bypass, and with only a relatively small expenditure of energy and reaction mass, it could use the sun and possibly any conveniently situated large planets, to slingshot out of the system in a new direction.
Even if a scout vessel stopped only for surveying purposes, it could use slingshotting to get out again within a few thousand years. Sufficiently sophisticated surveying craft might even pick up reaction mass on the way, from gas giants or meteoroids but even if that proved impossible, the sacrifice of a few craft on the off‑chance of an entire new solar system proving profitable to colonise, would be the proverbial sprat to catch a mackerel.

· Scouting craft almost certainly would be robots, and so would survey and seeding craft. Pioneering craft would generally be manned, though they still could be robotic, bearing embryonic colonists in diapause, to be woken, fed, and educated before making contact.

· Once having seeded a planet, and parked surveillance craft around it, we could started out to inspect our new real estate. Subsequent delay in colonising it would be most likely of the order of several million years. Over such periods the evolutionary situation on the planet might have developed considerably, and largely unpredictably. For example, the seeded life might have died out entirely instead of flourishing. That would not be immediately prohibitive in itself, but it is yet another reason why such enterprises are for Homo futurens, not Homo ephemerens.

· The very nature of interstellar voyages has attracted attention from authors for something like a century, depending on which works one classifies as being relevant. Most of them simply avoid the problem by assuming that there will be some sort of faster‑than‑light option. This I reject as too speculative to be worth our attention here. Others wrote variations on the theme of passengers variously in hibernation, gestation, or stasis. Some had generations of voyagers living on board ship till they arrived. In “The Boat of A Million Years”, Poul Anderson went for greater physical realism, hypothesising immortals that simply survived actively on board for as long as necessary; that sufficed for his theme, and it resembles the solution that emerges from our assumption of our beginning our future by creating our offspring as immortals.
Given our rapid advances in robotics, and plodding advances in spacecraft, the obvious technology for any spacecraft whose essential function is not the transport of humans or other livestock, it is robotic control and navigation. The robots in question need not be any more sentient than our contemporary electronics, though of course, their engineering should be a good deal more advanced. Even craft that do transport wetware should be largely automated.

· What would change the picture would be the nature of the emerging immortals, capable of maintaining their bodily functions almost completely voluntarily, and of digesting and recycling materials that not even rats and roaches could survive on, and having intellect to exceed any Homo ephemerens. They could routinely travel on interstellar journeys of arbitrary duration, arriving ready to hit the ground running. On the voyage they could maintain (dwindling, but relevant) contact with the home station, they could occupy themselves with as much sleep or anaesthesia as preferred, but commonly with mental work, either individually or in teams, practically as if they were working from home on Earth.

· Such space-faring communities probably would travel rarely; apart from any question of cost, it would be an extravagant craft that could offer luxuries to rival those of most occupied planets, but as a Homo futurens brain should always have plenty to keep itself busy, including maintaining its body, a million-year journey ending in arrival when and where intended, should be a consummation to be wished.
Next job waiting, no doubt.

Frontiers of the Mind, or of Humanity

No species before man could select its evolutionary destiny.
Armed with knowledge, man can do so.
He can steer evolution in the direction
he regards good and desirable.
Or he may elect to drift on the evolutionary current
oblivious of consequences.
One thing he probably cannot do is
to have evolution stand still.
Theodore Dobzhansky

E pluribus unum, sed et e unibus plurum

Do not fall in love with your solution
before you understand your problem
Bess Richfield

We need not eliminate the concept of mind duplication or transfer (more like somatic propagation) altogether. We know of something of the kind from studies of twins so conjoined at the head, that their thalamus is shared in such a way that they may hear each other’s thoughts and see out of each other’s eyes. In principle, minds could be put into contact to share thalamic function, which, taken to the limit, could duplicate one subjective consciousness in another brain, or perhaps fuse them in one brain or both.

Conversely, one body could bud off another over a period of several months, ending with brain duplication, content and all. The process need not be very much more radical than placental reproduction, and far less traumatic and expensive. It could have all the advantages of alternate genetic and somatic reproduction in insects such as aphids, and animals such as cnidarians.

Even in placental reproduction, as I suggest elsewhere, as the child grows, suitable neural connection could permit the mother to begin with thalamic education suited for dealing with life just after birth. That could greatly reduce hazards for the newborn, and reduce trauma for both parties.

In a different form, budding could build swarms resembling say eusocial insect colonies of castes. Teams of specialist colleagues, even not physically connected except by communication channels, could form functional entities, such as librarians, libraries, ministries, management bodies, community service bodies, research. Etc

Teams could include normals, physical castes such as repositories, computational devices, biological non‑humans, aliens, nations etc. They could be long‑term or transient.

Analogously, consider the sharing of thoughts of parts of our brains, all the more so if the brains are partly separated into regions in the torso etc

Again, if inter‑brain connections could become far more sophisticated, we could have similar effects of mental sharing between intact brains separated by thousands of km without perceptible delays

Conversely, we could have one or more temporary or permanent pets or miniature companions riding temporary or permanent host steed bodies with intimate mental connections. Such steed bodies could amount to communities.

Although it is unlikely that extreme bodily modifications for the sake of such as grand lunar brains would be popular, there is nothing stopping individuals from committing to something of the kind for special aims.

If such connections were intimate enough, it might enable us to make some compelling progress in the study of the phenomenon of subjective consciousness, which so far has amounted to largely unoriginal handwaving

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk

The idea of being visited by aliens lost its appeal
when I realised that they would probably
be asshole billionaires from another planet.
Anonymous, but logical

When the separation is wide enough for the delay to be non‑trivial, things get more complicated, but there could be considerable commerce of ideas between communities separated by parsecs, and possibly different classes of communities separated by megaparsecs.

Theoretically we could have communities, some of them separated by their red‑shift horizons, but with relay minds within the horizons of both. This would be tricky; it would seem to entail some conceptual conflicts, though they would not seem to be identical with those of black hole event horizons

Interplanetary competition and commerce would be slight and specialised, for realistic objectives, given the delays and material costs. Information however could be portable within the limits of c, and an info commerce could be significant.

Habitable planets would be the top prizes for colonisation, but given the probable distances between habitable, or at least terraformable planets, plus the relatively high frequency of valuable asteroids, the first permanent space dwellings and colonies could be on free‑space craft or on and in suitable asteroids.

The scope for war between planets will not foreseeably be great; especially between solar systems, the logistics and delays would be prohibitive, and the only realistic casus belli could be resentment on a scale to provoke the dispatch of nuclear bombs that would take centuries or millennia to arrive; by which time the cause, the aggressor, and the target might well be forgotten or gone. Also, there would be no time limit on when retaliation would arrive, possibly in the form of massive focussed bolts of radiation or energetic particles. Good behaviour would be cheaper, and if there were third parties to any dispute, they would be likely to deprecate or actively intervene or interfere, in the interests of their own security.

Even importation of material requirements from near space, would rarely be worth while except for exceptional materials such as siderophilic iridium concentrated in local asteroids if we were to find the remnants of the cores of rocky planets destroyed in past collisions.

The concept of community of interest among our descendants when our evolutionary relationship is more distant than current separation between humans and orchids (a separation of about 2GY), because it takes more than say 2 GY for a one‑way message to pass, probably via multiple intermediate relays.

Whether to regard that as a greater moral separation between human and human, or as a closer moral bond between human and orchid I leave to the individual, but I suggest that to anyone who thinks about it quietly, there is a an attraction to the latter; I have known some very nice orchids.

However, the nature of communication over intergalactic or cosmological distances is complex and confusing. Personally I do not believe in instantaneous communication at all, largely because of the logical conflicts it entails. Quantum entanglement is not communication at all; it is recognised in quantum physics that the correlation between entangled quanta does not permit instantaneous communication. If two measurements of the values in question were made at a considerable separation, and were seen as simultaneous by an observer halfway between, the measurements could be expected to be consistent. For observers much nearer to one or the other act of measurement, they still would be consistent, but the three observers would disagree about which measurement would happen first. To each of the observers the measurements would happen at different relative times.

So, if a message were sent to me from a light year way, by a magician who sends the information simultaneously by some instant magic, and by a laser beam, then one copy would reach me a year before the other. I then would find myself in possession of a message a year before the time it was sent, as it would seem to me.

We than also encounter the concept of storage of information by a delay line. In case you happen to find the concept unfamiliar, it is a common concept in data memory. Imagine that you shout a message at a cliff somewhat more than 300 metres away; the message echoes back to you about 2 seconds later. But you get the whole message after you sent it. It has not vanished in those 2 seconds; it has been stored. And that principle has been used in various ways for about a century for various purposes. A signal that is sent by any channel that takes a given time to deliver it, is in storage during that time, otherwise there is no communication: the signal would be lost. It is much as if you sent a signal as a message in an envelope by snailmail; it is in storage in that envelope while it is in transit.

Well then suppose that we send a message to a recipient a million light years away; that message has to be in storage for a million years, or the recipient will never get it.

This concept is variously important; we began to see evidence of it in the days of moon landings, in which responses to messages from Earth to the moon had a delay of over two seconds. That usually did not matter much, but if we send a message to a spacecraft, the reply is delayed by more than 4 hours.

For practical purposes such messages cannot be used in our ordinary conversational conventions; we need to use something more like our online chatroom conventions.

When we have to deal with separations of light years we begin to need still more unfamiliar conventions, in which the replies arrive after the original correspondent may no longer even be in the exchange; he might even be dead. It does not follow that the communication is meaningless, nor even useless, but it certainly would not fit into our usual conventions or our usual applications or needs.

Now, we do not usually send long distance messages directly; we send them by exchanges and changes of medium. I might shout a message across a street, but if I had to send it across acity I would change the sound to electric impulses, and send them by wire; I might change those impulses to light and send them by fibre or by radio, and change the medium back to sound at the other end; I might translate the language, or paraphrase the message; I certainly would have to amplify the message on the way with repeaters to make up for energy loss and remove noise that gets introduced.

Communication is a complex business, and what we do with the communicated information is even more complex.

And when we communicate over interplanetary distances, it gets worse; signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, and even with directional beams it is a major problem to receive signals from beyond Pluto. So far we can just about make do, but for heavy signal traffic we shall need repeater spacecraft in intermediate trajectories in order to pass signals on to each other and to the receiver. We already have various systems of the type to pass signals around planet Earth, but that is just the beginning of the beginning.

When we want to pass signals from star to star, and from scout craft to each other and home, we shall have to post repeater craft at the rate of say, one every light day or so, along active routes. Even for that we shall need powerful, long‑lived craft with strong protection from collisions with micro‑meteoroids, from damage from radiation etc. And we shall need redundant repeaters to enable us to deal with breaks in transmission or loss of craft from unavoidable accidents.

Over such distances we should need to use signals such as rasers, masers, and lasers.

By the time that we have a network covering a major part of our galaxy, we shall need hundreds of millions of repeater and data storage craft, and of course, there will be no question of anything like casual conversation, because even the closest messages will be years in transit.

Such a network would be precious in many ways, including as storage and transmission of data, and as a means of preserving a sense of unity and of common languages and comprehension between the populations of the observable universe.

No end

ETERNITY AND THE CLOCK
A homage to finity

Eternity's one of those mental blocks‑
the concept is inconceivable.
The clock concedes it in ticks and tocks,
belittled, belaboured, believable.

Each passing moment is seized and chewed
with argument incontestable.
Premasticated, like baby food,
eternity is digestible.
Piet Hein

What will be the end of everything?

I cannot tell.

Need there be an end of everything? What would that be?

Did there need to be a beginning of everything? We talk about the Big Bang, but there is increasing suspicion that the sense of its being the beginning of everything is true only in limited senses.

What, after all is “everything”?

To be sure, if we are heading for a big crunch to match the Big Bang, then, whether that is really the end of everything from our perspective or not, there might be other perspectives.

These things are too speculative to deal with here, but they recall the story of a popular scientific lecture in which the speaker said: “. . .and so we see that our sun will last no more than another five billion years.”

A little man in the audience jumped up and screamed: “What did you say?”

“I said: ‘Our sun will last no more than another five billion years.’ ”

“Oh! Thank heaven; I thought you said five million years!”

Immortality and Implications

A bit beyond perception's reach
I sometimes believe I see
that Life is two locked boxes, each
containing the other's key.
Piet Hein

In philosophy, and epistemology in particular, one of the most treacherous concepts, one of the most important, and one of the most slippery, is that of simplicity. In such fields, the more parsimonious one makes the objects in the universe of discourse, the more complex one is likely to have to make the operations applicable to the objects remaining.

For example, as I have defined it, immortality sounds simple, but its implications are different for small and for large populations, for simple and socially complex sociologies, for simple and complex technologies, for small and large regions or spaces, for large and small conceptual complexity of subject matter, for long or short times.

Some of those have emerged already in this text, and some more my emerge in this section. I coin some words to deal with them, some of them might already exist, might already be redundant. . . no matter, the semantics here are semantics of convenience.

Memory

Give the people a new word
and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather, On Writing

I already have mentioned the brain in discussing information processing and memory and how essential the functions are to the sentient immortal; and by that I mean not just “necessary”, but “of the essence”. It reminds me of one of the first SF stories I ever read, and in my opinion the best by A. E. van Vogt: “Dormant’. It told of a robot that had survived for billions of years before being aroused to perform its intended function.

Here I refer to some functions that have been associated with memory and intelligence. I have used the name of Mnemosyne as a root in terms related to her varied history in Greek mythology. By mnemology, I mean the study of memory and mental function. As I have pointed out, that would be vital throughout the existence of any significantly functional immortal. And it would demand both personal brain and external aids and teams.

That raises the topic of mnemecology; the mind at every level, whether individual or shared, would depend on the growth, harvest, organisation, and exchange of information, whether local, across borders, across separation at close range, at ranges that impose delays measured in perhaps hours or days. With such we are familiar in media such as the WWW, or in research or negotiation.

Negotiation would be hampered increasingly as distances increase within a solar system, and as delays extend into months or years; at distances beyond the solar system the concept of mnemecology is no longer optional; we would find ourselves in a situation analogous to when Eurasian authorities could only gropingly control, or negotiate with countries or authorities separated by small, fragile, wallowing vessels that took months for a voyage, and years to circumnavigate the planet. The results in those days were variously ignominious and tragic.

The game changes even more drastically when the delays are interstellar, and extend to decades and centuries. One might argue that even for immortal businessmen such transactions could not be profitable, even if they hardly nibbled at the lifespan, but that is why mnemecology as an economic discipline would have to deal with concepts that short-sighted economics tend to ignore on Earth so far. Reforestation after having stripped a land of old growth is not the rule in all countries, and when it is practiced, it commonly concentrates on monocultures of rapidly growing trees, instead of mixed forest that includes more valuable products of older growth.

The economics of Homo ephemerens is full of such considerations and short term policies that are long-term blunders and destructive exploitation.

Homo futurens in contrast, could conceive and and profit in altogether ways from altogether different cicumstances. Imagine for illustration, two planets, one of them prosperous and Earth‑like. Imagine the other to be in a highly elliptical orbit around an M‑type star half a light year away; assume it to be airless, amounting to a metallic planetary core, the remnant of an ancient collision. It might be say 1% of Earth’s mass, perihelion say, 10 million km and aphelion 10000 km.

Given suitable technology, one could imagine a massive mining operation on the metal planet, with suitable pre-processing all under robotic control. A robotic ore carrier (actually more like a robot propulsion and steering unit riding a shaped million-tonne lump of metal) might make the trip back to civilisation in 10000 to 100000 years, depending on the technology.

That might not sound economically attractive even to an immortal, but if there were something like a million craft, delivering loads at about one per day for about a billion years, and with most of the infrastructure recyclable, that might sound very attractive in mnemecological terms.

Those figures are thumbsucks, but I hope they convey the idea that having to live with the consequences of your acts for thousands, or millions, or billions of years, changes the game. And maybe for the better.

In the day of Homo futurens, a constructive discipline of mnemecology would be necessary to establish SSS’s to suit the various relationships that arise, and to protect and nourish them over what now would seem to us as interminable separations. The exchange of information and its manipulation would outweigh most material transaction and negotiation.

Not every livable planet is within shipping distance of something materially exploitable.

As separations extend into thousands and millions of years, it is hard to imagine the nature of the residual interactions. Material commerce is hard to imagine, though possibly credit and debit transactions in asset pools extending across huge distances might achieve some sort of practicality, lending some substance to notionally common currency.

Personally I don’t really understand even local currency, so I am more comfortable with the idea than many an economist might be.

But I hope I have at least suggested why a discipline something like mnemecology might emerge as essential to the future of a widely dispersed complex of communities of Homo futurens. All these things tie into what is to define the values for the communities, collectively and individually. Certainly some commonalities would remain, but the further that communities were separated and the greater the duration of separation, the greater the emergence of differences in philosophies and interests. And those in turn would affect tastes, actions, and policies.

Imagine for example two possible colonies, one around an isolated G‑type star tens of light years from the nearest neighbouring solar system, and the other in a large dusty cluster of M‑type dwarfs with a mean separation of half a light year, so that the colony would perpetually be monitoring the dust for dangerous collisions and for valuable objects.

Two such communities might be permanently in communication with a small communication time‑lag of say, a few centuries, and on excellent terms (why not, after all, given no cause for mutual friction?) but their views on what to do, and which projects and research to pursue, which body types to develop, and which populations of aliens, animals, ecologies, and synthetic organisms to develop or favour, could differ greatly — differ even more than say, the views and shibboleths of the US and UK.

Fields of study, concern, and expertise, once advances in immortality supersede preoccupation with somatic concerns and our descendants have achieved function comprehension of the realities and practicalities of subjective consciousness as the fundamental concern of existence — or perhaps meta‑existence. . . science

Then I tells them what I told them. . .

I went on writing, indeed, as a toy‑dog goes on barking
I yapped manuscript, threateningly, at an inattentive world.
HG Wells Autobiography

In this essay I have assumed that:

Humanity could achieve notionally indefinite longevity by development of biological technology and by engineering of the emotional, philosophical, and value‑judgemental aspects (that thereby should govern the ethical, moral, and technological aspects).
The achievement would (or should):

· Necessarily and progressively change human physiology and physique

· Profoundly change population management, both on and off Earth

· Demand management of environments both on‑Earth and elsewhere

· Imply progressive development of changes to human nature, much as developments in sociology and economics have done throughout history, though hitherto haphazardly.
This would necessarily:

· Alter the significance of reward, pain, and addiction

· Alter or eliminate the role of mood‑altering chemicals in society

· Develop constructive means and measures for dealing with conflicts of interest

· Alter the role and nature of crowd spirit, celebrity worship, and loyalty

· Affect the role and perspective of selfish individuality, altruism, affection, and indebtedness

· Direct the nature and course of personal and communal virtue, work, politics, material commitment, aggrandisement of self, others, and institutions.

Salient considerations:

In a matter of so many unforeseeable considerations, objectives cannot yet be specified in detail, but should be compatible with:

· Indefinite survival, relationships, and quality of human and other units, communities, cultures, resources, and heritages

· Viability of populations and institutions in challenging environments, whether on‑planet, between‑planet, interstellar, or intergalactic

· Harnessing of entropy in conservation of structure, information, and culture

· Restraining wasteful rates of increase of entropy in the form of chaos and destruction

· Preference of indefinite scope for values of growth, structure and achievement, instead of pointless static eternity

· Exploration of some of the implications and practicalities of such objectives.

If humanity does not achieve immortality, the species is doomed;
accordingly, immortality is imperative

Wednesday, August 6, 2025