The Terrors of Immortality

The movement is called anti-aging, not anti-injury. How do people who believe they have a real shot at immortality interact with the phenomena of safetyism?

I’m Christian (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and, as such, I believe that I will eventually be immortal, and that my soul is effectively immortal already. Bryan Johnson, noted anti-ager, used to be religious—same religion as me—but no longer is. As such, he no longer believes that he’ll achieve immortality eventually. He has a new dogma: that he needs to achieve immortality in this life, and that we are on the cusp of having the technology necessary to do that.

Last year I read his book DON’T DIE and my review was almost entirely negative. The kindest thing I can say is that his ideas are interesting, but contradictory. But it might be more accurate to say that they’re sophomoric. Turning to his actual anti-aging praxis, his anti-aging routine is ridiculous. (Specifically he appears to spend at least 50% of his time and attention to achieve maybe a 20% gain in life expectancy?)

Johnson and his eccentricities have been adequately covered in other outlets. But they bear a second look, particularly as it gives me an on-ramp to talk about the larger consequences of his anti-aging efforts and immortality in general: the terrors that would attend immortality. Which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

Science fiction has already done quite a bit to explore what immortality would be like—mostly it would make life boring and civilization stagnant. I agree that it would lead to both of those things, and that for that reason alone, it is probably a bad idea. But it would also carry a vastly heightened concern around safety, which turns immortality from “probably bad” into “certainly horrible”.

I haven’t seen this consequence mentioned anywhere else. While there are numerous examples of stagnation and ennui, there are no discussions of terror. When people talk about being on the cusp of immortality, they’re almost exclusively discussing abeyance or reversal of aging. The movement is called anti-aging, not anti-injury. Johnson may be correct that he can live well into his hundreds, but nothing he’s doing will give him Wolverine-like regeneration. He can still die in a car crash, be shot in the head, or take an unlucky tumble and break his neck.¹

I know he’s aware of these dangers, and that before he gets in a car he recites the mantra, “Driving is the most dangerous thing we do.” As part of his quest for immortality, Johnson is forced to be an exceptionally cautious and fearful driver.

But this is exactly my point: we haven’t fully grappled with the combination of immortality and the incredible level of safetyism present at the current moment. People are already terrified of risks. What happens to that terror if we achieve Johnson’s dream of immortality? Safetyism is already warping institutions and expectations, what happens if we’re all trying to protect a 1000 years of additional existence rather than 50?

As an example, take parenting. Everyone agrees that the average parent in 2025 is vastly more protective of their children than the average parent in 1975. What happens to this impulse, which was already trending upward, if you’re now responsible for getting an immortal being past their immature, risky stage? What sort of draconian measures would that encourage? What would it do to our already depressed fertility rates?

Perhaps on a micro level the problem of injury is also solvable by technology. Self-driving cars have started to make an appearance, and one could move on from there to imagine protective drones shadowing children. For example, a drone that catches someone if they fall while scaling a cliff. (As I recall there’s something like that in the Culture Series by Iain M. Banks.)

Still it seems unlikely that these things would represent an impenetrable safety net against accidents and injury. Also, it should be noted that safetyism has only arisen in an era that is already exceptionally safe. There’s a strong case to be made that safetyism is inversely correlated to actual danger. That the safer things get the more fearful people become of the few remaining dangers. Add potential immortality into the mix and you have created a cocktail of fear the likes of which we have only seen the smallest hint of thus far.

Whether the micro level plays out this way or not, there is still the macro level to consider. Safetyism is annoying but manageable when it’s just one mom at the park. It’s when it’s all moms at all parks, or all students in all colleges, that it truly becomes something where the fate of a civilization hangs in the balance.

Sure, it might be possible to make driving as safe as air travel (which people still worry about), but are you ever going to make a trip to Mars safe? And to be clear I have numerous criticisms of plans to colonize Mars, but it is a key component of the transhumanist future Johnson envisions.

If none of those objections are convincing, consider that we’ve just been talking about accidents and injury. We have yet to consider the problem of violence.

It would be nice if immortality ushered in an era of peace and harmony, but that seems unlikely. Consider that for some significant amount of time there would be a division between the immortality haves, and the have-nots. The logical outlet for the anger of the mortal “have-nots” would be to take the immortality of the “haves”. Which is just an elaborate framing on the very, very old act of murder.

Whatever the difficulties of preventing accidental death, the difficulties of preventing violent death are far greater. What could we do to stop it? Knives, guns, tanks, and nuclear weapons will still exist. Even if we just imagine preventing normal homicides it’s difficult to see how you solve it with technology. There’s only so much your personal protection drone can do before it has to start doing its own killing.

This is all related to a common trait of transhumanists: their tendency to skip over the messy transitional bits between where we are now and the glorious future they imagine. A world where humans and machines are melded together to create immortal and nearly indestructible cyborgs. Or being able to upload consciousness to a computer, such that wiping out a person would be as difficult as wiping a meme from the internet. But there’s a big, possibly uncrossable mountain range between the present and that future.

Yes, it’s interesting to imagine the long term possibilities, but in the short term there is still a lot of uncertainty:

What does a world of tenuously immortal beings look like?

How will they behave?

How frightened will they be?

When a timid high-tech society of immortals goes to war against a reckless low tech death cult what happens?

Perhaps we do have the technology to cross the initial peak of “anti-aging”, but every step we take on that path is going to be shadowed by terror at the smallest hazard, and believe me the road will be very hazardous.

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I know I promised that I would be releasing chapters from my book, and that the output has been pretty sparse. But I promise the very next post will be a chapter. Honest!

1. To be fair to Johnson, he does acknowledge that he may die in “the most ironic way possible”, so he certainly is aware of this possibility.